I was never troubled at all by what the critics called Whitman’s want of art, or his violation of art.  I saw that he at once designedly swept away all which the said critics have commonly meant by that term.  The dominant impression was of the living presence and voice.  He would have no curtains, he said, not the finest, between himself and his reader; and in thus bringing me face to face with his subject I perceived he not only did not escape conventional art, but I perceived an enlarged, enfranchised art in this very abnegation of art.  “When half-gods go, whole gods arrive.”  It was obvious to me that the new style gained more than it lost, and that in this fullest operatic launching forth of the voice, though it sounded strange at first, and required the ear to get used to it, there might be quite as much science, and a good deal more power, than in the tuneful but constricted measures we were accustomed to.

To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit the contrast was about the same.  The hedge is the more studiedly and obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction in trees that one would not care to lose.  There are symmetry and proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which these lines occur:—­

       “To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
        And blown with restless violence round
        About the pendent world.”

Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a soughing mass of foliage.

And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the verse-maker’s art:—­

 “This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded
     heaven,
  And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs
     and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be
     fill’d and satisfied then?
  And my Spirit said, No, we but level that lift, to pass and continue
     beyond."

Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse, was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic quality.  He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all artificial, all adventitious helps.  If interior, spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless hail of words,—­not one softly padded verse anywhere.

All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready to hand.  The form is suggestive,—­it invites and aids expression, and lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse.  The poet can “cut and cover,” as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman’s.