al, 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
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 the functions of the
body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are
divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get
every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes
to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without
selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for
descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the
full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the
prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square
miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and
prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to
accept lines like these:

"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north."

Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of
brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the
crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the
people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway
omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver
were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I
loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic,
simply describes himself as a t