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In ideals he is most like Emerson. Critics have called Whitman a concrete
translation of Emerson, and have noticed that he practiced the independence
which Emerson preached in the famous lecture on _The American Scholar_ (p.
185). In 1855 Emerson wrote to Whitman: "I am not blind to the worth of the
wonderful gift of _Leaves of Grass_. I find it the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."
Whitman is America's strangest compound of unfiltered realism, alloyed with
rich veins of noble idealism. No students of American democracy, its ideals
and social spirit, can afford to leave him unread. He sings, "unwarped by
any influence save democracy,"
"Of Life, immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine."
Intelligent sympathy with the humblest, the power to see himself "in prison
shaped like another man and feel the dull unintermitted pain," prompts him
to exclaim:--
"I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will."
An elemental poet of democracy, embodying its faults as well as its
virtues, Whitman is noteworthy for voicing the new social spirit on which
the twentieth century is relying for the regeneration of the masses.
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