This orbic nature which so thrills and fills Whitman is not at all akin to
that which we get in the so-called nature-poets of Wordsworth and his
school,--the charm of privacy, of the sequestered, the cosy,--qualities
that belong to the art of a domestic, home-loving race, and to lovers of
solitude. Tennyson's poetry abounds in these qualities; so does
Wordsworth's. There is less of them in Browning, and more of them in the
younger poets. That communing with nature, those dear friendships with
birds and flowers, that gentle wooing of the wild and sylvan, that flavor
of the rural, the bucolic,--all these are important features in the
current popular poetry, but they are not to any marked extent
characteristic of Whitman. The sentiment of domesticity, love as a
sentiment; the attraction of children, home and fireside; the attraction
of books, art, travel; our pleasure in the choice, the refined, the
artificial,--these are not the things you are to demand of Whitman. You do
not demand them of Homer or Dante or the Biblical writers. We are to
demand of him the major things, primary things; the lift of great
emotions; the cosmic, the universal; the joy of health, of selfhood; the
stimulus of the real, the modern, the American; always the large, the
virile; always perfect acceptance and triumph.
Whitman's free use of the speech of the common people is doubtless
offensive to a fastidious literary taste. Such phrases as "I will be even
with you," "what would it amount to," "give in," "not one jot less;"
"young fellows," "old fellows," "stuck up," "every bit as much," "week in
and week out," and a thousand others, would jar on the page of any other
poet more than on his.