His most poetic expression of this identity with all things and all men is the famous poem which begins:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years …
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.[1]
The personality of Walt Whitman is then but the dress, the rind of his cosmic love. Like all great souls he aspires to the complete and the infinite, but he does not seek to attain completeness by means of general and abstract terms. Just as his mysticism is an enormous amplification of his egotism, so his love for the universal manifests itself as a love of every single detail. He would reach the infinite by dint of the accumulation of finite things. Mad though the effort be, perilous though it be from the point of view of poetry, since it compels interminable enumerations, one must recognize that his constant insistence on particular things, and on the greatest possible number of particular things, suggests amplitude and universality more effectively than the abstract phrases with which philosophers and contemplatives are so well satisfied.
- ↑ Vol. II, pp. 135–38.
