dispenses with all the usual adventitious aids; and in general a
largeness, coarseness, and vehemence that are quite appalling to the
general reader. Lovers of poetry will of necessity be very slow in
adjusting their notions to the standards of "Leaves of Grass." It is a
survey of life and of the world from the cosmic rather than from the
conventional standpoint. It carries the standards of the natural-universal
into all fields.

Some men have accepted poverty and privation with such contentment and
composure as to make us almost envious of their lot; and Whitman accepts
the coarser, commoner human elements which he finds in himself, and which
most of us try to conceal or belittle, with such frankness and perception
of their real worth that they acquire new meaning and value in our eyes.
If he paraded these things unduly, and showed an overweening preference
for them, as some of his critics charge, this is of course an element of
weakness.

His precept and his illustration, carried out in life, would fill the land
with strong, native, original types of men and women animated by the most
vehement comradeship, selfism and otherism going hand in hand.

HIS RELATION TO CULTURE

I

"Leaves of Grass" is not the poetry of culture, but it is to be said in
the same breath that it is not such a work as an uncultured man produces,
or is capable of producing.

The uncultured man does not think Whitman's thoughts, or propose Whitman's
problems to himself, or understand or appreciate them at all. The "Leaves"
are perhaps of supreme interest only to men of deepest culture, because
they contain in such ample measure that without which all culture is mere
varnish or veneer. They are indirectly a tremendous criticism of American
life and civilization, and they imply that breadth of view and that
liberation of spirit--that complete disillusioning--which is the best
result of culture, and which all great souls have reached, no matter who
or what their schoolmasters may have been.

Our reading public probably does not and cannot see itself in Whitman at
all. He must be a great shock to its sense of the genteel and the
respectable. Nor can the working people and the unlettered, though they
were drawn to Whitman the man, be expected to respond to any considerable
extent to Whitman the poet. His standpoint can be reached only after
passing through many things and freeing one's self from many illusions. He
is more representative