Repository: UIHistories Project: Magazine - English Club The Illinois (1907) [PAGE 16]

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STUDIES IN A M E R I C A N LITERATURE

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these pa] rs i'n Whitman I have wa I 1.-38 t" define your timate of his oems

han t try t make you inl -'••'! 61 ;gh to read thorn foi your If. It you < that in tk irit I am trying to t II you is the $\ ril to r I them in, I am not afraid of the r< ult. The bitterest censure and the wildest adulation have been heaped upon him in about equal amounts, but the day f r such mistakes, 1 think, is past, and now we can \ it look ourselves in m

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two conspicuous marks on his writings, hi vast freedom from conventional literary form, and hi? apparent disregard of any sort of modesty in re-peet I i the question of sex. The world knew little of 1 who was something of a forerunner of the American poet in more ways than one. and what it did know , him did not keep it from its adoration bet * th altar of formal fixedness of the verses in i I ry 1 near the altar of tinkling verbal melody. (>vei a cade had past since the 1842 volume had plao 1 T« nysonian sweetness as an ideal before ehnos < \ >

aspiringrimester. This new freedom rom i

in the length of lines, and this hn e \'v

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pression seemed barbarous, unkempt, vi< behemoth raging through tin. p lCeful hai tors. Much more important as a cause serve of most of the oritioi m \\ |

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wJiich Emerson so earnestly obi

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