VII
To insist that Whitman has had small influence on later poetry because none of the later poets has made use of his chant is feeble criticism. No poet even can make use of his verse form without plagiarism, for his loose-fingered chords and his peculiar time-beat, his line-lengths, his wrenched hexameters—all this was Whitman himself. In all other ways he enormously influenced his age. His realism, his concrete pictures, his swing and freedom, his Americanism, his insistence upon message, ethic purpose, absolute fidelity to the here and now rather than to books of the past—all have been enormously influential. He is the central figure of the later period, the voice in the wilderness that hailed its dim morning and the strong singer of its high noon.