evil--comes out of the sunshine, the rains, the protecting snows. One
of our poets objects to Whitman’s saying that evil is just as perfect
as good. Whitman does not say it is just as desirable, but just as
perfect. Are not these things we call evil perfect--snakes, nettles,
thorns, volcanoes, earthquakes? Is not a fungus as perfect as a
rose?--a toad as perfect as a bird? Each obeys its own law. The germs
of typhoid fever and of pneumonia are just as perfect as the germs
that favor us. Whitman said:
“I permit to speak at every hazard Nature without check, with
original energy.”
The hazards are great, but the stakes are great also. Readers who
cannot stand an utterance of this sort should go to Pollock’s “Course
of Time,” or Young’s “Night Thoughts,” or Dr. Holland’s “Bitter
Sweet.”
Whitman bares his mind and soul to us as he bares his body. There are
no masks or disguises. His inmost heart is as nude as his anatomy.
Nothing is dressed up. No fashionable tailoring at all. There is
nowhere the air of the studied, the elaborated. When other poets
stand before the mirror, Whitman looks off at the landscape, or goes
and bathes and admires himself. Or, to vary the image, when other
poets distill perfumes, Whitman aims to give us the fresh breath
of the unhoused air. In this respect he stands alone among modern
English-speaking poets. He is the air of the hills and the shore, and
not of a flower garden, or of a June meadow, or of parlors. That is
what disappoints people. He aims at beauty no more than a wood or a
river or a lake or a jungle does. His aim is to tally Nature.
It was my rare good fortune to know this quiet, sympathetic, tolerant
man for more than thirty years, and to walk or saunter with him at
all seasons and hours. Often at night he would stop and gaze long
and silently at the stars, and then resume his walk. He was an
easy-going, lethargic man--nothing strenuous about him, never in a
hurry, never disturbed or excited, always in good humor, cleanly,
clad in gray, with a fresh, florid complexion, large, broad, soft
hands, blue-gray eyes, gray-haired and gray-bearded. He was fond
of children and old people. What a contrast were his placid and
easy-going ways to the astronomic sweep and power of his poems, his
spirit darting its solar rays to the utmost bounds of the universe.
When I was with him I did not feel his mighty intellect, I felt most
his humanity, his primitive sympathy, the depth and intensity of his
new democratic character, perhaps also that in him which led Thoreau
to say that he suggested something a little more than human.
Whitman’s attitude toward Nature stands out in contrast to that of
all other poets, ancient or modern. It was not that of the poet who
draws his themes from Nature, or makes much of the gentler and fairer
forms of wood and field, spring and summer, shore and mountain, as
has been so largely the custom of poets from Virgil down. Take all
the Nature lyrics and idyls out of English and American poetry,
and how have you impoverished it, how many names would suffer! Nor
does Whitman’s attitude in any degree conform to the worshipful
attitude of Wordsworth and so many other poets since his time. He
did not humanize Nature or read himself into it; he did not adorn
it as a divinity; he did not see through it as through a veil to
spiritual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does; he did not
gather bouquets, nor distill the wild perfumes in his pages; he did
not fill the lap of earth with treasures not her own--all functions
of true poetry, we must admit, and associated with great names. Yet
he made more of Nature than any other poet has done; he saw deeper
meanings in her for purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature
as a whole--not the parts, not the exceptional phases, but the total
scheme and unfolding of things.
He sings more in terms of personality, of democracy, of nationalism,
of sex, of immortality, of comradeship; more of the general, the
continuous, the world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts,
more of man and less of men. His religion takes no account of
sects and creeds, but arises from the contemplation of the soul,
of the Eternal, of the universe. We do not get the solace and the
companionship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in the modern
nature poets. With them we admire the “violet by a mossy stone,”
or the pretty shell on the seashore; with Whitman we saunter on
the hills, or inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds
open under the spread of the midnight skies--always the large,
the elemental, the processional, the modern. The scholarly, the
elaborated, the polished, the architectural, the Tennysonian perfume
and technique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and affiliation with
fells and groves, the Emersonian mysticism and charm of the wild and
the sequestered, were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of
Milton, the dramatic power of Shakespeare, nor, usually, the lyric
thrill of many of the minor poets. You embark on an endless quest
with Whitman; not on a picnic, nor a “day off,” but a day-by-day and
a night-by-night journey through the universe:
“I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut
from the woods.
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the
public road,
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.”
