Poetry is a progressive art. The emotion playing about the old ballads and legends is not as compelling as that found in the great modern novels and plays. Our great later poets and thinkers are more advanced and do not worship superstition and defend false beliefs, or celebrate revenge and war, as the old primeval poets do. When we think of the ideal poet, it is not the champion of the middle class like Longfellow and Tennyson, or one full of the early martial spirit and drawing fighting heroes like the author of _Beowulf_, or the _Nibelungen Lied_. Nor do we think of the poet who incorporates the religious errors and legends of his time and imitates ancient epics, nor of one who portrays a preceding and bygone age. We, or at least a few of us, like to think of him as a man drawing people in the grip of passions and battling for advanced ideas. We like to think of men like Shakespeare and Ibsen, Isaiah and Job, Balzac and Cervantes, Molière and Goethe, Byron and Shelley, Burns and Heine, Whitman and Swinburne, Carducci and Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ruskin, Dostoievsky and Dickens, Hugo and Rolland. We like to think chiefly of men who were largely personal in their appeal, and depicted their own sufferings, and described grief brought about by the social construction of society which they criticized. Such poets are no dalliers with anaemic feelings. They felt what they sang and were not afraid to give sway to their emotions and ideas. They are not didacticists nor moralists, but emotional thinkers. They do not think that they ought to deny the claims of the intellect and the moral vision. I do not say that other kinds of emotional writers are not great poets. I merely cite what I think is a high order of poetry. I do not deny that poets may avoid any moral mission and just sing private emotions, whether in prose or verse. The Troubadours, and the Roman Elegists, De Musset and Verlaine, Hafiz and Keats, are among the very greatest poets, even though they are not prophets.
Much of our so-called democratic poetry is not democratic at all. Poetry does not become democratic because some poets dwell on the privileges the working people of to-day have in contrast with those working people had generations ago, or because writers have discovered that even common people experience most of the emotions of the upper class. Literature cannot be democratic, while poets write for the few who use them as tools for their own interests, to defend a system which is courteously called competition instead of exploitation. Much of our democratic literature is either capitalistic or bourgeois literature that gives a slight condescending nod to the proletariat. Many wealthy and cultured authors have taken up the cause of the laborer just as they would that of caged animals. They have suggested improvements in the treatment of captives, but not complete freedom. Fortunately we have had works like Galsworthy's _Strife_, Hauptmann's _Weavers_, Verhaeren's _Dawn_, Sinclair's _Jungle_, Zola's _Germinal_, Gissing's _Nether World_.