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. But one of the laws that
dominate the progress of literature, as Edmond Shérer says, is incessant
change, not only in thought and ideas, but in taste and the
starting-points of art. A radical and almost violent change in these
respects is indicated by Whitman,--a change which is in unison with many
things in modern life and morals, but which fairly crosses the prevailing
taste in poetry and in art. No such dose of realism and individualism
under the guise of poetry has been administered to the reading public in
this century. No such break with literary traditions--no such audacious
attempt to tally, in a printed page, the living concrete man, an actual
human presence, instead of the conscious, made-up poet--is to be found in
modern literary records.