gross things in gross, crude,
or plain terms. Secondly,
literature. Thirdly, he sins
from time to time by being
devoid of a certain primitive
effectiveness. Fourthly, his
and every man and woman. These and any other
faults
poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then
The subject-matter of Whitman’s
poems, taken indi-
vidually, is absolutely miscellaneous: he
touches upon
any and every subject. But he has prefixed to his
last
edition an "Inscription" in the following terms,
showing
that the key-words of the whole book are
two—"One’s-
self" and "En Masse:"—
Small is the theme of the following chant, yet the
greatest—namely,
ONE’S-SELF; that
wondrous thing, a simple separate person.
That, for the use of the New World, I sing.
Man’s physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not
physiog-
nomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the
Muse: I say
the form complete is worthier far. The female
equally with
the male I sing.
Nor cease at the theme of
One’s-self. I speak the word of the
modern, the word EN MASSE.
My days I sing, and the
lands—with interstice I knew of hapless
war.
O friend, whoe’er you are, at
last arriving hither to commence, I feel
through every leaf the pressure of your hand,
which I return.
And thus upon our journey linked together let us
go.
The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem
both of
Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added,
of
American nationalism. It is par excellence the
modern
poem. It is distinguished also by this
peculiarity—that
in it the most literal view of
things is continually merging
into the most rhapsodic or
passionately abstract. Pic-
turesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat
patriarchal
kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the
littérateur; a certain echo of the old Hebrew
poetry may
even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is.
Another
most prominent and pervading quality of the book is
the
exuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are
throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter
much under different conditions.
Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in
Whitman’s
writing. He is both a realist and an
optimist in extreme
measure: he contemplates evil as in some
sense not
existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much
im-
portance as anything else. Not that he is a
materialist;
on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor
of the
soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its
infallible asso-
ciate and vehicle in the present frame of
things. Neither
does he drift into fatalism or
indifferentism; the energy of
his temperament, and ever-fresh
sympathy with national
and other developments, being an
effectual bar to this.
The paradoxical element of the poems
is such that one
may sometimes find them in conflict with
what has pre-
ceded, and would not be much surprised if they
said at
any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This
is
mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things,
and
to the immense width of relation in which Whitman
stands
to all sorts and all aspects of them.
But the greatest of this poet’s
distinctions is his absolute
and entire originality. He may be termed formless by
those who, not without much reason to show for them-
selves,
are wedded to the established forms and ratified
refinements
of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to
enlarge the canon
till it includes so great and startling a
genius, rather than
to draw it close and exclude him.
His work is practically
certain to stand as archetypal for
many future poetic
efforts—so great is his power as an
originator, so
fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably
the
largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor
Hugo’s
Légende des Siècles
alone might be named with
it for largeness, and even that with
much less of a new
starting-point in conception and treatment.
Whitman
breaks with all precedent. To what he himself
perceives
and knows he has a personal relation of the
intensest kind;
to anything in the way of prescription, no
relation at all.
But he is saved from isolation by the depth
of his Ameri-
canism; with the movement of his predominant
nation he
is moved. His comprehension, energy, and tenderness,
are
all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as
for
poetic genius, those who, without being ready to
concede
that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic
boldness
and his Titanic power of temperament, working in
the
sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his genius as
well.
Such, still further condensed, was the
critical summary
which I gave of Whitman’s position
among poets. It
remains to say something a little more precise of the
particular qualities of his works. And first, not to slur
over
defects, I shall extract some sentences from a letter
which a
friend, most highly entitled to form and express an
opinion on
any poetic question—one, too, who abundantly
upholds
the greatness of Whitman as a poet—has addres-
sed to
me with regard to the criticism above condensed.
