Poems By Walt Whitman.

by Walt Whitman.

"Or si sa il nome, o per tristo o per buono, E si sa pure al mondo ch'io ci sono."

--MICHELANGELO.

"That Angels are human forms, or men, I have seen a thousand times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms of man's body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and upon which, as on its base, it rests."

--SWEDENBORG.

"Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate voice--that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means."

--CARLYLE.

"Les efforts de vos ennemis contre vous, leurs cris, leur rage impuissante, et leurs pet.i.ts succes, ne doivent pas vous effrayer; ce ne sont que des egratignures sur les epaules d'Hercule."

--ROBESPIERRE.

TO WILLIAM BELL SCOTT.

DEAR SCOTT,--Among various gifts which I have received from you, tangible and intangible, was a copy of the original quarto edition of Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, which you presented to me soon after its first appearance in 1855. At a time when few people on this side of the Atlantic had looked into the book, and still fewer had found in it anything save matter for ridicule, you had appraised it, and seen that its value was real and great. A true poet and a strong thinker like yourself was indeed likely to see that. I read the book eagerly, and perceived that its substantiality and power were still ahead of any eulogium with which it might have come commended to me--and, in fact, ahead of most attempts that could be made at verbal definition of them.

Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend Swinburne, I found with much satisfaction that he also was an ardent (not of course a _blind_) admirer of Whitman. Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own works and his exacting acuteness as a critic might have seemed likely to carry him away from Whitman in sympathy at least, if not in actual lat.i.tude of perception.

Those who find the American poet "utterly formless," "intolerably rough and floundering," "dest.i.tute of the A B C of art," and the like, might not unprofitably ponder this very different estimate of him by the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_.

May we hope that now, twelve years after the first appearance of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, the English reading public may be prepared for a selection of Whitman's poems, and soon hereafter for a complete edition of them? I trust this may prove to be the case. At any rate, it has been a great gratification to me to be concerned in the experiment; and this is enhanced by my being enabled to a.s.sociate with it your name, as that of an early and well-qualified appreciator of Whitman, and no less as that of a dear friend.

Yours affectionately, W. M. ROSSETTI.

_October_ 1867.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

During the summer of 1867 I had the opportunity (which I had often wished for) of expressing in print my estimate and admiration of the works of the American poet Walt Whitman.[1] Like a stone dropped into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its concentric circles of consequences. One of these is the invitation which I have received to edit a selection from Whitman's writings; virtually the first sample of his work ever published in England, and offering the first tolerably fair chance he has had of making his way with English readers on his own showing. Hitherto, such readers--except the small percentage of them to whom it has happened to come across the poems in some one of their American editions--have picked acquaintance with them only through the medium of newspaper extracts and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory, and rather intercepting than forwarding the candid construction which people might be willing to put upon the poems, alike in their beauties and their aberrations. Some English critics, no doubt, have been more discerning--as W. J. Fox, of old, in the _Dispatch_, the writer of the notice in the _Leader_, and of late two in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _London Review_;[2] but these have been the exceptions among us, the great majority of the reviewers presenting that happy and familiar critical combination-- scurrility and superciliousness.

[Footnote 1: See _The Chronicle_ for 6th July 1867, article _Walt Whitman's Poems_.]

[Footnote 2: Since this Prefatory Notice was written [in 1868], another eulogistic review of Whitman has appeared--that by Mr. Robert Buchanan, in the _Broadway_.]

As it was my lot to set down so recently several of the considerations which seem to me most essential and most obvious in regard to Whitman's writings, I can scarcely now recur to the subject without either repeating something of what I then said, or else leaving unstated some points of princ.i.p.al importance. I shall therefore adopt the simplest course--that of summarising the critical remarks in my former article; after which, I shall leave without further development (ample as is the amount of development most of them would claim) the particular topics there glanced at, and shall proceed to some other phases of the subject.

Whitman republished in 1867 his complete poetical works in one moderate- sized volume, consisting of the whole _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, with a sort of supplement thereto named _Songs before Parting_,[3] and of the _Drum Taps_, with its _Sequel_. It has been intimated that he does not expect to write any more poems, unless it might be in expression of the religious side of man's nature. However, one poem on the last American harvest sown and reaped by those who had been soldiers in the great war, has already appeared since the volume in question, and has been republished in England.

[Footnote 3: In a copy of the book revised by Whitman himself, which we have seen, this t.i.tle is modified into _Songs of Parting_.]

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, such as Shakespeare furnishes the precedent for in drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic rhythmical sense throughout.

