interest attaching to them as bibliographical curiosities, but will
perhaps answer the needs of the student.
_Leaves of Grass_, 1855 (second edition, 1856; third, 1860–61; fourth,
1867; fifth, 1871); _Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps_ and its _Sequel_,
1865–66; _Democratic Vistas_, 1871; _After All not to Create Only_,
1871; _Passage to India_, 1871; _As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free_,
1872; _Memoranda during the War_, 1875–76; _Two Rivulets_ (prose and
verse), 1876; _Specimen Days and Collect_, 1882–83; _November Boughs_
(prose and verse), 1888; _Good-Bye My Fancy_, 1891; _Calamus: A Series
of Letters ... to a young friend (Peter Doyle)_, 1897; _The Wound
Dresser_, 1898.
The storm of opposition which greeted Whitman’s earlier work gradually
subsided, and he became a notable figure among contemporary men of
letters. He was invited to read original poems on public occasions,
such as the opening of the American Institute (1871), the Commencement
at Dartmouth College (1872), and the Commencement at Tufts College
(1874). In later years he enjoyed literary canonization in a small
way. Many pilgrims visited the bard in his unpoetical house in Camden.
Worshippers came from England to pay him homage and incidentally to
rail at Americans for neglecting one of their few geniuses, stolidly
ignoring the fact that they themselves had neglected not a few of their
many geniuses. And before Walt Whitman died (March 26, 1892) he had
tasted some of the delights of fame.
II
THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION
Being prejudiced in favor of metre and rhyme, probably from long
experience of verse written in the conservative way, an old-fashioned
world did not welcome _Leaves of Grass_ with enthusiasm. A few
discerning spirits saw in Whitman the promise of mighty things. Emerson
greeted him ‘at the beginning of a great career;’ but when the poet had
these words from a private letter stamped in gilt capitals on the cover
of his next volume, Emerson (it is thought) was a little dismayed.
Not only did the form of the poems offend, but the content as well.
There were lines calculated to disconcert even such people as were
not, in their own opinion, prudish. The lines were comparatively few
in number, but they were there in unabashed nakedness, and _Leaves of
Grass_, it may be assumed, often went on a top shelf instead of on
the sitting-room table along with innocuous poets like Tennyson and
Longfellow.
Neglect and abuse raised up for Whitman in time a small battalion of
champions, fierce, determined, uncompromising, militant. Among them
were men whose attitude towards literature was catholic and liberal.
For the most part they were Whitmanites, hot as lovers, quarrelsome as
bullies, biting their thumbs at every passer-by.
Literary championship has one good effect: it keeps the public, gorged
with novels of the day, from quite going to sleep. There is always
a chance that some open-minded reader will be stirred by the clash
of critical arms to look into the affair that is causing so great a
pother. Better to be advertised by the crowd of swashbucklers who
clattered about wearing Whitman’s colors than not to be advertised at
all. The public concluded that a man who could inspire loyalty like
this must be worth while. Whitman’s audience and influence grew. The
bodyguard pretty much lost the power to see virtue in any poet save its
own, but it had succeeded in arresting public attention.
In 1876 a number of English admirers subscribed freely to the new
edition of Whitman’s writings and garnished their guineas with
comfortable words. The poet was sick, poor, discouraged, and by his own
grateful testimony this show of interest put new heart into him--‘saved
my life,’ he said. It might well have had that effect, since no less
names than those of Tennyson, Ruskin, Rossetti, and Lord Houghton
were to be found in the list of subscribers. Even Robert Buchanan,
who assailed with virulence the author of ‘Jenny,’ had no scruple in
bidding God speed to the author of the ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Children
of Adam.’
A momentary set-back occurred in 1882, when Whitman’s Boston publisher
was threatened with prosecution. ‘The official mind’ declared that it
would be content if two poems were suppressed, the poems in question
resembling in some particulars the stories an English editor omitted
from the _Thousand-and-One Nights_, on the ground that they were
‘interesting only to Arabs and old gentlemen.’ Whitman refused to omit
so much as a word, and the book was transferred to a Philadelphia
publishing house.
After 1882 Whitman found himself able to publish freely and without
the fear of the district attorney before his eyes. Since his death he
has been accorded a niche in the American literary pantheon, if we may
believe the critics, who now treat his work with the confidence which
marks their attitude towards Lowell or Longfellow.
III
THE WRITER
Unless indeed, as some maintain, Whitman got the suggestion of a
rhapsodical form from the once famous _Poems of Ossian_, he may be
said to have invented his own ‘verse.’ These unrhymed and unmetred
chants give a pleasure the degree of which is largely determined by the
reader’s willingness to allow Whitman to speak in his own manner and
wholly without reference to time-honored modes of poetic expression.
