Unless the poetic perception is fundamental in us, and can grasp the
poetry of things, actions, characters, multitudes, heroisms, we shall read
Whitman with very poor results. Unless America, the contemporary age,
life, nature, are poetical to us, Whitman will not be. He has aimed at the
larger poetry of forces, masses, persons, enthusiasms, rather than at the
poetry of the specially rare and fine. He kindles in me the delight I have
in space, freedom, power, the elements, the cosmic, democracy, and the
great personal qualities of self-reliance, courage, candor, charity.
Always in the literary poets are we impressed with the art of the poet as
something distinct from the poet himself, and more or less put on. The
poet gets himself up for the occasion; he assumes the pose and the
language of the poet, as the priest assumes the pose and the language of
devotion. In Whitman the artist and the man are one. He never gets himself
up for the occasion. Our pleasure in him is rarely or never our pleasure
in the well-dressed, the well-drilled, the cultivated, the refined, the
orderly, but it is more akin to our pleasure in real things, in human
qualities and powers, in freedom, health, development. Yet I never open
his book without being struck afresh with its pictural quality, its grasp
of the concrete, its vivid realism, its intimate sense of things, persons,
truths, qualities, such as only the greatest artists can give us, and such
as we can never get in mere prose. It is as direct as a challenge, as
personal as a handshake, and yet withal how mystical, how elusive, how
incommensurable! To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of great
artists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal,--those who breathe the
breath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, who
make all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions,--is
to read him very inadequately, to say the least. To get at Walt Whitman
you must see through just as much as you do in dealing with nature; you
are to bring the same interpretive imagination. You are not to be balked
by what appears to be the coarse and the familiar, or his rank
contemporaneity; after a time you will surely see the lambent spiritual
flames that play about it all.
"Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering about me,"
and his cosmic splendor, depth, and power. It is not the denial of art, it
is a new affirmation of life. It is one phase of his democracy. It is the
logical conclusion of the vestless and coatless portrait of himself that
appeared in the first edition of his poems. He would give us more of the
man, a fuller measure of personal, concrete, human qualities, than any
poet before him. He strips away the artificial wrappings and illusions
usual in poetry, and relies entirely upon the native and intrinsic. He
will have no curtains, he says,--not the finest,--between himself and his
reader.
"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of
suns left),
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."
This is a hint of his democracy as applied to literature,--more direct and
immediate contact with the primary and universal, less of the vestments
and trappings of art and more of the push and power of original character
and of nature.