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If there was never any change in taste, if it always ran in the same channels, indeed, if it did not at times run in precisely opposite channels, there would be little hope that Walt Whitman's poetry would ever find any considerable number of readers.
In fact, in all that concerns the human relations Walt Whitman is as unreal as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would probably prefer Sigurd the Volsung, and understand it better than Whitman's poetry.
It was not a theory with him, but a fact that shaped his life and colored his poems. "Whoever degrades another degrades me," and the thought fired his imagination. The student of Whitman's life and works will be early struck by three things, his sudden burst into song, the maturity of his work from the first, and his self-knowledge and self-estimate.
Whitman's atmosphere is so distinctly outside of and above that which ministers to our social and domestic wants, the confined and perfumed air of an indoor life; his mood and temper are so habitually begotten by the contemplation of the orbs and the laws and processes of universal nature, that the phrase often comes to mind in considering him.
He answered, in effect, that he didn't make masterpieces. His poetry was diffused, like the grass blades that symbolized for him our democratic masses. Of course, the man in the street thinks that Walt Whitman's stuff is not poetry at all, but just bad prose. He acknowledges that there are splendid lines, phrases, and whole passages.
As they settled into their seats in the Reyburn train Miss Kendal said, "It's a pity we couldn't go to the lecture." She leaned back, tired, in her corner. She closed her eyes. Mary opened Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The beginning had begun. "What are you reading, Mary?" "The New Testament.... Extraordinary how interesting it is." "Interesting!" "Frightfully interesting."
Five Crows, the warrior, was there with Joe Lewis, of Whitman's household, and Joe Stanfield, alike suspicious and treacherous, and old Mungo, the interpreter. Sitkas, a leading Indian, may have been present, as the story I am to give came in part from him. Joe Lewis was the principal speaker. Addressing the Cayuses, he said: "The moon brightens; your tents fill with furs.
Whitman's relation to science is fundamental and vital. It is the soil under his feet. He comes into a world from which all childish fear and illusion has been expelled. He exhibits the religious and poetic faculties perfectly adjusted to a scientific, industrial, democratic age, and exhibits them more fervent and buoyant than ever before. We have gained more than we have lost.
From Whitman's point of view, it would have been positively immoral for him either to have vied with the lascivious poets in painting it as the forbidden, or with the sentimental poets in depicting it as a charm. Woman with him is always the mate and equal of the man, never his plaything. Whitman is seldom or never the poet of a sentiment, at least of the domestic and social sentiments.
If Whitman's paradox is true, that the soul and body are one, in the same sense the scientific paradox is true: that matter and electricity are one, and both are doubtless a phase of the universal ether a reality which can be described only in terms of the negation of matter. In a flash of lightning we see pure disembodied energy probably that which is the main-spring of the universe.
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