Such receptivity of mind is indispensable.
Whitman called his rhapsodies ‘poems,’ ‘chants,’ or ‘songs’
indifferently; the last term was a favorite with him, in later
editions; he has a ‘Song of the Open Road,’ a ‘Song of the Broad-Axe,’
a ‘Song for Occupations,’ a ‘Song of the Rolling Earth,’ a ‘Song of
Myself,’ a ‘Song of the Exposition,’ a ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree,’
‘Songs of Parting,’ and yet more songs. Obviously he used the word
without reference to the traditional meaning. Says Whitman: ‘... it is
not on _Leaves of Grass_ distinctively as _literature_, or a specimen
thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at
my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance,
or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or
æstheticism.’ Holding as he did that so long as ‘the States’ were
dominated by the poetic ideals of the Old World they would stop short
of first-class nationality, his own practice necessarily involved
getting rid, first of all, of the forms in which poetry had hitherto
found expression.
That the structure of Whitman’s rhapsodies is determined by some law
cannot be questioned. After one has read these pieces many times,
he will find himself instinctively expecting a certain cadence. The
change of a word spoils it, the introduction of a rhyme is intolerable.
They who are versed in Whitman’s style can probably detect at once
a variation from his best manner. That his peculiarities in the
arrangement of words are very subtile is plain from a glance at the
numerous and generally unsuccessful parodies of _Leaves of Grass_.
The parodists have not grasped Whitman’s secret. Merely to write in
irregular lines and begin each line with a capital is to represent only
the obvious and superficial side. Whitman is inimitable even in his
catalogues. The ninth stanza of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ reads like
an extract from a papal anathema, but it has the Whitmanesque quality;
no one can reproduce it. The imitations of Whitman are always amusing
and often ingenious, but they are not, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘Three
Voices,’ true parodies.
Whitman probably did not know every step of the process by which he
attained his results. He was a poet who created his own laws and had no
philosophy of poetic form to expound.
IV
_LEAVES OF GRASS_
A first impression of _Leaves of Grass_ is of uncouthness and blatancy,
together with something yet more objectionable. The writer would seem
to be a man fond of shocking what are called the proprieties, so frank
and egregious is his animalism, so overpowering his self-assertiveness.
The author of _Laus Veneris_ accuses Whitman of indecency. The charge
is a grave one and emanates from a high source. The distinguished
English poet admits that there are few subjects which ‘may not be
treated with success;’ but the treatment is everything. This is ‘a
radical and fundamental truth of criticism.’ Whitman’s indecency then
consists not so much in the choice of the subject as in the awkwardness
of the touch. Or as Swinburne puts it with characteristic emphasis:
‘Under the dirty paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any
tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune
should be the first principle of nature--the passion of man for woman
or the passion of woman for man.’
But along with that first impression of Whitman’s verse as the product
of a strong, coarse nature, wilfully brutal at times, comes the no less
marked impression that the man is serenely honest, and animated by a
benevolence which helps to relieve the brutality of its most repulsive
features. At all events, Whitman is what Carlyle might have described
as ‘one of the palpablest of Facts in this miserable world where so
much is Invertebrate and Phantasmal.’ Whether we like him or not,
Whitman is by no means one of those neutral literary persons who are in
danger of being overlooked.
In fact, the word ‘literary’ as applied to the author of _Leaves of
Grass_ is singularly inept. Whitman is not literary, that is to say he
is not a product of libraries. No meek and reverent follower of poets
gone before is this. ‘He has no literary ancestor, he is an ancestor
himself’--or at least takes the attitude of one. He is a son of earth,
a genuine autochthon, naked and not ashamed, noisy, vociferous, naïvely
delighted with the music of his own raucous voice.
In that first great rhapsody, ‘Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,’[71]
we have the most characteristic expression of his genius. He proclaims
his interest in all that concerns mankind--not a cold, objective
interest merely, he is himself a part of the mighty pageant of life,
sympathetic with every phase of joy and sorrow, identifying himself
with high and low, finding nothing mean or contemptible. He states the
idea with a hundred variations, returns upon it, sets it in new lights,
enforces it. Every phenomenon of human life teaches this lesson. Every
pleasure, every grief, every experience small or great concerns him. He
identifies himself with the life of the most miserable of creatures:--
I am possess’d!
Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
He carries the process of identification too far at times, leading to
results that would be disgusting were they not laughably grotesque.
Whitman makes no reservations on the score of taste.
This doctrine of the unity of being and experience is comprehensive,
not limited to human life; the brute and insentient existences are
included as well. For a statement of Whitman’s creed take the poem
beginning: ‘There was a child went forth.’ If a busy man were ambitious
to know something about Whitman’s poetry and had only a minimum of time
to give to the subject (like Franklin when he undertook to post up on
revealed religion), one would not hesitate to commend to his notice
this poem as one of the first to be read. The theme is contained in
the four introductory lines. All that follows is an amplification of a
single thought:--
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain
part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
Every object grows incorporate with the child, an essential inseparable
part of him,--the early lilacs, the noisy brood of the barnyard,
people, home, the family usages, doubts even (doubts ‘whether that
which appears is so, or is it all flashes and specks?’), the streets,
the shops, the crowd surging along, shadows and mist, and boats and
waves,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away
solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh
and shore mud,
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who
now goes, and will always go forth every day.
The idea has another setting in ‘Salut au Monde,’ Walt Whitman’s
brotherly wave of the hand to the whole world. It is a vision of
kingdoms and nations, comprehensive, detailed; it is geography and the
catalogue raised to the dignity of eloquence. Latitude and longitude
and the hot equator ‘banding the bulge of the earth’ acquire new
meaning in this strange chant. The poet hears the myriad sound of the
life of all peoples:--
I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear
the responsive bass and soprano,
* * * * *
I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms,
I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends
of the Romans,
I hear the tale of the divine life and the bloody death of the
beautiful God the Christ,
I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars,
adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote
three thousand years ago.
The mountains, the rivers, the stormy seas, the pageant of fallen
empires and ancient religions, of cities and plains, all sweep past in
this survey of the world. And to all, salutation:--
My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the
whole earth,
I have look’d for equals and lovers and found them ready for me
in all lands,
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
The ‘Song of the Open Road,’ which may very well be read next, is a
challenge to a larger life than that which conventions, and modes, and
common social habits will permit:--
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.
It is no journey of ease to which the poet invites his followers; he
offers none of the ‘old smooth prizes:’--
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm’d,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry
enemies, desertion.
Notable among Whitman’s best poems, and most important to an
understanding of him, is the ‘Song of the Answerer,’ that is to say, of
the Poet. He it is who puts things in their right relations:--
Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and a tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men.
The Answerer is quite other than the Singer--he is more powerful, his
existence is more significant, his words are of weight and insight:--
The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or
dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general
light and dark,
The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.
In that fine rhapsody ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’ Whitman restates his
doctrine while applying it to the need of his own America:--
Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil
of literature,
America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it
or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
is no fear of mistake,
(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country
absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it.)
‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore,’ from which these lines are taken, is a chant
for America. Patriotism is Whitman’s darling theme. Love of native
land, confidence in democracy, the self-sufficiency of the Republic and
the certainty of its future--with these ideas and with this spirit his
verse is charged to the full:--
A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety
of ourselves,
We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
We stand self-pois’d in the middle, branching thence over the world,
From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.
America is safe, thought Whitman, so long as she does her own work in
her own way and cultivates a wholesome fear of civilization.
America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at
all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under
their forms,
* * * * *
These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the
day and night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness,
the soul loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity,
the soul loves.
One of the most magnificent of Whitman’s patriotic chants is that known
by its opening line, ‘As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.’ He would be a
hardened sceptic who, after reading these superb and uplifting verses,
found himself still unconverted to some portion of the gospel of poetry
as preached by Walt Whitman. There is no resisting the man here, or
when he shows his power in pieces like ‘Proud Music of the Storm,’
‘Passage to India,’ ‘The Mystic Trumpeter,’ ‘With Husky-Haughty
Lips, O Sea!’ ‘To the Man-of-War-Bird,’ ‘Song of the Universal,’ and
‘Chanting the Square Deific.’
Admirable, even wonderful, as these verses are, it may be after all
that the little volume called _Drum-Taps_ (together with its _Sequel_)
is Whitman’s best gift to the literature of his country. Vivid pictures
of battle-field, camp, and hospital, they are not to be forgotten by
him who has once looked on them. The ‘Prelude,’ ‘Cavalry Crossing a
Ford,’ ‘By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame,’ ‘The Dresser,’ the impressive
‘Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,’ and the no less striking
‘A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,’ together with
‘As toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s woods,’ the ‘Hymn of Dead Soldiers,’
and ‘Spirit whose Work is Done,’--these and many more have accomplished
for Whitman’s reputation what the ‘Song of Myself’ and kindred poems
could not.