Lavish and persistent has been the abuse poured forth upon Whitman by his own countrymen; the tricklings of the British press give but a moderate idea of it. The poet is known to repay scorn with scorn. Emerson can, however, from the first be claimed as on Whitman's side; nor, it is understood after some inquiry, has that great thinker since then retreated from this position in fundamentals, although his admiration may have entailed some worry upon him, and reports of his recantation have been rife. Of other writers on Whitman's side, expressing themselves with no measured enthusiasm, one may cite Mr. M. D. Conway; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, who wrote a pamphlet named _The Good Grey Poet_; and Mr. John Burroughs, author of _Walt Whitman as Poet and Person_, published quite recently in New York.

His thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond rivalry _the_ poet of the epoch; an estimate which, startling as it will sound at the first, may nevertheless be upheld, on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his compet.i.tors a man of the period, one of audacious personal ascendant, incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works.

Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as they are true, shall frankly stand confessed--some of them as very serious faults. Firstly, he speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms.

Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature.

Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative--giving long strings of successive and detached items, not, however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self- a.s.sertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These and any other faults appear most harshly on a cursory reading; Whitman is a poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then the volume and torrent of his power carry the disfigurements along with it, and away.

The subject-matter of Whitman's poems, taken individually, 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 Ma.s.se:"--

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 physiognomy 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 Ma.s.sE. 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 pa.s.sionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the _litterateur_; 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 writings. 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 importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous a.s.sertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible a.s.sociate 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 preceded, 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 themselves, 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 _Legende des Siecles_ 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 Americanism; 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 t.i.tanic 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 ent.i.tled to form and express an opinion on any poetic question--one, too, who abundantly upholds the greatness of Whitman as a poet--has addressed 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 bl.u.s.ter. His own personal and national self-reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I applaud, and sympathise 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 a.s.serts so violently that he is-- always as if he was fighting the case 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 observe, which is fully shared by myself, and, I suppose, by all who consent in any adequate measure to recognise Whitman, and to yield themselves to his influence.

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 an 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 a 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 pa.s.sionate 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 unfathomed 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 unsurpa.s.sable sympathy and intelligence between himself and his readers. The entire book may be called the paean 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 foremost, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.

There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation 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 pa.s.sages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or a.n.a.logy 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 n.o.bler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical extension or recast.

Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remarkable poet--the founder of _American_ poetry rightly to be so called, and the most sonorous poetic voice of the tangibilities of actual and prospective democracy--is in his proper life and person.

Walt Whitman 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 County, 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 marriage. The father was a farmer, and afterwards a carpenter 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 pa.s.sions, 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 carpenter 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 remuneration for his services.

The first immediate occasion of his going down to camp was on behalf of his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New York Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a piece of sh.e.l.l 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.

Northerner 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 cases 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 enrolment- 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 1865, in the form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.

Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_; 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 Gra.s.s_.

He is much above the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned--a model of physique and of health, and, by natural consequence, as fully and finely related to all physical facts by his bodily const.i.tution as to all mental and spiritual facts by his mind and his consciousness. He is now, however, old-looking for his years, and might even (according to the statement of one of his enthusiasts, Mr. O'Connor) have pa.s.sed for being beyond the age for the draft when the war was going on. The same gentleman, in confutation of any inferences which might be drawn from the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ by a Harlan or other Holy Willie, affirms that "one more irreproachable in his relations to the other s.e.x lives not upon this earth"--an a.s.sertion 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 indifferent, not to say scornful--having in fact a very decisive opinion of his own concerning its calibre and destinies. Th.o.r.eau, 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 appreciation of the President, considering him (it is said by Mr. Burroughs) "by far the n.o.blest 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 a.s.suredly be the written monument reared to him by Whitman.

The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an accessible human individual is that given by Mr. Conway.[4] I borrow from it the following few details.

"Having occasion 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 100, 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 clothing, his blue-grey shirt, his iron-grey hair, his swart sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-white gra.s.s--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 pa.s.s 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 att.i.tudes 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-gla.s.s 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 const.i.tuted 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 ma.s.s of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island.... The only distinguished 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."

[Footnote 4: In the _Fortnightly Review_, 15th October 1866.]

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 confounded 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 considerable work was the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_. He began it in 1853, and it underwent two or three complete rewritings prior to its publication at Brooklyn in 1855, in a quarto volume--peculiar-looking, but with something perceptibly 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 contempt 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 cla.s.s 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."