n impulse
rather than a specimen.

I have accepted Whitman entire and without reservation. I could not do
otherwise. It was clear enough to me that he was to be taken as a whole or
not at all. We cannot cut and carve a man. The latest poet brings us
poetic wares, curiously and beautifully carved and wrought specimens, some
of which we accept and some of which we pass by. Whitman brings us no
cunning handicraft of the muses: he brings us a gospel, he brings us a
man, he brings us a new revelation of life; and either his work appeals to
us as a whole, or it does not so appeal. He will not live in separate
passages, or in a few brief poems, any more than Shakespeare or Homer or
Dante, or the Bible, so lives.

The chief thing about the average literary poet is his poetic gift, apart
from any other consideration; we select from what he brings us as we
select from a basket of fruit. The chief thing about Whitman is the
personality which the poetic gift is engaged in exploiting; the excitement
of our literary or artistic sense is always less than the excitement of
our sense of life and of real things. We get in him a fixed point of view,
a new vantage-ground of personality from which to survey life. It is less
what he brings, and more what he is, than with other poets. To take him by
fragments, picking out poetic tidbits here and there, rejecting all the
rest, were like valuing a walk through the fields and woods only for the
flowers culled here and there, or the bits of color in the grass or
foliage. Is the air, the sunshine, the free spaces, the rocks, the soil,
the trees, and the exhilaration of it all, nothing? There are flowers in
Whitman, too, but they are amid the rocks or under the trees, and seem
quite unpremeditated and by the way, and never the main concern. If our
quest is for these alone, we shall surely be disappointed. "In order to
appreciate Whitman's poetry and his purpose," says Joel Chandler Harris,
"it is necessary to possess the intuition that enables the mind to grasp
in instant and express admiration the vast group of facts that make
man,--that make liberty,--that make America. There is no poetry in the
details; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive assimilation of
the mighty forces behind them,--the inevitable, unaccountable,
irresistible forward movement of man in the making of this republic."

And again: "Those who approach Walt Whitman's poetry from the literary
side are sure to be disapp