His
observations, though severe on this individual point,
appear
to me not other than correct. "I don’t think
that
you quite put strength enough into your blame on
one side,
while you make at least enough of minor faults
or
eccentricities. To me it seems always that Whitman’s
great flaw is a fault of debility, not an excess of strength
—I mean his bluster. His own personal and national
self-
reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I
applaud,
and sympathize and rejoice in; but the blatant
ebullience
of feeling and speech, at times, is feeble for so
great a
poet of so great a people. He is in part certainly the
poet
of democracy; but not wholly,
because he tries so
openly to
be, and asserts so violently that he
is—always as if he was
fighting the cause out on a
platform. This is the only thing
I really or greatly dislike
or revolt from. On the whole"
(adds my correspondent) "my
admiration and enjoyment
of his greatness grow keener and
warmer every time I
think of him"—a feeling, I may be
permitted to ob-
serve, which is fully shared by myself, and,
I suppose,
by all who consent in any adequate measure to re-
cognise Whitman, and to yield themselves to his in-
fluence.
To continue. Besides originality and daring,
which
have been already insisted upon, width and intensity
are
leading characteristics of his writings—width
both
of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity
of
self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and
expresses. He scans and presents and enormous panorama,
unrolled before him as from a mountain-top; and yet
whatever
most large or most minute or casual thing his
eye glances
upon, that he enters into with a depth of
affection which
identifies him with it for the time, be the
object what it
may. There is a singular interchange
also of actuality and of
ideal substratum and suggestion.
While he sees men, with even
abnormal exactness and
sympathy, as men, he sees them also
"as trees walking,"
and admits us to perceive that the whole
show is in a
measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask
of a
larger and profounder reality beneath it, of which it
is
giving perpetual intimations and auguries. He is the
poet
indeed of literality, but of passionate and
significant
literality, full of indirections as well as
directness, and of
readings between the lines. If he is the
’cutest of Yankees,
he is also as truly an
enthusiast as any the most typical poet.
All his faculties
and performance glow into a white
heat of brotherliness; and
there is a poignancy both of
tenderness and of beauty
about his finer works which
discriminates them quite as much as their modernness,
audacity, or any other exceptional point. If the reader
wishes
to see the great and more intimate powers of
Whitman in their
fullest expression, he may consult the
Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln; than which it would
be difficult to find anywhere a purer, more elevated,
more
poetic, more ideally abstract, or at the same time
more
pathetically personal, threnody—uniting the thrilling
chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final un-
fathomed satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman
is
a master of words and of sounds: he has them at his
command—made for, and instinct with, his
purpose—
messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and
intelligence
between himself and his readers. The entire book
may
be called the pæan of the natural
man—not of the merely
physical, still less of the
disjunctively intellectual or
spiritual man, but of him who,
being a man first and fore-
most, is therein also a spirit and
an intellect.
There is a singular and impressive intuition
or revela-
tion of Swedenborg’s: that the whole of
heaven is in the
form of one man, and the separate societies
of heaven in
the forms of the several parts of man. In a
large sense,
the general drift of Whitman’s
writings, even down to the
passages which read as most
bluntly physical, bear a
striking correspondence or analogy
to this dogma. He
takes man, and every organism and faculty
of man, as the
unit—the datum—from which
all that we know, discern,
and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as
of
concrete and sensual, has to be computed. He knows of
nothing nobler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he
can
use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical exten-
sion or recast.
Let us next obtain some idea of what this
most remark-
able poet—the founder of
American poetry rightly to be so
called, and the most
sonorous poetic voice of the tangibi-
lities of actual and
prospective democracy—is in his proper
life and
person.
Walt Whitman (we infer that he was in fact
baptized
Walter, like his father, but he always uses the name
Walt)
was born at the farm-village of West Hills, Long
Island,
in the State of New York, and about thirty miles
distant
from the capital, on the 31st of May 1819. His
father’s
family, English by origin, had already
been settled in this
locality for five generations. His
mother, named Louisa
van Velsor, was of Dutch extraction, and
came from Cold
Spring, Queen’s Country, about three
miles from West
Hills. "A fine-looking old lady" she has been
termed in
her advanced age. A large family ensued from the
mar-
riage. The father was a farmer, and afterwards a
car-
penter and builder: both parents adhered in religion
to
"the great Quaker iconoclast, Elias Hicks." Walt was
schooled at Brooklyn, a suburb of New York, and began
life at
the age of thirteen, working as a printer, later on as a
country teacher, and then as a miscellaneous press-writer in
New York. From 1837 to 1848 he had, as Mr. Burroughs
too
promiscuously expresses it, "sounded all experiences of
life,
with all their passions, pleasures, and abandonments."
In 1849
he began travelling; and became at New Orleans a
newspaper
editor, and at Brooklyn, two years afterwards,
a printer. He
next followed his father’s business of car-
penter
and builder. In 1862, after the breaking-out of
the great
Civil War, in which his enthusiastic unionism
and also his
anti-slavery feelings attached him inseparably
though not
rancorously to the good cause of the North,
he undertook the
nursing of the sick and wounded in the
field, writing also a
correspondence in the
New York
Times. I am informed
that it was through Emerson’s
intervention that he
obtained the sanction of President
Lincoln for this purpose of
charity, with authority to
draw the ordinary army rations;
Whitman stipulating at
the same time that he would not receive
any remunera-
tion for his services. The first immediate
occasion of his
going down to cam was on behalf of his
brother, Lieu-
tenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st
New
York Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a
piece of shell at Fredericksburg. From the spring of
1863,
this nursing, both in the field and more especially
in
hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and
nightly
occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne
to his
measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the
work, and to
the unbounded fascination, a kind of magnetic
attraction and ascendency, which he exercised over the
patients, often with the happiest sanitary results. North-
erner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same
tending from him. It is said that by the end of the war
he had
personally ministered to upwards of 100,000 sick
and wounded.
In a Washington hospital he caught, in
the summer of 1864, the
first illness he had ever known,
caused by poison absorbed
into the system in attending
some of the worst causes of
gangrene. It disabled him for
six months. He returned to the
hospitals towards the
beginning of 1865, and obtained also a
clerkship in the
Department of the Interior. It should be
added that,
though he never actually joined the army as a
combatant,
he made a point of putting down his name on the
enrol-
ment-lists for the draft, to take his chance as it
might
happen for serving the country in arms. The reward
of
his devotedness came at the end of June 1856, in the
form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.
Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the
Leaves of Grass: a book whose outspokenness, or (as
the
official chief considered it) immorality, raised a holy
horror
in the ministerial breast. The poet, however,
soon obtained
another modest but creditable post in the
office of the
Attorney-General. He still visits the
hospitals on Sundays,
and often on other days as
well.
The portrait of Mr. Whitman reproduced in the
present
volume is taken from an engraving after a daguerreotype
given in the original
Leaves of Grass. He is much above
the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned—a
model of physique and health, and, by natural con-
sequence,
as fully and finely related to all physical facts
by his
bodily constitution as to all mental and spiritual
facts by
his mind and his consciousness. He is now, how-
ever,
old-looking for his years, and might even (according
to the
statement of one of his enthusiasts, Mr. O’Connor)
have passed for being beyond the age for the draft when
the
war was going on. The same gentleman, in confuta-
tion of any
inferences which might be drawn from the
Leaves of Grass by a Harlan or other Holy Willie,
affirms
that "one more irreproachable in his relations to the
other
sex lives not upon this earth"—an assertion
which one
must take as one finds it, having neither
confirmatory nor
traversing evidence at hand. Whitman has
light blue
eyes, a florid complexion, a fleecy beard now grey,
and a
quite peculiar sort of magnetism about him in relation
to
those with whom he comes in contact. His ordinary
appearance is masculine and cheerful: he never shows
depression of spirits, and is sufficiently undemonstrative,
and even somewhat silent in company. He has always
been
carried by predilection towards the society of the
common
people; but is not the less for that open to
refined and
artistic impressions—fond of operatic and
other good
music, and discerning in works of art. As to
either praise or blame of what he writes, he is totally
in-
different, not to say scornful—having in fact a
very
decisive opinion of his own concerning its calibre
and
destinies. Thoreau, a very congenial spirit, said of
Whitman "He is Democracy;" and again, "After all,
he suggests
something a little more than human." Lincoln
broke out into
the exclamation "Well,
he looks like a
man!" Whitman
responded to the instinctive apprecia-
tion of the President,
considering him (it is said by Mr.
Burroughs) "by far the
noblest and purest of the political
characters of the time;"
and, if anything can cast, in the
eyes of posterity, an added
halo of brightness round the
unsullied personal qualities and
the great doings of Lincoln,
it will assuredly be the written
monument reared to him
by Whitman.
The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an
acces-
sible human individual is that given by Mr. Conway.*
I
borrow from it with the following few details. "Having
occa-
sion to visit New York soon after the appearance
of
Walt Whitman’s book, I was urged by some friends
to
search him out. . . The day was excessively hot, the
thermometer at nearly 100º, and the sun blazed down
as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze. . . I
saw
stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at
the
terrible sun, the man I was seeking. With his grey
* In the Fortnightly Review, 15th
October 1866.
clothing, his blue-grey shirt, his iron-grey hair, his
swart
sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the
brown-and-
white grass—for the sun had burnt away its
greenness—
and was so like the earth upon which he
rested that he
seemed almost enough a part of it for one to
pass by
without recognition. I approached him, gave my
name
and reason for searching him out, and asked him if he
did
not find the sun rather hot. ’Not at all too
hot,’ was his
reply; and he confided to me that this
was one of his
favourite places and attitudes for composing
’poems.’ He
then walked with me to his
home, and took me along its
narrow ways to his room. A small
room of about fifteen
feet square, with a single window
looking out on the barren
solitudes of the island; a small
cot, a wash-stand with a
little looking-glass hung over it
from a tack in the wall, a
pine table with pen, ink, and
paper, on it; an old line-
engraving representing Bacchus,
hung on the wall, and
opposite a similar one of Silenus; these
constituted the
visible environments of Walt Whitman. There
was not,
apparently, a single book in the room. . . The books
he
seemed to know and love best were the Bible, Homer,
and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in
his
pockets while we were talking. He had two studies
where he
read; one was the top of an omnibus, and the
other a small
mass of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far
out in the ocean,
called Coney Island. . . The only dis-
tinguished contemporary
he had ever met was the Rev.
Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn, who had visited
him. .
. He confessed to having no talent for industry,
and that his
forte was ’loafing and writing poems:’ he
was poor, but had discovered that he could, on the whole,
live
magnificently on bread and water. . . On no occasion
did he
laugh, nor indeed did I ever see him smile."
The first trace of Whitman as a writer is in
the pages
of the Democratic Review in or about 1841.
Here he
wrote some prose tales and sketches—poor
stuff mostly,
so far as I have seen of them, yet not to be
wholly con-
founded with the commonplace. One of them is a
tragic
school-incident, which may be surmised to have
fallen
under his personal observation in his early experience
as
a teacher. His first poem of any sort was named
Blood
Money, in denunciation of the Fugitive Slave
Law, which
severed him from the Democratic party. His first
con-
siderable work was the Leaves of Grass. He began
it
in 1853, and it underwent two or three complete re-
writings prior to its publication at Brooklyn in 1855, in a
quarto volume—peculiar-looking, but with something
per-
ceptibly artistic about it. The type of that edition
was
set up entirely by himself. He was moved to
undertake
this formidable poetic work (as indicated in a
private letter
of Whitman’s, from which Mr. Conway
has given a sentence
or two) by his sense of the great
materials which America
could offer for a really American
poetry, and by his con-
tempt for the current work of his
compatriots—"either
the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at
bottom
nothing but maudlin puerilities or more or less
musical
verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and
enervation
as their result; or else that class of poetry,
plays, &c., of
which the foundation is feudalism, with
its ideas of lords
and ladies, its imported standard of
gentility, and the
manners of European high-life-below-stairs
in every line
and verse." Thus incited to poetic
self-expression,
Whitman (adds Mr. Conway) "wrote on a sheet
of paper,
in large letters, these words ’Make the
Work,’ and fixed
it above his table, where he could
always see it whilst
writing. Thenceforth every cloud that
flitted over him,
every distant sail, every face and form
encountered, wrote
a line in his book."
The Leaves of Grass excited no sort of
notice
until a letter from Emerson* appeared, expressing
a
deep sense of its power and magnitude. He termed
it
"the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom
that America
has yet contributed." The edition of
about a thousand copies
sold off in less than a
year. Towards the end of 1856 a
second edition in
16mo appeared, printed in New York, also of
about a
* Mr. Burroughs (to whom I have recourse
for most biographical
facts concerning Whitman) is careful to
note, in order that no mis-
apprehension may arise on the
subject, that, up to the time of his
publishing the Leaves
of Grass, the author had not read either the
essays or
the poems of Emerson.
thousand copies. Its chief feature was an additional
poem
beginning "A Woman waits for me." It excited a con-
siderable storm. Another edition, of about four to five
thousand copies, duodecimo, came out at Boston in
1860-61,
including a number of new pieces. The
Drum
Taps,
consequent upon the war, with their
Sequel which
comprises the poem on Lincoln, followed in 1865; and in
1867,
as I have already noted, a complete edition of all
the poems,
including a supplement named
Songs before
Parting. The
first of all the
Leaves of Grass, in point
of date, was
the long and powerful composition, entitled,
Walt Whitman—perhaps the most typical and
memo-
rable of all his productions, but shut out from the
present selection for reasons given further on. The final
edition shows numerous and considerable variations from
all
its precursors; evidencing once again that Whitman is
by no
means the rough-and-ready writer, panoplied in rude
art and
egotistic self-sufficiency, that many people suppose
him to
be. Even since this issue, the book has been
slightly revised
by its author’s own hand, with a special
view to
possible English circulation. The copy so revised
has reached
me (through the liberal and friendly hands of
Mr. Conway)
after my selection had already been decided
on; and the few
departures from the last printed text
which might on
comparison be found in the present volume
are due to my having
had the advantage of following this
revise copy. In all other
respects I have felt bound to
reproduce the last edition, without so much as
considering
whether here and there I might personally prefer
the
readings of the earlier issues.
The selection here offered to the English
reader con-
tains a little less than half the entire bulk of
Whitman’s
poetry. My choice has proceeded upon two
simple rules:
first, to omit entirely every poem which could
with any
tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the
feelings of
morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous
age; and,
second, to include every remaining poem which
appeared
to me of conspicuous beauty or interest. I have also
in-
serted the very remarkable prose preface which
Whitman
printed in the original edition of Leaves of
Grass, an
edition that has become a literary rarity. This
preface
has not been reproduced in any later publication,
although
its materials have to some extent been worked up
into
poems of a subsequent date.* From this prose
composition,
contrary to what has been my rule with any of
the poems,
it has appeared to me permissible to omit two or
three
short phrases which would have shocked ordinary
readers,
and the retention of which, had I held it
obligatory, would
have entailed the exclusion of the preface
itself as a whole.
A few words must be added to the indecencies
scattered
through Whitman’s writings. Indecencies
or improprie-
ties—or, still better, deforming
crudities—they may rightly
* Compare, for instance, the Preface, pp. 49, 50,
with the poem
To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress, p. 171.
