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To get the final lilt of songs,
To penetrate the inmost lore of poets to know the mighty ones,
Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Tennyson, Emerson;
To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and
doubt to truly understand,
To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.
Lilt is a particularly cheerful song, so this line may translate to “to get the final happy song of songs. It seems as though he’s going to search through different poems and poets to try and find the single most optimistic poem in existence; or perhaps create it himself.
He knows that in order to produce this kind of work he needs to have the wisdom of the great poets of all time. He calls them “the might ones” and follows this with a list of what seems to be his favorites.
Whitman lists them in chronological order and ends with his own contemporaries. All of these poets were deceased at the time he wrote this poem, so there is probably some significance in his mentioning these poets in specific.
Perhaps Whitman is saying here that the only way to obtain this great wisdom of these writers is to encounter death himself.
He calls the poets “faculty” as though they are the Professors of some great university. Whitman also calls them the last faculty, which seems to tell us that he feels that they are the masters and anyone who follows will only try and recreate what they have done.
At this very ending line, he mentions how with old age comes past experiences and that makes for great poetry. It shows in Whitman’s work in these last years of his life. He uses all of his wisdom he has acquired through the years. However, his poetry seems to be less optimistic in his later years so it’s interesting that he’d be looking for the “lilt”.