Whitman's ideal is undoubtedly much larger, coarser, stronger--much more
racy and democratic--than the ideal we are familiar with in current
literature, and upon which our culture is largely based. He applies the
democratic spirit not only to the material of poetry,--excluding all the
old stock themes of love and war, lords and ladies, myths and fairies and
legends, etc.,--but he applies it to the form as well, excluding rhyme and
measure and all the conventional verse architecture. His work stands or it
falls upon its inherent, its intrinsic qualities, the measure of life or
power which it holds. This ideal was neither the scholar nor the priest,
nor any type of the genteel or exceptionally favored or cultivated. His
influence does not make for any form of depleted, indoor, over-refined or
extra-cultured humanity. The spirit of his work transferred to practice
begets a life full and strong on all sides, affectionate, magnetic,
tolerant, spiritual, bold with the flavor and quality of simple,
healthful, open-air humanity. He opposes culture and refinement only as he
opposes that which weakens, drains, emasculates, and tends to beget a
scoffing, carping, hypercritical class. The culture of life, of nature,
and that which flows from the exercise of the manly instincts and
affections, is the culture implied by "Leaves of Grass." The democratic
spirit is undoubtedly more or less jealous of the refinements of our
artificial culture and of the daintiness and aloofness of our literature.
The people look askance at men who are above them without being of them,
who have dropped the traits and attractions which they share with
unlettered humanity. Franklin and Lincoln are closer akin to this spirit,
and hence more in favor with it, than a Jefferson or a Sumner.
Whitman might be called the poet of the absolute, the unconditioned. His
work is launched at a farther remove from our arts, conventions, usages,
civilization, and all the artificial elements that modify and enter into
our lives, than that of any other man. Absolute candor, absolute pride,
absolute charity, absolute social and sexual equality, absolute nature. It
is not conditioned by what we deem modest or immodest, high or low, male
or female. It is not conditioned by our notions of good and evil, by our
notions of the refined and the select, by what we call good taste and bad
taste. It is the voice of absolute man, sweeping away the artificial,
throwing himself boldly, joyously, upon unconditioned nature. We are all
engaged in upholding the correct and the conventional, and drawing the
line sharply between good and evil, the high and the low, and it is well
that we should; but here is a man who aims to take absolute ground, and to
look at the world as God himself might look at it, without partiality or
discriminating,--it is all good, and there is no failure or imperfection
in the universe and can be none:--
"Open mouth of my Soul uttering gladness,
Eyes of my Soul seeing perfection,
Natural life of me, faithfully praising things,
Corroborating forever the triumph of things."
He does not take sides against evil, in the usual way, he does not take
sides with the good except as nature herself does. He celebrates the All.
Can we accept the world as science reveals it to us, as all significant,
as all in ceaseless transmutation, as every atom aspiring to be man, an
endless unfolding of primal germs, without beginning, without end, without
failure or imperfection, the golden age ahead of us, not behind us?