"I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe, I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless of observation. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me." The subject of his verse is the realities of democracy. No other great American poet had indulged in realism as extreme as this:-- "The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down." Whitman says boldly:-- "And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue." He discarded ordinary poetic meter, because it seemed to lack the rhythm of nature. It is, however, very easy for a poet to cross the line between realism and idealism, and we sometimes find adherents of the two schools disagreeing whether Whitman was more realist or idealist in some of his work, for instance, in a line or verse unit, like this, when he says:-- "That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world." [Illustration: IDENTITY (Drawing by Elihu Vedder)] The fact that not all the later eastern poets were realistic needs emphasis. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, perhaps the most noted successor of New England's famous group, was frequently an exquisite romantic artist, or painter in miniature, as these eight lines which constitute the whole of his poem, _Identity_, show:-- "Somewhere--in desolate wind-swept space-- In Twilight-land--in No-man's-land-- Two hurrying Shapes met face to face, And bade each other stand. "And who are you?' cried one, agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. 'I know not,' said the second Shape, 'I only died last night!'" WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, 1837-1920 [Illustration: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS] The foremost leader of realism in modern American fiction, the man who influenced more young writers than any other novelist of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was William Dean Howells, who was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, in 1837. He never went to college, but obtained valuable training as a printer and editor in various newspaper offices in Ohio. He was for many years editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and an editorial contributor to the _New York Nation_ and _Harper's Magazine_. In these capacities, as well as by his fiction, he reached a wide public. Later he turned his attention mainly to the writing of novels. So many of their scenes are laid in New England that he is often claimed as a New England writer.