III. The poets, that is, in the old pristine Greek sense, the makers, the
creators, in the generic sense, and not merely in the specific sense of
makers of verses.
If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as
putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility
and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions
of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are
poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and
that prophets have entirely disappeared. And I bring to my support the
more liberal lexicography of science, whose spectroscopy now admits the
humblest elements into the society of the stars; whose microscopy, as
Maeterlinck has helped us to become aware, has permitted the flowers to
share the aspirations of animal intelligence; whose chemistry has gathered
the elements into a social democracy in which no permanent aristocracy
seems now to be possible, except that of service to man; whose physics has
divided the atom and yet exalted it to a place which would lead Lucretius,
were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum instead of Natura
Rerum.
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