THE GOOD GREY POET
Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We
come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes
everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating
motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major
prophets--like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a
means of swaying the souls of men.
Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of
critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors
write in this fashion about his books, and do not lose their positions
for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman’s lifetime; in
the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene
maniac. His first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a thousand copies
printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he
sent out free--and even some of these were returned, one by the poet
Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was “as unacquainted with art as a
hog with mathematics.” Another wrote that he “deserved the whip of the
public executioner.” He was thrown out of a government position in
Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and
again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public
prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman’s
contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman
published Emerson’s letter in the second edition of “Leaves of Grass,”
Emerson was embarrassed--for in the meantime his horrified friends had
persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how
difficult it is to judge one’s contemporaries.
Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island.
His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town.
Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good
reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an
orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of “crank”;
a slow-moving, rather stubborn youth, who wandered about from place to
place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but
caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but
gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in
life--a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough
manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying
literature and life. Walt’s people loved him, but could not make him
out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul.
He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He
wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with
them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job,
he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He
wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and
back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own
taste, taking no one’s opinions. When he was ready to express himself,
it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling
voice yet lifted in America.
It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements
through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was
made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the
same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a
respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that
Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of
the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could
not understand what the poet was driving at.
Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he
writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they
themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying
the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir
Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of
the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the
apple-picker?
Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as
distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters
up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous,
instinctive forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer,
could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide
it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would
follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and
fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts.
Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was
for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in
Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave,
ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who
made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers.
Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all
things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a
common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years
which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to
revive it--but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time.
Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his
poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished
product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was
one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the
representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and
his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This
big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how
great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a
necktie--he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the
police.
The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children
of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified
silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it
had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take
sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote
about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of
Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the
book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not
been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his
message its due proportion and no more. He was a clean man, living an
abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his
body.
The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made
apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on
almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals,
bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and
neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved
him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his
presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full
beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to
note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said
to Goethe: “This is a man!”
“The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his
health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He
published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which
was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a
people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic
Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in
his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and
equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an
almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand
religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.”
Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then
suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last
twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame
spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now
emerging--and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed
forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle--I nourish
active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of
rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration.
Is it poetry? That is a question over which battles are fought. It seems
to me that words matter little; it is a kind of inspired chant, which
moves you if you are susceptible to its ideas. For two years I steeped
myself in the literature of the Civil War, while writing “Manassas”; and
to me at that time “Drum-Taps” seemed to contain all the fervor and
anguish of the conflict. But the everyday person, who does not rise to
those heights, prefers “O Captain, My Captain,” which has the easier
beauties of rhyme and fixed rhythm.
The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the
only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the
human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be
poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a
poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had
names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic
symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old
trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English
Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the
Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn
goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers
and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye
Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ...
Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord
which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are
a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product
of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human
body.
The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have
stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not
equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of
imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the
fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of
theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater
number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather
than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie
and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman
is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic
fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet!