Conservative's Consolations
The medium employed by Walt Whitman, at times rhythmic and cadenced, at times ungirt and sagging loosely, enabled him to write passages of sustained beauty, passages grandly conceived and felicitously rendered. It also permitted him a riotous and somewhat monotonous excess. Every word misused revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation. The medium employed by the unshackled poets of today is capable of vivid and accurate imagery. It has aroused—or revealed—habits of observation. It paints pen-pictures cleverly. In the hands of French, British, and American experts, it shows sobriety, and a clear consciousness of purpose. But it is useless to deny that the inexpert find it perilously easy. The barriers which protect an ordinary four-lined stanza are not hard to scale; but they do exist, and they sometimes bring the versifier to a halt. Without them, nothing brings him to
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