It is charged against Whitman that he does not celebrate love at all, and
very justly. He had no purpose to celebrate the sentiment of love.
Literature is vastly overloaded with this element already. He celebrates
fatherhood and motherhood, and the need of well-begotten, physiologically
well-begotten, offspring. Of that veiled prurient suggestion which readers
so delight in--of "bosoms mutinously fair," and "the soul-lingering loops
of perfumed hair," as one of our latest poets puts it--there is no hint
in his volume. He would have fallen from grace the moment he had attempted
such a thing. Any trifling or dalliance on his part would have been his
ruin. Love as a sentiment has fairly run riot in literature. From
Whitman's point of view, it would have been positively immoral for him
either to have vied with the lascivious poets in painting it as the
forbidden, or with the sentimental poets in depicting it as a charm. Woman
with him is always the mate and equal of the man, never his plaything.
Whitman is seldom or never the poet of a sentiment, at least of the
domestic and social sentiments. His is more the voice of the eternal,
abysmal man.
The home, the fireside, the domestic allurements, are not in him; love, as
we find it in other poets, is not in him; the idyllic, except in touches
here and there, is not in him; the choice, the finished, the perfumed, the
romantic, the charm of art and the delight of form, are not to be looked
for in his pages. The cosmic takes the place of the idyllic; the begetter,
the Adamic man, takes the place of the lover; patriotism takes the place
of family affection; charity takes the place of piety; love of kind is
more than love of neighbor; the poet and the artist are swallowed up in
the seer and the prophet.
The poet evidently aimed to put in his sex poems a rank and healthful
animality, and to make them as frank as the shedding of pollen by the
trees, strong even to the point of offense. He could not make it pleasing,
a sweet morsel to be rolled under the tongue; that would have been levity
and sin, as in Byron and the other poets. It must be direct and rank,
healthfully so. The courage that did it, and showed no wavering or
self-consciousness, was more than human. Man is a begetter. How shall a
poet in our day and land treat this fact? With levity and by throwing over
it the lure of the forbidden, the attraction of the erotic? That is one
way, the way of nearly all the poets of the past. But that is not
Whitman's way. He would sooner be bestial than Byronic, he would sooner
shock by his frankness than inflame by his suggestion. And this in the
interest of health and longevity, not in the interest of a prurient and
effeminate "art." In these poems Whitman for a moment emphasizes sex, the
need of sex, and the power of sex. "All were lacking if sex were lacking."
He says to men and women, Here is where you live after all, here is the
seat of empire. You are at the top of your condition when you are fullest
and sanest there. Fearful consequences follow any corrupting or abusing or
perverting of sex. The poet stands in the garden of the world naked and
not ashamed. It is a great comfort that he could do it in this age of
hectic lust and Swinburnian impotence,--that he could do it and not be
ridiculous. To have done it without offense would have been proof that he
had failed utterly. Let us be shocked; it is a wholesome shock, like the
douse of the sea, or the buffet of the wind. We shall be all the better
for it by and by.