Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in the wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled with childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights. I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the making and the welding place of the bones of the world. It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a world a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know it and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be written across the world once more--written across this year of the world in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot quite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we hear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the machines themselves. IV POETS When, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the thing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas practical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will always be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the real spirit we know exists in the real world. Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century. Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the earth. The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead, this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the daring of their dreams.