Poems By Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman
page 38 of 313 (12%)
page 38 of 313 (12%)
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of the best, and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and
future are not disjoined, but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins, and stands them again on their feet: he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realise you. He learns the lesson--he places himself where the future becomes present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions,--he finally ascends and finishes all: he exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond--he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown: by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralise or make applications of morals,--he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and the one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both, and they are vital in his style and thoughts. The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity,--nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you, have looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight |
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