The soul of a nation is not in its literature but in its contemporary life. Literatures haven't souls, even if, haply, they have considerable vitality or permanence. Literatures are intricate autobiographies, vague symbols of personal feeling, lifted by a modicum of consciousness into mystic articulation. The great literatures that are on the way will be more and more psychological. What people call love in the world of realism will play a sublimer part in the world of consciousness. Prose and poetry in which our conscious life is more intimately portrayed will challenge and in a million years increase consciousness, so that through emphasis and use this later acquisition of the race will transmute information into perfect organic knowledge. A larger consciousness will break up the chaos of unnumbered antagonisms in human relationships. The literature of description and the blind play of instinct has served its purpose and had its day. The literature of the future must deal with a vaster world than that in which animals prey upon one another. Such a literature will not bear the name of a man, a state, a nation, or an age.
We are opposed to the whole idea of nationalism; we even object to worldliness in literature; we want something still bigger: a literature with a sense of the planets in it. In this new day it is too late to fuss about nations, geographical literatures, and races. We are called toward the universe and mankind. In this land of blended nationalities our hope is to evolve a literature vitalized by the blood of multitudinous races and linked in pedigree with the infinite ages of the past. Walt Whitman's poetry was cosmic; the new poetry will extend to the planets. The summit of Parnassus now rests in the gloom of the valley, and the poet of the future will look down from the higher eminence to which science has called him. Man today soars in flying machines in the old realm of his young imagination. Poets must outreach mere science.
What little patriots call a nation is a huge dogma that must be overcome. In poetry there must be an increasingly larger sense of the universe instead of nations as man's habitation. National literatures are exclusive of and alien to one another; they should be interrelated and fundamentally combinable. There can be no local literature if the thought of the world is embodied in it, and any other quality of literature must lack integrity. Wild dreamers insist upon a literature that shall be superior to political boundaries. The idea of nationalism involves the setting up of barriers and the fossilizing of life. It is a small idea that belongs to the dark ages. If we are ever to expand in feeling, thought, and achievement we must rise above nations into the starry spaces. We shall at least be citizens of the world, and, if citizens of the world, then truth-seekers beyond the reach of land and sea.