ist, the professional poet,
is kept entirely in abeyance, or is completely merged and hidden in the
man, more so undoubtedly than in any poet this side the old Oriental
bards. We call him formless, chaotic, amorphous, etc., because he makes no
appeal to our modern highly stimulated sense of art or artificial form. We
must discriminate this from our sense of power, our sense of life, our
sense of beauty, of the sublime, of the all, which clearly Whitman would
reach and move. Whitman certainly has a form of his own: what would a
poet, or any writer or worker in the ideal, do without some kind of form?
some consistent and adequate vehicle of expression? But Whitman's form is
not what is called artistic, because it is not brought within the rules of
the prosodical system, and does not appeal to our sense of the consciously
shaped and cultivated. It is essentially the prose form heightened and
intensified by a deep, strong, lyric and prophetic note.

The bonds and shackles of regular verse-form Whitman threw off. This
course seemed to be demanded by the spirit to which he had dedicated
himself,--the spirit of absolute unconstraint. The restrictions and
hamperings of the scholastic forms did not seem to be consistent with this
spirit, which he identified with democracy and the New World. A poet who
sets out to let down the bars everywhere, to remove veils and
obstructions, to emulate the freedom of the elemental forces, to effuse
always the atmosphere of open-air growths and objects, to be as
"regardless of observation" as the processes of nature, etc., will not be
apt to take kindly to any arbitrary and artificial form of expression. The
essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the
spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could
have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the
effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a
different medium.

IX

Whitman threw himself with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude,
seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it?
Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Is
it plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? I do not
ask, Does he work it up into what are called artistic forms? Does he make
it the quarry from which he carves statues or builds temples? because
evidently he does not do this, or assume to do it. He is co