E-text prepared by Andrea Ball, Jon Ingram, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN by WALT WHITMAN SELECTED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI A NEW EDITION "Or si sa il nome, o per tristo o per buono, E si sa pure al mondo ch'io ci sono." --MICHELANGELO. "That Angels are human forms, or men, I have seen a thousand times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms of man's body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and upon which, as on its base, it rests." --SWEDENBORG. "Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate voice--that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means." --CARLYLE. "Les efforts de vos ennemis contre vous, leurs cris, leur rage impuissante, et leurs petits succès, ne doivent pas vous effrayer; ce ne sont que des égratignures sur les épaules d'Hercule." --ROBESPIERRE. TO WILLIAM BELL SCOTT. DEAR SCOTT,--Among various gifts which I have received from you, tangible and intangible, was a copy of the original quarto edition of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, which you presented to me soon after its first appearance in 1855. At a time when few people on this side of the Atlantic had looked into the book, and still fewer had found in it anything save matter for ridicule, you had appraised it, and seen that its value was real and great. A true poet and a strong thinker like yourself was indeed likely to see that. I read the book eagerly, and perceived that its substantiality and power were still ahead of any eulogium with which it might have come commended to me--and, in fact, ahead of most attempts that could be made at verbal definition of them. Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend Swinburne, I found with much satisfaction that he also was an ardent (not of course a _blind_) admirer of Whitman. Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own works and his exacting acuteness as a critic might have seemed likely to carry him away from Whitman in sympathy at least, if not in actual latitude of perception. Those who find the American poet "utterly formless," "intolerably rough and floundering," "destitute of the A B C of art," and the like, might not unprofitably ponder this very different estimate of him by the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_.