M. D. Conway; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, who
wrote a pamphlet named _The Good Grey Poet_; and Mr. John Burroughs, author
of _Walt Whitman as Poet and Person_, published quite recently in New York.
His thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond rivalry _the_ poet
of the epoch; an estimate which, startling as it will sound at the first,
may nevertheless be upheld, on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his
competitors a man of the period, one of audacious personal ascendant,
incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in the scheme and form of his
works.
Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as they are true, shall
frankly stand confessed--some of them as very serious faults. Firstly, he
speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms.
Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which
produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature.
Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and
agglomerative--giving long strings of successive and detached items, not,
however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self-
assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or
merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking
on behalf of all men, and every man and woman.
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