Some of our own critics have been a good deal annoyed by the fact that
many European scholars and experts have recognized Whitman as the only
distinctive American poet thus far. It would seem as if our reputation for
culture and good manners is at stake. We want Europe to see America in our
literary poets like Lowell, or Longfellow, or Whittier. And Europe may
well see much that is truly representative of America in these and in
other New England poets. She may see our aspiration toward her own ideals
of culture and refinement; she may see native and patriotic themes firing
Lowell and Whittier; she may see a certain spirit and temper begotten by
our natural environment reflected in Bryant, our delicate and gentle
humanities and scholarly aptitudes shining in Longfellow. But in every
case she sees a type she has long been familiar with. All the poets'
thoughts, moods, points of view, effects, aims, methods, are what she has
long known. These are not the poets of a new _world_, but of a new
_England_. The new-world book implies more than a new talent, more than a
fresh pair of eyes, a fresh and original mind like the poets named; such
men are required to keep up the old line of succession in English
authorship. What is implied is a new national and continental spirit,
which must arise and voice the old eternal truths through a large, new,
democratic personality,--a new man, and, beyond and above him, a new
heaven and a new earth.
Our band of New England poets have carried the New England spirit into
poetry,--its sense of fitness, order, propriety, its shrewdness,
inventiveness, aptness, and its aspiration for the pure and noble in life.
They have finely exemplified the best Yankee traits; but in no instance
were these traits merged in a personality large enough, bold enough, and
copious and democratic enough to give them national and continental
significance. It would be absurd to claim that the pulse-beat of a great
people or a great era is to be felt in the work of any of these poets.
Whitman is responded to in Europe, because he expresses a new type with
adequate power,--not, as has been so often urged, simply because he is
strange, and gives the jaded literary palate over there a new fillip. He
meets the demand for something in American literature that should not face
toward Europe, that should joyfully stand upon its own ground and yet
fulfill the conditions of greatness. He fully satisfies the thirst for
individualism amid these awakening peoples, and the thirst for nationalism
also. He realizes the democratic ideal, no longer tentative or apologetic,
but taking possession of the world as its own and reappraising the wares
it finds there.