Born, at West Hills, near Huntington, Suffolk County, New York, 31 May, 1819. At school at Brooklyn, 1824–28. Lawyer’s clerk in Brooklyn, 1830–32. Worked as printer in Brooklyn, 1834–37. Schoolmaster on Long Island, 1837–38. Founded and edited a weekly newspaper, 1839–40. Returned to Brooklyn, 1840; worked as printer till 1848. On staff of New Orleans “Daily Crescent,” 1848. Edited Brooklyn “Daily Eagle,” 1848–49. At Brooklyn working as housebuilder and agent, 1850–62; during this period contrib. to various periodicals, and published “The Freeman.” At Washington, 1862–73. Nurse and surgeons’ assistant during war, 1862–66. Held clerkships in Indian Office of Interior Dept., in Office of Solicitor to Treasury, and in Attorney-General’s Office, 1865–73. Settled at Camden, New Jersey, summer of 1873. Died there, 26 March 1892. Buried at Harleigh Cemetery, Camden. Works: “Leaves of Grass,” 1855; “Drum Taps,” 1865; “Sequel to Drum Taps,” 1866; “Memoranda during the War,” 1867; “Democratic Vistas,” 1871; “After All, not to Create only,” 1871; “Passage to India,” 1871; “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” 1872; “Two Rivulets,” 1876; “Complete Works, revised to 1877” (2 vols.), 1878; “Specimen Days and Collect,” 1882–83; “November Boughs,” 1888; “Good-bye, my Fancy,” 1891; “Autobiographia,” 1892; “Complete Prose Works,” 1892.

Personal

  Walt the satyr, the Bacchus, the very god Pan. We sat with him for two hours, and much to our delight; he promising to call on us at the International at ten in the morning to-morrow, and there have the rest of it.

  At my third knock a fine-looking old lady opened the door just enough to eye me carefully, and ask what I wanted. It struck me, after a little, that his mother—for so she declared herself—was apprehensive that an agent of the police might be after her son, on account of his audacious book. At last, however, she pointed to an open common with a central hill, and told me I should find her son there. The day was excessively hot, the thermometer at nearly 100, and the sun blazed down as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze. The common had not a single tree or shelter, and it seemed to me that only a very devout fire-worshipper indeed could be found there on such a day. No human being could I see at first in any direction; but just as I was about to return I saw stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at the terrible sun, the man I was seeking. With his grey clothing, his bluegrey shirt, his iron-grey hair, his swart sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-white grass—for the sun had burnt away its greenness—and was so like the earth upon which he rested, that he seemed almost enough a part of it for one to pass by without recognition. I approached him, gave my name and reason for searching him out, and asked him if he did not find the sun rather hot. “Not at all too hot,” was his reply; and he confided to me that this was one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing “poems.” He then walked with me to his home, and took me along its narrow ways to his room. A small room of about fifteen square feet, with a single window looking out on the barren solitudes of the island; a small cot, a wash-stand with a little looking-glass hung over it, from a tack in the wall, a pine table with pen, ink, and paper on it; an old-line-engraving, representing Bacchus, hung on the wall, and opposite a similar one of Silenus; these constituted the visible environment of Walt Whitman. There was not, apparently, a single book in the room. In reply to my expression of a desire to see his books, he declared that he had very few. I found, upon further enquiry, that he had received only such a good English education as every American lad may receive from the public schools, and that he now had access to the libraries of some of his friends. The books he seemed to know and love best were the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in his pockets whilst we were talking. He had two studies where he read; one was the top of an omnibus, and the other a small mass of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island. Many days had he passed on that island, as completely alone as Crusoe.

  Here is Walt Whitman—a man who has lived a brave, simple, clean, grand, manly life, irradiated with all good works and offices to his country and his fellow-men—intellectual service to the doctrines of liberty and democracy, personal service to slaves, prisoners, the erring, the sick, the outcast, the poor, the wounded and dying soldiers of the land. He has written a book, welcomed, as you know, by noble scholars on both sides of the Atlantic; and this, for ten years, has made every squirt and scoundrel on the press fancy he had a right to insult him. Witness the recent editorial in the Chicago Republican. Witness the newspapers and literary journals since 1856, spotted with squibs, pasquinades, sneers, lampoons, ferocious abuse, libels. The lying jabber of the boys, drunkards and libidinous persons privileged to control many of the public prints, has passed as evidence as to his character; the ridiculous opinions of callow brains, the refraction of filthy hearts, have been received as true interpretations of his volume. All this is notorious. You know it, I suppose, as well as I. And finally after the years of defamation, calumny, private affronts, public contumely, my pamphlet refers to—after the social isolation, the poverty, the adversity which an evil reputation thus manufactured for a man and following him into every detail of his life must involve—Mr. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, lifting the charge of autorial obscenity into the most signal consequence, puts on the top-stone of outrage by expelling him from office with this brand upon his name.

  The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the man’s character.

  When I shook hands with him there, at the door of his little house in Camden, I scarcely realised the great privilege that had been given to me—that of seeing face to face the wisest and noblest, the most truly great, of all modern literary men. I hope yet, if I am spared, to look upon him again, for well I know that the earth holds no such another nature. Nor do I write this with the wild hero-worship of a boy, but as the calm, deliberate judgment of a man who is far beyond all literary predilections or passions. In Walt Whitman I see more than a mere maker of poems, I see a personality worthy to rank even above that of Socrates, akin even, though lower and far distant, to that of Him who is considered, and rightly, the first of men. I know that if that other were here, his reception in New England might be very much the same. I know, too, that in some day not so remote, humanity will wonder that men could dwell side by side with this colossus, and not realize his proportions.

  In the works of Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and other eminent American poets, it will, I believe, be difficult to point out a single example of lusty self-appreciation. Walt Whitman does not hesitate to take a reader into his personal confidence, though he may sometimes make the reader blush and wish the poet had been more reticent.

  It is not a little difficult to write an article about Walt Whitman’s home, for it was humorously said by himself, not long ago, that he had all his life possessed a home only in the sense that a ship possesses one…. Of late years the poet, who was sixty-nine years old on the last day of May, 1888, has been in a state of half-paralysis. He gets out of door regularly in fair weather, much enjoys the Delaware River, is a great frequenter of the Camden and Philadelphia Ferry, and may occasionally be seen sauntering along Chestnut or Market Streets in the latter city. He has a curious sort of public sociability, talking with black and white, high and low, male and female, old and young, of all grades. He gives a word or two of friendly recognition, or a nod or smile, to each. Yet he is by no means a marked talker or logician anywhere. I know an old book-stand man who always speaks of him as Socrates. But in one respect the likeness is entirely deficient. Whitman never argues, disputes, or holds or invites a cross-questioning bout with any human being. Through his paralysis, poverty, the embezzlement of book-agents (1874–1876), the incredible slanders and misconstructions that have followed him through life, and the quite complete failure of his book from a worldly and financial point of view, his splendid fund of personal equanimity and good spirits has remained inexhaustible, and is to-day, amid bodily helplessness and a most meagre income, more vigorous and radiant than ever.

	Here health we pledge you in one draught of song,
	Caught in this rhymer’s cup from earth’s delight,
	Where English fields are green the whole year long,
	The wine of might,
	That the new-come Spring distils, most sweet and strong,
	In the viewless air’s alembic, wrought too fine for sight.
	Good health! we pledge, that care may lightly sleep,
	And pain of age be gone for this one day,
	As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep,
	Grow glad at heart straightway
	To feel once more the kindly heat of the sun
	Creative in you, as when in youth it shone,
	And pulsing brainward with the rhythmic wealth
	Of all the summer whose high minstrelsy
	Shall soon crown field and tree,
	And call back age to youth again, and pain to perfect health.

	Good-bye, Walt!
	Good-bye, from all you loved of earth—
	Rock, tree, dumb creature, man and woman—
	To you, their comrade human.
	The last assault
	Ends now; and now in some great world has birth
	A minstrel, whose strong soul finds broader wings,
	More brave imaginings.
	Stars crown the hilltop where your dust shall lie,
	Even as we say good-bye,
	Good-bye, old Walt!

  My first meeting with Walt Whitman occurred when I was a boy and had occasion to ask for a certain residence in his street. I did not know who or what he was, but on his answering my question I was so struck with the quality of his voice, which was musical and resonant, that I took the earliest opportunity to make enquiry as to the new-comer, and received the information that it was a man named Walt Whitman, who had written what some people called poetry and others nonsense. Had the present city directory of the town been in existence, I could have found it authoritatively stated that the gentleman was “Walt Whitman, poet.” My first visit to him occurred some years later, in the little house on Mickle Street which has been the scene of the closing years of his life. When I entered the room the poet was sitting in his great chair by the window, in front of him a table heaped up at least to the height of four feet with books of all sorts, old and new, gift-editions from men famous in letters, and cheap second-hand purchases; the floor was knee-deep in newspapers, manuscript, and books, among the last a well-thumbed Latin Lexicon…. The most interesting talk that I ever had with Walt Whitman was on one winter afternoon some five years ago, when I dropped in and found the poet ready and eager “to gossip in the early candle-light of old age.” His theme was himself and his book, and he told the story not at all to me, as it seemed, but as though he were taking a backward glance o’er travelled roads, alone. The starting-point was an answer to the question,—“Mr. Whitman, how did you come to write poetry?” And in his reply he said that at the time when he was a carpenter-builder in Brooklyn he would buy a bit of property in the suburbs, erect a little house upon it with his own hands, sell the place at an average profit of about two hundred dollars, and, taking the money thus earned, go down to Long Island and lie out on the rocks, reading, dreaming, and watching the ships…. Whitman seemed to have the keenest enjoyment of bright colors. On one Sunday afternoon while entertaining some half-dozen callers he halted the general talk to call attention to the bright red dress of a little girl whom he spied out of his window. “How that color brightens up the whole street!” he said. And on another occasion, when he had driven out to a horse race (his first appearance at a race-track), he told me he lost all interest in the sporting event to sit in admiration of a clump of green trees that outlined themselves against a white fence. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he said. “How the white back-ground sets off the many shades of the green leaves!” One of the most satisfying qualities that Whitman possessed, as a man, was the dignified, unruffled demeanor that he never lost, whether he was hobnobbing with a deck-hand or a ’bus-driver or entertaining some guest who was a celebrity in two continents.

  I saw Whitman in war times and later with an experience akin to that of some Athenian who had known Socrates, and perhaps followed the grand pug-nosed old loafer from place to place to hear him talk. If ever the loafer come to his own, and we amend our Christian legends, Saint Socrates will be his patron. Even as I had fancied the shaggy-browed Socrates floating about Athens, the eyes of the police upon him with their own thoughts as to his means of support, there was the suggestion of a parallel in Whitman. He had a conspicuous, massive figure, invariably in frowsy picturesque raiment. You ran against him in out of the way places—riding on the front of horse cars in conversation with the driver, giving pennies to ragged groups of negro children; sailing down Pennsylvania avenue, with that wonderful hat, that collar that was never buttoned, like some old three-decker of ninety-four, or trailing out toward the camps in suburban Washington with packages under his arms or in his coat pockets, presumably for the hospital. There was something of a rude, enviable splendor in his superb, rugged health,—the body dominant with wholesome conditions; something also of the Horace Greeley in this personality—the same shambling, go-as-you-please gait, Whitman rather the sturdier of the two; nothing of the inspired childhood; phenomenal touch of genius, as in the famous journalist. You were apt to find him silent, civil, not communicative, but cordial when you could reach him.

	Serene, vast head, with silver cloud of hair,
	Lined on the purple dusk of death
	A stem medallion, velvet set—
	Old Norseman throned, not chained upon thy chair,
	Thy grasp of hand, thy hearty breath
	Of welcome thrills me yet
	As when I faced thee there.

  In his book he despised riches, in his actual life he probably never gave up one day to the pursuit of them. In his book the ideal man gives alms to everyone that asks; in actual life the man, Walt Whitman, gave his days and nights, his labor, his love and sympathy, his time and strength, and at last his splendid health, to those who needed help and a friend. The ideal man in “Leaves of Grass” is a lover of his kind in a new and higher sense, affection, devotion, faith, pride, all the lofty passions, are in him developed to an unprecedented degree. Those who know the actual flesh and blood Walt Whitman can bear witness that the living man fell not an iota short of his pen and ink prototype.

  His Quaker ancestry, in my judgment, dominated all other elements in his character. He was from early childhood of a quiet, thoughtful and kindly disposition, full of calm seriousness and powerful faith…. If to have Christlike qualities is to be a Christian, then it would be difficult to select a more perfect example than Walt Whitman. His gentleness, unselfishness, charity and lovingness for every living creature were so thoroughly natural and spontaneous, that those who knew him personally fully realize how perfectly he has placed a man in his book.

  No one was ever more generous and frank of nature, more ready to accept differences of opinion, more tolerant of criticism. At the same time he displayed a desire to diffuse his doctrines, an eagerness to be acknowledged in his life time. He craved for responsive affection in the audience to whom he appealed, and regarded his literary teaching in the light of a cause. He acted like one who did not trust to the certainty of the eventual success of genius. He collected and distributed trifling panegyrics of himself, culled from the holes and corners of American journalism. He showed small sense of proportion in criticism, and seemed to value people by the amount of personal zeal they displayed in the propagation of his views.

  I liked the man much, a fine-natured, good-hearted, big fellow, who must have been handsome in young days (as indeed an early portrait shows him).

  Whitman’s magnetic quality was peculiar. I never knew a person to meet him for the first time who did not come under its spell; most people going away in such a curious state of exaltation and excitement as to produce a certain wakefulness, the general feeling not wearing off for a fortnight.

  It was a poet’s life from first to last,—free, unhampered, unworldly, unconventional, picturesque, simple, untouched by the craze of money-getting, unselfish, devoted to others, and was on the whole, joyfully and contentedly lived. It was a pleased and interested saunter through the world,—no hurry, no fever, no strife; hence no bitterness, no depletion, no wasted energies. A farm boy, then a school-teacher, then a printer, editor, writer, traveler, mechanic, nurse in the army hospitals, and lastly government clerk; large and picturesque of figure, slow of movement; tolerant, passive, receptive, and democratic,—of the people; in all his tastes and attractions, always aiming to walk abreast with the great laws and forces, and to live thoroughly in the free, nonchalant spirit of his own day and land.

  Walt Whitman was at this time fifty-eight, but he looked seventy. His beard and hair were snow-white, his complexion a fine colour, and unwrinkled. He had still, though stricken in 1873 by paralysis, a most majestic presence. He was over six feet, but he walked lame, dragging the left leg, and leaning heavily on a stick. He was dressed always in a complete suit of gray clothes with a large and spotless white linen collar, his flowing white beard filling in the gap at his strong sunburnt throat. He possessed a full-toned, rather high, baritone voice, a little harsh and lacking in the finer modulations for sustained recitation; having an excellent memory, he declaimed many scenes from Shakespeare, poems by Tennyson, and occasionally his own. The “Mystic Trumpeter” was a favorite with him, because he had often recited to his soldiers in the hospitals the opening lines.

Leaves of Grass, 1855

  I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits—namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

  How I loathe “Wishi-washi,”—of course without reading it. I have not been so happy in loathing anything for a long while—except, I think, “Leaves of Grass,” by that Orson of yours. I should like just to have the writing of a valentine to him in one of the reviews.

  I’ve read “Leaves of Grass,” and found it rather pleasant, but little new or original; the portrait the best thing. Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language.

  The plainness of speech in “Leaves of Grass” is indeed biblical; there is, too, a startling priapism running through it; nay, squeamish readers must needs hold their noses, for the writer does not hesitate to bring the slop-bucket into the drawing-room to show that the chemic laws work therein also; yet from its first sentence, “I celebrate myself,” there starts forth an endless procession of the forms and symbols of life—now funeral, now carnival, or again a masquerade of nations, cities, epochs, or the elements, natural and human—fascinating the eye with wonder or dread. To these terrible eyes Maya surrenders; faces, forms, skeletons, are unsheated. Here are the autographs of New York, and of the prairies, savannahs, Ohio, Mississippi, and all powers, good and evil. There is much that is repulsive to the ordinary mind in these things and in the poems that really express them; but as huge reptiles help to fashion the pedestal of man, as artists find in griffins and crouching animal forms the fundamental vitality upon which the statue or pillar may repose one might not unreasonably find in the wild and grotesque forms of Walt Whitman’s chants, so instinct with life, the true basis of any shaft, not the duplicate of any raised elsewhere, that American thought is to raise.

  I read through the three volumes on Sunday: and upon a sober comparison I think Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” worth at least a million of “Among My Books” and “Atalanta in Calydon.” In the two latter I could not find anything which has not been much better said before; but “Leaves of Grass” was a real refreshment to me—like rude salt spray in your face—in spite of its enormous fundamental error that a thing is good because it is natural, and in spite of the world-wide difference between my own conceptions of art and its author’s.

  In two things he fairly did take the initiative, and might, like a wise advocate, rest his case upon them. He essayed, without reserve or sophistry, the full presentment of the natural man. He devoted his song to the future of his own country, accepting and outvying the loudest peak-and-prairie brag, and pledging These States to work out a perfect democracy and the salvation of the world.

  They have neither rhyme nor metre, neither form nor melody. His poetry, although well received in England, has but few admirers in America, and has been very justly characterized as “mere dirty rubbish, full of blatancy and obscenity.”

  I come next to Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusions, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.

  In “Leaves of Grass” Whitman has bodied forth a biography of the human soul; of his own ostensibly, of all souls really, for the experience of the individual is simply the experience of the race in miniature. “Leaves of Grass” is a record of the soul’s voyage through life; a gathering of experience, of joy and sorrow, of feeling, emotion and thought. This gives to the book its power and charm, and also, in some aspects and to some persons, makes it repellent…. I do not advise any one to read “Leaves of Grass” except as a whole. It would not be understood. Passages are easy to find which, when detached, seem foolish or offensive but in their proper place contribute to the harmony of the structure. When one of the editions was in preparation a friend of Whitman urged him to omit certain passages, saying, “What in the world do you want to put in that stuff for that nobody can read?” Whitman replied, “Well, John, if you need to ask that question it is evident, at any rate, that the book was not written for you;” a fitting answer to other objectors…. Tested by scholastic rules, I suppose “Leaves of Grass” would not be called poetry at all. It does not obey the laws of prosody, yet musicians have affirmed that it does obey the laws of music. When, however, the key of the meaning is found, the propriety of the form is felt; it almost seems as though no other form would have served. A comparison between “Leaves of Grass” and the finest of Whitman’s prose, shows that the former stands upon a level altogether higher than the latter. Here, as in all works of true power, the thought has created its own befitting form.

