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

---

[230] “I see.” In I sing the body Electric he specifies in detail “wrists and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,” with thirteen more lines of just such minutiae. In the same poem he explains that he wishes his verses to be regarded as “man's, woman's, child's, youth's, wife's, husband's, mother's, father's, young man's, young woman's poems.” This is like bringing home a sackful of pebbles from the beach and asking us to admire the collected heap as a fine sea view. But it is to be noticed that these follies diminish in his later works: the lines grow shorter; and though he does not acquiesce in rhyme, he occasionally accepts a rhythm so well defined that it may be called conventional, as in the fine verses entitled Darest thou now, 0 soul? And it is a fact which absolutely overthrows the whole theory of poetic structure or stricturelessness implied in Whitman's volumes, that his warmest admirers usually place first among his works the poem on Lincoln's death, Mily Captain, which comes so near to recognized poetic methods that it falls naturally into rhyme.

Whitman can never be classed as Spinoza was by Schleiermacher, among “Godcated”