Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/147

And of necessity, since he would educate, he must be rough and without compliments:

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe.^[1]

He is, then, less a poet in the modern sense than a prophet, a vates in the ancient sense. He is not the singer of certain specific things or of a few sentiments: he is the poet of the universal, of the all, of the ensemble.

There are poets who sing only the love of woman, others who sing only the love of nature, others yet who sing only the love of fatherland or of mankind or of themselves. Whitman sings all these loves together, and others as well:

I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days.^[2]

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.^[3]

And he has heard the command of the Muse:

Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the universal.^[4]

1. Vol. I, p. 29.
2. Vol. I, pp. 25–26.
3. Vol. II, p. 161.
4. Vol. I, p. 276.