  I have thought of him as a bard devoted by the gods to America as those of old were to Britain. His mission has seemed to me to be the rendering into the early speech of his race what things it is meet should be kept for the future races to know—to know truly, not historically—about the young America. As we know the thought and life of early England through its druids and bards, so I suppose it is intended that Walt Whitman shall be the recorder of our early nationality. Future scholars or patriots in the time when America has grown old in word and deed, and no longer wears the freshness of youth, will go to his book for refreshment, and drink from it promise of the future, because the past has been true and unaffected. Other books there are, certainly, which will help to form the foundation of a great national literature; but none so smack of the very soil, none grow out of it as do “Leaves of Grass.”

  I had my choice when I commenc’d. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. As fulfill’d, or partially fulfill’d, the best comfort of the whole business (after a small band of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to minor cause—doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising—this little phalanx!—for being so few) is that, unstopp’d and unwarp’d by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time…. “Leaves of Grass” indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—an attempt from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America), freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on “Leaves of Grass” distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism.

  “Leaves of Grass” started in almost universal displeasure. It shocked literary and sex traditions. Two things, at least, in its own plane and theory, were necessary to its life. It needed to reflect the broadening spirit of our new age and new land. The rhyme, the convention, the formal measure, insisted upon by old literary codes, were unequal to the current conditions. Whitman made his own vehicle. His book was to get as close to nature as her reserves would permit. The natural was to reflect the healthy and the abiding. Sex, under this treatment, must reclaim its heritage. No middle-age monastic contempt could longer be visited upon motherhood, the body, or any corporeal functions. To dare so dire a thraldom, to strike so near the throne, seemed to be to dare everything. No anti-subjectivist could delight in “Leaves of Grass,” for that one volume uncurtains the frankest confession of life found in annal or story. Who touches this, the author himself teaches, touches not art nor intellect, but a man. Yet there was no sign, as in Amiel, of the disease of introspection. The whole work precipitates the manliest salutations. “Leaves of Grass” has passed through about ten editions.

  The reader may scan page after page without perceiving an image boldly and clearly drawn. If obscurity is a virtue, much of this author’s work has merit; but he does not fulfil the requirements of the literary artist. In style, not only is he open to criticism, but in thought as well. In his “Children of Adam,” he gives utterance to ideas that verge on indecency. He protects himself, of course, by the time-worn adage, “Evil to him who evil thinks;” but purity of thought and expression is a boasted characteristic of American scholars. No author is justified in using words and expressions that would create a vulgar thought in the minds of even the outcast from society…. Though open to criticism, based possibly upon differences of opinion, “Leaves of Grass” is the life work of an American patriot who had the genius to conceive the necessities of our literature and the hardihood to attempt a great original poem. The first edition was a thin volume. Then, during the civil war, the author spent three years as an army nurse, gaining experience preparatory to new literary ventures. From time to time during his after life, appeared additions and annexes until the entire work forms a good-sized volume.

  There is in “Leaves of Grass” a freshness almost physical, and from one end to the other the reader breathes that odor of open air and earth, wholesome and refreshing, such as overtakes and invigorates one who has long been shut within the walls of the city and at last goes forth into the ample fields.

  Everyone who so far has ventured on the reading of “Leaves of Grass” has had the following experiences: After the perusal of the first few pages it has seemed to him that the book must have been the work of a madman. Soon, however, he has been suddenly arrested by an original thought which has revealed to him the meaning of what he has so far read, and has irresistibly urged him to read further. He has found himself, then, in the condition of the magician’s pupil in Goethe’s ballad, who is unable to free himself from the spirits which he has called up…. The reading of “Leaves of Grass” may be compared to the ascent of a mountain, where every laborious step is rewarded with new and fascinating views. The summit, however, of this spirit-mountain has never yet been reached, as is confessed readily by his most ardent worshippers and most industrious readers, who comfort themselves with the thought that as they have already conquered so many difficulties, the remaining secrets will be yet unveiled to them.

  Looked at as a whole, “Leaves of Grass” is mystical, joyous, full of the power to impart courage and moral strength. It resembles the Iliad or the Nibelungen Lied in being a growth, not a make, a true epos, not an epopee. It is perhaps the only great epos in the world in which some individual woman is not the prime and the centre around which all revolves. Yet it honors woman more than all the others…. Shallow students of Whitman never get hold of this cardinal premise at all, but serenely criticise him for not attaining what he avowed at the start he did not intend to do.

  In 1860 a much enlarged edition was printed at Boston in which the most objectionable verses were grouped under the grotesque title, “Enfans d’Adam.” It was at this juncture that Emerson took his famous walk with Whitman and calmly expostulated with him in regard to his overfrank treatment of sexual matters. Whitman listened in silence, years later confessed that the arguments were unanswerable, but was more convinced than ever that he must let his verses stand. What Emerson could not do with Whitman it is not likely that any reader or critic will be able to do with Whitman’s disciples. The “Children of Adam” poems need, therefore, no discussion here. It should be remarked, however, that the time for upbraiding the author—if such a time ever existed—has long since passed. No careful student of Whitman’s life and works can now fail to perceive that he was thoroughly sincere in believing that his frank speaking was demanded in the interest of the highest morality. It was a part of his message, and it is permissible to maintain that his most questionable poems can have done few people harm, and must have done something towards shaking the hold of prudery and cant. It is equally permissible to maintain that his concrete presentation of this portion of his message was, to say the least, singularly open to misconstruction.

General

  It has been a melancholy task to read this book; [“Drum-Taps”] and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper’s “Philosophy” there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic sort…. Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance—the life—of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy—such we take to be the author’s argument—but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people. He tells us, in the lines quoted, that the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are everything, and very little at that. A great deal of verse that is nothing but words has, during the war, been sympathetically sighed over and cut out of newspaper corners, because it has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. Whitman’s verse, we are confident, would have failed even of this triumph, for the simple reason that no triumph, however small, is won but through the exercise of art, and that this volume is an offence against art. It is not enough to be grim and rough and careless; common sense is also necessary, for it is by common sense that we are judged. There exists in even the commonest minds, in literary matters, a certain precise instinct of conservatism, which is very shrewd in detecting wanton eccentricities. To this instinct Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste. The point is that it does this on theory, wilfully, consciously, arrogantly. It is the little nursery game of “open your mouth and shut your eyes.” Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense, but never in direct violation of it.

  That glorious man Whitman will one day be known as one of the greatest sons of Earth, a few steps below Shakespeare on the throne of immortality.

  I think it was very manly and kind of you to put the whole of Walt Whitman’s poems into my hands; and that I have no other friend who would have judged them and me so wisely and generously. I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I feel sometimes as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems. In the series headed “Calamus,” for instance, in some of the “Songs of Parting,” the “Voice out of the Sea,” the poem beginning “Tears, Tears,” etc., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under it—stands quite still—and I am obliged to lay the book down for a while. Or again, in the piece called “Walt Whitman,” and one or two others of that type, I am as one hurried through stormy sea, over high mountains, dazed with sunlight, stunned with a crowd and tumult of faces and voices, till I am breathless, bewildered, half dead. Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened. Living impulses flow out of these that make me exult in life, yet look longingly towards “the superb vistas of Death.” Those who admire this poem, and don’t care for that, and talk of formlessness, absence of meter, etc., are quite as far from any genuine recognition of Walt Whitman as his bitter detractors.

  Pupils who are accustomed to associate the idea of poetry with regular classic measure in rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse, or elastic hexameters, will commence these short and simple prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder how any number of them can form a poem. But let them read aloud, with minds in sympathy with the picture as it is displayed, and they will find by nature’s unmistakable responses that the author is a poet, and possesses the poet’s incommunicable power to touch the heart. This power is the inheritance into which the poet is born, and as Webster said of eloquence, labor and learning will toil for it in vain.

  Whitman is unceasingly gay, and fresh and racy. He speaks of common things, and men, and the common sights of everyday life, and yet he is always artistic. The things he observes are significant and such as arrest the eye and the mind, and make a deep mark in the memory. He expresses more than happiness, he expresses exultation. The two hemispheres of the soul he describes as love and dilatation, or pride:—

I was Manhattanese, friendly, and proud.

And so he often uses the word arrogant in a good sense. His poems teem with such words as superb, perfect, gigantic, divine. At his touch the dry bones of our meagre humanity are transformed, and man starts forth like a god, in body and in soul superhuman…. No English poet except perhaps Shelley was so well acquainted with all that could be learned from books. But they give expression to their learning in widely different ways. Shelley’s knowledge did not appear in his poetry, it went to feed his idealism and egotism. Whitman’s appears as a natural growth. He alludes to the solar system and the formation of the earth, and to what he has learned from travellers and ethnologists, as he alludes to the apple-blossom or any other common thing. No poet ever assimilated his knowledge so well as Whitman or so vitalised it with his own large and joyous life…. He is the noblest literary product of modern times, and his influence is invigorating and refining beyond expression.