be termed; to call them immoralities would be going too
far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women,
to be a
compound of soul and body; he finds that body
plays an
extremely prominent and determining part in
whatever he and
other mundane dwellers have cognizance
of; he perceives this
to be the necessary condition of
things, and therefore, as he
fully and openly accepts it,
the right condition; and he knows
of no reason why what
is universally seen and known, necessary
and right, should
not also be allowed and proclaimed in
speech. That such
a view of the matter is entitled to a great
deal of weight,
and at any rate to candid consideration and
construction,
appears to me not to admit of a doubt; neither
is it dubious
that the contrary view, the only view which a
mealy-
mouthed British nineteenth century admits as
endurable,
amounts to the condemnation of nearly every great
or
eminent literary work of past time, whatever the
century
it belongs to, the country it comes from, the
department
of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of
merit it
possesses. Tenth, second, or first century before
Christ,
—first, eighth, fourteenth, fifteenth,
sixteenth, seventeenth,
or even eighteenth century
A.D.—it is still the same: no
book
whose subject-matter admits as possible of an impro-
priety
according to current notions can be depended upon
to fail of
containing such impropriety,—can, if those notions
are accepted as the canon, be placed with a sense of se-
curity in the hands of girls and youths, or read aloud to
women; and this holds good just as much of severely
moral or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, know-
ing, or licentious books. For my part, I am far from
thinking
that earlier state of literature, and the public
feeling from
which it sprang, the wrong ones—and our
present
condition the only right one. Equally far there-
fore am I
from indignantly condemning Whitman for
every startling
allusion or expression which he has ad-
mitted into his book,
and which I, from motives of policy,
have excluded from this
selection; except, indeed, that I
think many of his tabooed
passages are extremely raw and
ugly on the ground of poetic or
literary art, whatever
aspect they may bear in morals. I have
been rigid in
exclusion, because it appears to me highly
desirable that
a fair verdict on Whitman should now be
pronounced in
England on poetic grounds alone; and because it
was
clearly impossible that the book, with its audacities
of
topic and of expression included, should run the same
chance of justice, and of circulation through refined minds
and hands, which may possibly be accorded to it after the
rejection of all such peccant poems. As already intimated,
I
have not in a single instance excised any
parts of
poems: to do so would have been, I conceive, no less
wrongful
towards the illustrious American than repug-
nant, and indeed
unendurable, to myself, who aspire to no
Bowdlerian honours.
The consequence is that the reader
loses
in toto
several important poems, and some extremely
fine ones—notably the one previously alluded to, of
quite
exceptional value and excellence, entitled
Walt
Whit-
man. I sacrifice them grudgingly; and yet
willingly, be-
cause I believe this to be the only thing to do
with due
regard to the one reasonable object which a selection
can
subserve—that of paving the way towards the issue
and
unprejudiced reception of a complete edition of the
poems
in England. For the benefit of misconstructionsists, let
me
add in distinct terms that, in respect of morals and
pro-
priety, I neither admire nor approve the
incriminated
passages in Whitman’s poems, but on the
contrary con-
sider that most of them would be much better
away; and,
in respect of art, I doubt whether even one of them
de-
serves to be retained in the exact phraseology it at
present
exhibits. This, however, does not amount to saying
that
Whitman is a vile man, or a corrupt or corrupting
writer:
he is none of these.
The only division of his poems into
selections, made by
Whitman himself, has been noted above:
Leaves of
Grass, Songs before Parting, supplementary
to the pre-
ceeding, and Drum Taps, with their
Sequel. The peculiar
title, Leaves of Grass,
has become almost inseparable
from the name of Whitman; it
seems to express with
some aptness the simplicity,
universality, and spontaneity,
of the poems to which it is
applied. Songs before
Parting may indicate that these
compositions close
Whitman’s poetic roll. Drum
Taps are, of course,
songs of the Civil War, and their
Sequel is mainly
on
the same theme: the chief person in this last section
being
the one on the death of Lincoln. These titles all apply
to
fully arranged series of compositions. The present
volume
is not in the same sense a fully arranged series, but
a
selection; and the relation of the poems
inter se
appears
to me to depend on altered conditions, which,
however
narrowed they are, it may be as well frankly to
recognize
in practice. I have therefore redistributed the
poems (a
latitude of action which I trust the author may not
object
to), bringing together those whose subject-matter seems
to
warrant it, however far separated they may possibly be
in
the original volume. At the same time, I have retained
some characteristic terms used by Whitman himself, and
have
named my sections respectively—
1. Chants Democratic (poems of
democracy).
