In 1888 Whitman wrote that "from a worldly and business point of view, Leaves of Grass has been worse than a failure—that public criticism on the book and myself as author of it yet shows mark'd anger and contempt more than anything else." But he says that he had comfort in "a small band of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause." He was also well received in England. He met with cordial appreciation from Tennyson. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), a graduate of Oxford and an authority on Greek poetry and the Renaissance, wrote, "Leaves of Grass, which I first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced me more, perhaps, than any other book has done except the Bible; more than Plato, more than Goethe." Had Whitman lived until 1908, he would probably have been satisfied with the following statement from his biographer, Bliss Perry, formerly professor of English at Princeton, "These primal and ultimate things Whitman felt as few men have ever felt them, and he expressed them, at his best, with a nobility and beauty such as only the world's very greatest poets have surpassed."
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. His most pronounced single characteristic is his presentation of democracy:—
"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is
fine."
He said emphatically, "Without yielding an inch, the working man and working woman were to be in my pages from first to last." He is the only American poet of his rank who remained through life the close companion of day laborers. Yet, although he is the poet of democracy, his poetry is too difficult to be read by the masses, who are for the most part ignorant of the fact that he is their greatest representative poet.
He not only preached democracy, but he also showed in practical ways his intense feeling of comradeship and his sympathy with all. One of his favorite verses was
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud."
His Civil War experiences still further intensified this feeling. He looked on the lifeless face of a son of the South, and wrote:—
"… my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead."
Like Thoreau, Whitman welcomed the return to nature. He says:—
"I am enamour'd of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods."