e
down side by side in the free cemetery. The old poetic forms will
always have their place. They can never grow old-fashioned; any
more than Pisanello, or El Greco, or Botticelli, or Scopas, or any
ancient Chinese Painter, can grow old-fashioned. But when a
modern artist or poet sets to work to create a new form, let him
remember what he is doing! It is not the pastime of an hour, this. It
is not the casual gesture of a mad iconoclast breaking Classic
Statues into mud, out of which to make goblins. It is the fierce,
tenacious, patient, constructive work of a lifetime, based upon
a tremendous and overpowering Vision! Such a vision Walt
Whitman had, and to such constant inspired labour he gave his
life--notwithstanding his talk about "loafing and inviting his soul"!

The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws,
the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need,
as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind!
Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping
absinthe. Is it a secret still, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which
Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long,
plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs;
those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn
flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have
their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts!

Take that little poem--quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit
of democratic vulgarity--which begins:

"Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon--"

Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a
challenge? Take the poem which begins:

"In the growths, by the margins of pond-waters--"

Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of that
reference to the rank, rain-drenched _anonymous weeds,_ which
every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would
have driven the magic of it quite away.

Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense
of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and
wreckage, of vast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and
litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy
American landscape, but which those who love England know
where to find, even among our trim gardens! No one like Walt
Whitman can convey