Whitman rarely celebrates exceptional characters. He loves the common
humanity, and finds his ideals among the masses. It is not difficult to
reconcile his attraction toward the average man, towards workingmen and
"powerful, uneducated persons," with the ideal of a high excellence,
because he finally rests only upon the most elevated and heroic personal
qualities,--elevated but well grounded in the common and universal.
The types upon which he dwells the most fondly are of the common people.
"I knew a man,
He was a common farmer--he was the father of five sons,
And in them were the fathers of sons--and in them were the fathers of
sons.
"This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the richness and breadth of his manners, the pale
yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable
meaning of his black eyes,
These I used to go and visit him to see--he was wise also,
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old--his sons were
massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him--all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance--they loved him with personal love;
He drank water only--the blood showed like scarlet through the
clear-brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher--he sailed his boat himself--he had
a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner--he had fowling-pieces
presented to him by men that loved him;
When he went with his five sons and many grandsons to hunt or fish, you
would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him--you would wish to sit by him
in the boat, that you and he might touch each other."
All the _motifs_ of his work are the near, the vital, the universal;
nothing curious, or subtle, or far-fetched. His working ideas are
democracy, equality, personality, nativity, health, sexuality,
comradeship, self-esteem, the purity of the body, the equality of the
sexes, etc. Out of them his work radiates. They are the eyes with which it
sees, the ears with which it hears, the feet upon which it goes. The poems
are less like a statement, an argument, an elucidation, and more like a
look, a gesture, a tone of voice.
"The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand
at last," says the author, "is the word Suggestiveness."
"Leaves of Grass" requires a large perspective; you must not get your face
too near the book. You must bring to it a magnanimity of spirit,--a
charity and faith equal to its own. Looked at too closely, it often seems
incoherent and meaningless; draw off a little and let the figure come out.
The book is from first to last a most determined attempt, on the part of a
large, reflective, loving, magnetic, rather primitive, thoroughly
imaginative personality, to descend upon the materialism of the nineteenth
century, and especially upon a new democratic nation now in full career
upon this continent, with such poetic fervor and enthusiasm as to lift and
fill it with the deepest meanings of the spirit and disclose the order of
universal nature. The poet has taken shelter behind no precedent, or
criticism, or partiality whatever, but has squarely and lovingly faced the
oceanic amplitude and movement of the life of his times and land, and
fused them in his fervid humanity, and imbued them with deepest poetic
meanings. One of the most striking features of the book is the adequacy
and composure, even joyousness and elation, of the poet in the presence
of the huge materialism and prosaic conditions of our democratic era. He
spreads himself over it all, he accepts and absorbs it all, he rejects no
part; and his quality, his individuality, shines through it all, as the
sun through vapors. The least line, or fragment of a line, is redolent of
Walt Whitman. It is never so much the theme treated as it is the man
exploited and illustrated. Walt Whitman does not write poems, strictly
speaking,--does not take a bit of nature or life or character and chisel
and carve it into a beautiful image or object, or polish and elaborate a
thought, embodying it in pleasing tropes and pictures. His purpose is
rather to show a towering, loving, composite personality moving amid all
sorts of materials, taking them up but for a moment, disclosing new
meanings and suggestions in them, passing on, bestowing himself upon
whoever or whatever will accept him, tossing hints and clues right and
left, provoking and stimulating the thought and imagination of his reader,
but finishing nothing for him, leaving much to be desired, much to be
completed by him in his turn.