196 The Future Poetry
practicality of the time was caught up from its healthful soul of
nature and converted into a huge grinding mechanism. He has
the intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he utters, an
almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous
mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very
spirit of life, — that closeness he has more than any other poet
since Shakespeare, — and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly
vigour into a broad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads
and all is made subject and object and substance of a free and
a powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is made one
with the pulse of life and the grave reflective pallor and want
of blood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that
vigorous union. Whitman writes with a conscious sense of his
high function as a poet, a clear self-conception and consistent
idea of what he has to cast into speech, —
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En Masse...
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power,
Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.No other writer of the time has had this large and definite con-
sciousness of the work of a modern poet as a representative voice
of his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation conceived
as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind,
of universal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and
action. His creation, triumphing over all defect and shortcoming,
draws from it a unique broadness of view, vitality of force and
sky-wide atmosphere of greatness.
But beyond this representation of the largest thought and life
and broadest turn to the future possible to his age, there is some-
thing else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards
what is now opening to man around or above, towards a vision
of new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence.
Whitman by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on
the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound
sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in