nd
beyond all these things.

What are the questions or purposes, then, in which his work has root?
Simply put, to lead the way to larger, saner, more normal, more robust
types of men and women on this continent; to prefigure and help develop
the new democratic man,--to project him into literature on a scale and
with a distinctness that cannot be mistaken. To this end he keeps a deep
hold of the savage, the unrefined, and marshals the elements and
influences that make for the virile, the heroic, the sane, the large, and
for the perpetuity of the race. We cannot refine the elements,--the air,
the water, the soil, the sunshine,--and the more we pervert or shut out
these from our lives the worse for us. In the same manner, the more we
pervert or balk the great natural impulses, sexuality, comradeship, the
religious emotion, nativity, or the more we deny and belittle our bodies,
the further we are from the spirit of Walt Whitman, and from the spirit of
the All.

With all Whitman's glorification of pride, self-esteem, self-reliance,
etc., the final lesson of his life and work is service, self-denial,--the
free, lavish giving of yourself to others. Of the innate and essential
nobility that we associate with unworldliness, the sharing of what you
possess with the unfortunate around you, sympathy with all forms of life
and conditions of men, charity as broad as the sunlight, standing up for
those whom others are down upon, claiming nothing for self which others
may not have upon the same terms,--of such nobility and fine manners, I
say, you shall find an abundance in the life and works of Walt Whitman.

The spirit of a man's work is everything; the letter, little or nothing.
Though Whitman boasts of his affiliation with the common and near at hand,
yet he is always saved from the vulgar, the mean, the humdrum, by the
breadth of his charity and sympathy and his tremendous ideality.

Of worldliness, materialism, commercialism, he has not a trace; his only
values are spiritual and ideal; his only standards are the essential and
the enduring. What Matthew Arnold called the Anglo-Saxon contagion, the
bourgeois spirit, the worldly and sordid ideal, is entirely corrected in
Whitman by the ascendant of the ethic and the universal. His democracy
ends in universal brotherhood, his patriotism in the solidarity of
nations, his glorification of the material in the final triumph of the
spiritual, his egoism issues at last in complete other