Chapter IV: Leaves of Grass

A first impression of _Leaves of Grass_ is of uncouthness and blatancy, together with something yet more objectionable. The writer would seem to be a man fond of shocking what are called the proprieties, so frank and egregious is his animalism, so overpowering his self-assertiveness.

The author of _Laus Veneris_ accuses Whitman of indecency. The charge is a grave one and emanates from a high source. The distinguished English poet admits that there are few subjects which ‘may not be treated with success;’ but the treatment is everything. This is ‘a radical and fundamental truth of criticism.’ Whitman’s indecency then consists not so much in the choice of the subject as in the awkwardness of the touch. Or as Swinburne puts it with characteristic emphasis: ‘Under the dirty paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature--the passion of man for woman or the passion of woman for man.’

But along with that first impression of Whitman’s verse as the product of a strong, coarse nature, wilfully brutal at times, comes the no less marked impression that the man is serenely honest, and animated by a benevolence which helps to relieve the brutality of its most repulsive features. At all events, Whitman is what Carlyle might have described as ‘one of the palpablest of Facts in this miserable world where so much is Invertebrate and Phantasmal.’ Whether we like him or not, Whitman is by no means one of those neutral literary persons who are in danger of being overlooked.

In fact, the word ‘literary’ as applied to the author of _Leaves of Grass_ is singularly inept. Whitman is not literary, that is to say he is not a product of libraries. No meek and reverent follower of poets gone before is this. ‘He has no literary ancestor, he is an ancestor himself’--or at least takes the attitude of one. He is a son of earth, a genuine autochthon, naked and not ashamed, noisy, vociferous, naïvely delighted with the music of his own raucous voice.

In that first great rhapsody, ‘Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,’[71] we have the most characteristic expression of his genius. He proclaims his interest in all that concerns mankind--not a cold, objective interest merely, he is himself a part of the mighty pageant of life, sympathetic with every phase of joy and sorrow, identifying himself with high and low, finding nothing mean or contemptible. He states the idea with a hundred variations, returns upon it, sets it in new lights, enforces it. Every phenomenon of human life teaches this lesson. Every pleasure, every grief, every experience small or great concerns him. He identifies himself with the life of the most miserable of creatures:--

I am possess’d!
Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

He carries the process of identification too far at times, leading to results that would be disgusting were they not laughably grotesque. Whitman makes no reservations on the score of taste.

This doctrine of the unity of being and experience is comprehensive, not limited to human life; the brute and insentient existences are included as well. For a statement of Whitman’s creed take the poem beginning: ‘There was a child went forth.’ If a busy man were ambitious to know something about Whitman’s poetry and had only a minimum of time to give to the subject (like Franklin when he undertook to post up on revealed religion), one would not hesitate to commend to his notice this poem as one of the first to be read. The theme is contained in the four introductory lines. All that follows is an amplification of a single thought:--

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain
part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

Every object grows incorporate with the child, an essential inseparable part of him,--the early lilacs, the noisy brood of the barnyard, people, home, the family usages, doubts even (doubts ‘whether that which appears is so, or is it all flashes and specks?’), the streets, the shops, the crowd surging along, shadows and mist, and boats and waves,

The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away
solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh
and shore mud,
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who
now goes, and will always go forth every day.

The idea has another setting in ‘Salut au Monde,’ Walt Whitman’s brotherly wave of the hand to the whole world. It is a vision of kingdoms and nations, comprehensive, detailed; it is geography and the catalogue raised to the dignity of eloquence. Latitude and longitude and the hot equator ‘banding the bulge of the earth’ acquire new meaning in this strange chant. The poet hears the myriad sound of the life of all peoples:--

I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear
the responsive bass and soprano,

* * * * *

I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms,
I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends
of the Romans,
I hear the tale of the divine life and the bloody death of the
beautiful God the Christ,
I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars,
adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote
three thousand years ago.

The mountains, the rivers, the stormy seas, the pageant of fallen empires and ancient religions, of cities and plains, all sweep past in this survey of the world. And to all, salutation:--

My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the
whole earth,
I have look’d for equals and lovers and found them ready for me
in all lands,
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

The ‘Song of the Open Road,’ which may very well be read next, is a challenge to a larger life than that which conventions, and modes, and common social habits will permit:--

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
would hold me.

It is no journey of ease to which the poet invites his followers; he offers none of the ‘old smooth prizes:’--

My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm’d,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry
enemies, desertion.

Notable among Whitman’s best poems, and most important to an understanding of him, is the ‘Song of the Answerer,’ that is to say, of the Poet. He it is who puts things in their right relations:--

Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and a tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men.

The Answerer is quite other than the Singer--he is more powerful, his existence is more significant, his words are of weight and insight:--

The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or
dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general
light and dark,
The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.

In that fine rhapsody ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’ Whitman restates his doctrine while applying it to the need of his own America:--

Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil
of literature,
America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it
or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
is no fear of mistake,
(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country
absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it.)

‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore,’ from which these lines are taken, is a chant for America. Patriotism is Whitman’s darling theme. Love of native land, confidence in democracy, the self-sufficiency of the Republic and the certainty of its future--with these ideas and with this spirit his verse is charged to the full:--

A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety
of ourselves,
We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
We stand self-pois’d in the middle, branching thence over the world,
From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.

America is safe, thought Whitman, so long as she does her own work in her own way and cultivates a wholesome fear of civilization.

America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at
all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under
their forms,

* * * * *

These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the
day and night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness,
the soul loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity,
the soul loves.

One of the most magnificent of Whitman’s patriotic chants is that known by its opening line, ‘As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.’ He would be a hardened sceptic who, after reading these superb and uplifting verses, found himself still unconverted to some portion of the gospel of poetry as preached by Walt Whitman. There is no resisting the man here, or when he shows his power in pieces like ‘Proud Music of the Storm,’ ‘Passage to India,’ ‘The Mystic Trumpeter,’ ‘With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!’ ‘To the Man-of-War-Bird,’ ‘Song of the Universal,’ and ‘Chanting the Square Deific.’

Admirable, even wonderful, as these verses are, it may be after all that the little volume called _Drum-Taps_ (together with its _Sequel_) is Whitman’s best gift to the literature of his country. Vivid pictures of battle-field, camp, and hospital, they are not to be forgotten by him who has once looked on them. The ‘Prelude,’ ‘Cavalry Crossing a Ford,’ ‘By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame,’ ‘The Dresser,’ the impressive ‘Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,’ and the no less striking ‘A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,’ together with ‘As toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s woods,’ the ‘Hymn of Dead Soldiers,’ and ‘Spirit whose Work is Done,’--these and many more have accomplished for Whitman’s reputation what the ‘Song of Myself’ and kindred poems could not.

In _Drum-Taps_ appeared the tributes to Lincoln, ‘O Captain, my Captain,’ and the great lament beginning ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.’ Here the poet rises to his supreme height. For pathos and tenderness, for beauty of phrase, nobility of thought, and a grand yet simple manner this threnody is indeed worthy of the praise bestowed on it by those critics whose praise is most to be desired.[72]