s it happen'd, 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 shelter'd hollow of rock and sand, with the
sea on each side. (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelm'd
by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described,
in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
landscapes 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 dreams and passions
of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:

These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught
(almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast,
terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national
declamatory expression had not been given to me. It is certain, I
say, that although I had made a start before, only from the
occurrence of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes
of lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of
course, I don't mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly
in others, in millions)--that only from the strong flare and
provocation of that war's sights and scenes the final
reasons-for-being of an autochthonic and passionate song definitely
came forth.

I