Whitman has let himself go, and trusted himself to the informal and
spontaneous, to a degree unprecedented. His course required a
self-reliance of the highest order; it required an innate cohesion and
homogeneity, a firmness and consistency of individual outline, that few
men have. It would seem to be much easier to face the poet's problem in
the old, well-worn forms--forms that are so winsome and authoritative in
themselves--than, to stand upon a basis so individual and intrinsic as
Whitman chose to stand upon. His course goes to the quick at once. How
much of a man are you? How vital and fundamental is your poetic gift? Can
it go alone? Can it face us in undress?
Never did the artist more cunningly conceal himself; never did he so
completely lose himself in the man, identifying himself with the natural
and spontaneous; never emerging and challenging attention on his own
account, denying us when we too literally seek him, mocking us when we
demand his credentials, and revealing himself only when we have come to
him upon his own terms.
The form the poet chose favored this self-revelation; there is nothing, no
outside conscious art, to stand between himself and his reader. "This is
no book," he says: "who touches this touches a man." In one sense Whitman
is without art,--the impression which he always seeks to make is that of
reality itself. He aims to give us reality without the usual literary
veils and illusions,--the least possible amount of the artificial, the
extrinsic, the put-on, between himself and his reader. He banishes from
his work, as far as possible, what others are so intent upon,--all
atmosphere of books and culture, all air of literary intention and
decoration,--and puts his spirit frankly and immediately to his readers.
The verse does not seem to have been shaped; it might have grown: it takes
no apparent heed of externals, but flows on like a brook, irregular,
rhythmical, and always fluid and real. A cry will always be raised against
the producer in any field who discards the authority of the models and
falls back upon simple Nature, or upon himself, as Millet did in painting,
and Wagner in music, and Whitman in poetry.
Whitman's working ideas, the principles that inspired him, are all
directly related to life and the problems of life; they are democracy,
nature, freedom, love, personality, religion: while the ideas from which
our poets in the main draw their inspiration are related to art,--they are
literary ideas, such as lucidity, form, beauty.