m. He was an
unintellectual man who wrote conventionally when he was plain Walter
Whitman, living in Brooklyn. But he imitated Ossian and Blake, and
their singing robes ill-befitted his burly frame. If, in Poe, there is
much "rant and rococo," Whitman is mostly yawping and yodling. He is
destitute of humour, like the majority of "prophets" and uplifters,
else he might have realised that a Democracy based on the "manly love
of comrades" is an absurdity. Not alone in Calamus, but scattered
throughout Leaves, there are passages that fully warrant unprejudiced
psychiatrists in styling this book the bible of the third sex.

But there is rude red music in the versicles of Leaves. They
stimulate, and, for some young hearts, they are as a call to battle.
The book is a capital hunting-ground for quotations. Such massive
head-lines--that soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust
swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long
foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign
countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called
"mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself
a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism--what Coleridge called
"the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete
imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief asset is an
extraordinary sensitiveness to the sense of touch; it is his
distinguishing passion, and tactile images flood his work; this, and
an eye that records appearances, the surface of things, and registers
in phrases of splendour the picturesque, yet seldom fuses matter and
manner into a poetical synthesis. The community of interest between
his ideas and images is rather affiliated than cognate. He has a
tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting,
rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell
calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of
his supreme effort--the Lincoln burial hymn--serves as a nebulous
buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives
atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea
and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for
me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of
the poet--ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow,
ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels
where the slag covers r