shall not do. My love for Whitman is too deep. His poetry is not such that it can be reduced to a coherent system and subjected to dialectic criticism. Whitman’s soul is as vast as the world, as all-enfolding as God. It includes everything—joy and grief, body and spirit, liberty and discipline, pride and humility, God and the blade of grass. One must accept it as one accepts the universe, without regard for the cleavages that men have made in the world.
But Whitman’s soul is not merely a gigantic lake of love. It is composed of qualities, sentiments, passions that may inspire men, excite them to action, to life, render them saner, stronger, purer, better. Men who do not feel, as they read Whitman, that the flame of life grows broader and shines more brilliantly, as if it were carried into a better air, who are not conscious of an intense regret that it was not for them to know and embrace the author of certain of these songs, who are shocked by the coarseness, the violence, the shamelessness, the energy of the poems, and would have the man calmer and more refined, more prudent and less rough—such men understand Whitman not at all, will never understand him, and are not worthy to understand him.
Whitman is a good plebeian who sings unashamed all the things of the world. And the most significant counsel that he gives us—after
