efined,--white houses, white china, white
marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour
in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature as fast as
possible.

It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt Whitman is more read
abroad than in his own country. It is on the rank, human, and
emotional side--sex, magnetism, health, physique,--that he is so
full. Then his receptivity and assimilative powers are enormous, and
he demands these in his reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as
much as they are intellectual. They radiate from his entire being,
and are charged to repletion with that blended quality of mind and
body--psychic and physiologic--which the living form and presence send
forth. Never before in poetry has the body received such ennoblement.
The great theme is IDENTITY, and identity comes through the body; and
all that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, is entailed upon
the spirit. In his rapt gaze, the body and the soul are one, and what
debases the one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. Not more
ardently and purely did the great sculptors of antiquity carve it in the
enduring marble than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and
flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direction is invaluable.
Well has it been said that the man or the woman who has "Leaves of
Grass" for a daily companion will be under the constant, invisible
influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a gradual severance from
all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean.

In regard to the unity and construction of the poems, the reader
sooner or later discovers the true solution to be, that the dependence,
cohesion, and final reconciliation of the whole are in the Personality
of the poet himself. As in Shakespeare everything is strung upon the
plot, the play, and loses when separated from it, so in this poet every
line and sentence refers to and necessitates the Personality behind it,
and derives its chief significance therefrom. In other words, "Leaves of
Grass" is essentially a dramatic poem, a free representation of man in
his relation to the outward world,--the play, the interchanges between
him and it, apart from social and artificial considerations,--in which
we discern the central purpose or thought to be for every man and woman
his or her Individuality, and around that, Nationality. To show rather
than to tell,--to body forth as in a play how these arise and