The reader will be sure to demand of Whitman ample compensation for the
absence from his work of those things which current poets give us in such
full measure. Whether or not the compensation is ample, whether the music
of his verse as of winds and waves, the long, irregular, dithyrambic
movement, its fluid and tonic character, the vastness of conception, the
large, biblical speech, the surging cosmic emotion, the vivid personal
presence as of the living man looking into your eye or walking by your
side,--whether all these things, the refreshing quality as of "harsh salt
spray" which the poet Lanier found in the "Leaves," the electric currents
which Mrs. Gilchrist found there, the "unexcelled imaginative justice of
language" which Mr. Stevenson at times found, the religious liberation and
faith which Mr. Symonds found, the "incomparable things incomparably well
said" of Emerson, the rifle-bullets of Ruskin, the "supreme words" of
Colonel Ingersoll, etc.,--whether qualities and effects like these, I say,
make up to us for the absence of the traditional poetic graces and
adornments, is a question which will undoubtedly long divide the reading
world.
In the works upon which our poetic taste is founded, artistic form is
paramount; we have never been led to apply to such works open-air
standards,--clouds, trees, rivers, spaces,--but the precision and
definiteness of the cultured and the artificial. If Whitman had aimed at
pure art and had failed, his work would be intolerable. As his French
critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, has well said: "In the large work which Whitman
attempted, there come no rules save those of nobility and strength of
spirit; and these suffice amply to create a most unlooked-for and
grandiose aspect of beauty." "Overcrowded and disorderly" as it may seem,
"if heroic emotion and thought and enthusiasm vitalize it," the poet has
reached his goal.