Walt Whitman as the carpenter or printer turned bard in Manhattan pleases one's taste for the autocthonous, the home-grown. More than that, it touches the heart by symbolizing the national sense that, after all our civilizing efforts, we live still in an unfinished world. He acquired blandness with the years; yet even in his mild old age he looked out from under his wide-brimmed hat and from the cloudy covert of beard and hair with no academic mien—rather with the untamed and heroic aspect of
On the centenaries of most of the American poets who flourished at the time when the Leaves of Grass was first put forth, we enquire rather coldly and incuriously what is left of them. They have sadly dwindled—most of them—they have lost their warmth for us, they have become irrelevant to our occasions. Whitman still with astonishing completeness lives. He lives because he marvelously well identified that daimonic personality with his book, so that whoever touches it, as he himself declared, touches a man, and a man of singularly intense perceptiveness. One can hardly exaggerate the potency of Whitman's imaginative process—a process easier to illustrate than to define. Let us take, for example, these lines on the fugitive slave and consider the almost intolerable immediacy of the presentment:
