His last book, November Boughs, as
he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to
us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and
hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such
faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a
simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his
spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and
the matter of his work. His strange mode of expression is shown in these
pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.
The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many
years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric
in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what
will be to many an entirely new light. For in his very rejection of art
Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by
certain means and he succeeded. There is much method in what many have
termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to
fancy.

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of
sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a
stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there, in
the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and
New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than
in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_ you
read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of
Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient
Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.
As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad
. . . I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end
of Long Island, in a sheltered hollow of rock and sand, with the sea
on each side. (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelmed by
those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in
the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)

Edgar Allan Poe's amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and
our day, 'there can be no such thing as a long poem,' fascinated him.
'The same thought had been haunting my mind before,' he said, 'but Poe's
argument . . . work'd the sum out, and proved it to me,' and the English
translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility
of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still
be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system.
Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the
'technique' of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that
spirit which was to give life to the strange form. The central point of
the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily 'an identical
body and soul, a personality,' in fact, which personality, he tells us
frankly, 'after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled
should be myself.' However, for the true creation and revealing of this
personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed.