nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!"

The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of
the Psalms of David and of some of the Prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_,
and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed
Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the
old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases
attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to
the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which
was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures
and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom.
There is no consenting estimate of this poet. {547} Many think that
his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of
prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation
and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a passing "fad" of a few
literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like
Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have
something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing
else--in writings from this side of the water before they will
acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering
in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." Others maintain that he is the
greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is
"cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling
rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's
poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry,
the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of
conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse
elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and
even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to
be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and
nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the
conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the
salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole
classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the
{548} divisions in _Leaves of Grass_, particularly that entitled
_Children of Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its
outspokenness. Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all t