lowing,
Or in front, and I following her just the same."

The critics perpetually misread Whitman because they fail to see this
essentially composite and dramatic character of his work,--that it is not
the song of Walt Whitman the private individual, but of Walt Whitman as
representative of, and speaking for, all types and conditions of men; in
fact, that it is the drama of a new democratic personality, a character
outlined on a larger, more copious, more vehement scale than has yet
appeared in the world. The germs of this character he would sow broadcast
over the land.

In this drama of personality the poet always identifies himself with the
scene, incident, experience, or person he delineates, or for whom he
speaks. He says to the New Englander, or to the man of the South and the
West, "I depict you as myself." In the same way he depicts offenders,
roughs, criminals, and low and despised persons as himself; he lays claim
to every sin of omission and commission men are guilty of, because, he
says, "the germs are in all men." Men dare not tell their faults. He will
make them all his own, and then tell them; there shall be full confession
for once.

"If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake;
If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot
remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?"

It will not do to read this poet, or any great poet, in a narrow and
exacting spirit. As Whitman himself says: "The messages of great poems to
each man and woman are: Come to us on equal terms, only then can you
understand us."

In the much misunderstood group of poems called "Children of Adam" the
poet speaks for the male generative principle, and all the excesses and
abuses that grow out of it he unblushingly imputes to himself. What men
have done and still do, while under the intoxication of the sexual
passion, he does, he makes it all his own experience.

That we have here a revelation of his own personal taste and experiences
may or may not be the case, but we have no more right to assume it than we
have to assume that all other poets speak from experience when they use
the first person singular. When John Brown mounted the scaffold in
Virginia, in 1860, the poet says:--

"I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd,
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling
with age and your unheal'd wounds, you mo