eans and he succeeded. There is much method in what many have
termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to
fancy.

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of
sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a
stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there, in
the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and
New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than
in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_ you
read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of
Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient
Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.
As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad
. . . I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end
of Long Island, in a sheltered hollow of rock and sand, with the sea
on each side. (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelmed by
those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in
the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)

Edgar Allan Poe's amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and
our day, 'there can be no such thing as a long poem,' fascinated him.
'The same thought had been haunting my mind before,' he said, 'but Poe's
argument . . . work'd the sum out, and proved it to me,' and the English
translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility
of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still
be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system.
Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the
'technique' of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that
spirit which was to give life to the strange form. The central point of
the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily 'an identical
body and soul, a personality,' in fact, which personality, he tells us
frankly, 'after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled
should be myself.' However, for the true creation and revealing of this
personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed. This
came from the Civil War. After describing the many