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Updated: May 2, 2025
Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet as something distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. The poet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and the language of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language of devotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himself up for the occasion.
But may not the revolution which we are passing through be something different, a great American revolution, which is being carried through in the characteristic American fashion? Walt Whitman expresses the great characteristic of American history: "Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars."
After Walt Whitman, Paul Fort, for instance, seems simply an eloquent prose writer. And none of them can get the trick of it. None of them! Somewhere, once, I heard a voice that approached it; a voice murmuring of "Those that sleep upon the wind, And those that lie along in the rain, Cursing Egypt " But that voice went its way; and for the rest what banalities! What ineptitudes!
So they hustled into the Whitman motor and drove to Center, where the new observation train was already filling. The race with Hartley was always one of the great spring events, but the new observation train made it more of an event than ever. People gloated over it as though they had never seen a train before, much to the amusement of Lily, whose attendance at New London had been frequent.
She made a motion to close it, stepping between Rose and Horace, but the young man sprang to his feet. "Let me close it, Mrs. Whitman," said he, and did so. "It ain't late enough in the season to set right beside an open window and let the wind blow in on you," said Sylvia, severely. She drew up a rocking-chair and sat down.
I. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded.
Whitman was swayed by a few great passions, the passion for country, the passion for comrades, the cosmic passion, etc. His first concern seems always to have been for his country. He has touched no theme, named no man, not related in some way to America. The thought of it possessed him as thoroughly as the thought of Israel possessed the old Hebrew prophets.
The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading part in a prosecution which attracts public notice. The list of statesmen who have risen in that fashion includes the names of many of the highest dignity, e.g., Hughes, Folk, Whitman, Heney, Baker and Palmer.
Theophilus Londonderry's subject, therefore, was "Walt Whitman," a name which conveyed no offence to the Committee, for the simple reason that it conveyed nothing. It was a strange and humorous thing for the young man to think of, that his was to be the first human voice that had spoken that name of the future aloud in Coalchester.
Well, anyway it's like old Whitman. Fine chap, Whitman! Fine old chap! Queer, you can't quote him. ... And these millions aren't anything.
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