One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said:
"They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it--
rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt
Whitman's verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on
his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song
that stirs one's blood.
Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so
dark and gloomy on the Celoron journey, to the lamp of the academician and
the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the
world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the
saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs,
harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars,
ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts;
unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides
(under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would
Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that
should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened
by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the
Frenchman's canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read
these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York,
standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university
corridor--where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors
and shuffling feet--I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of
these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were
but waiting in the air to be heard.
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