Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's
poets, and among English poets generally,--a cropping out again, after so
many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain. Had he dropped upon us
from some other sphere, he could hardly have been a greater surprise and
puzzle to the average reader or critic. Into a literature that was timid,
imitative, conventional, he fell like leviathan into a duck-pond, and the
commotion and consternation he created there have not yet subsided. All
the reigning poets in this country except Emerson denied him, and many of
our minor poets still keep up a hostile sissing and cackling. He will
probably always be more or less a stumbling-block to the minor poet,
because of his indifference to the things which to the minor poet are all
in all. He was a poet without what is called artistic form, and without
technique, as that word is commonly understood. His method was analogous
to the dynamic method of organic nature, rather than to the mechanical or
constructive method of the popular poets.
X
Of course the first thing that strikes the reader in "Leaves of Grass" is
its seeming oddity and strangeness. If a man were to come into a dress
reception in shirt sleeves and with his hat on, the feature would strike
us at once, and would be magnified in our eyes; we should quite forget
that he was a man, and in essentials differed but little from the rest of
us, after all. The exterior habiliments on such occasions count for nearly
everything; and in the popular poetry rhyme, measure, and the language and
manners of the poets are much more than anything else. If Whitman did not
do anything so outré as to come into a dress reception with his coat off
and his hat on, he did come into the circle of the poets without the usual
poetic habiliments. He was not dressed up at all, and he was not at all
abashed or apologetic. His air was confident and self-satisfied, if it did
not at times suggest the insolent and aggressive. It was the dress circle
that was on trial, and not Walt Whitman.
We could forgive a man in real life for such an audacious proceeding only
on the ground of his being something extraordinary as a person, with an
extraordinary message to convey; and we can pardon the poet only on
precisely like grounds. He must make us forget his unwonted garb by his
unique and lovable personality, and the power and wisdom of his utterance.
If he cannot do this we shall soon tire of him.
That Whitman was a personality the like of which the world has not often
seen, and that his message to his country and to his race was of prime
importance, are conclusions at which more and more thinking persons are
surely arriving.
His want of art, of which we have heard so much, is, it seems to me, just
this want of the usual trappings and dress uniform of the poets. In the
essentials of art, the creative imagination, the plastic and quickening
spirit, the power of identification with the thing contemplated, and the
absolute use of words, he has few rivals.