After all I have written about Whitman, I feel at times that the main
thing I wanted to say about him I have not said, cannot say; the best
about him cannot be told anyway. "My final merit I refuse you." His full
significance in connection with the great modern movement; how he embodies
it all and speaks out of it, and yet maintains his hold upon the
primitive, the aboriginal; how he presupposes science and culture, yet
draws his strength from that which antedates these things; how he glories
in the present, and yet is sustained and justified by the past; how he is
the poet of America and the modern, and yet translates these things into
universal truths; how he is the poet of wickedness, while yet every fibre
of him is sound and good; how his page is burdened with the material, the
real, the contemporary, while yet his hold upon the ideal, the spiritual,
never relaxes; how he is the poet of the body, while yet he is in even
fuller measure the poet of the soul; in fact, how all contradictions are
finally reconciled in him,--all these things and more, I say, I feel that
I have not set forth with the clearness and emphasis the subject demanded.
Other students of him will approach him on other lines, and will disclose
meanings that I have missed.
Writing about him, as Symonds said, is enormously difficult. At times I
feel as if I was almost as much at sea with regard to him as when I first
began to study him; not at sea with regard to his commanding genius and
power, but with regard to any adequate statement and summary of him in
current critical terms. One cannot define and classify him as he can a
more highly specialized poetic genius. What is he like? He is like
everything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand forms
of life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; he
is like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, but
ever throbbing with life. He is fluid, generative, electric; he is full of
the germs, potencies, and latencies of things; he provokes thought without
satisfying it; he is formless without being void; he is both Darwinian and
Dantesque. He is the great reconciler, he united and harmonized so many
opposites in himself. As a man he united the masculine and feminine
elements in a remarkable degree; he united the innocent vanity of the
child with the self-reliance of a god. In his moral aspects, he united
egoism and altruism, pride and charity, individualism and democracy,
fierce patriotism and the cosmopolitan spirit; in his literary aspects he
united mysticism and realism, the poet and prophet, the local and the
universal; in his religious aspects he united faith and agnosticism, the
glorification of the body and all objective things, with an unshakable
trust in the reality of the invisible world.
Rich in the elements of poetry, a London critic says, almost beyond any
other poet of his time, and yet the conscious, elaborate, crystallic,
poetic work which the critic demanded of him, carefully stopping short of,
quite content to hold it all in solution, and give his reader an impulse
rather than a specimen.
I have accepted Whitman entire and without reservation. I could not do
otherwise. It was clear enough to me that he was to be taken as a whole or
not at all. We cannot cut and carve a man. The latest poet brings us
poetic wares, curiously and beautifully carved and wrought specimens, some
of which we accept and some of which we pass by. Whitman brings us no
cunning handicraft of the muses: he brings us a gospel, he brings us a
man, he brings us a new revelation of life; and either his work appeals to
us as a whole, or it does not so appeal. He will not live in separate
passages, or in a few brief poems, any more than Shakespeare or Homer or
Dante, or the Bible, so lives.
The chief thing about the average literary poet is his poetic gift, apart
from any other consideration; we select from what he brings us as we
select from a basket of fruit. The chief thing about Whitman is the
personality which the poetic gift is engaged in exploiting; the excitement
of our literary or artistic sense is always less than the excitement of
our sense of life and of real things. We get in him a fixed point of view,
a new vantage-ground of personality from which to survey life. It is less
what he brings, and more what he is, than with other poets. To take him by
fragments, picking out poetic tidbits here and there, rejecting all the
rest, were like valuing a walk through the fields and woods only for the
flowers culled here and there, or the bits of color in the grass or
foliage. Is the air, the sunshine, the free spaces, the rocks, the soil,
the trees, and the exhilaration of it all, nothing? There are flowers in
Whitman, too, but they are amid the rocks or under the trees, and seem
quite unpremeditated and by the way, and never the main concern. If our
quest is for these alone, we shall surely be disappointed. "In order to
appreciate Whitman's poetry and his purpose," says Joel Chandler Harris,
"it is necessary to possess the intuition that enables the mind to grasp
in instant and express admiration the vast group of facts that make
man,--that make liberty,--that make America. There is no poetry in the
details; it is all in the broad, sweeping, comprehensive assimilation of
the mighty forces behind them,--the inevitable, unaccountable,
irresistible forward movement of man in the making of this republic."
And again: "Those who approach Walt Whitman's poetry from the literary
side are sure to be disappointed. Whatever else it is, it is not literary.
Its art is its own, and the melody of it must be sought in other
suggestions than those of metre.... Those who are merely literary will
find little substance in the great drama of Democracy which is outlined
by Walt Whitman in his writings,--it is no distinction to call them poems.
But those who know nature at first hand--who know man, who see in this
Republic something more than a political government--will find therein the
thrill and glow of poetry and the essence of melody. Not the poetry that
culture stands in expectation of, nor the melody that capers in verse and
metre, but those rarer intimations and suggestions that are born in
primeval solitudes, or come whirling from the vast funnel of the storm."
How admirable! how true! No man has ever spoken more to the point upon
Walt Whitman.
The appearance of such a man as Whitman involves deep world-forces of race
and time. He is rooted in the very basic structure of his age. After what
I have already said, my reader will not be surprised when I tell him that
I look upon Whitman as the one mountain thus far in our literary
landscape. To me he changes the whole aspect, almost the very climate, of
our literature. He adds the much-needed ruggedness, breadth, audacity,
independence, and the elements of primal strength and health. We owe much
to Emerson. But Emerson was much more a _made_ man than was Whitman,--much
more the result of secondary forces, the college, the church, and of New
England social and literary culture. With all his fervid humanity and
deeply ingrained modernness, Whitman has the virtues of the primal and the
savage. "Leaves of Grass" has not the charm, or the kind of charm, of the
more highly wrought artistic works, but it has the incentive of nature and
the charm of real things. We shall not go to it to be soothed and lulled.
It will always remain among the difficult and heroic undertakings,
demanding our best moments, our best strength, our morning push and power.
Like voyaging or mountain-climbing, or facing any danger or hardship by
land or sea, it fosters manly endeavor and the great virtues of sanity and
self-reliance.
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
presented in the original text.
The following misprint has been corrected:
"differentation" corrected to "differentiation" (page 18)
Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.