To say that Whitman is a poet in undress is true within certain limits. If
it conveys the impression that he is careless or inapt in the use of
language, or that the word is not always the fit word, the best word, the
saying does him injustice. No man ever searched more diligently for the
right word--for just the right word--than did Whitman. He would wait for
days and weeks for the one ultimate epithet. How long he pressed the
language for some word or phrase that would express the sense of the
evening call of the robin, and died without the sight! But his language
never obtrudes itself. It has never stood before the mirror, it does not
consciously challenge your admiration, it is not obviously studied, it is
never on dress parade. His matchless phrases seem like chance hits, so
much so that some critics have wondered how he happened to _stumble_ upon
them. His verse is not dressed up, because it has so few of the artificial
adjuncts of poetry,--no finery or stuck-on ornament,--nothing obtrusively
beautiful or poetic; and because it bears itself with the freedom and
nonchalance of a man in his every-day attire.
But it is always in a measure misleading to compare language with dress,
to say that a poet clothes his thought, etc. The language is the thought;
it is an incarnation, not an outside tailoring. To improve the expression
is to improve the thought. In the most vital writing, the thought is nude;
the mind of the reader touches something alive and real. When we begin to
hear the rustle of a pompous or highly wrought vocabulary, when the man
begins to dress his commonplace ideas up in fine phrases, we have enough
of him.
Indeed, it is only the mechanical writer who may be said to "clothe" his
ideas with words; the real poet thinks through words.