Whitman, who was to influence future generations so profoundly in Europe
as well as in America, had already appeared. The third edition of that
stupendous volume, _Leaves of Grass_, had been printed in 1860. Almost
immediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed out of
public notice. But private scrutiny was keen. In 1865 a petty official
discovered that Whitman was the author of the “notorious” _Leaves of
Grass_ and, in spite of his great sacrifices in nursing hundreds of
wounded soldiers, in spite of his many past services and his present
poverty, the offending poet was dismissed from his small clerkship in
the Department of the Interior at Washington, D. C. Other reverses
followed rapidly. But Whitman, broken in health and cheated by his
exploiters, lived to see not only a seventh edition of his great work
published in 1881, but a complete collection printed in his
seventy-third year (1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental
first edition had grown to nearly four hundred.
The influence of Whitman can scarcely be overestimated. It has touched
every shore of letters, quickened every current of art. And yet, as late
as 1900, Barrett Wendell in his _Literary History of America_ could
speak of Whitman’s “eccentric insolence of phrase and temper” and,
perturbed by the poet’s increasing vogue across the Atlantic (Whitman
had been hailed by men as eminent as Swinburne, Symonds, Rossetti), he
is led to write such a preposterous sentence as “In temperament and
style he was an exotic member of that sterile brotherhood which eagerly
greeted him abroad.”
Such a judgment would be impossible today. Whitman has been acclaimed by
a great and growing public, not only here but in England, Germany, Italy
and France. He has been hailed as prophet, as pioneer, as rebel, as the
fiery humanist and, most frequently, as liberator. He is, in spite of
the rhetorical flourish, the Lincoln of our literature. The whole scheme
of _Leaves of Grass_ is inclusive rather than exclusive; its form is
elemental, dynamic, free.
Nor was it only in the relatively minor matter of form that Whitman
became our great poetic emancipator. He led the way toward a wider
aspect of democracy; he took his readers out of fusty, lamp-lit
libraries into the coarse sunlight and the buoyant air. He was, as
Burroughs wrote, preëminently the poet of vista; his work had the power
“to open doors and windows, to let down bars rather than to put them up,
to dissolve forms, to escape narrow boundaries, to plant the reader on a
hill rather than in a corner.” He could do this because, first of all,
he believed implicitly in life—in its physical as well as its spiritual
manifestations; he sought to grasp existence as a whole, not rejecting
the things that, to other minds, had seemed trivial or tawdry. The
cosmic and the commonplace were synonymous to him; he declared he was
part of the most elemental, primitive things and constantly identified
himself with them.
_“What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is Me.”_
And by “me” he meant not only himself but any man; Whitman’s entire
work, which has so often been misunderstood as the outpourings of
egotism, was never so much a celebration of himself as a glorification
of the ordinary man, “the divine average.”
It was this breadth, this jubilant acceptance that made Whitman so keen
a lover of casual and ordinary things; he was the first of our poets to
reveal “the glory of the commonplace.” He transmuted, by the intensity
of his emotion, material which had been hitherto regarded as too
unpoetic for poetry. His long poem “Song of Myself” is an excellent
example. Here his “barbaric yawp,” sounded “over the roofs of the
world,” is softened, time and again, to express a lyric ecstasy and naïf
wonder.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of
the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre of the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!
It is this large naturalism, this affection for all that is homely and
of the soil, that sets Whitman apart from his fellow-craftsmen as our
first American poet. This blend of familiarity and grandeur, this racy
but religious mysticism animates all his work. It swings with tremendous
vigor through “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; it sharpens the sturdy rhythms
(and occasional rhymes) of the “Song of the Broad-Axe”; it beats
sonorously through “Drum-Taps”; it whispers immortally through the
“Memories of President Lincoln” (particularly that magnificent threnody
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”); it quickens the “Song of
the Open Road” with what Tennyson called “the glory of going on,” and
lifts with a biblical solemnity in his most famous “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking.”
Whitman did not scorn the past; no one was quicker than he to see its
wealth and glories. But most of the older flowerings belonged to their
own era; they were foreign to our country—transplanted, they did not
seem to flourish on this soil. What was original with many transatlantic
poets was being merely aped by facile and unoriginal bards in these
states; concerned only with the myths of other and older countries, they
were blind to the living legends of their own. In his “Song of the
Exposition” Whitman not only wrote his own _credo_, he uttered the
manifesto of the new generation—especially in these lines:
Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia.
Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts;
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’
wanderings;
Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus ...
For know that a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried domain
awaits, demands you.