In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled _The Good Gray Poet_, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.
It [_Leaves of Grass_] is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word--colonial--comprehends and stamps our literature.... At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in _Leaves of Grass_ the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctly and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life.
The defense fell for the most part on deaf ears. It had been Whitman's dream that the great poet of democracy was to be the idol of the common people, the poet loved and read even by the illiterate.
The woodman that takes his ax and jug with him shall take me with him all day, The farm-boy, plowing in the field, feels good at the sound of my voice.
But the common people heard him not gladly: they preferred Longfellow. The American average man--"en masse"--sees no poetry in him. Moreover, he has been rejected very largely by the more educated. It has been his curious experience to be repudiated by democratic America and to be accepted and hailed as a prophet by the aristocratic intellectual classes of England and of Europe generally. Swinburne, W. M. Rossetti, Symonds, Dowden, Saintsbury, Tennyson, and very many others accepted him early and at full value, as did also Freiligrath, Schmidt, and Björnson. A cult early sprang up about him, one composed largely of mystics, and revolutionists, and reformers in all fields.