The intense individualism of Whitman's nature was strengthened rather than modified by the education of environment. He knew little of the life that came through books, hut much of that other life of the democratic masses which to most of his poetic eontemporaries was as foreign as classical culture was to him. Perhaps he was sometimes willfully eccentric. Certainly, in la boring to be natural, he stripped himself some times of more than the garment of convention. There was some excuse for those who found that he became indecent in his endeavors not to be In subject, the Leaves of Grass were from the distinctively American, dealing with moral and social conditions and with po litical questionings. "These United States them selves are essentially the greatest poem," he had said in the preface, and'he finds elsewhere that his country's crowning glory is to be spiritual and heroic. It is then the glorification of de mocraey, of the average man, the assertion of his right to he himself, the freedom of the indi vidual, and at the same time the ideal of demo cratic brotherhood which this freedom implies, that are his themes and his inspiration. With this passionate devotion to human nature goes a hatred like that of Rousseau for the conven tions that hedge it in, and parallel with this, in the style, there is a feeling for poetic beauty amt a hatred for the conventions of expression. He has an instinct of rhythm. words conic to him in felicitous collocations, but when they do not conic he does not seek them. The result of Whitman's efforts was one of the ironies of lit erary history. The deinoerat iv for whom Whitman wrote, made of it nothing at all. For him poetry must needs lie conventional to be comprehensible. So Whitman writing of and for
the multitude finds himself the admiration of a cultured coterie, appreciated only by a literary aristovracy. Yet there is no donh1 that more peo ple are coining to understand and to enjoy him. Ile was willing, he said, to wait to be understood through the growth of the taste for himself and what lie represented. Up to the present time his cult has been mainly confined to a group of open-minded lovers of poetry and to those in search of new literary sensations. It may be added that only the pruriency against which he protests could find his work immoral. It is not always agreeable, it is often indelicate and total ly frank, but it is as lacking in sensuality even in its most crude and unconventional expression, as was the poet's own life. Although as a whole his unmetrical matter comes under no present definition of poetry, and although a large portion of it has no possible poetic significance, yet there remains a small body of his verse that reveals a richness of poetic imagination unexcelled in America and that promises to last as long as anything in existing American poetry.
Consult A utobiographia, or the Story of a Life, selected from Whitman's Writings (1892). There is also an authorized biography by Bucke (1883). Consult also: Burroughs, 117itman, as Poet and Person (1866) ; Whitman, a Study (1896) ; O'Connor, The Good, Gray Port, a Vindication (1866) ; A. Symonds, Essays Spreulatirr and Suggestire, vol. and Dowden. Studies in Lit erature (The Poet of Democracy). The Philadel phia Conservator, a monthly edited by Horace Traubei, is the chief organ of Whitman studies.