Tenth, second, or first century before Christ--first, eighth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or even eighteenth century
A.D.--it is still the same: no book whose subject-matter admits as possible
of an impropriety according to current notions can be depended upon to fail
of containing such impropriety,--can, if those notions are accepted as the
canon, be placed with a sense of security in the hands of girls and youths,
or read aloud to women; and this holds good just as much of severely moral
or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, knowing, or licentious
books. For my part, I am far from thinking that earlier state of
literature, and the public feeling from which it sprang, the wrong ones--
and our present condition the only right one. Equally far, therefore, am I
from indignantly condemning Whitman for every startling allusion or
expression which he has admitted into his book, and which I, from motives
of policy, have excluded from this selection; except, indeed, that I think
many of his tabooed passages are extremely raw and ugly on the ground of
poetic or literary art, whatever aspect they may bear in morals. I have
been rigid in exclusion, because it appears to me highly desirable that a
fair verdict on Whitman should now be pronounced in England on poetic
grounds alone; and because it was clearly impossible that the book, with
its audacities of topic and of expression included, should run the same
chance of justice, and of circulation through refined minds and hands,
which may possibly be accorded to it after the rejection of all such
peccant poems.
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