nant thoughts. Walt wrote once in "Specimen Days":
Somehow I got thinking today of young men's deaths—not at all sadly or sentimentally, but gravely, realistically, perhaps a little artistically.
What a curious note of apology there is in the last admission! He who was so rarely "artistic"! He who began his career as a writer of incredibly mawkish short stories and doggerels, and rigidly trained himself to omit the "stock" touches! Let us not try to speak of Walt, or of death, in any "artistic" vein.
"Stop this day and night with me" (Walt said) "and you shall possess the origin of all poems." By which he meant, of course, you shall possess your own soul. You shall grasp with sureness and ecstasy the only fact you can cling to in this baffling merry-go-round—the dignity and worth of your own life. In reading Whitman one seems to burst through the crust of perversity, artificial complexity and needless timidity that afflicts us all, to meet a strong river of sanity and courage that sweeps away the petty rubbish. Because it is so far from the course of our meaningless gestures, we know instinctively it is right and true. There is no heart so bruised, there is no life so needlessly perplexed, but it can find its message in this man. "I have the best of time and space," he said. So have we all, for our little moment. Read his defiant words, great and scornful as any ever penned:
