Poe and Whitman
Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their egotism,
two outsiders who upset most of the conventional American rules for
winning the literary race, two men of genius, in short, about whom we
are still quarreling, and whose distinctive quality is more accurately
perceived in Europe than it has ever been in the United States.
Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both shared in
the tradition and influence of European Romanticism. But they were also
late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant
phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to
ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand
and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was
older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824.
He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was
colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models
were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge
than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without
the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the
same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same
reputation as a dead-beat.
A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he
hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of his nativity--as
much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. His father died early
of tuberculosis, and his mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease
and poverty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The boy, by
physical inheritance a neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity
in youth, was adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond,
Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to
school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a
year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short,
bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good
record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on
the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in
drinking and gambling. But his Scotch foster-father disapproved of his
conduct and withdrew him from the University. A period of wandering
followed. He enlisted in the army and was stationed in Boston in 1827,
when his first volume, Tamerlane, was published. In 1829 he was in
Fortress Monroe, and published Al Aaraf at Baltimore. He entered West
Point in 1830, and was surely, except Whistler, the strangest of all
possible cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had written the
marvellous lines To Helen, Israfel, and The City in the Sea. That is
enough to have in one's knapsack at the age of twenty-two.
In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to
an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that
of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore,
Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat
bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe
wrote back to Philadelphia the morning after he arrived with his
child-wife in New York: "We are both in excellent spirits.... We have
now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and
borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon." When
the child-wife died in the shabby cottage at Fordham, her wasted body
was covered with the old army overcoat which Poe had brought from West
Point. If Poe met some of the tests of practical life inadequately, it
must be remembered that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was
pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence in drink set his
over-wrought nerves jangling. Ferguson, the former office-boy of the
"Literary Messenger," judged this man of letters with an office-boy's
firm and experienced eye: "Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was
sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked
him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable
men I have ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C. F. Briggs to
Lowell. "He has some good points, but taken altogether, he is badly made
up." "Badly made up," no doubt, both in body and mind, but all
respectable and prosperous Pharisees should be reminded that Poe did not
make himself; or rather, that he could not make himself over. Very few
men can. Given Poe's temperament, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote
to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability
and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to
anything--to be consistent in anything. My life has been
whim--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things
present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic
confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer, a
tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found a
refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said
elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such
hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and
superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror
and strange crime, should have wrought structures of imperishable
beauty.
Let us notice the critical instinct which he brought to the task of
creation. His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account
for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth
but pleasure--the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief,
indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain
quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst
for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true
type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more
readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's
chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his
single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note,
the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes,
with some variation, a phrase or line already used. In such poems as To
Helen, Israfel, The Haunted Palace, Annabel Lee, the theme, the tone,
the melody all weave their magic spell; it is like listening to a
lute-player in a dream.
That the device often turns into a trick is equally true. In The Bells
and The Raven we detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though such
juggling as only a master-musician can perform. In Ulalume and other
show-pieces the wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering tinsel
fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the dangers of the technical
temperament unenriched by wide and deep contact with human feeling.
Poe's theory of the art of the short story is now familiar enough. The
power of a tale, he thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its
unity, its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all of his finest
stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher the theme is Fear; the
opening sentence strikes the key and the closing sentence contains the
climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one
end in view. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the
somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is
an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim
phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. In
Ligeia, which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme
is the ceaseless life of the will, the potency of the spirit of the
beloved and departed woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the
workmanship consummate. So with the theme of revenge in The Cask of
Amontillado, the theme of mysterious intrigue in The Assignation. In
Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as he preferred to
call them, he takes to pieces for our amusement a puzzle which he has
cunningly put together. The Gold Bug is the best known of these, The
Purloined Letter the most perfect, The Murders in the Rue Morgue the
most sensational. Then there are the tales upon scientific subjects or
displaying the pretence of scientific knowledge, where the narrator
loves to pose as a man without imagination and with "habits of rigid
thought." And there are tales of conscience, of which The Black Cat is
the most fearful and William Wilson the most subtle; and there are
landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor
stuff.
It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's
limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human
drama with camera-like precision. Other aspects of life, and nobler, he
never seemed to perceive. The human comedy sometimes moved him to
laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit malign. His imagination
fled from the daylight; he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He
closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the green sunlit earth,
seed-time and harvest, man going forth to his toil and returning to his
hearthstone, the America that laughs as it labors. He wore upon his
finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. But we could wish
that the palaces they reared for him were not in such a somber land,
with such infernal lights gleaming in their windows, and crowded with
such horror-haunted forms. We could wish that his imagination dealt less
often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of our
race. Yet when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort of atavism
into primal savagery and shudder with a recrudescence of long forgotten
fears. No doubt Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He was
caged in by his ignorance, Yet he had beautiful dusky wings that bruised
themselves against his prison.
Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and both his standards of
workmanship and his critical precepts have been of great service to his
careless countrymen. He turned out between four and five short stories a
year, was poorly paid for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling
them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting them for the better. His
best poems were likewise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire
for artistic perfection. He became the pathbreaker for a long file of
men in France, Italy, England, and America. He found the way and they
brought back the glory and the cash.
I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other men and one woman, seated
at a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of
themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray
would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him.
George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with
those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But
Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe
before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he
has seen that man before, in The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows. All of them
would find in him something to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and
perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, shabby, lonely Poe--what
would he think of them? He might not care much for the other guests, but
I think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: "I belong at
this table." And he does.
Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor dubbed the "good gray poet,"
offers a bizarre contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing
distinctively American about Poe except his ingenuity; he had no
interest in American history or in American ideas; he was a timeless,
placeless embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman had a passion
for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent
much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after all,
is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of
science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of
the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique. In
many respects he still baffles our curiosity. He repels many of his
countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic
interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever
foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast
majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still an outsider.
Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It
is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory
of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St.
Francis of Assisi's Canticle to the Sun. It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia
opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!"
That is the real motto for Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like St. Francis,
and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a
mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead
of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants "I know
I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly
American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at
the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his
Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations
with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he
owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury
for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as
Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents
the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a
thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate
person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. "I wear my
hat as I please, indoors and out." Sometimes this is mere swagger.
Sometimes it is superb.
So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life.
It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose
and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long
Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story,
and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot.
Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There
were many children. When little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish
him from his father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The
boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried
type-setting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island.
He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily
impressible.
The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was
editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the
Democratic Review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow,
Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a
novel on temperance, "mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall," and
tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with
the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with
Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his
position on The Brooklyn Eagle and wandered south to New Orleans. By and
by he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the
carpenter's trade with his father, and brooded over a book--"a book of
new things."
This was the famous Leaves of Grass. He set the type himself, in a
Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The
book had a portrait of the author--a meditative, gray-bearded poet in
workman's clothes--and a confused preface on America as a field for the
true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted
in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary
readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a
rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the
book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were
startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to
Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and
wisdom that America has yet contributed."
Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn,
patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then
he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled
down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital
nurse. He wrote Drum Taps and other magnificent poems about the War,
culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the
Dooryard Bloomed. Swinburne called this "the most sonorous nocturn ever
chanted in the church of the world." After the war had ended, Whitman
stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John
Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the
best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to
recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered by
his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic
stroke which forced him to resign his position in Washington and remove
to his brother's home in Camden, New Jersey.
He was only fifty-four, but his best work was already done, and his
remaining years, until his death in 1892, were those of patient and
serene invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in this final period,
and his cluttered chamber in Camden became the shrine of many a literary
pilgrim, among them some of the foremost men of letters of this country
and of Europe. He was cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally he
appeared in public, a magnificent gray figure of a man. And then, at
seventy-three, the "Dark mother always gliding near" enfolded him.
There are puzzling things in the physical and moral constitution of Walt
Whitman, and the obstinate questions involved in his theory of poetry
and in his actual poetical performance are still far from solution. But
a few points concerning him are by this time fairly clear. They must be
swiftly summarized.
The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the
formlessness or alleged formlessness of Leaves of Grass. This is a
highly technical question, involving a more accurate notation than has
thus far been made of the patterns and tunes of free verse and of
emotional prose. Whitman's "new and national declamatory expression," as
he termed it, cannot receive a final technical valuation until we have
made more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. As regards the
contents of his verse, it is plain that he included much material
unfused and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the
nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his
catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only. Like many
mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to
communicate to his reader the trance-like emotion which he himself
experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more
significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages
of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855.
The gospel or burden of Leaves of Grass is no more difficult of
comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped
to inspire it. The starting-point of the book is a mystical illumination
regarding the unity and blessedness of the universe, an insight passing
understanding, but based upon the revelatory experience of love. In the
light of this experience, all created things are recognized as divine.
The starting-point and center of the Whitman world is the individual
man, the "strong person," imperturbable in mind, athletic in body,
unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and
pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded
because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America
for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger
over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a
fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting
freely on the open road, to his conception of "these States." One of his
typical visions of the breadth and depth and height of America will be
found in By Blue Ontario's Shore. In this and in many similar rhapsodies
Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his
national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression
is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, O Pioneers. Yet this new America
is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as
Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is
emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America.
Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln.
In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is "one and
indivisible." This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the
issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck
of the "victor ship," but the ship comes into the harbor "with object
won." Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America
with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and
thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity has but one heart
and that it should have but one will. No American poet has ever
prophesied so directly and powerfully concerning the final issue
involved in that World War which he did not live to see.
Whitman, like Poe, had defects of character and defects of art. His life
and work raise many problems which will long continue to fascinate and
to baffle the critics. But after all of them have had their say, it will
remain true that he was a seer and a prophet, far in advance of his own
time, like Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of the
soul of this republic.