And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.[1]
Thus he writes To a Certain Civilian. So then the purpose of his volume is not to amuse people, nor to soothe sensitive ears, nor to delight students of metrics. His ideal is not the classic Æolian harp, but rather the hoarse locomotive, with its “madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all.”[2] He has no fear of professors of poetry; he is content to contemplate the awe of a Colorado canyon:
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace
—column and polish’d arch forgot?[3]
“What do I care?”—Whitman seems to say—“all this is but literature”:
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.[4]
He sings not for the sake of singing, but that he may rouse men, educate them, inspire them:
