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 returns; and if we wish to salute him, he will give us the tune:

But why is this interesting and vital personality important to us? Open the Leaves of Grass, and you will find this piquantly intimate answer: "I considered long and seriously of you before you were born." Other poets have given little thought to us, and we, in compensation, give little thought to them; for we modern men and women of realistic temper go not to literature to escape from life, but to intensify our sense of it and to find a spirit that will animate us in the thick of it. Whitman, proclaimer of egotism, foresaw our intentness upon our own enterprises, and prepared for the day when we should demand of him: "What have you said, Poet, that concerns us?" Though he is saturated with historical and contemporary references, nothing in him is merely contemporary, merely historical. He gathers up ages, literatures, philosophies, and consumes them as the food of passion and prophecy. He strides with the energy and momentum of the national past into the national future,