-a kind of
childish inaptness and homeliness,--often exposes him to our keen, almost
abnormal sense of the ridiculous. He was deficient in humor, and he wrote
his book in entire obliviousness of social usages and conventions, so that
the perspective of it is not the social or indoor perspective, but that
of life and nature at large, careering and unhampered. It is probably the
one modern poem whose standards are not social and what are called
artistic.

Its atmosphere is always that of the large, free spaces of vast, unhoused
nature. It has been said that the modern world could be reconstructed from
"Leaves of Grass," so compendious and all-inclusive is it in its details;
but of the modern world as a social organization, of man as the creature
of social usages and prohibitions, of fashions, of dress, of
ceremony,--the indoor, parlor and drawing-room man,--there is no hint in
its pages. In its matter and in its spirit, in its standards and in its
execution, in its ideals and in its processes, it belongs to and
affiliates with open-air nature, often reaching, I think, the cosmic and
unconditioned. In a new sense is Whitman the brother of the orbs and
cosmic processes, "conveying a sentiment and invitation of the earth." All
his enthusiasms, all his sympathies have to do with the major and
fundamental elements of life. He is a world-poet. We do not readily adjust
our indoor notions to him. Our culture-standards do not fit him.

III

The problem of the poet is doubtless more difficult in our day than in any
past day; it is harder for him to touch reality.

The accumulations of our civilization are enormous: an artificial world of
great depth and potency overlies the world of reality; especially does it
overlie the world of man's moral and intellectual nature. Most of us live
and thrive in this artificial world, and never know but it is the world of
God's own creating. Only now and then a man strikes his roots down through
this made land into fresh, virgin soil. When the religious genius strikes
his roots through it, and insists upon a present revelation, we are apt to
cry "heretic;" when the poet strikes his roots through it, as Whitman did,
and insists upon giving us reality,--giving us himself before custom or
law,--we cry "barbarian," or "art-heretic," or "outlaw of art."

In the countless adjustments and accumulations, and in the oceanic
currents of our day and land, the individual is more and more lost sight
of,