"I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot
expound myself."
The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere
mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a
personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself,
because its operations are synthetic and not analytic, its mainspring is
love and not mere knowledge. In his prose essay called "A Backward Glance
o'er Travel'd Roads," appended to the final edition of his poems, Whitman
has not so much sought to expound himself as to put his reader in
possession of his point of view, and of the considerations that lie back
of his work. This chapter might render much that I have written
superfluous, were there not always a distinct gain in seeing an author
through another medium, or in getting the equivalents of him in the
thoughts and ideals of a kindred and sympathetic mind. But I have not
consciously sought to expound Whitman, any more than in my other books I
have sought to expound the birds or wild nature. I have written out some
things that he means to me, and the pleasure and profit I have found in
his pages.
There is no end to what can be drawn out of him. It has been said and
repeated that he was not a thinker, and yet I find more food for thought
in him than in all other poets. It has been often said and repeated that
he is not a poet, and yet the readers that respond to him the most fully
appear to be those in whom the poetic temperament is paramount. I believe
he supplies in fuller measure that pristine element, something akin to the
unbreathed air of mountain and shore, which makes the arterial blood of
poetry and literature, than any other modern writer.
V
We can make little of Whitman unless we allow him to be a law unto
himself, and seek him through the clews which he himself brings. When we
try him by current modes, current taste, and demand of him formal beauty,
formal art, we are disappointed. But when we try him by what we may call
the scientific standard, the standard of organic nature, and demand of him
the vital and the characteristic,--demand of him that he have a law of his
own, and fulfill that law in the poetic sphere,--the result is quite
different.
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other
poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies, rather than
in what he portrays; and more than any other poet must he wait to be
understood by the growth of the taste of himself. "I make the only growth
by which I can be appreciated," he truly says.
His words are like the manna that descended upon the Israelites, "in which
were all manner of tastes; and every one found in it what his palate was
chiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it the young
men tasted bread; the old men honey; and the children oil." Many young
men,--poets, artists, teachers, preachers,--have testified that they have
found bread in Whitman, the veritable bread of life; others have found
honey, sweet poetic morsels; and not a few report having found only gall.