Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MODERN POETRY THAT the art of poetry has entered upon a period of experiment and even of transition, perhaps a notable period, is at least plausible. The pioneer of this transition was, of course, Whitman the ridiculed the tolerated, and finally the over-praised poet of American democracy and universal fellowship and goodwill. Whitman imagined himself a Realist, and, obsessed by that belief, he carried Realism to its extreme. Uncovering much that best were hidden, even as Nature hides her dead and decaying things, he laid himself open to misunderstanding and much harsh as well as ignorant criticism. Only his all- permeating Idealism, if any thing, will preserve Whitman and his poems from the dust-heap of forgotten men and their works. This, our candid opinion, is not that of one always opposed to the method of the " good grey poet," but is, in fact, that of one long since recovered from serious Whitmania. Without precedent in America, and uninfluenced by any European poet, unless possibly William Blake, who himself had come under the spell of the amorphous Poems of Osstan, Whitman burst upon the public in a manner startling to the vast majority of his readers, butwelcome to the few, some of whom were but unreasoning admirers of novelty as such, even as were many who had praised the spurious MacPherson productions. As a realist, Whitman turned from well-nigh every established canon of the poet's art. At the same time, as Idealist, he sought a vehicle of literary expression larger, more underlying, and less trammeled than any before discovered. That absolute revolt from the Greco-Latin manner of David and the Romanticism of the Italo-French school of Barbizon which, as we have seen, began with Corot and eventuated in Futurist and Synchromist painting, was a series of departure...