Whitman’s standards are always those of Nature and of life. Emerson hung his verses in the wind--a good thing to get the chaff out of poetry or wheat. Whitman brings his, and all art, to the test of the natural, universal standards. He read his songs in the open air to bring them to the test of real things; he emulated the pride of the level he planted his house by. Always is his eye on the orbs, and on the earth as a whole: “I feel the globe itself swift swimming through space. I will confront the shows of day and night, I will see if I am to be less real than they are.” He would have his songs tally “earth’s soil, trees, winds, waves.” “Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?” he demands of those who would create the art of America. His poems abound in natural images and objects, but there is rarely a trace of the method and spirit of the so-called nature poets, some of whom bedeck Nature with jewelry and finery till we do not know her. In one of his nature jottings, written in 1878 at his country retreat not far from Camden, New Jersey, he speaks thus of the emotional aspects and influences of Nature: I too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all the prevailing intellections, literature, and poems) to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences of Nature at all, but of our own distorted, sick, or silly souls. Here amid this wide, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet! I do not wonder that Whitman gave such a shock to the reading public sixty years ago. This return, in a sense, to aboriginal Nature, this sudden plunge into the great ocean of primal energies, this discarding of all ornamentation and studied external effects of polish and elaboration, gave the readers of poetry a chill from which they are not yet wholly recovered. The fireside, the library corner, the seat in the garden, the nook in the woods: each and all have their charm and their healing power, but do not look for them in Walt Whitman. Rather expect the mountain-tops, the surf-drenched beach, and the open prairies. A poet of the cosmos, fortified and emboldened by the tremendous discoveries and deductions of modern science, he takes the whole of Nature for his province and dominates it, is at home with it, affiliates with it through his towering personality and almost superhuman breadth of sympathy.