Politics,
and politics of a creative character, has never lacked good blood
in the United States. Organization, and organization of a kind
requiring the creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our
energies, especially since the Civil War, and by no means all of
it has been business organization. Consider our systems of
education and philanthropy, erected for vast needs. And I venture
to guess that more varieties of religious experience have arisen
in America than elsewhere in the same period. After all, why
expect a century and a half of semi-independent intellectual
existence to result in a great national literature? Can other
countries, other times, show such a phenomenon?
No, if we have been slow in finding ourselves in literature, in
creating a school of expression like the Elizabethan or the
Augustan, the difficulties are to be sought elsewhere than in a
lack of energy.
Seek them first of all in a weakening of literary tradition. The
sky changes, not the mind, said Horace, but this is true only of
the essentials of being. The great writers of our common English
tradition--Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others--are as
good for us as they are good for you.
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