The problem of the poet is doubtless more difficult in our day than in any
past day; it is harder for him to touch reality.
The accumulations of our civilization are enormous: an artificial world of
great depth and potency overlies the world of reality; especially does it
overlie the world of man's moral and intellectual nature. Most of us live
and thrive in this artificial world, and never know but it is the world of
God's own creating. Only now and then a man strikes his roots down through
this made land into fresh, virgin soil. When the religious genius strikes
his roots through it, and insists upon a present revelation, we are apt to
cry "heretic;" when the poet strikes his roots through it, as Whitman did,
and insists upon giving us reality,--giving us himself before custom or
law,--we cry "barbarian," or "art-heretic," or "outlaw of art."
In the countless adjustments and accumulations, and in the oceanic
currents of our day and land, the individual is more and more lost sight
of,--merged, swamped, effaced. See him in Whitman rising above it all. See
it all shot through and through with his quality and obedient to his will.
See the all-leveling tendency of democracy, the effacing and sterilizing
power of a mechanical and industrial age, set at naught or reversed by a
single towering personality. See America, its people, their doings, their
types, their good and evil traits, all bodied forth in one composite
character, and this character justifying itself and fronting the universe
with the old joy and contentment.