  “The Leaves of Grass” is redeemed by few grand descriptive passages from absolute barbarism both of manner and matter. It is a glorification of nature in her most unabashed forms, an audacious protest against all that civilization has done to raise men above the savage state. The “Drum Taps,” a set of generally vigorous pictures of the war, are less objectionable; the dirge on Lincoln in particular has many qualities of a noble elegy,—the imagery is rich though sometimes fantastic, and there is here and there a wild music in the composition,—but it is still defaced by pedantic words and unjustifiable, because unnecessary, novelties of phrase.

  If I ever saw anything in print that deserved to be characterized as atrociously bad, it is the poetry of Walt Whitman; and the three critics of repute, Dr. Dowden, Mr. W. Rossetti, and Mr. Buchanan, who have praised his performances, appear to me to be playing off on the public a well-intentioned, probably good-humoured, but really cruel hoax…. He is in no sense a superlatively able man, and it was beyond his powers to make for himself a legitimate poetical reputation. No man of high capacity could be so tumid and tautological as he—could talk, for instance, of the “fluid wet” of the sea; or speak of the aroma of his armpits, or make the crass and vile mistake of bringing into light what nature veils, and confounding liberty with dissolute anarchy. The poet of democracy he is not; but his books may serve to buoy, for the democracy of America, those shallows and sunken rocks on which, if it is cast, it must inevitably, amid the hootings of mankind, be wrecked. Always, unless he chooses to contradict himself for the sake of paradox, his political doctrine is the consecration of mutinous independence and rabid egotism and impudent conceit. In his ideal city “the men and women think lightly of the laws.” His advice is to resist much and to obey little. This is the political philosophy of Bedlam, unchained in these ages chiefly through the influence of Rousseau, which has blasted the hopes of freedom wherever it has had the chance, and which must be chained up again with ineffable contempt if the self-government of nations is to mean anything else than the death and putrescence of civilization. Incapable of true poetical originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it. As a Yankee phenomenon, to be good-humouredly laughed at, and to receive that moderate pecuniary remuneration which nature allows to vivacious quacks, he would have been in his place; but when influential critics introduce him to the English public as a great poet, the thing becomes too serious for a joke.

  We are rather vexed, now it is too late, that I did not carry out a sort of incipient intention to expunge a motto from Walt Whitman which I inserted in Book IV. Of course the whole is irrevocable by this time; but I should have otherwise thought it worth while to have a new page, not because the motto itself is objectionable to me—it was one of the finer things which has clung to me from among his writings—but because, since I quote so few poets, my selection of a motto from Walt Whitman might be taken as a sign of a special admiration, which I am very far from feeling.

  Wordsworth speaks of Chatterton as “the marvellous boy;” Walt Whitman, in his first “Leaves of Grass,” might have been styled the marvellous “b’hoy.” Walt protested against all convention, even all forms of conventional verse; he seemed to start up from the ground, an earth-born son of the soil, and put to all cultivated people the startling question, “What do you think of Me?” They generally thought highly of him as an original. Nothing is more acceptable to minds jaded with reading works of culture than the sudden appearance of a strong, rough book, expressing the habits, ideas, and ideals of the uncultivated; but, unfortunately, Whitman declined to listen to the suggestion that his daring disregard of convention should have one exception, and that he must modify his frank expression of the relations of the sexes. The author refused, and the completed edition of the “Leaves of Grass” fell dead from the press. Since that period he has undergone new experiences; his latest books are not open to objections urged against his earliest; but still the “Leaves of Grass,” if thoroughly cleaned, would even now be considered his ablest and most original work.

  As everything that he has written is easily included in one medium-sized volume, it must be supposed that this increasing audience is not due to freshness of matter brought before the public at frequent intervals, but to the something inherent and of value in the old. But, with this increase, the audience is even now but a limited one. It is a minority, and a small minority; yet it has in its range some of the distinguished names of the century. Emerson is one of them, though perhaps Emerson may be reckoned as one of the earlier heralds of enthusiasm, whose glow and fervor faltered a little in the heat of the day, which later made the atmosphere about Mr. Whitman something of a trial-test to his admirers. But it is certainly enough to know that Mr. Emerson at once, after reading the first issue of “Leaves of Grass,” wrote to Mr. Whitman, expressing in the strongest terms his approbation and admiration of the book. Then later we come to such adherents as Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, Dowden, and our own O’Connor, and John Burroughs, author of that delightful book, “Winter Sunshine.” Thoreau, too, “that austere spirit,” testifies in his last volume to his great esteem for Whitman, and, greater than all, Thomas Carlyle, that fiery router and detester of shams, considers Walt Whitman “a man furnished for the highest of all enterprises—that of being the poet of his age.”… I cannot call myself an ardent admirer of Mr. Whitman’s poems, but I am confident that, though my individual taste may not be pleased by the poet’s method, his purpose is noble. And I do not see how an unprejudiced critic can fail to perceive something, at least, of this good intention.

  The real American poet is Walt Whitman—a man enormously greater than Longfellow or any other of his poetic compatriots.

  These are quite glorious things you have sent me. Who is Walt (Walter?) Whitman, and is much of him like this?

  No one more conspicuously shines by difference. Others are more widely read, but who else has been so widely talked of, and who has held even a few readers with so absolute a sway? Whatever we may think of his chantings, the time has gone by when it was possible to ignore him; what ever his ground may be, he has set his feet squarely and audaciously upon it, and is no light weight. Endeavor, then, to judge him on his merits, for he will and must be judged…. The fault was not that he discussed matters which others timidly evade, but that he did not do it in a clean way,—that he was too anatomical and malodorous withal; furthermore, that in this department he showed excessive interest, and applied its imagery to other departments, as if with a special purpose to lug it in. His pictures sometimes were so realistic, his speech so free, as to excite the hue and cry of indecent exposure; the display of things natural, indeed, but which we think it unnatural to exhibit on the highway, or in the sitting-room, or anywhere except their wonted places of consignment…. As an assimilating poet of nature he has positive genius, and seems to me to present his strongest claims. Who else, in fact, has so true a hand or eye for the details, the sweep and color, of American landscape? Like others, he confronts those superb physical aspects of the New World which have controlled our poetry and painting, and deferred the growth of a figure-school, but in this conflict with nature he is not overcome; if not the master, he is the joyous brother-in-arms. He has heard the message of the pushing, wind-swept sea, along Paumanok’s shore; he knows the yellow, waning moon and the rising stars,—the sunset, with its cloudbar of gold above the horizon,—the birds that sing by night or day, bush and brier, and every shining or swooning flower, the peaks, the prairie, the mighty, conscious river, the dear common grass that children fetch with full hands. Little escapes him, not even “the mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, mullen and poke-weed;” but his details are massed, blended,—the wind saturates and the light of the American skies transfigures them. Not that to me, recalling the penetrative glance of Emerson, the wood and way-side craft that Lowell carried lightly as a sprig of fir, and recalling other things of others, does Whitman seem our “only” poet of nature; but that here he is on his own ground, and with no man his leader.

  While I differ from him utterly as to every principle of artistic procedure; while he seems to me the most stupendously mistaken man in all history as to what constitutes true democracy, and the true advance of art and man; while I am immeasurably shocked at the sweeping invasions of those reserves which depend on the very personality I have so much insisted upon, and which the whole consensus of the ages has considered more and more sacred with every year of growth in delicacy; yet, after all these prodigious allowances, I owe some keen delights to a certain combination of bigness and naïveté which make some of Whitman’s passages so strong and taking, and indeed, on the one occasion when Whitman has abandoned his theory of formlessness and written in form he has made “My Captain, O my Captain” surely one of the most tender and beautiful poems in any language…. Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people, nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated. The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant’s costume, and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society.

  He is perhaps of all writers the most repellent to the reader who glances at him superficially. In the first place he is indecent, and that too not accidentally but on principle. Whatever may be thought of his morality, and that I hold to be essentially sound and healthy, it cannot be denied that in one section of his work, and occasionally throughout the poems and prose, he outrages every ordinary rule of decency. There is nothing impure in this land of exposure; it has indeed the direct antithesis of prurient suggestion, and the intention of it is unquestionably honest, but from an artistic point of view it is the gravest of faults, it is essentially and irredeemably ugly, and repulsive…. He stands convicted of ἀπειροκαλία, if of nothing worse. Akin to this first instance of defect in artistic perception is a second—his use, namely, of words which are either not English, or essentially vulgar; and to this must be added a not unfrequent neglect of syntax, which, together with looseness in the application of some words, makes him at times vague or unintelligible. Occasionally there occur words or expressions which, though not ordinarily found in literature, have a native force which justifies them; but generally it is the case that for the French word or for the vulgarism savouring either of the gutter on the one hand or of the Yankee penny-a-liner on the other might be substituted a good English word equally expressive.

