I first became acquainted with Whitman's poetry through the columns of the
old "Saturday Press" when I was twenty or twenty-one years old (1858 or
1859). The first things I remember to have read were "There was a child
went forth," "This Compost," "As I ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," "Old
Ireland," and maybe a few others. I was attracted by the new poet's work
from the first. It seemed to let me into a larger, freer air than I found
in the current poetry. Meeting Bayard Taylor about this time, I spoke to
him about Whitman. "Yes," he said, "there is something in him, but he is a
man of colossal egotism."
A few years later a friend sent me a copy of the Thayer & Eldridge edition
of "Leaves of Grass" of 1860. It proved a fascinating but puzzling book to
me. I grazed upon it like a colt upon a mountain, taking what tasted good
to me, and avoiding what displeased me, but having little or no conception
of the purport of the work as a whole. I found passages and whole poems
here and there that I never tired of reading, and that gave a strange
fillip to my moral and intellectual nature, but nearly as many passages
and poems puzzled or repelled me. My absorption of Emerson had prepared me
in a measure for Whitman's philosophy of life, but not for the ideals of
character and conduct which he held up to me, nor for the standards in art
to which the poet perpetually appealed. Whitman was Emerson translated
from the abstract into the concrete. There was no privacy with Whitman; he
never sat me down in a corner with a cozy, comfortable shut-in feeling,
but he set me upon a hill or started me upon an endless journey.
Wordsworth had been my poet of nature, of the sequestered and the idyllic;
but I saw that here was a poet of a larger, more fundamental nature,
indeed of the Cosmos itself. Not a poet of dells and fells, but of the
earth and the orbs. This much soon appeared to me, but I was troubled by
the poet's apparent "colossal egotism," by his attitude towards evil,
declaring himself "to be the poet of wickedness also;" by his seeming
attraction toward the turbulent and the disorderly; and, at times, by what
the critics had called his cataloguing style of treatment.
When I came to meet the poet himself, which was in the fall of 1863, I
felt less concern about these features of his work; he was so sound and
sweet and gentle and attractive as a man, and withal so wise and tolerant,
that I soon came to feel the same confidence in the book that I at once
placed in its author, even in the parts which I did not understand. I saw
that the work and the man were one, and that the former must be good as
the latter was good. There was something in the manner in which both the
book and its author carried themselves under the sun, and in the way they
confronted America and the present time, that convinced beyond the power
of logic or criticism.
The more I saw of Whitman, and the more I studied his "Leaves," the more
significance I found in both, and the clearer it became to me that a new
type of a man and a new departure in poetic literature were here
foreshadowed. There was something forbidding, but there was something
vital and grand back of it. I found to be true what the poet said of
himself,--
"Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them,"--
I have persevered in my study of the poet, though balked many times, and
the effect upon my own mental and spiritual nature has been great; no such
"solid prizes" in the way of a broader outlook upon life and nature, and,
I may say, upon art, has any poet of my time afforded me. There are
passages or whole poems in the "Leaves" which I do not yet understand
("Sleep-Chasings" is one of them), though the language is as clear as
daylight; they are simply too subtle or elusive for me; but my confidence
in the logical soundness of the book is so complete that I do not trouble
myself at all about these things.