Whittier, Tennyson, and Walt Whitman still
live."
Started out by that item on Old Poets and Poetry for chyle to inner
American sustenance--I have thus gossipp'd about it all, and treated
it from my own point of view, taking the privilege of rambling
wherever the talk carried me. Browning is lately dead; Bryant, Emerson
and Longfellow have not long pass'd away; and yes, Whittier and
Tennyson remain, over eighty years old--the latter having sent out
not long since a fresh volume, which the English-speaking Old and New
Worlds are yet reading. I have already put on record my notions of T.
and his effusions: they are very attractive and flowery to me--but
flowers, too, are at least as profound as anything; and by common
consent T. is settled as the poetic cream-skimmer of our age's melody,
_ennui_ and polish--a verdict in which I agree, and should say that
nobody (not even Shakspere) goes deeper in those exquisitely touch'd
and half-hidden hints and indirections left like faint perfumes in the
crevices of his lines. Of Browning I don't know enough to say much;
he must be studied deeply out, too, and quite certainly repays the
trouble--but I am old and indolent, and cannot study (and never did.)
Grand as to-day's accumulative fund of poetry is, there is certainly
something unborn, not yet come forth, different from anything now
formulated in any verse, or contributed by the past in any land--
something waited for, craved, hitherto non-express'd. What it will be,
and how, no one knows.
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