  The acrid taste is no more than a pleasant sharpness now and again; and in the main these “Notes of a Half-Paralytic” are sweet and sane and nourishing, more, perhaps, than their writer knows or can know. No diary of an invalid is wholesomer reading than this; never a groan or a growl, never a word of complaint; but every bright hour, every breeze of health, every delight in flower and bird and stream and star, and in the kind voice or hand of a friend, remembered and recorded. Always, in this invalid’s diary, the pure, fresh air, and the sky overhead; never the blinds drawn down, the table crowded with medicine bottles, and the foot of the spiritual medicine-man upon the threshold…. Connected with the notes of convalescence in this volume are Whitman’s previously published memoranda of the war; and the national frenzy and agony (with underlying sanity and strength) of the one period goes well with the tender calm and restorative happiness of the other. His lecture on Lincoln, a record of his visits to Emerson and Longfellow, a reminiscence and a criticism, severe, yet sympathetic, of Edgar Poe, will interest readers who care to see great or distinguished persons through a poet’s eyes.

  Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the “barbaric yawp” of Whitman?

  Mr. Whitman, indeed, appears not to be content with the abrogation of all conventional notions of poetry and artificial contrivances for constructing and testing it. Not only are rhymes avoided by him and even measures shunned—spondees, dactyls, trochees, iambics, anapests, odes, ballads, and sonnets, kicked into chaos together, as frippery suited only to poets who lull their readers with “piano tunes,”—but he overrides and crushes out with remorseless effort even those innocently recurring cadences and natural rhythms which are so often the involuntary accompaniment of the expression of impassioned thought. He thus succeeds not only in avoiding all semblance of piano tunes or any other musical thing, but in producing singularly harsh and disagreeable prose. Whatever may be Mr. Whitman’s powers of imagination and description, his lack of a sense of poetic fitness, his failure to understand the business of a poet, is certainly astounding.

  He stands there in his stricken old age, contemplating with serene, nay, with still glowing eyes, the vast growth of his beloved nation, refusing to despair over its diseases, looking steadfastly to a golden age beyond; the most significant living figure in American literature…. Looking round on contemporary poetry, English and French, one is led to suspect that much of it will go the way of last generation’s theology, and that poets who have spun their philosophies and gospels into vast webs of verse, “laying great bases for eternity,” will be found in a century or so to have spent much labour in vain. But the poetry of Whitman, ill-smelted as so much of it is, cataloguial as is so much of his transcription from life, and lacking as his song so often is in music, somehow does not seem thus marked for doom even in respect of his didacticism. And the reason would seem to be not merely that his message is the intense expression of his deepest passion, but that the passion is the very flower of the life of the race thus far, and carries in it the seeds of things to come. He cannot soon be left behind—he has gone so far before.

  I feel no hesitation in saying that the spirit of Mr. Whitman’s poetry is the contrary of the democratic spirit, because it is deficient in clearness, in consistency, in art, and in common sense. At first blush there may seem to be a kinship of liberty; but the liberty of democracy is the highest evolutionary step in the struggle for the rights of man, while the liberty of Walt Whitman’s poetry is license of thought and anarchy of expression. Most people take pride in conquering the thoughts which he takes a riotous glee in giving vent to.

  His strong individuality, wilfulness, audacity, with his scorn of convention and rote, have unquestionably carried him far outside the regular metes and bounds. No wonder there are some who refuse to consider his “Leaves” as “literature.” It is perhaps only because he was brought up a printer, and worked during his early years as newspaper and magazine writer, that he has put his expression in typographical form, and made a regular book of it, with lines, leaves and binding.

  I had never shared in the general vituperation which greeted “Leaves of Grass” when it appeared in an English dress, under the auspices of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, much as there was repulsive even in that expurgated edition. There seemed to me flashes of genius and clear insight which no age, least of all our own, can afford to despise. The man who wrote “Whispers of Heavenly Death” could not be a mere licentious charlatan. The revolt of Whitman against rhyme is like the revolt of Wagner against stereotyped melody, and in his way he seemed to me to be in search of a freer and more adequate method for conveying the intimate and rapid interior changes of the soul. Over and above this Whitman’s wild stanzas, with their lists of carpenters’ tools and “barbaric yawps,” their delight in the smoke and roar of cities, as well as in the solitudes of woods and the silence of mountains and seas of prairies—seemed to me to breathe something distinctive, national, American—with all his confusion of mind. I could hardly read his superb prose description of the Federal battlefields—and those matchless pages on the assassination of President Lincoln (of which he was an eye-witness), without feeling that Whitman was no figure-head—one more monkey, in fact—but a large and living soul, with a certain width of aboriginal sympathy, too rare in these days of jejune thought and palsied heart.

  When I think of that gray head, gently bowing before the contempt of the literary class in America, when I think that Boston crowns Emerson and turns aside from the spirit potent enough to create a hundred Emersons and leave strength sufficient for the making of the whole Bostonian cosmogony, from Lowell upwards, I for a moment lose patience with a mighty nation; but only for a moment: the voice of my gentle master sounds in my ear, and I am reminded that if he is great and good, it is because he represents the greatness and goodness of a free and noble people.

  There is one American poet whose faults of art and judgment are on a scale commensurate with his original genius. I mean Walt Whitman, whose speech is often as drearily prosaic as the wide sands and mud-flats of the sea which he so loves, when they are left bare by the tide; but after one is fairly embarked on the ocean of his more rhythmic lines, their long swing—their multitudinous rise, and fall—have the same strange, irregular harmony that one feels in the curve and motion of the billows…. Whitman, like Browning, has invaded and annexed a new province, although one that is less habitable. But he is always, and above everything, meditative, moralizing, introspective; seeing all other objects and persons in himself, and himself in all other persons and objects.

  The term poet does not fully describe Walt Whitman: the word prophet would come nearer; but that might be misunderstood. Schopenhauer has been well described as “the great prophet of the world’s despair.” Walt Whitman may be termed conversely the great prophet of the world’s hope…. He sounds all the chords of human feeling with the depth and urgency of one who has suffered, in his own person and by sympathy, all woes and agonies, but whose spirit is too great to be turned by any suffering from the clear faith that “all is well.”

  To the better qualities discernible in the voluminous and incoherent effusions of Walt Whitman it should not be difficult for any reader not unduly exasperated by the rabid idiocy of the Whitmaniacs to do full and ample justice: for these qualities are no less simple and obvious than laudable and valuable. A just enthusiasm, a genuine passion of patriotic and imaginative sympathy, a sincere though limited and distorted love of nature, an eager and earnest faith in freedom and in loyalty—in the loyalty that can only be born of liberty; a really manful and a nobly rational tone of mind with regard to the crowning questions of duty and of death; these excellent qualities of emotion and reflection find here and there a not inadequate expression in a style of rhetoric not always flatulent or inharmonious…. Assuredly I never have meant to imply what most assuredly I never have said—that I regarded Mr. Whitman as a poet or a thinker in the proper sense; the sense in which the one term is applicable to Coleridge or to Shelley, the other to Bacon or to Mill. Whoever may have abdicated his natural right, as a being not born without a sense of music or a sense of reason, to protest against the judgment which discerns in “Childe Harold” or in “Drum-Taps” a masterpiece of imagination and expression, of intelligence or of song, I never have abdicated mine. The highest literary quality discoverable in either book is rhetoric: and very excellent rhetoric in either case it sometimes is; what it is at other times I see no present necessity to say…. If any thing can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things: intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or transcendant supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in such revelation of naked nature as was possible to Titian. But Mr. Whitman’s Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall; but Mr. Whitman’s Venus is a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum. Cotytto herself would repudiate the ministration of such priestesses as these. But what then, if anything, is it that a rational creature who has studied and understood the work of any poet, great or small, from Homer down to Moschus, from Lucretius down to Martial, from Dante down to Metastasio, from Villon down to Voltaire, from Shakespeare down to Byron, can find to applaud, to approve, or to condone in the work of Mr. Whitman? To this very reasonable and inevitable question the answer is not far to seek. I have myself repeatedly pointed out—it may be (I have often been told so) with too unqualified sympathy and too uncritical enthusiasm—the qualities which give a certain touch of greatness to his work, the sources of inspiration which infuse into its chaotic jargon some passing or seeming notes of cosmic beauty, and diversify with something of occasional harmony the strident and barren discord of its jarring and erring atoms. His sympathies, I repeat, are usually generous, his views of life are occasionally just, and his views of death are invariably noble…. As a poet, no amount of improvement that self-knowledge and self-culture might have brought to bear upon such exceptionally raw material could ever have raised him higher than a station to which his homely and manly patriotism would be the best claim that could be preferred for him, a seat beside such writers as Ebenezer Elliott—or possibly a little higher, on such an elevation as might be occupied by a poet whom careful training had reared and matured into a rather inferior kind of Southey.

	Bold innovator in the realm of thought;
	Strong-sinewed Titan fighting for the right,
	And wresting from the panoplies of night
	The glories that the patient stars have caught
	From an evanished sun; brave teacher, taught
	By Nature’s lips to see with Nature’s sight,
	And so to shed day’s fair unsullied light
	Upon the work thy rugged hands have wrought,—
	Thou stand’st serene upon thy mountain crag,
	Unmindful of the shallow hum which fills
	The valleys with derision. Thou canst wait,
	And, waiting, find thine own, when prescient Fate
	Shall grant thee justice, and unfurl the flag
	Of Innocency on a thousand hills.

