Whitman always avails himself of the poet's privilege and magnifies
himself. He magnifies others in the same ratio, he magnifies all things.
"Magnifying and applying come I," he says, "outbidding at the start the
old cautious hucksters." Indeed, the character which speaks throughout
"Leaves of Grass" is raised to the highest degree of personal exaltation.
To it nothing is trivial, nothing is mean; all is good, all is divine. The
usual distinctions disappear, burned up, the poet says, for religion's
sake. All the human attributes are heightened and enlarged; sympathy as
wide as the world; love that balks at nothing; charity as embracing as the
sky; egotism like the force of gravity; religious fervor that consumes the
coarsest facts like stubble; spirituality that finds God everywhere every
hour of the day; faith that welcomes death as cheerfully as life;
comradeship that would weld the nation into a family of brothers;
sexuality that makes prudes shudder; poetic enthusiasm that scornfully
dispenses with all the usual adventitious aids; and in general a
largeness, coarseness, and vehemence that are quite appalling to the
general reader. Lovers of poetry will of necessity be very slow in
adjusting their notions to the standards of "Leaves of Grass." It is a
survey of life and of the world from the cosmic rather than from the
conventional standpoint. It carries the standards of the natural-universal
into all fields.
Some men have accepted poverty and privation with such contentment and
composure as to make us almost envious of their lot; and Whitman accepts
the coarser, commoner human elements which he finds in himself, and which
most of us try to conceal or belittle, with such frankness and perception
of their real worth that they acquire new meaning and value in our eyes.
If he paraded these things unduly, and showed an overweening preference
for them, as some of his critics charge, this is of course an element of
weakness.
His precept and his illustration, carried out in life, would fill the land
with strong, native, original types of men and women animated by the most
vehement comradeship, selfism and otherism going hand in hand.