The Voice of the Machines | Page 4

and (2) of trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ
machines. Modern charity is a machine for getting people to help each
other. Modern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.
Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern journalism
is a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for
supplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines
cannot supply.
Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable thing
that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better or worse,
is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes little
difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It has come to
stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for. We cannot move it.
We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We are born in the
machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We breathe the
machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more than he
can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by
destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in machinery--that is if
there is no beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery for our
modern life--there cannot be poetry in anything in modern life. Either
the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where
the door ought to be. If we who have made machines cannot make our
machines mean something, we ourselves are meaningless, the great
blue-and-gold machine above our lives is meaningless, the winds that
blow down upon us from it are empty winds, and the lights that lure us
in it are pictures of darkness. There is one question that confronts and

undergirds our whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part
of it. Can a Machine Age have a soul?
If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea in
its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines of steel
and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find a great hope for
our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we have already
mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other machines--our
spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--the better. In
taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas
and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery, we are
taking a stand for the continued existence of modern religion--(in all
reverence) the God-machine; for modern education--the man-machine;
for modern government--the crowd-machine; for modern art--the
machine in which the crowd lives.
If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because it
is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern world
to connect inspiring ideas with.
Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and
shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and
looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist
of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps past.
But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a
great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in the
wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled with
childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to wonder my
way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown to me;
miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world lifting itself
mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over on a great steel pivot,
down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights. I am whirled away from
it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting their souls up
in a great flame and laying down floors on a star. I have stood and
watched, in the melting-down place, the making and the welding place
of the bones of the world.
It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a world a

man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know it and make
one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be written across
the world once more--written across this year of the world in the roar of
its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot quite see the word
YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we hear it
sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the machines
themselves.

IV
POETS
When, standing in the midst of