LOOKING ACROSS THE PASTURE WALL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE NATHAN CHASE FARM
JOHN BURROUGHS AND WALT WHITMAN
A certain publisher, who honored very much Walt Whitman, could have paid him no higher tribute than to have closed the preface to Whitman's Poems as follows: "To have met Whitman was a privilege, to have been his friend was an honor. The latter was mine; and among the many reminiscences of my life, none are to me more pleasing than those which gather about the name of 'The Good Grey Poet'."
John Burroughs was for thirty years the intimate friend and constant associate of Walt Whitman, and I have heard him say that those were among the most pleasant years of his life. All who ever knew Whitman, and became in any way intimate with him, have practically the same to say of him. No writer ever unfolded himself and his greatness more completely than Whitman, and yet we have a great many excellent critics who are pretty harsh on him. This we believe is so, because the critics have not read the poet aright. They have failed to get out of the poems what was put in them. Whitman is not a poet according to classical standards, but as a "Creator" he is.
Emerson says of his poetry: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Julian Hawthorne says of it: "Original and forceful, Whitman cannot be judged by ordinary literary standards. His scornful trampling upon all metrical rules, and his freedom in treating of matters, usually passed in silence, have so far been a decided barrier to the approval of his work."
Professor Underwood of the California University has the following good word for the poet: "Pupils who are accustomed to associate the idea of poetry with regular classic measure in rhyme, or in ten-syllabled blank verse or elastic hexameter, will commence these short and simple prose sentences with surprise, and will wonder how any number of them can form a poem. But let them read aloud with a mind in sympathy with the picture as it is displayed, and they will find by Nature's unmistakable response, that the author is a poet, and possesses the poets' incommunicable power to touch the heart."
Professor Pattee of the Pennsylvania State College, on the other hand says: "It is certainly true that to the majority of readers, 'Leaves of Grass', contains a few good things amid a disgusting mass of rubbish.
"Whitman is confessedly the poet of the body. His book is not upward. He grovels in the earthly and disgusting parts of human life and experience. His egotism is remarkable.