poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
be vacuums.

"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
the arches and cornices?)

"All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the
instruments;
It is not the violins and the cornets--it is not the oboe, nor
the beating drums--nor the score of the baritone singer singing
his sweet romanza--nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of
the women's chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they."

Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all that pertains
essentially to him, and the steady ignoring of conventional and social
distinctions and prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal
brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in "Leaves of Grass" that
have caused so much abuse and fury,--the allusions to sexual acts and
organs,--the momentary contemplation of man as the perpetuator of his
species. Many good judges, who have followed Whitman thus far, stop here
and refuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed in this part,
he has failed in the rest. It is of a piece with the whole. He has felt
in his way the same necessity as that which makes the anatomist or
the physiologist not pass by, or neglect, or falsify, the loins of his
typical personage. All the passages and allusions that come under this
head have a scientific coldness and purity, but differ from science, as
poetry always must differ, in being alive and sympathetic, instead of
dead and analytic. There is nothing of the forbidden here, none of those
sweet morsels that we love to roll under the tongue, such as are found
in Byron and Shakespeare, and even in austere Dante. If the fact is not
lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far-reaching laws of maternity
and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it
is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar and
mean.

Again: Out of all the full-grown, first-class poems, no matter what
their plot or theme, emerges a sample of Man, each after its kind, its
period, its nationality, its antecedents. The vast and cumbrous Hindu
epics contribute their special types of both man and woman, impossible
except from far-off Asia and Asian antiquity. Out of Homer, after all
his gorgeous action and events, the distinct personal identity, the
heroic and warlike chieftain of Hellas