Note 11 — THE POETIC FORM OF “LEAVES OF GRASS”

“I had not dreamed,” says Mrs. Gilchrist in A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman, “that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I sometimes feel as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems. In the series headed ‘Calamus,’ for instance, in some of the ‘Songs of Parting,’ the ‘Voice out of the Sea,’ the poem beginning ‘Tears, Tears,’ &c., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under it—stands quite still—and I am obliged to lay the book down for a while.”