November 1901 (12:138)

The following is a stylish example of the anti-Whitman fulminations that Traubel regularly included in the pages of his journal, presumably to give his mostly dyed-in-the-wool Whitmaniac subscribers a good laugh.

Recent Study and Criticism of Whitman

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            That Whitman was a “rough” in literature all the axioms and standards which he shattered declare.  He is the apostle of the uncouth and the barbaric—a destructive bovine intruder in the artistic china shop.  One of his Georgia admirers says that he “galloped through our literature like an untamed stallion.”  Defiant of the laws of literary form, he “exhausted the resources of formlessness”; and, as W. D. Howells says: “In formlessness, everything spills and wastes away: this is the defect of Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies.”  Leaves of Grass, in many parts, is the most amorphous agglomeration of unpoetic words ever shoveled together; and much of Whitman’s work is really monstrous in form.  In a few verses there is a swimming majesticalness, as of a walrus sporting,  rolling, wallowing in the waves; but, for the most part, his movement is as ungainly as that same sea beast flopping and bumping and thumping about on the shore.  His unwieldy gracelessness suggests the megalosaurus or the iguanodon; and his species may well become extinct like theirs.  As for rhythm, his thought was seldom rocked in that cradle of the deep: some of his so-called poetry is described by Professor Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, as a “mad kind of rhythm which sounds as if hexameters were trying to bubble through sewage”; and his verses, mostly, a jangle—not jingle—with about as much meter and music as cowbells beat out in fly time.  

—William V. Kelly, in The Homiletic Review.