He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flowing lines anything like
the sympathy and insight that beget them, will know what I mean. Our
modern nature poets are holiday flower-gatherers beside this inspired
astronomer, geologist, and biologist, all in one, sauntering the
streets, loitering on the beach, roaming the mountains, or rapt and
silent under the midnight skies. When, now, in my old age, I open his
pages again and read the “Song of the Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry,” “The Song of the Broad-Axe,” “This Compost,” “Walt Whitman,”
“Great are the Myths,” “Laws for Creation,” and scores of others, I
seem to be present at the creation of worlds. I am in touch with
primal energies. I am borne along by a tide of life and power that
has no parallel elsewhere in literature. It is not so much mind as it
is personality, not so much art as it is Nature, not so much poetry
as it is the earth, the sky. Oh, the large, free handling, the naked
grandeur, the elemental sympathy, the forthrightness, and the power!
Not beauty alone, but meanings, unities, profundities; not merely the
bow in the clouds, but the clouds also, and the sky, and the orbs
beyond the clouds. A personal, sympathetic, interpretive attitude
toward the whole of Nature, claiming it all for body and mind,
drawing out its spiritual and æsthetic values, forging his laws for
creation from it, trying his own work by its standards, and seeking
to emulate its sanity, its impartiality, and its charity.
Whitman wrote large the law of artistic productions which he sought
to follow:
“All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world;
There shall be no subject too pronounced--all works shall
illustrate the divine law of indirections.
What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free,
and own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,
but that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such
laws?”
Whitman’s standards are always those of Nature and of life. Emerson
hung his verses in the wind--a good thing to get the chaff out of
poetry or wheat. Whitman brings his, and all art, to the test of the
natural, universal standards. He read his songs in the open air to
bring them to the test of real things; he emulated the pride of the
level he planted his house by. Always is his eye on the orbs, and on
the earth as a whole:
“I feel the globe itself swift swimming through space.
I will confront the shows of day and night,
I will see if I am to be less real than they are.”
He would have his songs tally “earth’s soil, trees, winds, waves.”
“Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?”
he demands of those who would create the art of America.
His poems abound in natural images and objects, but there is rarely a
trace of the method and spirit of the so-called nature poets, some of
whom bedeck Nature with jewelry and finery till we do not know her.
In one of his nature jottings, written in 1878 at his country retreat
not far from Camden, New Jersey, he speaks thus of the emotional
aspects and influences of Nature:
I too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all
the prevailing intellections, literature, and poems) to turn
everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death.
Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results,
influences of Nature at all, but of our own distorted, sick, or
silly souls. Here amid this wide, free scene, how healthy, how
joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!
I do not wonder that Whitman gave such a shock to the reading public
sixty years ago. This return, in a sense, to aboriginal Nature,
this sudden plunge into the great ocean of primal energies, this
discarding of all ornamentation and studied external effects of
polish and elaboration, gave the readers of poetry a chill from which
they are not yet wholly recovered. The fireside, the library corner,
the seat in the garden, the nook in the woods: each and all have
their charm and their healing power, but do not look for them in Walt
Whitman. Rather expect the mountain-tops, the surf-drenched beach,
and the open prairies. A poet of the cosmos, fortified and emboldened
by the tremendous discoveries and deductions of modern science, he
takes the whole of Nature for his province and dominates it, is at
home with it, affiliates with it through his towering personality and
almost superhuman breadth of sympathy.
The egotism of Whitman was like the force of gravity, like the poise
of the earth, the centrality of the orbs. Nothing could disturb it,
no burden was too great for it to bear. He seemed always to have in
mind the self-control and the _insouciance_ of Nature. He would fain
try himself by the self-balanced orbs. His imagination was fired by
the undemonstrative earth; he would be as regardless of observation
as it was. He was moved by the unsophisticated freshness of Nature.
He saw that the elemental laws never apologized; he would emulate the
level he planted his house by:
“these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they are.”
He will not be outfaced by irrational things:
“I will see if I have no meanings, while the houses and ships
have meanings,
I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for
themselves, and I not to be enough for myself.
I match my spirit against yours, you orbs, growths, mountains,
brutes.
Copious as you are, I absorb you all in myself, and become the
master myself.”
It is these cosmic and natural-universal standards to which Whitman
appeals, that mark him off from all other poets or bards who have
yet appeared, and which, I hope, justify me in singling him out and
giving him a place in this volume.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg 182: ‘Java man of Du Bois’ replaced by ‘Java man of Dubois’.