riticism, yet a
far-reaching criticism is implied in the very start of his poems. No
modern poet presupposes so much, or requires so much preliminary study and
reflection. He brings a multitude of questions and problems, and, what is
singular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, and
in his attitude toward life and reality.

Whitman says he has read his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, that he
has tried himself by the elemental laws; and tells us in many ways, direct
and indirect, that the standards he would be tried by are not those of art
or books, but of absolute nature. He has been laughed at for calling
himself a "Kosmos," but evidently he uses the term to indicate this
elemental, dynamic character of his work,--its escape from indoor,
artificial standards, its aspiration after the "amplitude of the earth,
and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of
the earth, and the equilibrium also."

II

Unless the poetic perception is fundamental in us, and can grasp the
poetry of things, actions, characters, multitudes, heroisms, we shall read
Whitman with very poor results. Unless America, the contemporary age,
life, nature, are poetical to us, Whitman will not be. He has aimed at the
larger poetry of forces, masses, persons, enthusiasms, rather than at the
poetry of the specially rare and fine. He kindles in me the delight I have
in space, freedom, power, the elements, the cosmic, democracy, and the
great personal qualities of self-reliance, courage, candor, charity.

Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet as
something distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. The
poet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and the
language of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language of
devotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himself
up for the occasion. Our pleasure in him is rarely or never our pleasure
in the well-dressed, the well-drilled, the cultivated, the refined, the
orderly, but it is more akin to our pleasure in real things, in human
qualities and powers, in freedom, health, development. Yet I never open
his book without being struck afresh with its pictural quality, its grasp
of the concrete, its vivid realism, its intimate sense of things, persons,
truths, qualities, such as only the greatest artists can give us, and such
as we can never get in mere prose. It is as