Days with Walt Whitman : with some notes on his life and work / by Edward Carpenter.

  • Edward Carpenter
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Days with Walt Whitman : with some notes on his life and work / by Edward Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    respect for “ Leaves of Grass ” as a feasible contribution to literature seems to have waned. He respected of course much of the matter of it, but could not stomach the manner. He told his friend Sanborn once that the book read like “ a mixture of the Bhagvat-Gita and the New Tork Herald.1 He included no specimen of it in his collection “Parnassus” (1874); and detested its metre or want of metre.2 [Whitman says somewhere—“ Specimen Days,” p. 321—“I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd—Waller’s ‘ Go, lovely rose,’ or Lovelace’s lines ‘To Lucasta’—and the like.”] Yet for the Man, as well as I think for his Message in its real essence, Emerson had a great and enduring respect. 1 “ Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” by W. S. Kennedy (1896), p. 78. 2 Nevertheless Emerson himself at an earlier age had made experiments in the same direction.
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