Our critics have been fond of taunting Whitman with the fact that the
common people, the workers, of whom he makes so much, and to whom he
perpetually appeals, do not read him, or show any liking for his poems at
all.
Whitman's appeal to the common people, to the democratic masses, is an
appeal to the future; it is an appeal to the universal human conscience
and intelligence, as they exist above and beneath all special advantages
of birth and culture and stand related to the total system of things. It
also calls attention to the fact that the spirit in which he writes, and
in which he is to be read, is the spirit of open-air life and nature.
"No school or shutter'd room commune with me,
But roughs and little children, better than they,"
because the simple, unforced, unrefined elements of human nature are those
out of which the poems sprang and with which they are charged. Their
spirit is closer akin to unlettered humanity than to the over-intellectual
and sophisticated products of the schools.
Of course "roughs and little children" can make nothing of "Leaves of
Grass," but unless the trained reader has that fund of fresh, simple,
wholesome nature, and the love for real things, which unlettered humanity
possesses, he will make nothing of it either.