These are some of the elementary reasons why those who demand of the poet a definite code of morals or manners--“American ideals,” or “Puritanism,” or on the other side, “radical ideas”--seem to me to show their incompetence as critics. How can we expect illumination from those who share the “typical American business man’s” inherent inability to live in the world of fantasy which the poets have created, without the business man’s ability to face the external facts of life and mould them to his will? These men are schoolmasters, pedants, moralists, policemen, but neither critics nor true lovers of the spiritual food that art provides. To the creative writers of America I should give a wholly different message from theirs. I should say to them: “Express what is in you, all that serene or turbulent vision of multitudinous life which is yours by right of imagination, trusting in your own power to achieve discipline and mastery, and leave the discussion of ‘American ideals’ to statesmen, historians, and philosophers, with the certainty that if you truly express the vision that is in you, the statesmen, historians, and philosophers of the future will point to your work as a fine expression of the ‘American ideals’ you have helped to create.” But it is no part of the critic’s duty to lay down laws for the guidance of the creator, though he may have insight enough to foresee some of the directions which literature is likely to take. He may even point out new material for the imagination of poets to feed on,--the beautiful folklore of our native Indians, the unplumbed depths of the Negro’s soul, the poetry and wisdom of Asia (which it may be our chief destiny to interpret for the nations of Europe), the myth and story of the hundred races that are to make up the new America, and all the undiscovered coigns and crannies of our national life. I shall not say that these services are extraneous and unimportant, like furnishing the fountain-pen with which a great poem is written; but incursions into the geography of the imagination are incidental to the critic’s main duty of interpreting literature and making its meaning and purpose clear to all who wish to love and understand it.