Notable among Whitman’s best poems, and most important to an understanding of him, is the ‘Song of the Answerer,’ that is to say, of the Poet. He it is who puts things in their right relations:—
Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and a tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men.
The Answerer is quite other than the Singer—he is more powerful, his existence is more significant, his words are of weight and insight:—
The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,
The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.
In that fine rhapsody ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’ Whitman restates his doctrine while applying it to the need of his own America:—
Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away,