Walt Whitman was of the people, the common people, and always gave out
their quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of the
things you have always known,--the day, the sky, the soil, your own
parents,--were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture or
poetic gifts. He was redolent of the human and the familiar. Though
capable, on occasions, of great pride and hauteur, yet his habitual mood
and presence was that of simple, average, healthful humanity,--the virtue
and flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who live
with real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon,
the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or specially
favored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
or apart from them."
The spirit that animates every page of his book, and that it always
effuses, is the spirit of common, universal humanity,--humanity apart from
creeds, schools, conventions, from all special privileges and refinements,
as it is in and of itself in its relations to the whole system of things,
in contradistinction to the literature of culture which effuses the spirit
of the select and exclusive.
His life was the same. Walt Whitman never stood apart from or above any
human being. The common people--workingmen, the poor, the illiterate, the
outcast--saw themselves in him, and he saw himself in them: the attraction
was mutual. He was always content with common, unadorned humanity.
Specially intellectual people rather repelled him; the wit, the scholar,
the poet, must have a rich endowment of the common, universal, human
attributes and qualities to pass current with him. He sought the society
of boatmen, railroad men, farmers, mechanics, printers, teamsters, mothers
of families, etc., rather than the society of professional men or
scholars. Men who had the quality of things in the open air--the virtue of
rocks, trees, hills--drew him most; and it is these qualities and virtues
that he has aimed above all others to put into his poetry, and to put them
there in such a way that he who reads must feel and imbibe them.
The recognized poets put into their pages the virtue and quality of the
fine gentleman, or of the sensitive, artistic nature: this poet of
democracy effuses the atmosphere of fresh, strong Adamic man,--man acted
upon at first hand by the shows and forces of universal nature.
If our poet ever sounds the note of the crude, the loud, the exaggerated,
he is false to himself and to his high aims. I think he may be charged
with having done so a few times, in his earlier work, but not in his
later. In the 1860 edition of his poems stands this portraiture, which may
stand for himself, with one or two features rather overdrawn:--
"His shape arises
Arrogant, masculine, naïve, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by
the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from
taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia,
clean-breathed,
Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds,
full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and
back,
Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms,
Attitudes lithe and erect, costume free, neck gray and open, of slow
movement on foot,
Passer of his right arm round the shoulders of his friends, companion
of the street,
Persuader always of people to give him their sweetest touches, and never
their meanest.
A Manhattanese bred, fond of Brooklyn, fond of Broadway, fond of the
life of the wharves and the great ferries,
Enterer everywhere, welcomed everywhere, easily understood after all,
Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his
phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive,
of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem,
comparison, individuality, form, locality, eventuality,
Avowing by life, manners, words to contribute illustrations of results
of These States,
Teacher of the unquenchable creed namely egotism,
Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against
his."