2. Drum Taps (war songs).
3. Walt Whitman (personal poems).
4. Leaves of Grass (unclassified poems).
5. Songs of Parting (missives).
The first thee designations explain
themselves. The
fourth, Leaves of Grass, is not so
specially applicable
to the particular poems of that
selection here as I should
have liked it to be; but I could
not consent to drop
this typical name. The Songs of
Parting, my fifth section,
are compositions in which the
poet expresses his own
sentiment regarding his works, in which he forecasts
their
future, or consigns them to the reader’s
consideration.
It deserves mention that, in the copy of
Whitman’s last
American edition revised by his own
hand as previously
noticed, the series termed
Songs of
Parting has been
recast, and made to consist of poems of
the same character
as those included in my section No. 5.
Comparatively few of Whitman’s
poems have been en-
dowed by himself with titles so properly
called. Most of
them are merely headed with the opening words
of the
poems themselves—as "I was looking a long
while;" "To
get betimes in Boston Town;" "When lilacs last in
the
door-yard bloomed;" and so on. It seems to me that in
a
selection such a lengthy and circuitous method of
identi-
fying the poems is not desirable: I should wish them
to
be remembered by brief, repeatable, and significant
titles.
I have therefore supplied titles of my own to such
pieces
as bear none in the original edition: wherever a real
title
appears in that edition, I have retained it.
With these remarks I commend to the English
reader
the ensuing selection from a writer whom I sincerely
be-
lieve to be, whatever his faults, of the order of
great
poets, and by no means of pretty good ones. I would
urge
the reader not to ask himself, and not to return any
answer to
the questions, whether or not this poet is like
other
poets—whether or not the particular application of
rules of art which is found to hold good in the works
of those others, and to constitute a part of their
excellence,
can be traced also in Whitman. Let the questions
rather
be—Is he powerful? Is he American? Is he new?
Is
he rousing? Does he feel and make me feel? I enter-
tain no doubt as to the response which in due course of
time
will be returned to these questions and such as
these, in
America, in England, and elsewhere—or to the
further
question, "Is Whitman then indeed a true and a
great poet?"
Lincoln’s verdict bespeaks the ultimate
decision
upon him, in his books as in his habit as he lives—
"Well,
he looks like a man."
Walt Whitman occupies at the present moment
a
unique position on the globe, and one which, even in
past time, can have been occupied by only an infinitesi-
mally small number of men. He is the one man who enter-
tains
and professes respecting himself the grave conviction
that he
is the actual and prospective founder of a new
poetic
literature, and a great one—a literature
proportional
to the material vastness and the unmeasured
destinies of
America: he believes that the Columbus of the
continent
or the Washington of the States was not more truly
than
himself in the future a founder and upbuilder of
this
America. Surely a sublime conviction, and expressed
more than once in magnificent words—none more so
than
the lines beginning
Come, I will make this continent indissoluble.*
* See the poem headed Love of Comrades, p.
391.
Were the idea untrue, it would still be a glorious
dream,
which a man of genius might be content to live in
and
die for: but is it untrue? Is it not, on the
contrary,
true, if not absolutely, yet with a most genuine and
sub-
stantial approximation? I believe it
is thus true.
I
believe that Whitman is one of the huge, as yet mainly
unrecognised, forces of our time; privileged to evoke, in
a
country hitherto still asking for its poet, a fresh, athletic,
and American poetry, and predestined to be traced up to
by
generation after generation of believing and ardent—
let us hope not servile—disciples.
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world."
Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when
poetry
was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity
of
truth. Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out
for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will
one
day be potential or magisterial wherever the English
language
is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of
the
earth; and, in his own American hemisphere, the
uttermost
avatars of democracy will confess him not more
their
announcer than their inspirer.
