Excerpt from Walt Whitman: Yesterday Today In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (i 8 5 5) characterizes Walt Whitman thus: No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He will bring poems to fill the days and nights - fit for men andwomen with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beauti ful. Are you to be put down, he seems to ask, to that shallow level of literature and conversation that stops a man's recognizing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or a woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. Sex will not be put aside; it is the great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate inten tion and effort. To men and women, he says, you can have healthy and powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine. Follow me, and there shall be taller and richer crops of humanity on the earth. From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the Crayon (new York, this extract may be taken With a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity of perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of Grass has no identity, no concentration, no purpose it is barbarous, undisciplined, like the poetry of a half civilized people, and as a whole useless, save to those miners of thought who prefer the metal in its unworked state. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.