e:--

"For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,
procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
After treading ground, and breasting river and lake,
After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifying elevations and removing
obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman,
the divine power to speak words."

Whitman's sense of composition and his rare artistic faculty of using
language are seen, as John Addington Symonds says, in the "countless clear
and perfect phrases" "which are hung, like golden medals of consummate
workmanship and incised form, in rich clusters over every poem he
produced. And, what he aimed at above all, these phrases are redolent of
the very spirit of the emotions they suggest, communicate the breadth and
largeness of the natural things they indicate, embody the essence of
realities in living words which palpitate and burn forever."

The great poet is always more or less the original, the abysmal man. He is
face to face with universal laws and conditions. He speaks out of a
greater exaltation of sentiment than the prose-writer. He takes liberties;
he speaks for all men; he is a bird on "pinions free."

XXVIII

In saying or implying that Whitman's aim was not primarily literary or
artistic, I am liable to be misunderstood; and when Whitman himself says,
"No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary
performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward
art or aestheticism," he exposes himself to the same misconception. It is
the literary and poetic value of his verses alone that can save them.
Their philosophy, their democracy, their vehement patriotism, their
religious ardor, their spirit of comradeship, or what not, will not alone
suffice. All depends upon the manner in which these things are presented
to us. Do we get the reality, or words about the reality? No matter what
the content of the verse, unless into the whole is breathed the breath of
the true creative artist they will surely perish. Oblivion awaits every
utterance not touched with the life of the spirit. Whitman was as
essentially an artist as was Shakespeare or Dante; his work shows the same
fusion of imagination, will, emotion, personality; it carries the same
quality of real things,--not the same sh