To tell you when you cannot fully taste a book that it is
because it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To
say it of a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be
true of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some
north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the nationality
of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former glories of his country,
he tells us that "the nightingale still sings old Persian"; I can
understand the nationality of Burns when he turns his plough aside to
spare the rough burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two for
dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of
which we are all citizens,--that country of the heart which has no
boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must smack of the soil,
for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it, but it
must do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that climbs forever
toward diviner air, and not in the grovelling fashion of the potato. Any
verse that makes you and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but
no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were disinterred and edited some thirty
years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may
browse there to his heart's content.
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