mood, and so building them up gradually, with many erasures,
corrections, and substitutions, into the finished poem. Much of the
vigor of his style is due to his escape from conventional literary
phrase-making and his return to the racy idiom of common life. His
verse, apparently inchoate and so different from classical poetic
forms, is shaped with a cunning incredible skill. And more than that,
it is art, in that it is not a bare statement of fact, but communicates to
us the poet's emotion, so that we realize the emotion in ourselves.
When his purpose is considered, it is seen that no other technique
was possible. His achievement proves that a new need creates its
own means of expression.

What is true of Whitman in respect to his technique is true in greater
or less degree of every artist, working in any form. It is true of
Pheidias, of Giotto and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, of Dante and
Shakespeare, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Monet, of Rodin, in fine,
from the beginnings of art to the day that now is. All have created
out of existing forms of expression their own idiom and way of
working. Every artist owes something to his predecessors, but
language is re-created in the hands of each master and becomes a
new instrument. There can be then no single formula for technical
method nor any fixed and final standard of judgment.

An artist himself is justified from his own point of view in his
concern with technique, for upon his technique depends his
effectiveness of expression. His practice serves to keep alive the
language and to develop its resources. Art in its concrete
manifestations is an evolution. From Velasquez through Goya to
Manet and Whistler is a line of inheritance. But a true artist
recognizes that technique is only a means. As an artist he is seeking
to body forth in external form the vision within, and he tries to make
his medium "faithful to the coloring of his own spirit." Every artist
works out his characteristic manner; but the progress must be from
within outwards. Toward the shaping of his own style he is helped
by the practice of others, but he is helped and not hindered only in
so far as the manner of others can be made genuinely the expression
of his own feeling. Direct borrowing of a trick of execution and
servile imitation of a style have no place in true art. A painter who
would learn of Velasquez should study the master's technique, not
that in the end he may paint like Velasquez, but that