ypical, average man--the same as any
other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great
tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil
war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the
Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the
_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready
comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call
himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a
slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers
allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in
the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra
civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all
his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of
life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his
panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because
he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such
a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the
human race. Stripped of verbiage and repetition, his ideas are not
many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the
_Leaves of Grass_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the
individual differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the
_dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too
early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But
it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have not accepted him yet
as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and
feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and
even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the
literary class. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate
reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists,
but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward
the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new
stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the
_technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most
inspired passages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank
verse, for example, in the _Man-of-War-Bird_:

"Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.;