  To endorse, in any valid sense, much of the tenor of modern opinion as to the poetic merit of the school of Whitman, is altogether impossible, though the oracle at Delphi order it.

  In absolute ability he is about equal to Taylor, Stoddard, Stedman, or Aldrich; but by minimizing the spiritual and the artistic, and magnifying the physical and the crudely spontaneous, he has attracted an attention among critics in America, England, and the Continental nations greater, for the moment, than that bestowed upon any contemporary singer of his nation, and fairly rivalling the international adulation of his exact opposite, Poe. To him the ideal is little and the immediately actual is much; love is merely a taurine or passerine passion; and to-day is a thing more important than all the past. His courage is unquestionable; his vigor is abounding; and therefore, by the very paradox of his extravagant demands, he has impressed some and interested more, and has induced a limited but affectionate and exceedingly vociferous coterie to attempt, for his sake, to revise the entire canon of the world’s art.

  Whitman is a force in modern poetry. He has sought to give new and striking expression to what is distinctive in American life, by breaking with the accepted laws of poetic form. With his profound humanity, his breadth, strength, and insight, I believe that he has proved himself a great poet,—but this in spite of, and not by means of, his contempt of form.

  Walt Whitman, stricken in years and health, but as serene as of yore, still alert to all the infinite possibilities of his own soul and of mankind in general, still oblivious of the irredeemable commonplace of so much of his barbaric chant.

  Yes, Walt Whitman has appeared. He has his place upon the stage. The drama is not ended. His voice is still heard. He is the poet of Democracy—of all people. He is the poet of the body and soul. He has sounded the note of individuality. He has given the pass-word primeval. He is the Poet of Humanity—of Intellectual Hospitality. He has voiced the aspirations of America—and, above all, he is the poet of Love and Death.

	Thy soul hath revelled in the forests green;
	The solemn purple plains;
	The immense far range of hills whose summits hoar
	Mix with the eternal blue; the ceaseless roar
	Of rivers swollen by Titanic rains:
	Somewhat thy soul hath gathered of the might
	Of thine America; by day, by night,
	Watching, thy gaze hath won
	A measured glimpse of what man’s eyes shall see;
	While Europe’s slaves to kings have bent the knee
	Thou, yokeless, hast been vassal of the sun:
	Thou, scaling thought’s untrodden mountain-sides,
	Hast felt the heart of Freedom like a bride’s
	Against thine own heart beat;
	While the old world struggled, cramped by prison-bars,
	Thou, seeking Freedom’s palace lit by stars,
	Didst pass the heights where storms and the eagles meet.

  Whitman offers enormous difficulties to the critic who wishes to deal fairly with him. The grotesqueness of his language and the uncouth structure of his sentences render it almost impossible to do justice to the breadth of his thought and the sublimity of his imagination. He ought to be taken in large draughts, to be lived with in long solitudes. His peculiar mode of utterance suffers cruelly by quotation. Yet it is needful to extract his very words, in order to escape from the vagueness of a summary…. Whitman expels miracles from the region of mysticism, only to find a deeper mysticism in the world of which he forms a part, and miracles in commonplace occurrences. He dethrones the gods of old pantheons, because he sees God everywhere around him. He discrowns the heroes of myth and romance; but greets their like again among his living comrades.

  The large number of persons who are blinded to Whitman’s genius by the incidental nakedness of his writing would do well to ponder Mr. Ellis’s most apposite contrast in this particular of Whitman with Swift. Swift regarded men and women not only as beasts, but as lower than other beasts, on account of the grotesque hypocrisy which leads them to muffle up their beasthood under decorous names; and this mask his dire indignation and misapplied sincerity impelled him ruthlessly to strip off. There is all the legacy of mediaeval body-hatred in the portrait of the Yahoo; and Swift is a Christian manqué. Whitman is a pagan, and takes his nudity as sanely as he does everything else. Neither writer is likely to hurt any healthy grown person; it is the thin and eager minds, the erotic mystics, who really have the “seminal principle in their brains,” not these burly and virile spirits. Where many of Whitman’s poems fall short is, in one word, in Art. That is a sufficiently fatal shortcoming, and one which avenges itself speedily by the extinction of the peccant work. Whitman’s capacity for inspiration, for prophecy, and for hope is very far ahead of his literary sense; he wrestles with difficulties of expression and construction, and constantly succumbs before them. Now and then he conquers; and an immortal flower of verse is born like

“Warble me now for joy of lilac-time,”

or like “Captain! my Captain!” Some, therefore, of the poetry, or rhythmic prose, which contains certain of Whitman’s farthest reaching thought, is artistically faulty; and Mr. Ellis, as befits his somewhat doctrinal purpose, puts aside the question of Whitman’s poetic accomplishment, and is engrossed rather with enquiring what creed he can extract from him.

  There is much imperfection in his work. In fact, but little is perfect. Let us say it while there is yet opportunity. A time will come when Walt Whitman—the so long ignored (except by a few among whom were those who scorned, insulted, persecuted him), afterwards the butt of the irrepressible witling:—nay, perhaps the day is coming fast when it will be heresy, presumption, folly, to suggest that this Walt Whitman is not perfect and complete…. We wear the very garb of philosophers after reading Spencer, we are more vigorous after Carlyle, more healthy in reading Walt Whitman.

  Walt Whitman, notwithstanding his many great and glaring faults, is perhaps the most interesting living personality in American literature. His works have attracted the favourable attention of some of our most distinguished critics, and aroused the wrath of many others, not less distinguished, both in the country of his birth and in England…. It is extremely doubtful whether the name of poet can with propriety be applied to Whitman, since his works lack one of the first and most essential qualities of poetry—concrete and artistic expression. He is undoubtedly a great and original genius; and would have been a very great poet had he possessed this indispensable faculty…. The “Song of the Broad Axe,” and “Salut au Monde,” are two of his longest poems. The first is a chant of Democracy and Labour, of a very vigorous character, suited to its subject; of the other, we may say that it almost justifies its name. Both are thoroughly characteristic examples of their author’s best use of his peculiar style. Whitman wrote two funeral hymns on the death of Lincoln. One of these entitled, “O Captain! my Captain!” is the only instance in which he attempts regular artistic structure. It is a really beautiful poem, and is entitled to quotation in its entirety, showing as it does the great results which he might have achieved with a proper and persevering cultivation of poetic form.

  His words are perpetual warnings to all sects and syndicates, to all leagues and orders which bind men’s minds or muscles to the bidding of another, which make them slaves in thought or in action; and a warning against that worse and commoner bondage to one’s own self, to imbibed traditions, to cultivated fears, to accepted and self-forged shackles. He who would gain true freedom, who would feel soul and body stinging with a new, and electric life, the life of one’s self, let him patiently, persistently seek the meaning of that legacy of verse left with us by him whom now we consign to the clasp of the tomb.

  There were quite special reasons why it would have been fortunate had Walt Whitman been persuaded to visit London. For there is no doubt whatever that, whether or not endowed with any kind of literary genius—poetic genius no one now dreams of crediting him with—he was very richly endowed with the genius of a magnetic personality, which enables a few rare individuals throughout the entire animal kingdom to create a following by means of shear unintelligibility and muddle-headedness…. When, not so many years ago, I was attacked, perhaps I might say abused, by the young gentlemen—bards for the most part—who “did” the literature in a little group of newspapers, on the ground that I was a “reactionary poet”—that is to say an anti-Whitmanite who had corrupted a certain set of great poets, including Dante Rossetti, inoculating them with my reactionary views—the gravest charge against me was that I had christened Whitman the “Jack Bunsby of Parnassus.” Well, there is no doubt that I did give him that name, but not as a poet, as a naturalist; now that he is dead, and now that I know what a fine and manly soul it was that expressed itself with so much incoherence, I regret that I should ever have given him such a name…. Of course, if Whitman really has a message for humanity we will listen to him in whatsoever jargon he may deliver it. But what is his message? No Capt. Cuttle has ever formulated this. At one moment this teaching is that of an intense individualism, at the next that of a kind of democratic Socialism, at the next it is Carlylean. It is extremely easy to disguise puzzle-headedness the moment that you pass away from prose statement. As to benevolence, comradeship, some of the countrymen of Shakespeare, of Sterne, of Burns, of Ebenezer Elliott, of Dickens, seem really to think that Whitman invented these qualities, or, at least, gave first expression to them. As to his amazing indecency, that may be forgiven. It has done no harm. It is merely the attempt of a journalist to play the “tan-faced man”—to play “the noble savage” by fouling with excrement the doorstep of Civilization.

  He had absorbed divine influences from past thinkers, but he had no sense of the laws of style, or, indeed, the sense that there were any laws. Hence, the sometimes—one might be induced to say, the frequent—formless lines, and the attempts to produce effects which no great artist would have employed. The poet was unable, through lack of literary culture, to clothe his novel and often glowing conceptions in any ideal poetic form. Rather he flings his ideas at us in a heap, leaving it to us to arrange them in order in our minds. His results, therefore, fail to satisfy many not unsympathetic readers.

