He says that his purpose has been “not to carry out in the approved style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents or courtesies—­all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included—­to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them.”  He adds, “No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism.”

It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has been done before, or follow a prescribed code.  But for all that, art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics.  All that critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of gravity, even if they are not known.  The more permanent art is, the more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty, and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that expression.  Architecture, for instance, and music, are alike based upon instinctive preferences in human beings, the one for geometrical form, the other for the combination of vibrations.  It is a law of music, for instance, that the human being prefers an octave in absolute unison, and not an octave of which one note is a semitone flat.  That is not a rule invented by critics; it is a law of human perception and preference.  Similarly there is undoubtedly a law which determines human preferences in poetry, though a far more complicated law, and not yet analysed.  The new poet is not a man who breaks the law, but one who discovers a real extension of it.

The question then, roughly, is this:  Whitman chose to express himself in a species of poetry, based roughly upon Hebrew poetry, such as we have in the Psalms and Prophets.  If this is a true expansion of the aesthetic law of poetry, then it is a success; if it is not a true expansion, but only a wilful variation, not consonant with the law, it is a failure.

Now there are many effects in Whitman which are, I believe, inconsistent with the poetical law.  Not to multiply instances, his grotesque word-inventions—­“Me imperturbe!” “No dainty dolce affettuoso I,” “the drape of the day”—­his use of Greek and Latin and French terms, not correctly used and not even rightly spelt, his endless iterations, lists, catalogues, categories, things not clearly visualised or even remotely perceived, but swept relentlessly in, like the debris of some store-room, all these are ugly mannerisms which simply blur and encumber the pages.  The question is not whether they offend a critical and cultured mind, but whether they produce an inspiring effect upon any kind of mind.