"
In 1888 Whitman wrote that "from a worldly and business point of view,
_Leaves of Grass_ has been worse than a failure--that public criticism on
the book and myself as author of it yet shows mark'd anger and contempt
more than anything else." But he says that he had comfort in "a small band
of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause." He
was also well received in England. He met with cordial appreciation from
Tennyson. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), a graduate of Oxford and an
authority on Greek poetry and the Renaissance, wrote, "_Leaves of Grass_,
which I first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced me more, perhaps,
than any other book has done except the _Bible_; more than Plato, more than
Goethe." Had Whitman lived until 1908, he would probably have been
satisfied with the following statement from his biographer, Bliss Perry,
formerly professor of English at Princeton, "These primal and ultimate
things Whitman felt as few men have ever felt them, and he expressed them,
at his best, with a nobility and beauty such as only the world's very
greatest poets have surpassed."
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. His most pronounced single characteristic is his
presentation of democracy:--
"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is
fine.
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