ntent if he
present America and the modern to us as they are inwrought into his own
personality, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, or as character,
passion, will, motive, conviction. He would show them subjectively and as
living impulses in himself. Of course a great constructive, dramatic poet
like Shakespeare would have solved his problem in a different manner, or
through the objective, artistic portrayal of types and characters. But the
poet and prophet of democracy and of egotism shows us all things in and
through himself.

His egotism, or egocentric method, is the fundamental fact about his work.
It colors all and determines all. The poems are the direct outgrowth of
the personality of the poet; they are born directly upon the ego, as it
were, like the fruit of that tropical tree which grows immediately upon
the trunk. His work is nearer his radical, primary self than that of most
poets. He never leads us away from himself into pleasant paths with
enticing flowers of fancy or forms of art. He carves or shapes nothing for
its own sake; there is little in the work that can stand on independent
grounds as pure art. His work is not material made precious by elaboration
and finish, but by its relation to himself and to the sources of life.

X

Whitman was compelled to this negation of extrinsic art by the problem he
had set before himself,--first, to arouse, to suggest, rather than to
finish or elaborate, less to display any theme or thought than "to bring
the reader into the atmosphere of the theme or thought;" secondly, to make
his own personality the chief factor in the volume, or present it so that
the dominant impression should always be that of the living, breathing
man as we meet him and see him and feel him in life, and never as we see
him and feel him in books or art,--the man in the form and garb of actual,
concrete life, not as poet or artist, but simply as man. This is doubtless
the meaning of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself prefixed to
the first issue of the "Leaves," to which I have referred. This portrait
is symbolical of the whole attitude of the poet toward his task. It was a
hint that we must take this poet with very little literary tailoring; it
was a hint that he belonged to the open air, and came of the people and
spoke in their spirit.

It is never the theme treated, but always the character exploited; never
the structure finished, but always the plan suggested; never the