Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/148

132 Else why should all men listen to his songs?

At first sight, on the contrary, Whitman seems the most personal of poets, or at least the most sincere of egotists. Is he not the proud author of the Song of Myself? His very first line is this:

And again he says:

His own personality recurs frequently in his songs, and not under the abstract and indeterminate title I, but with the face and the clothes of Walt Whitman:

But it would be a mistake to regard this adoration of the self as a proof of Whitman’s individualism. He adores the self because he adores