It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could not understand what the poet was driving at. Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the apple-picker? Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, instinctive forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers. Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to revive it--but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a necktie--he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the police.