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

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[227] work will long live as that of the Sir Galahad among our American poets.

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Walt Whitman

We may, perhaps, include here what is to be said of Whitman, not so much because he lived for a time in the South, as because Lanier's criticisms thus bring him freshly to mind. He was, indeed, a person and a poet singularly detached from place. He lived in New York, in New Orleans, in Washington, and was always ready to take the road for a new experience. He was carpenter, printer, editor, government clerk. Perhaps it was from his early years in the neighborhood of New York city, just then beginning to outgrow its provincial character, that his first inspiration was drawn. Several of his poems record the delight with which the manifold restless forces of life in the new metropolis affected him, and the fondness which grew in him for all sorts and conditions of men as he saw them upon the wharves and streets of New York.

In the stricter sense of the critics, Whitman may not be called a poet. There seems to be a provision in nature for a class who appear at long intervals, who become known as poets,