Robert Green Ingersoll

Walt Whitman Robert Green Ingersoll

In the year 1855 the American people knew but little of books. Their ideals, their models, were English. Young and Pollok, Addison and Watts were regarded as great poets. Some of the more reckless read Thomson's "Seasons" and the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott. A few, not quite orthodox, delighted in the mechanical monotony of Pope, and the really wicked-those lost to all religious shame-were worshipers of Shakespeare. The really orthodox Protestant, untroubled by doubts, considered Milton the greatest poet of them all. Byron and Shelley were hardly respectable-not to be read by young persons. It was admitted on all hands that Burns was a child of nature of whom his mother was ashamed and proud. In the blessed year aforesaid, candor, free and sincere speech, were under the ban. Creeds at that time were entrenched behind statutes, prejudice, custom, ignorance, stupidity, Puritanism and slavery; that is to say, slavery of mind and body. Of course it always has been, and forever will be, impossible for slavery, or any kind or form of injustice, to produce a great poet. There are hundreds of verse makers and writers on the side of wrong-enemies of progress-but they are not poets, they are not men of genius.