I
"Leaves of Grass" is not the poetry of culture, but it is to be said in
the same breath that it is not such a work as an uncultured man produces,
or is capable of producing.
The uncultured man does not think Whitman's thoughts, or propose Whitman's
problems to himself, or understand or appreciate them at all. The "Leaves"
are perhaps of supreme interest only to men of deepest culture, because
they contain in such ample measure that without which all culture is mere
varnish or veneer. They are indirectly a tremendous criticism of American
life and civilization, and they imply that breadth of view and that
liberation of spirit--that complete disillusioning--which is the best
result of culture, and which all great souls have reached, no matter who
or what their schoolmasters may have been.
Our reading public probably does not and cannot see itself in Whitman at
all. He must be a great shock to its sense of the genteel and the
respectable. Nor can the working people and the unlettered, though they
were drawn to Whitman the man, be expected to respond to any considerable
extent to Whitman the poet. His standpoint can be reached only after
passing through many things and freeing one's self from many illusions. He
is more representative of the time-spirit out of which America grew, and
which is now shaping the destiny of the race upon this continent. He
strikes under and through our whole civilization.
He despised our social gods, he distrusted our book-culture, he was
alarmed at the tendency to the depletion and attenuation of the national
type, and he aimed to sow broadcast the germs of more manly ideals. His
purpose was to launch his criticism from the basic facts of human life,
psychic and physiologic; to inject into the veins of our anæmic literature
the reddest, healthiest kind of blood; and in doing so he has given free
swing to the primary human traits and affections and to sexuality, and has
charged his pages with the spirit of real things, real life.
We have been so long used to verse which is the outcome of the literary
impulse alone, which is written at so many removes from the primary human
qualities, produced from the extreme verge of culture and artificial
refinement, which is so innocent of the raciness and healthful coarseness
of nature, that poetry which has these qualities, which implies the body
as well as the mind, which is the direct outgrowth of a radical human
personality, and which make demands like those made by real things, is
either an offense to us or is misunderstood.