[Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)]

Bothwell: A Poem in six parts By W. Edmonstoune Aytoun, D. C. L., Author of "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, &c," W. Blackwood and Sons. Edinburgh and London, 1856.

Leaves of Grass Brooklyn, New York, 1855.

In the works named above we have two not unmete representatives of the extremes of the Old and of the New World poetic ideal: "Bothwell," the product of the severely critical, refined, and ultra-conservative author of the Lays of the "Scottish Cavaliers;" and "Leaves of Grass," the wild, exuberant, lawless offspring of Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy, "One of the Roughs!"

In contrast with this we have named the effusions of the Brooklyn Bard. If the accredited author of "Firmilian" has now shown us what a poem ought to be, assuredly Walt Whitman is wide of the mark. Externally and internally he sets all law, decorum, prosody and propriety at defiance. A tall, lean, sallow, most republican, and Yankee-looking volume, is his "Leaves of grass; full of egotism, extravagance, and spasmodic eccentricities of all sorts; and heralded by a sheaf of double-columned extracts from Reviews—not always the least curious of its singular contents. Here, for example, is a protest against the intrusion of the British muse on the free soil of the States of the Union, which must surely satisfy the most clamant demand for native poetics and republican egotism:

"What very properly fits a subject of the British crown, may fit very ill an American freeman. No fine romance, no inimitable delineation of character, no grace of delicate illustrations, no rare picture of shore or mountain or sky, no deep thought of the intellect, is so important to a man as his opinion of himself is; everything receives its tinge from that. In the verse of all those undoubtedly great writers, Shakespeare, just as much as the rest, there is the air which to America is the air of death. The mass of the people, the laborers and all who serve, are slag, refuse. The countenances of kings and great lords are beautiful; the countenances of mechanics are ridiculous and deformed. What play of Shakespeare represented in America, is not an insult to America, to the marrow in its bones? How can the tone—never silent in their plots and characters—be applauded, unless Washington should have been caught and hung, and Jefferson was the most enormous of liars, and common persons, North and South, should bow low to their betters, and to organic superiority of blood? Sure as the heavens envelop the earth, if the Americans want a race of bards worthy of 1855, and of the stern reality of this republic, they must cast around for men essentially different from the old poets, and from the modern successions of jinglers and snivellers and fops."

—and here accordingly is something essentially different from all poets, both old and new.

The poet, unnamed on his title page, figures on his frontispiece, and unmistakeably utters his own poem:

Such is the starting point of this most eccentric and republican of poets; of whom the republican critic above quoted, after contrasting with him Tennyson, as "The bard of ennui, and the aristocracy and their combination into love, the old stock love of playwrights and romancers, Shakespeare, the same as the rest."—concludes by confessing his inability to decide whether Walt Whitman is "to prove the most lamentable of failures, or the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature."

Assuredly, the Brooklyn poet is no commonplace writer. That he is startling and outré, no one who opens his volume will doubt. The conventionalities, and proprieties, and modesties, of thought, as well as of language, hold him in no restraint; and hence he has a vantage ground from which he may claim such credit as its licence deserves. But, apart from this, there are unmistakeable freshness, originality, and true poetic gleams of thought, mingled with the strange incoherencies of his boastful rhapsody. To call his "Leaves" poems, would be a mistake; they resemble rather the poet's first jottings, out of which the poem is to be formed; the ore out of which the metal is to be smelted; and, in its present form, with more of dross than sterling metal in the mass.

To find an extractable passage is no easy task. Here a fine suggestive fancy ends in some offensive pruriency; there it dwindles into incomprehensible aggregations of words and terms, which—unless Machiavelli was right in teaching that words were given us to conceal our thoughts,—are mere clotted nonsense! Were we disposed to ridicule: our selections would be easy enough; or gravely to censure: abundant justification is at hand. We rather cull—not without needful omissions—the thoughts that seem to have suggested the quaint title of "Leaves of Grass".

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This passage is far from being the most characteristic of the poem, and even in it we have stopped abruptly for one line more, and…Yet this will show that the punctuation is as odd as any other feature of the work; for the whole is full of conceits which speak fully as much of coarse vain-glorious egotism as of originality of genius. Any man may be an original, whether in the fopperies of the dress he puts on himself or on his poem. We are not, therefore, disposed to rate such very high, or to reckon Walt Whitman's typographical whims any more indicative of special genius, than the shirt-sleeves and unshaven chin of his frontispiece. If they indicate any thing specially, we should infer that he is a compositor by trade, and, for all his affectations of independence, could not keep "the shop" out of his verse. But that he sets all the ordinary rules of men and poets at defiance is visible on every page of his lank volume; and if readers judge thereby that he thinks himself wiser than all previous men and poets—we have no authority to contradict them. That some of his thoughts are far from vain or common place, however, a few gleanings may suffice to prove; culled in the form, not of detached passages but of isolated ideas—line, or fragments of lines:—

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These doubled and quadrupled points, let us add, pertain to the original, whatever their precise significance may be. Here again is a grand idea, not altogether new; and rough in its present setting, as the native gold still buried in Californian beds of quartz and debris. Nevertheless it is full of suggestive thought, and like much else in the volume—though less than most,—only requires the hand of the artist to cut, and polish, and set, that it may gleam and sparkle with true poetic lustre:—

Such are some of the "Leaves of Grass," of the Brooklyn poet who describes himself in one of them as:

But if the reader—recognising true poetry in some of these,—should assume such a likeness running through the whole as pertains to the blades of Nature's Grass, we disclaim all responsibility if he find reason to revise his fancy. In the two very diverse volumes under review it seems to us that we have in the one the polish of the artist, which can accomplish so much when applied to the gem or rich ore; in the other we discern the ore, but overlaid with the valueless matrix and foul rubbish of the mine, and devoid of all the unveiling beauties of art. Viewed in such aspects these poems are characteristic of the age. From each we have striven to select what appeared most worthy of the space at command, and best calculated to present them to the reader in the most favorable point of view consistent with truth. And so we leave the reader to his own judgment, between the old-world stickler for authority, precedent, and poetical respectability, and the new-world contemner of all authorities, laws, and respectabilities whatsoever. Happily for us, all choice is not necessarily limited to these. The golden mean of poesie does not, we imagine, lie between such extremes. There are not a few left, both in England and in America, for whom old Shakspeare is still respectable enough, and poetical enough,—aye and free enough too, in spite of all the freedom which has budded and bloomed since that year 1616, when his sacred ashes were laid beneath the chancel stone whose curse still guards them from impious hands. Nevertheless we have faith in the future. We doubt not even the present. When a greater poet than Shakespeare does arrive we shall not count him an impossibility.

D.W.

Publication Information
D.W. "[Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)]." Canadian Journal n.s. 1 (>November 1856): 541-51.

Whitman Archive ID
anc.00029

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