Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[229] the fiercest innovating poets to revert to the ranks of order before they die. Whitman abstained, through all his later publications, from those proclamations of utter nudity to which Emerson objected, and omitted some of the most objectionable instances of it from later editions; and was also far more compressed and less simply enumerative than when he began. True poetry is not merely the putting of thoughts into words, but the putting of the best thoughts into the best words; it secures for us what Ruskin calls “the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line.” It fires a rifle-bullet instead of a shower of bird-shot; it culls the very best phrase out of language, instead of throwing a dozen epithets to see if one may chance to stick. For example, Emerson centres his Problem in “a cowled church-man; ;” Browning singles out an individual Bishop Blougram or Rabbi Ben Ezra, as the case may be; but Whitman enumerates “priests on the earth, oracles, sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, lamas, monks, muftis, exhorters.” In The song of the broad-axe there are nineteen successive lines beginning with the word “where;” in Salut au Monde eighteen in succession begin with