Whitman says:--
"For grounds for _Leaves of Grass_, as a poem, I abandoned the
conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock
ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high exceptional
personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's
sake--no legend or myth or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme."
His unbalanced desire for realism led him into two mistakes. In the first
place, his determination to avoid ornamentation often caused him to insert
in his poems mere catalogues of names, which are not bound together by a
particle of poetic cement. The following from his _Song of Myself_ is an
instance:--
"Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!
Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple
and the grape!"
In the second place, he thought that genuine realism forbade his being
selective and commanded him to put everything in his verse. He accordingly
included some offensive material which was outside the pale of poetic
treatment. Had he followed the same rule with his cooking, his chickens
would have been served to him without removing the feathers.
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