The Voice of the Machines | Page 5

the huge machine-shop of our modern
life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the
thing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas
practical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will always be
practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal to the
imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the real spirit
we know exists in the real world.
Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.
Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are
now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the earth.
The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of
John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something
of the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer
of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this
same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of
poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be lifting
its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead, this same
world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more kinds of
poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the daring of
their dreams.
Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in the

real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not being in
enough of the real world.
If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy
expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall
we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument? the
minor poet?
The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the
doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by
peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the
door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and
humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing
upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere
outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the thing called
life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He shall be seen
living with retorts around him, loomed over by machines--shadowed by
weariness--to the men about him half comrade, half monk--going in
and out among them silently, with some secret glory in his heart.
If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who
are putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and brakemen--as
well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club, there would
be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--i. e., a great hope or
great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of
poetry in machinery is not literary, nor æsthetic. It is sociological. It is
in getting people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

V
GENTLEMEN
The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his
work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves his
work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a
gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own

employer. No matter how many men are over him, or how many men
pay him, or fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one
man who is master of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man
on it. The man who loves his work has the single thing the world
affords that can make a man free, that can make him his own employer,
that admits him to the ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich
enough to pay him, what a gentleman's work is worth.
The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it, the
men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that
these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of
them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They
cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the
autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him,
possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.
Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number
employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than
there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative in
creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else there
are more poets