Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps
New York
Times,
22 November 1865, p. 4.
Mr. Whitman has strong aspirations toward poetry, but he is wanting
entirely in the qualities that Praed possessed in such large measure. He
has no ear, no sense of the melody of verse. His poems only differ from
prose in the lines being cut into length, instead of continuously pointed.
As prose, they must be gauged by the sense they contain, the mechanism
of verse being either despised by, or out of the reach of the writer. Considered
as prose, then, we find in them a poverty of thought, paraded forth with
a hubbub of stray words, and accompanied with a vehement self-assertion
in the author, that betrays an absence of true and calm confidence in himself
and his impulses. Mr. Whitman has fortunately better claims on the gratitude
of his countrymen than any he will ever derive from his vocation as a poet.
What a man does, is of far greater consequence than what he says
or prints, and his devotion to the most painful of duties in the
hospitals at Washington during the war, will confer honor on his
memory when Leaves of Grass are withered and Drum
Taps have ceased to vibrate.
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