This is an obvious imitation of Walt Whitman, is it?
Well, and wouldn’t that be better than another in sickly rime?
Perhaps you would prefer as more exquisite
Some other fellow’s footprints in the sands of time,
Or the past perhaps present future of Eliot’s pleasant slime….
But this is not an imitation of anyone: listen to me, I am alive!
Whitman and Longfelloware dead; Eliot doesn’t know he is;
I am for the Great-not the great poet, no matter how true he is;
I say that every man alive is great, no matter who he is,
For it is great to be alive!
The lowest man on earth is a hero and a god with me:
Whoever he is, he is greater than any or all of his fellows;
Means more to me than all the crowned or bald heads of europe;
Cleaner than any dust from greece,
Warmer than the bones in westminster abbey;
Greater by far than all that has been before him,
And dwarfed only by what is to come after him….
Whoever he is, he is the One on whose shoulders the world rests;
the One at whose command material empires rise in ministration-
Not some artist or philosopher or emperor, but any man.
What is his social value, his justification?
Well, what is life’s justification?
If he can neither work nor plan, fiddle nor rime,
If he can’t provide occupational therapy for sick psychiatrists,
If rulers ever learn from him to abjure war, and need no gunman,
There would still be justification for his existence, in his sheer existence.
For life, in the saint and sinner, sane and insane, wise and otherwise-
Is its own justification.
Every man is inferior to every other man-in some respects;
And every man is superior to every other man-in other respects.
We can’t live without holding someone else up,
And we can’t live without someone holding us up.
One man is just as good as another, in fact better-
And in fact better than a million men; because you can’t make world wars out of one man,
And that’s all you can do with the latter.
But every man is great only in what he makes, in his subject matter
In the only things that really matter.
The plumber can’t bake, the builder can’t plumb, and the architect has them both beat;
The three are awed by the mathematician, who defers to the man with the axe;
They all yield to the artist who accepts them with all that lives and breathes;
And the all go to work and war-and must accept the superiority of a lunatic who is mad in a world which is s terrifyingly sane.
There is no man living who can not find on some one thing higher authority-
That is if we accept those terribly important people who string words together
And think themselves so much better than men who merely stick bricks together;
As we expect other people with similar theses,
Such as elephantine labourers who would pull social theories and theorists to pieces,
And such as anyone who seeks to rule over the living, and is in that one fact-dead!
Well then, if there must be lords and masters,
Let us rule matter with every man alive;
If we must have slaves, let us enslave machines.
Let us be gods, and selfish-
Let the prostrate worshippers of the past be someone else-ish;
Let us be, and be worshipped ourselves.
Let the painter forgive his painting,
The poet redeem his poem,
And the dead bury the dead…
My poems are revolutions, of the builders, the living great,
Searching with god-like hunger new matter to animate-
And of cities steeled in silence, now growing articulate;
Of things, machines, our creatures, raching in lever and rod
To touch the hands of their creators, praying to us as god….
True it is I echo-the mighty shouts of these hordes;
Yes, and an imitator-of impetuous powerful words;
Plagiarist of Whitman, of all the Sons of Man-
For they have heard me in the future, as I do those to come-
Yet greater than Christ or Whitman, than ash from any tomb-
Greater than any history, than ink from any pen,
For you my poems scan,
Who despair of your social value, who are despised by men:
You are alive, you are human-by life you are made devine!
You are the revelation-one mightier poem than mine!
(Harry Hooton)
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