His verse sometimes seems mere verbiage, but it is always a
higgledy-piggledy, Santa Claus bagful of _things_. And he could penetrate
to the essential reality. He tells in his "Drum-Taps" how one daybreak he
arose in camp, and saw three still forms stretched out in the eastern
radiance, how with light fingers he just lifted the blanket from each
cold face in turn: the first elderly, gaunt, and grim--Who are you, my
dear comrade? The next with cheeks yet blooming--Who are you, sweet boy?
The third--Young man, I think I know you. I think this face is the face
of the Christ Himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again
he lies.
True poetry focuses experience, not merely transmits it. It must redeem
it for ever from transitoriness and evanescence. Whitman incontinently
pours experience out in a Niagara-like cataract. But in spite of his
habitual publicity he was at heart of a "shy, brooding, impassioned
devotional type"; in spite of his self-conscious, arrogant virility, he
was to the end of his life an entranced child. He came into the world,
saw and babbled. His deliberate method of writing could have had no other
issue. A subject would occur to him, a kind of tag. He would scribble it
down on a scrap of paper and drop it into a drawer.
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