Walt Whitman the Poet of Democracy Author:William Gay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: they are so far from ministering to pruriency that they actually tend to rebuke and purify it. " Well has it been said," says Burroughs, to whom every student of... more » Whitman must ever be indebted, " that the man or woman who has Leaves of Grass for a daily companion will be under the constant, invisible influence of sanity, cleanliness, strength, and a gradual severance from all that corrupts and makes morbid and mean." Many of Whitman's admirers, however, including Emerson, draw the line at the point where he begins to deal with this subject of parenthood, and it must be confessed that his utterances in this regard are pretty strong meat, unfit for babes, adolescent or adult ; but they are certainly to be recommended to the serious private study of properly matured men and women. Soon after his dismissal Whitman got another appointment in the office of the Attorney-General. In 1865 he published Drum Taps — a volume of poems on subjects suggested by the war. A Sequel followed shortly after, and was of the same character. Both works, as, indeed, all the poems that Whitman subsequently wrote, are now incorporated with Leaves of Grass. His prose writings, which are mostlyof a fragmentary character, are collected in the volume called Specimen Days and Collect; and most of them are included in two volumes of the Camelot Series, called respectively Specimen Days in America, and Democratic Vistas and Other Papers. A good and cheap selection from his poems is published in the "Canterbury Poets," with an appreciative introduction by Ernest Rhys; and an even better selection is published by Chatto and Windus, to which a biographical and critical preface is contributed by W. M. Rossetti. The only British edition of his complete works is published by Wilson and McCor- rnick of Glasgow.. In ...« less