Self-reliance, or self-trust, is one of the principles Whitman announces
in his "Laws for Creations." He saw that no first-class work is possible
except it issue from a man's deepest, most radical self.

"What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul but to walk free and own no
superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that
man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?"

I think it probable that Whitman anticipated a long period of comparative
oblivion for himself and his works. He knew from the first that the public
would not be with him; he knew that the censors of taste, the critics and
literary professors, would not be with him; he knew that the vast army of
Philistia, the respectable, fashionable mammon-worshiping crowd, would not
be with him,--that the timid, the pampered, the prurient, the conforming,
the bourgeoisie spirit, the class spirit, the academic spirit, the
Pharisaic spirit in all its forms, would all work against him; and that,
as in the case of nearly all original, first-class men, he would have to
wait to be understood for the growth of the taste of himself. None knew
more clearly than he did how completely our people were under the
illusion of the genteel and the conventional, and that, even among the
emancipated few, the possession of anything like robust aesthetic
perception was rare enough. America, so bold and original and independent
in the world of practical politics and material endeavor, is, in spiritual
and imaginative regions, timid, conforming, imitative. There is, perhaps,
no civilized country in the world wherein the native, original man, the
real critter, as Whitman loved to say, that underlies all our culture and
conventions, crops out so little in manners, in literature, and in social
usages. The fear of being unconventional is greater with us than the fear
of death. A certain evasiveness, polish, distrust of ourselves, amounting
to insipidity and insincerity, is spoken of by observant foreigners. In
other words, we are perhaps the least like children of any people in the
world. All these things were against Whitman, and will continue to be
against him for a long time. With the first stroke he broke through the
conven