of poetry. The Bible is full of such materials. English
literature shows many attempts to work this material up into poetry, but
always with a distinct loss of poetic value. The gold is simply beaten
out thin and made to cover more surface, or it is mixed with some base
metal. A recent English poet has attempted to work up the New Testament
records into poetry, and the result is for the most part a thin, windy
dilution of the original. If the record or legend is full of poetic
suggestion, that is enough; to elaborate it, and deck it out in poetic
finery without loss of poetic value, is next to impossible.

To me the Arthurian legends as they are given in the old books, are more
poetic, more stimulating to the imagination, than they are after they have
gone through the verbal upholstering and polishing of such a poet as
Swinburne or even Tennyson. These poets add little but words and flowers
of fancy, and the heroic simplicity of the original is quite destroyed.

XX

No critic of repute has been more puzzled and misled by this unwrought
character of our poet's verse than Mr. Edmund Gosse, the London poet and
essayist. Mr. Gosse finds Whitman only a potential or possible poet; his
work is literature in the condition of protoplasm. He is a maker of poems
in solution; the structural change which should have crystallized his
fluid and teeming pages into forms of art never came. It does not occur to
Mr. Gosse to inquire whether or not something like this may not have been
the poet's intention. Perhaps this is the secret of the vitality of his
work, which, as Mr. Gosse says, now, after forty years, shows no sign of
declining. Perhaps it was a large, fresh supply of poetic yeast that the
poet really sought to bring us. Undoubtedly Whitman aimed to give his work
just this fluid, generative quality, to put into it the very basic
elements of life itself. He feared the "structural change" to which Mr.
Gosse refers; he knew it was more or less a change from life to death: the
cell and not the crystal; the leaf of grass, and not the gem, is the type
of his sentences. He sacrificed fixed form; above all, did he stop short
of that conscious intellectual elaboration so characteristic of later
poetry, the better to give the impression and the stimulus of creative
elemental power. It is not to the point to urge that this is not the
method or aim of other poets; that others have used the fixed forms, and
found them plastic and vital in