In _Drum-Taps_ appeared the tributes to Lincoln, ‘O Captain, my
Captain,’ and the great lament beginning ‘When lilacs last in the
dooryard bloom’d.’ Here the poet rises to his supreme height. For
pathos and tenderness, for beauty of phrase, nobility of thought, and
a grand yet simple manner this threnody is indeed worthy of the praise
bestowed on it by those critics whose praise is most to be desired.[72]
V
_SPECIMEN DAYS AND COLLECT_
Whitman’s prose in the definitive edition makes a stout volume of more
than five hundred closely printed pages. The title, _Specimen Days and
Collect_, gives an imperfect hint of the contents. Here are extracts
from journals kept through twenty years. Many bear a resemblance to
Hugo’s _Choses Vues_. Largely autobiographical and reminiscent, they
are vivid, picturesque, and far better in their haphazard way than a
good deal of formal ‘literature.’ Here are reprints of prefaces to the
several editions of _Leaves of Grass_, together with papers on Burns,
Tennyson, and Shakespeare, a lecture on Lincoln, a paper on American
national literature, and yet more ‘diary-notes’ and ‘splinters.’ He
who loves to browse in a book will find the volume of Whitman’s prose
made to his hand. The prose is of high importance to an understanding
of what, oddly enough, his poetry imperfectly reveals--Whitman’s
character. To know the man as he really was we must read _Specimen Days
and Collect_.
VI
WHITMAN’S CHARACTER
There is a certain uncanny quality in parts of Whitman’s verse. The
reiteration of particular phrases and words awakens an uncomfortable
feeling, a suspicion of not-to-be-named queernesses, to use no plainer
term. The constant translation of conceptions of ideal love into
fleshly symbols moves the reader to irreverence if not to disgust.
Whitman’s favorite image of bearded ‘comrades’ who kiss when they meet,
and who take long walks with their arms around each other’s necks, may
be ‘nonchalant’ but it is not agreeable. Somehow it does not seem as
if the doctrine of the brotherhood of man gained many supporters by so
singular a method of propagandism.
When from time to time Whitman talked with Peter Doyle about his books,
Doyle would say: ‘I don’t know what you are trying to get at.’[73] It
is an ironical comment on the great preacher of the needs and virtues
of the average man that his poetry should have been handed over to
the keeping of those whose jaded taste makes them hanker after the
bizarre, after anything that breeds discussion, anything demanding
interpretation and defence.
Yet no one doubts the sincerity of these faithful followers.
Whitmanites really like Whitman albeit they protest too much. It
is difficult to read him and not like him. Unfortunately the many
find it impossible to read him. Whitman prepares his feast, throws
open his doors, and bids all enter who will. A few come and by their
shrill volubility make it seem as if the dining-room were crowded. The
majority do not trouble to cross the threshold. They have heard that
the host serves queer dishes; it has even been reported that he is a
cannibal.
This, or something very like it, has been Whitman’s fate. A taste for
his work must be acquired. He is the idol of cliques and societies, and
a meaningless name to the great people whom he loved, whose virtues he
chanted with confident fervor, and in whom he trusted unreservedly.
Poetry so egoistic might be supposed to reveal the man. Strangely
enough, Whitman’s poetry, despite the heavy and continued accentuation
of the personal note, gives but a partial, a quite imperfect view of
the man himself. Whitman tells us so emphatically what he _thinks_ that
we are at a loss to know what he himself _is_. The great Shakespeare,
according to popular opinion, is veiled from us through his
extraordinary impersonality. Whitman accomplishes a not dissimilar end
by diametrically opposite means; he hides himself by over obtrusion of
the personal element. The case is not so common as to be undeserving
of study. As a method it has many drawbacks.
Whitman has suffered at his own hands. The egoistic manner,
indispensable to his theory and not to be taken with literalness, is
nevertheless a stumbling-block. Instruct themselves how they will that
in saying ‘I’ the poet also means ‘You,’ that whatever Walt Whitman
claims for himself he also claims for every one else, readers somehow
lose hold of the thought and are amazed and angered by the poet’s
monstrous vanity.
To this feeling the prose writings are an antidote. We learn in a few
pages how simple-minded, patient, and lovable this man really was;
how reverent of genius, how free from envy, undisturbed by suffering,
ill-repute, and delayed hopes. There was something at once pathetic
and noble in his patience, in his magnificent repose and stability.
The impersonal character of the tree and the rock, which he admired
so much, became in a measure his. He bided his time. The success of
other poets awakened no jealousy. He never called names, never picked
flaws in the work of his brother bards. The better we know him the more
dignified and lofty his figure becomes.
FOOTNOTES:
[69] ‘Conversations with George W. Whitman,’ _In Re Walt Whitman_,
p. 36.