As he
says in one of his finest apologues:
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
nothing is scanted.
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,
what you are picks its way.
3
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or
even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in
The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be
carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at
least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages
in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of
all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the
republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very
great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of
glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too
that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more
ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all."
And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with
which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born
characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I
was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest
and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I
am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise
what the democratic spirit of America really is.
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