Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce, Cry out for togas and the picturesque, Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s self Was commonplace to Lady Guenever; And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat, As Regent Street to poets. Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch Upon the burning lava of a song, The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age: That, when the next shall come, the men of that May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say ‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked! That bosom seems to beat still, or at least It sets ours beating. This is living art, Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’ What form is best for poems? Let me think Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit, As sovran nature does, to make the form; For otherwise we only imprison spirit, And not embody. Inward evermore To outward,—so in life, and so in art, Which still is life. Five acts to make a play. And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven? What matter for the number of the leaves, Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact The literal unities of time and place, When ’tis the essence of passion to ignore Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire, And leave the generous flames to shape themselves. ’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness To this or that convention; ‘exit’ here And ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed, Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams; And all the close-curled imagery clipped In manner of their fleece at shearing-time. Forget to prick the galleries to the heart Precisely at the fourth act,—culminate Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,— We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely plead Against our just damnation. Stand aside; We’ll muse for comfort that, last century, On this same tragic stage on which we have failed, A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.