William Rossetti says his language has a certain ultimate quality. Another
critic speaks of his absolute use of language. Colonel Ingersoll credits
him with more supreme words than have been uttered by any other man of our
time.
The power to use words was in Whitman's eyes a divine power, and was
bought with a price:--
"For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,
procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
After treading ground, and breasting river and lake,
After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifying elevations and removing
obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman,
the divine power to speak words."
Whitman's sense of composition and his rare artistic faculty of using
language are seen, as John Addington Symonds says, in the "countless clear
and perfect phrases" "which are hung, like golden medals of consummate
workmanship and incised form, in rich clusters over every poem he
produced. And, what he aimed at above all, these phrases are redolent of
the very spirit of the emotions they suggest, communicate the breadth and
largeness of the natural things they indicate, embody the essence of
realities in living words which palpitate and burn forever."
The great poet is always more or less the original, the abysmal man. He is
face to face with universal laws and conditions. He speaks out of a
greater exaltation of sentiment than the prose-writer. He takes liberties;
he speaks for all men; he is a bird on "pinions free."