ing, as applied either to the verses or their author:

The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.
A belief in the preciousness of filth.
Entirely bestial.
Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.
Noxious weeds.
Impious and obscene.
Disgusting burlesque.
Broken out of Bedlam.
Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.
Defilement.
Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.
Ithyphallic audacity.
Gross indecency.
Sunken sensualist.
Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.
Roots like a pig.
Rowdy Knight Errant.
A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.
Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of
the lowest lust!
Priapus--worshipping obscenity.
Rant and rubbish.
Linguistic silliness.
Inhumanly insolent.
Apotheosis of Sweat.
Mouthings of a mountebank.
Venomously malignant.
Pretentious twaddle.
Degraded helot of literature.
His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering
tags of a thousand colors.
Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through
every field of lascivious thought.
Muck of abomination.

A few quotations from the press of this period will serve to indicate
the general tenor of comment:

"The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludicrous, if it were
not something a great deal more offensive," observed the Christian
Examiner (Boston, 1856). "It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses,
and appetites in terms that admit of no double sense. The author is
'one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, sensual, divine
inside and out. The scent of these armpits an aroma finer than
prayer.' He leaves 'washes and razors for foofoos,' thinks the talk
about virtue and vice only 'blurt,' he being above and indifferent to
both of them. These quotations are made with cautious delicacy. We
pick our way as cleanly as we can between other passages which are
more detestable."

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of
all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (1855) characterizes Walt
Whitman thus: "No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He
will bring poems to fill the days and nights--fit for men and women
with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. The body, he
teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful. Are you to be put down,
he seems to ask, to that shallow level of literature and conversation
that stops a man's recogn