Millet,
when he ceased painting nudes for art-dealers' windows and
ventured to express himself, faced starvation. Every artist is in some
measure an innovator; for his own age he is a romanticist. But the
romanticist of one age becomes a classic for the next; and his
performance in its turn gives laws to his successors. Richard Strauss,
deriving in some sense from Wagner, makes the older man seem a
classic and conservative. Then a new mind again is raised up, a new
temperament, with new needs; and these shape their own adequate
new expression. "The cleanest expression," says Whitman, "is that
which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one." As all life is
growth, as there are no bounds to the possibilities of human
experience, so the workings of the art-impulse cannot be
compressed within the terms of a hard and narrow definition, and
any abstract formula for beauty is in the very nature of things
foredoomed to failure. No limit can be set to the forms in which
beauty may be made manifest.

"The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august masters
of beauty." And Whitman's own verse is a notable example of a new
technique forged in response to a new need of expression. Dealing
as he did with the big basic impulses of common experience
accessible to all men, Whitman needed a largeness and freedom of
expression which he did not find in the accepted and current poetic
forms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people,
occupations, and aspirations of "these States," as yet undeveloped
but vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tally
the fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and a
new world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope and
flexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation and
variety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that
Whitman did not draw for his resources on the great treasury of
world-literature; and he profited by the efforts and achievement of
predecessors. But the form in his hands and as he uses it is new.
Whatever we may think of the success of his total accomplishment,
there are very many passages to which we cannot deny the name of
poetry. Nor did Whitman work without conscious skill and
deliberate regard for technical processes. His note-books and papers
reveal the extreme calculation and pains with which he wrote,
beginning with the collection of synonyms applying to his idea and