"we have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture it so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism . . . Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." Clearly, Emerson was calling for a singer in many important respects resembling Whitman; and Whitman answered.
It is not yet adequately recognized to what extent Emerson anticipated not only Whitman but also the poets of the present hour. He anticipates their desire to strike up for the new world a new tune. He thinks that we leaned too much in the past upon England. Our literature has become lifelessly traditional through uninspired imitation. We require some sort of break and shock to liberate our own native talents. In an extremely interesting passage of the third volume of the Journals, he records the surmise that salvation may come from that very element which, in politics, he thought of as constituting the party of unkempt pioneers, barbarians,
