No More Learning

Firstly, he
speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms.
Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which
produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature.
Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and
agglomerative--giving long strings of successive and detached items, not,
however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self-
assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or
merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking
on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These and any other faults
appear most harshly on a cursory reading; Whitman is a poet who bears and
needs to be read as a whole, and then the volume and torrent of his power
carry the disfigurements along with it, and away.

The subject-matter of Whitman's poems, taken individually, is absolutely
miscellaneous: he touches upon any and every subject. But he has prefixed
to his last edition an "Inscription" in the following terms, showing that
the key-words of the whole book are two--"One's-self" and "En Masse:"--

Small is the theme of the following chant, yet the greatest. --namely,
ONE'S-SELF; that wondrous thing, a simple separate person. That, for the
use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I
sing. Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse: I say
the form complete is worthier far. The female equally with the male I sing.
Nor cease at the theme of One's-self. I speak the word of the modern, the
word EN MASSE. My days I sing, and the lands--with interstice I knew of
hapless war.
O friend, whoe'er you are, at last arriving hither to
commence, I feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I
return. And thus upon our journey linked together let us go.

The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of
Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is _par
excellence_ the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity--
that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the
most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly
of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of
the _litterateur_; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be
caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and
pervading quality of the book is the exuberant physique of the author. The
conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter
much under different conditions.

Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is
both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as
in some sense not existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much
importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary,
he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the
body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of
things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy
of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other
developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of
the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what
has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment
the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity
of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which
Whitman stands to all sorts and all aspects of them.

But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute and entire
originality. He may be termed formless by those who, not without much
reason to show for themselves, are wedded to the established forms and
ratified refinements of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to enlarge the
canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than to draw
it close and exclude him.