  To him the dirtiest puddle reflects the beauty of the skies. We have heard of a child who wept on being told that a flower she admired was nothing but a weed. To Whitman there are no weeds in the world. With the child’s simple eye to nature he takes them all for plants of precious growth, bearing each one of them, buried deep, perhaps, within its calyx, the seed of perfection. And in this he is not like the child, that his trust can be destroyed by the first rude unthinking hand. With authority, as if he spoke for God, he gives his imperious verdict on behalf of what the world despises, and pronounces it also to be good. He rejects nothing, he despises nothing: “Good or bad, I never question you, I love all—I do not condemn anything.” For the poet, as in one of his softly rounded, tenderly suggestive phrases he asserts, “judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing;” or else, as in this case, like the young child who has no standard but its own clinging nature to measure people by. To his pure, spiritualised vision “objects gross and the unseen soul are one.” No head to him but wears its “nimbus of gold-coloured light.” He takes everyone, the meanest and most worthless, by the hand, and whispers to him or her that he understands and loves what none others have understood or loved; that the true being, soul and body (he will never separate them), stands revealed in its glory and perfection to him, unhidden by the most repulsive exterior; that at the worst, though premature death should have already fallen, the means will be provided that it may “pick its way.”… What might shock and disgust if it came from any one else only startles us with its note of strangeness from him. His coarseness is as the coarseness of the earth, which, with “disdainful innocence,” takes all for clean…. As we study him his utterances take on power and beauty. His character seems to gather cohesion and to expand; so that whereas, in our first perusal of him, when we came across some passage of exquisite beauty or on some announcement of matured wisdom, we were startled almost as if a very child amid its careless babblings had uttered words of inspiration, we end by acknowledging in him both the giant and the child, a man,

full-statured in magnificence.

  Their author is virile, but not always rational. Too often he opens his eyes wide with amazement at mere matters of quantity and magnitude. He makes extravagant claims for his extravagant muse. He does not appreciate delicate effects and nice distinctions of thought. He has something of mob violence about him, but also much mob power and vehemence. He is the pioneer and extreme of his class, but certain of his traits appear, scattered and incidental, in the work of some of our recent novelists and critics.

  What is he? What is his class? Is he the Homer of America? What will he be to posterity? If answers to these questions were obtained from the knowing ones in the world of letters, the result would show some interesting contrasts. Only a few people deny that there are some good and strong things in Whitman. But most people agree that these grains of wheat are hidden under a wilderness of—chaff, our figure requires; but it is a heavier rubbish than that. Even judging him through his devoted little band of adherents, the result of his great theory of “formlessness” is notably against him, for the poem which they admire most and point to before all others is the fine one, “O Captain, my Captain;” and—it is most significant—this comes nearer to conventional form than anything else in Whitman’s whole collection…. If Whitman reminds us, in his use of the fag ends of foreign tongues, of a cosmopolitan hotel waiter, it is also true that in the midst of his queer phraseology he sometimes stumbles on a felicity of expression that is Homeric in its simplicity, its strength, and its grandeur. This is the most unexplainable thing about the man: he can be grand and grandisse in the same line. Genius and fatuity go hand in hand throughout his writings.

  The general characteristic of the outward form of Whitman’s poems, and the only quality of accepted poetical form which they possess, is a rhythm at once majestic and subtle, completely separating them from verse as well as from prose, yet defying analysis. Considering his poetry, however, not merely in its formal aspect, but regarding it as an undivided whole in which matter and form are organically one, regarding it as the single and sincere expression of the mind of a poet who says what he thinks in his own best natural way, we shall find that Whitman’s most general characteristics are a sustained and magnetic power, and a deep spiritual insight. He writes with the force of the primeval poets, as well befits one who is indeed a solitary singer in the morning of the new day of men and women which has succeeded to that of lords and ladies, kings and hierarchs. In him the world, retaining the wisdom of ages, renews its youth. Confronting history, science, philosophy, he cheerfully accepts and absorbs them, and goes on singing with the joyful freshness that springs from perfect faith. In complete rapport with modern life, he is the poet of the great movements in which that life is expressing itself. He does not merely go to science for new metaphors, but he takes up the inanimate mechanism of science itself and breathes into it the breath of life.

  Walt Whitman’s verses are arbitrarily divided into very different lengths. Sometimes it is undeniable that the rhythmic swing does not strike the ear at all, at others every line is marked by a rapid certainty and majestic force which can only be compared with the heaving breast of the ocean or the course of wind over the prairies. German, as well as Scandinavian, literature can certainly show poems in rhythmic prose, but the most casual comparison will establish the radical difference between them and those of Walt Whitman. The only thing which approximately reminds us of the American poet’s mode of expression is the peculiar accent which is here and there discovered in our translation of the Old Testament or in one or two of H. Wergeland’s unrhymed poems…. Whitman is a democratic poet, who has become the spokesman of a democratic people. The breadth of the continent is illustrated in his poems.

  There are many things in Whitman’s works which should assure him special consideration in Germany. He is the greatest poetic representative of that which is usually considered a prime focal point in German philosophy. In the philosophy of the modern world there are apparently only two principal currents—the one starting from England, the other from Germany…. Walt Whitman is essentially and in the first place a poet, not a philosopher; but that he has occupied himself with philosophic questions, and in a philosophic manner, will be clear to every reader. And in this respect he stands in a special relationship to his age, in which thought has achieved an unexampled influence over action.

  Walt Whitman pleases one reader and repels ten thousand…. You know at a glance that Walt Whitman’s sincerity is a matter of his own manufacture; it is an assumption that has grown into his tissues and become indurated.

  In this same period, there is a single figure who seems steadily and constantly to face not what is now past, but what is now present or to come. Though his right to respect is questioned oftenest of all, we cannot fairly pass Walt Whitman without mention. He lacks, of course, to a grotesque degree, artistic form; but that very lack is characteristic. Artistic form, as we have seen, is often the final stamp that marks human expression as a thing of the past. Whitman remarkably illustrates this principle: he lacks form chiefly because he is stammeringly overpowered by his bewildering vision of what he believes to be the future. He is uncouth, inarticulate, whatever you please that is least orthodox; yet, after all, he can make you feel for the moment how even the ferry-boats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God’s eternities.

  Walt Whitman’s figure is surely one of the most commanding in American literature, yet its full stature will never be realized by the cultivated public at large, so long as the fanatical devotees of the poet’s memory continue to lavish their extravagant encomiums upon his faults and his virtues alike.

  I had on this occasion [1875] a long and interesting discussion with Mr. Tennyson relative to Walt Whitman, and involving the principles or nature of poetry. According to the poet-laureate, poetry, as he understood it, consisted of elevated or refined, or at least superior thought, expressed in melodious form, and in this latter it seemed to him (for it was very modestly expressed) that Whitman was wanting.

  The most original and national of American poets; originator of a unique style, which is neither prose nor verse, yet is not wanting in a wild kind of rhythm, and is often highly poetical.

  If he reads “Walt Whitman” carefully, a reader of middle life will probably come to the conclusion that the best way to classify the wholly anomalous and irregular writer who produced it is to place him by himself as a maker of poems in solution. I am inclined to admit that in Walt Whitman we have just missed receiving from the New World one of the greatest of modern poets, but that we have missed it must at the same time be acknowledged. To be a poet it is not necessary to be a consistent and original thinker, with an elaborately-balanced system of ethics. The absence of intellectual quality, the superabundance of the emotional, the objective, the pictorial, are no reasons for undervaluing Whitman’s imagination. But there is one condition which distinguishes art from mere amorphous expression; that condition is the result of a process through which the vague and engaging observations of Whitman never passed. He felt acutely and accurately, his imagination was purged of external impurities, he lay spread abroad in a condition of literary solution. But there he remained, an expanse of crystallisable substances, waiting for the structural change that never came; rich above almost all his coevals in the properties of poetry, and yet, for want of a definite shape and fixity, doomed to sit for ever apart from the company of the Poets.

  Whitman has a rhythm which is all his own, as much as the waves and the surf-beat belong to the sea. Some of his work is exquisite in its word-music and grand as the roll of breakers. Some of his passages need not fear comparison with the finest in the Old Testament. Still I cannot think he will have many followers or imitators.

  For the magnitude of his vision Whitman owes much to Homer, to Shakespeare, and to the Book of Job. He was also largely influenced by Emerson’s essays, whose independence and exaggeration he has imitated. The most important source for his genius is his observation of American barbarism, as he terms it. He embodies his sense of this in vivid imagery; imagining frequently and boldly that America and himself possess the same traits,—pride, carelessness, and generous receptivity…. Whitman had a mind of great power,—so far he ought to have the homage that he has received at home as well as from abroad. Still we may be not less firm in believing, on account of his disregard of the broad canons of literary form, and still more of the ideas, that praise of him should be moderate, although, with less disdain of literary form he would certainly have been a much larger and more important figure in American literature than he can now be considered.

  One of the deities to whom the degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among “mad geniuses.” Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a genius? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond, a reprobate rake, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime. “This is the deepest theory of susceptibility,” he says in one place, “without preference or exclusion; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant—none are denied.” And in another place he explains he “loves the murderer and the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.” An American driveller, W. D. O’Connor, has called him on this account “The good gray Poet.” We know, however, that this “goodness,” which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality, frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears, even in the cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol…. In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a cringer of the most arrogant Yankee conceit. His war-poems—the much renowned “Drum Taps”—are chiefly remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter.

