Modern poetry tends to deal emotionally with social problems. The poet who calls attention to the suffering of the poor, or the persecutions of reformers, or shows the ills in family life brought about by our marriage system, or announces a social message, is not a propagandist when he writes something that evokes our emotions. When Untermeyer published his book on poetry he was much criticized for the prominence he gave to James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are excellent poets. It is to be regretted that Untermeyer did not include also a chapter on Horace Traubel. Untermeyer may insist too much on the social mission of poetry, but he is nearer to an exalted conception of poetry than those who weld words to metre and have neither ideas nor substance in their writing.
Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not belong to him (the poet),--politics, economics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much as sunsets and souls; only these things, placed in their order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic."
An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two lectures on the "Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes," delivered in 1852, and posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, gave vent to many remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following passage was written three years before the _Leaves of Grass_, and sums up Whitman's ideas, and is worthy of quotation to-day for its timeliness:
The Poetry of the coming age must come from the Working Classes. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at least as it represents their life, has long been worn out, sickly and sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal aristocracy with its associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott. Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and endurance still want their voice, and it must come from the classes whose observation is at first hand, and who speak fresh from nature's heart. What has poetry to do with our Working Classes? Men of work! We want our poetry from you--from men who will dare to live a brave and true life;----
It does not follow that individualism in poetry will die out and that ignorant laborers are to be the sole heroes and subjects of poetry. The intellectual reader will still find in poetry his intellectual heroes. There will never be equality of intellect, and hence there will also be something of an intellectual aristocracy in connection with the literature and poetry of democracy.