Not the least of my poet's successes is in his thorough assimilation of
the modern sciences, transmuting them into strong poetic nutriment, and
in the extent to which all his main poems are grounded in the deepest
principles of modern philosophical inquiry.
Nearly all the old literatures may be said to have been founded upon
fable, and upon a basis and even superstructure of ignorance, that,
however charming it may be, we have not now got, and could not keep if
we had. The bump of wonder and the feeling of the marvelous,--a kind
of half-pleasing fear, like that of children in the dark or in the
woods,--were largely operative with the old poets, and I believe are
necessary to any eminent success in this field; but they seem nearly to
have died out of the modern mind, like organs there is no longer any
use for. The poetic temperament has not yet adjusted itself to the new
lights, to science, and to the vast fields and expanses opened up in
the physical cosmos by astronomy and geology, and in the spiritual or
intellectual world by the great German metaphysicians. The staple of
a large share of our poetic literature is yet mainly the result of the
long age of fable and myth that now lies behind us. "Leaves of Grass"
is, perhaps, the first serious and large attempt at an expression in
poetry of a knowledge of the earth as one of the orbs, and of man as
a microcosm of the whole, and to give to the imagination these new and
true fields of wonder and romance. In it fable and superstition are at
an end, priestcraft is at an end, skepticism and doubt are at an end,
with all the misgivings and dark forebodings that have dogged the human
mind since it began to relax its hold upon tradition and the past; and
we behold man reconciled, happy, ecstatic, full of reverence, awe, and
wonder, reinstated in Paradise,--the paradise of perfect knowledge and
unrestricted faith.
It needs but a little pondering to see that the great poet of the future
will not be afraid of science, but will rather seek to plant his feet
upon it as upon a rock. He knows that, from an enlarged point of view,
there is no feud between Science and Poesy, any more than there is
between Science and Religion, or between Science and Life. He sees that
the poet and the scientist do not travel opposite but parallel roads,
that often approach each other very closely, if they do not at times
actually join. The poet will always pause when he finds himself in
opposition to science; and the scientist is never more worthy the name
than when he escapes from analysis into synthesis, and gives us living
wholes. And science, in its present bold and receptive mood, may be said
to be eminently creative, and to have made every first-class thinker and
every large worker in any aesthetic or spiritual field immeasurably
its debtor. It has dispelled many illusions, but it has more than
compensated the imagination by the unbounded vistas it has opened up
on every hand. It has added to our knowledge, but it has added to our
ignorance in the same measure: the large circle of light only reveals
the larger circle of darkness that encompasses it, and life and being
and the orbs are enveloped in a greater mystery to the poet to-day than
they were in the times of Homer or Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not
restrict the imagination, but often compels it to longer flights.
The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like a midnight meteor
through space, a brand cast by the burning sun with the fire at its
heart still unquenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the whole
train of worlds with it, no one knows whither,--what a lift has science
given the imagination in this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the
correlation and conservation of forces, the identity and convertibility
of heat and force and motion, and that no ounce of power is lost,
but forever passed along, changing form but not essence, is a poetic
discovery no less than a scientific one. The poets have always felt
that it must be so, and, when the fact was authoritatively announced by
science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure.
Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,--it seems the conception
of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool
conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great
power always does. Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is
essentially a poetic one,--the love of the marvelous, of the sublime,
and of grand harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is
strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. Or the hell of fire
through which the earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which
its fair forms have emerged,--from which of the seven circles of the
Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere
reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic
tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans
on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual
fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.
The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound,
the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope,
the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the
deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the
microscope,--in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether
it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to. What greater magic
than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a
prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?
In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the
sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction,
but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every
heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The
power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as
literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.
The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas,
and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was
a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms
of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The
earth now rests upon the sun,--in his outstretched palm; the sun rests
upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally
rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of
science," and well may Walt Whitman say:--
"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."
But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that
science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the
especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow
it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having
disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal
humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the
system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against
him. There were nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the
results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and
less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top,
magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from
without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not
appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into
human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do
nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most
heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a
vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under
his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic
nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam,"
"Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage from "In
Memoriam:"--
"They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
"In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;
"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time
"Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,
"But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom
"To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the
sweetest music:--
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below."
A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that
the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender
love-song!
But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and
re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star
in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish,
carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this
wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it
is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent
heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true
poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before
Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:--
"I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
And call anything close again when I desire it.
"In vain the speeding and shyness;
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones;
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
lying low."
In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man
is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how
absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:--
"I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am incloser of things
to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
steps;
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there;
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.
"Long I was hugg'd close--long and long,
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me,
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
boatmen;
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
"Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it,
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long low strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
it with care;
All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight
me:
Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul."
I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my
imagination like that beginning the second stanza:--
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me."
One seems to see those huge Brocken shadows of the past sinking and
dropping below the horizon like mountain peaks, as he presses onward on
his journey. Akin to this absorption of science is another quality in
my poet not found in the rest, except perhaps a mere hint of it now and
then in Lucretius,--a quality easier felt than described. It is a tidal
wave of emotion running all through the poems, which is now and then
crested with such passages as this:--
"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea, half held by the night.
"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
"Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with
blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my
sake!
Far-swooping, elbow'd earth! rich, apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!"
Professor Clifford calls it "cosmic emotion,"--a poetic thrill and
rhapsody in contemplating the earth as a whole,--its chemistry and
vitality, its bounty, its beauty, its power, and the applicability
of its laws and principles to human, aesthetic, and art products. It
affords the key to the theory of art upon which Whitman's poems are
projected, and accounts for what several critics call their sense of
magnitude,--"something of the vastness of the succession of objects in
Nature."
"I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
of the earth!
I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it corroborate
the theory of the earth!
No politics, art, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth."