The Nation and Athenaeum, 41 (4 June 1927) 302
[Mr. T. S. Eliot writes:] Mr. McNulty expresses surprise at my comparison of Whitman and Tennyson. 1 May I assure him that I intended this comparison to be quite serious; and if he will look back at the earlier number of The Nationin which I reviewed a recent biography of Whitman, he will see that I have made the same assertion at more length. 2 I would remind him first of Whitman’s almost boundless admiration for Tennyson, and second I would say again that Whitman’s and Tennyson’s respective attitudes toward the society which they inhabited are closely parallel. I quite agree that Tennyson’s verse is “perfect”; but I would assert that Whitman’s gifts were of exactly the same kind. He was, in my opinion, a great master of versification, though much less reliable than Tennyson. It is, in fact, as a verse maker that he deserves to be remembered; for his intellect was decidedly inferior to that of Tennyson. His political, social, religious, and moral ideas are negligible.
[t. s. eliot]