  Whitman brings the warmth of the sun to the buds of the heart so that they may open and bring forth form, color, perfume. He becomes for them aliment and dew; so these buds become blossoms, fruits, tall branches, and stately trees that cast refreshing shadows. There are men who are to other men as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land—such is Walt Whitman.

  Opinion will doubtless long be divided about the value of his work. He said he was “willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste” of himself. That this taste is growing, that the new generations are coming more and more into his atmosphere, that the mountain is less and less forbidding, and looms up more and more as we get further from it, is obvious enough. That he will ever be in any sense a popular poet is in the highest degree improbable: but that he will kindle enthusiasm in successive minds; that he will be an enormous feeder to the coming poetic genius of his country; that he will enlarge criticism, and make it easy for every succeeding poet to be himself and to be American; and finally that he will take his place among the few major poets of the race, I have not the least doubt.

  Walt Whitman was unable or unwilling to master the art of writing, and consequently his works, though abounding in lines and phrases of the highest excellence in form as well as in substance, are so uneven and unfinished that he cannot be called a great writer, and can hardly be expected to endure. But he was a man of great democratic ideas. He is the only author yet produced in this country or in any other, who has perceived what democracy really means, and who has appreciated the beauty and the heroism which are found in the daily lives of the common people. Millet troubled himself not at all about political theories or forms of government, but his whole life was devoted to the representation upon canvas of those same qualities of every-day beauty and heroism which were the delight and the study of Walt Whitman. An appropriate line from Whitman’s prose or verse could easily be found to put beneath every one of Millet’s pictures.

  It is a curious phase of Whitman’s greatness—this intense personal following. There has been nothing like it in the history of letters. Johnson had only one Boswell. No man, apparently, could come near Whitman without being swayed from his own orbit. John Burroughs appears to be almost the only man who, knowing him very well, is able to stand up straight after it…. “I am not a Comtist nor a Buddhist nor a Whitmanite,” a friend writes me. Is the shade of ridicule towards the last class a figment of the fancy? A Whitmanite, it is to be feared, no matter how dignified his bearing, is never taken quite seriously. Perhaps it is the “ite,” the remnant of the prejudice that hovers in the minds of men over the Hittites, Kenites, Perizzites, Jebusites. Perhaps it is phonetic. While Whitman lived he was never, in spite of the well-intentioned efforts of his friends, a ridiculous figure. The robustness and breeziness of the man put sentimentality where it belonged, and turned childish adulation into decent praise. Even the charity that his admirers brought upon him he accepted with sturdy good humour—and opened a bank-account. But now that Whitman is dead, all this is changed. Now that the head is gone, the decapitated body waves wild members, and calls it eulogy. First there was “In Re,” a volume that some of us who admire Whitman’s genius cannot even yet open without qualms; and then “Whitman the Man,” and then “The Pete Letters,” and now, worse and most persistent of all, this Whitman journal. Is it any wonder that Whitman had the foresight to enter protest:

	“I call the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies, as I myself do.
	I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself,
	I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
	I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.”

  Walt Whitman has given utterance to the soul of the tramp…. In Whitman’s works the elemental parts of a man’s mind and the fragments of imperfect education may be seen merging together, floating and sinking in a sea of insensate egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, disgusting, extraordinary…. The attraction exercised by his writings is due to their flashes of reality. Of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of an insane self-consciousness in its presence…. It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than Walt Whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely. He is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. All that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being.

  Instead of defining Walt Whitman as an “American Bookman,” one might with greater justice describe him and his “Leaves of Grass”—for they are virtually one, as an American Book and a Man. It is merely a distinction of syllables, yet it has an important significance.

  The essential fault of Whitman’s poetry was well pointed out by a man of more heroic nature and higher genius, Lanier, who defined him as a dandy. Of all our poets, he is really the least simple, the most meretricious; and this is the reason why the honest consciousness of the classes which he most celebrates,—the drover, the teamster, the soldier,—has never been reached by his songs. He talks of labor as one who has never really labored; his “Drum-Taps” proceed from one who has never personally responded to the tap of the drum. This is his fatal and insurmountable defect; and it is because his own countrymen instinctively recognize this, and foreigners do not, that his following has always been larger abroad than at home. But it is also true that he has, in a fragmentary and disappointing way, some of the very highest ingredients of a poet’s nature: a keen eye, a ready sympathy, a strong touch, a vivid but not shaping imagination. In his cyclopædia of epithets, in his accumulated directory of details, in his sandy wastes of iteration, there are many scattered particles of gold—never sifted out by him, not always abundant enough to pay for the sifting, yet unmistakable gold. He has something of the turgid wealth, the self-conscious and mouthing amplitude of Victor Hugo, and much of his broad, vague, indolent desire for the welfare of the whole human race; but he has none of Hugo’s structural power, his dramatic or melo-dramatic instinct, and his occasionally terse and brilliant condensation. It is not likely that he will ever have that place in the future which is claimed for him by his English admirers or even by the more cautious indorsement of Mr. Stedman; for, setting aside all other grounds of criticism, he has phrase, but not form—and without form there is no immortality.

  To none ought Whitman’s faults and flaws be more obvious than to those who love him. His rejection by the world in general is not to be construed necessarily as a sign manual of martyred genius. It was not the inspired side of Whitman that wrought his ruin as a universal propagandist. Indeed, to accept him without reservation, to refuse to see egregious absurdities of style and frequent incoherence of idea in his writings, to deny that read in part, the poet may exert an influence contrary to the one he coveted, is to display a wilfulness or ill-balanced judgment only equaled by Whitman’s adversaries, who recognize none of the compensating virtues of his works. Walt Whitman’s poetry is, in other words, an extraordinary literary landscape, which offers a scale of altitude ranging from sea level banalities to Alpine peaks of real greatness of prospect. Although the annunciator of a new heaven and earth, he was at times capable of uttering the veriest commonplaces of the uninspired. It is unfortunately the fantastic yeoman side of Whitman, which has struck the majority of readers and repelled them from the innumerable beauties of phrase and thought that lie hidden elsewhere in his pages. And frankly speaking, the bowlders in the path of ordinary appreciation are not easily surmounted: they represent perhaps the most flagrant departures literature has ever known. It is therefore thoroughly irrational of his followers to express surprise that proselytism is not more promptly accomplished.

  Like all our great poets Whitman uses mostly vigorous Anglo-Saxon words, but he does not eschew Latin derivatives, and with strange effect he uses constantly words frankly foreign or else manufactured for the occasion. Here are a few of these of which he is very fond: “ostent,” “imperturbe,” “debouch,” “melange,” “ensemble,” “eleves,” “mafemme,” “allons,” “cadaver.” These are introduced without warning into beautiful lines which their presence completely spoils, and are only surpassed by the use of such de trop expressions as “shoulder your duds,” “sour dead,” “boss,” &c. All this betrays what Holmes would call a blind spot in Whitman’s brain and makes him produce what offends us as much as a glaring poster on some noble façade. This blind spot is also responsible for the vicious way in which the poet exaggerates his style, for the strangeness of some of his themes, for the improprieties of which he is guilty. Another grave defect is his sheer lack of humour, which in a poet of his kind is somewhat fatal…. It is no small claim he has upon greatness, that while democracy is tending here to throw off the ancient faiths, or there to preserve merely the cant catchwords of piety, he, the poet of democracy, preached that brotherly love and religion must go hand in hand with it. And conjointly with these he adds two truths, the greatness of the soul and the hope of immortality.

  It was the singularity of his literary form—the challenge it threw to the conventions of verse and of language—that first gave Whitman notoriety: but this notoriety has become fame, because those incapacities and solecisms which glare at us from his pages are only the obverse of a profound inspiration and of a genuine courage. Even the idiosyncrasies of his style have a side which is not mere perversity or affectation; the order of his words, the procession of his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spontaneous, absolutely lazy fancy.

  Whitman’s later work, and especially his prose, often expresses in inspiring fashion the exultant vigor, the generous humanity, of our national life. But to the masses he was unintelligible, while to most of the critical few his own defiant scorn for conventions, still more his utter lack of deeper insight or artistic charm, have made him—uninteresting.

  What Whitman’s ultimate rank among writers will be is a matter upon which no living man is warranted to speak with confidence. The more we study him the more we perceive the impossibility of criticising him adequately. From an apparently hopeless jungle of jargon we pass without warning into a passage marked by superb rhythm, almost infallible diction, and at least vivid imagination. From a “barbaric yawp” of seemingly idiotic chauvinism we pass to a profoundly moving exposition of the dangers, material and spiritual, confronting American democracy. If we think that we can put a finger upon this or that defect of the poet and his work, straightway we discover a poem or a passage that necessitates a modification of opinion. In a word, Whitman seems not only a far better man and truer poet than his censors are willing to admit, but too large a man and poet for adequate comprehension at present. He may turn out to be a mouse in the telescope rather than an elephant in the moon, but who shall take to pieces the instrument through which we view the literary heavens when the instrument is nothing more nor less than—Time?