Nor will I, in writing of Whitman, follow the plan of those who, having nothing of their own to say, proceed to a mechanical analysis of style. And yet, in the case of Whitman, there are choice questions of metrical jurisprudence to be proposed and solved. One might ask whether the poetry of Whitman is truly metrical, as Whitman himself declared, and others—Noel, Stedman, Gamberale—have repeated; or whether it has a dactylic cadence, as Macaulay believed, or a sort of consonantal rhythm, as Triggs maintains, or a latent rhythmic harmony with psychic rhyme and strophic period, as our own Jannacone has it. Or again, one might follow O’Connor and Nencioni in the endeavor to decide which movements in nature the song of Whitman most resembles—whether forest winds or ocean waves—or one might investigate the influence of Whitman’s theories as to the relation between prose and verse on the French movement of the verslibristes. And if one had plenty of time to waste, one might also consider Whitman’s favorite rhetorical figure, enumeration, and compare it with Homer’s periphrasis, Dante’s metonymy, Victor Hugo’s antithesis, and d’Annunzio’s metaphor. But all this fine research is not for us, for what we seek in the world and in men is spiritual activity, and what we seek in the spirit is ideas.
Walt Whitman wrote a few songs which are
