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What is the reason why these fictitious characters should seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in actual life? The reason is that great fictitious characters are typical of their class, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any actual member of the class they typify. They "contain multitudes," to borrow Whitman's phrase.
There is no poetry in the details; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive assimilation of the mighty forces behind them, the inevitable, unaccountable, irresistible forward movement of man in the making of this republic." And again: "Those who approach Walt Whitman's poetry from the literary side are sure to be disappointed. Whatever else it is, it is not literary.
He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum.
The quality of BEING, in the object's self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto not criticism by other standards and adjustments thereto is the lesson of Nature. Who knows whether this may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer, Mr. Emory Holloway, writes?
Whitman's elegant tea-leaf border for the cover of Dr. O. W. Holmes's "Over the Tea-cups," and Miss Alice Morse's arabesques and medallions for Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the French West Indies." Miss May Morris designed many tasteful letters for the fine bindings executed by Mr.
It is worthy of note that Whitman's Washington physician said he had one of the most thoroughly natural physical systems he had ever known, the freest, probably, from extremes or any disproportion; which answers to the perfect sanity which all his friends must have felt with regard to his mind. A few years ago a young English artist stopping in this country made several studies of him.
They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's first edition of "Leaves of Grass," although Whitman had the assistance of the Attorney-General of Massachusetts in advertising his remarkable volume. Henry Thoreau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend, "Thank God, the edition is exhausted."
Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formulas! From your formulas, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests!" This magnificent poem, "The Song of the Open Road," is one of the most significant in Whitman's work. He takes the open road as his type, not an end in itself, not a fulfillment, but a start, a journey, a progression.
Nevertheless, it appears to me unfortunate in Seeger's noble poem, where it forces me to taste its foreign flavour. Another French word, bouquet, is indisputably English; and yet when I find it in Walt Whitman's heartfelt lament for Lincoln, 'O Captain, my Captain', I cannot but feel it to be a blemish:
The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived.
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