hat there is more talk about a
monument to Walt Whitman, "the good, gray poet." Just why the
adjective good is always applied to Whitman it is difficult to
discover, probably because people who could not understand him at
all took it for granted that he meant well. If ever there was a poet
who had no literary ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he.
He was neither good nor bad, any more than are the animals he
continually admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive
sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations,
enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was
the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is
admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph
he informs you that, "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,"
and that "The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed
drop horribly into a pail." No branch of surgery is poetic, and that
hopelessly prosaic word "pail" would kill a whole volume of sonnets.
Whitman's poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general,
some times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the
ocean with its "imperious waves, commanding" is beautiful, and that
the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste
may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet's
task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do
that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks to the
fixed stars. His "Leaves of Grass" is a sort of dictionary of the
English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation
set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.

But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental
force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life.
He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the
old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red
blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a
passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. He has no
code but to be natural, a code that this complex world has so long
outgrown. He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinbourne and
Gautier, who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects on
the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians who ate
and slept and married and smacked their lips over the mead horn. He
is rigidly limited to the physical,