Let me send you a supplementary word to that "view" of Shakspere
attributed to me, publish'd in your July number,[47] and so courteously
worded by the reviewer (thanks! dear friend.) But you have left out
what, perhaps, is the main point, as follows:
"Even the one who at present reigns unquestion'd--of Shakspere--for all
he stands for so much in modern literature, he stands entirely for
the mighty esthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and
democratic, the sceptres of the future." (See pp. 55-58 in "November
Boughs," and also some of my further notions on Shakspere.)
The Old World (Europe and Asia) is the region of the poetry of concrete
and real things,--the past, the esthetic, palaces, etiquette, the
literature of war and love, the mythological gods, and the myths anyhow.
But the New World (America) is the region of the future, and its poetry
must be spiritual and democratic. Evolution is not the rule in Nature,
in Politics, and Inventions only, but in Verse. I know our age is
greatly materialistic, but it is greatly spiritual, too, and the future
will be, too. Even what we moderns have come to mean by _spirituality_
(while including what the Hebraic utterers, and mainly perhaps all the
Greek and other old typical poets, and also the later ones, meant) has
so expanded and color'd and vivified the comprehension of the term,
that it is quite a different one from the past. Then science, the final
critic of all, has the casting vote for future poetry.
Note:
[47] This bit was in "Poet-lore" monthly for September, 1890.
"UNASSAIL'D RENOWN"
The N. Y. _Critic_, Nov. 24, 1889, propounded a circular to several
persons, and giving the responses, says, "Walt Whitman's views [as
follow] are, naturally, more radical than those of any other contributor
to the discussion":
Briefly to answer impromptu your request of Oct. 19--the question
whether I think any American poet not now living deserves a place
among the thirteen "English inheritors of unassail'd renown" (Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats,)--and which American poets would be
truly worthy, &c. Though to me the _deep_ of the matter goes down,
down beneath. I remember the London _Times_ at the time, in opportune,
profound and friendly articles on Bryant's and Longfellow's deaths,
spoke of the embarrassment, warping effect, and confusion on America
(her poets and poetic students) "coming in possession of a great
estate they had never lifted a hand to form or earn"; and the further
contingency of "the English language ever having annex'd to it a lot of
first-class Poetry that would be American, not European"--proving then
something precious over all, and beyond valuation. But perhaps that
is venturing outside the question. Of the thirteen British immortals
mention'd--after placing Shakspere on a sort of pre-eminence of fame not
to be invaded yet--the names of Bryant, Emerson, Whittier and Longfellow
(with even added names, sometimes Southerners, sometimes Western or
other writers of only one or two pieces,) deserve in my opinion an
equally high niche of renown as belongs to any on the dozen of that
glorious list.