Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them voices in the wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of them unheeded until a new generation had arisen to whom they had become but names and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; Whitman in 1819, the year of Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman Melville, J.G. Holland, Julia Ward Howe, and E.P. Whipple, and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his first significant volume, in 1855, the year of Hiawatha, of Maud, and of Arnold's Poems. He issued it again in 1856 and again in 1860—a strange nondescript book rendered all the more strange by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, that it had won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at the beginning of a great career." But even the compelling name of Emerson could not sell the book; little notice, in fact, was taken of it save as a few voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862 Whitman became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not so much impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whitman seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accustomed to curious phenomena.

The antecedents and the early training of Whitman were far from literary. He came from a race of Long Island farmers who had adhered to one spot for generations. No American was ever more completely a product of our own soil.

They were crude, vigorous plowmen, unbookish and elemental. The father was the first to break from the soil and the ancestral environment, but he left it only to become a laborer on buildings in the neighboring city of Brooklyn.

The boyhood of Whitman was passed in the city, though with long vacations in the home of his grandparents on Long Island. His schooling was brief and desultory. He left the schools at twelve to become office boy for a lawyer and from that time on he drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, serving for brief periods as doctor's clerk, compositor in a country printing office, school teacher in various localities, editor and proprietor of a rural weekly, stump speaker in the campaign of 1840, editor of various small journals, contributor of Hawthornesque stories and sketches to papers and magazines, writer of a melodramatic novel, and in 1846 editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But he could hold to nothing long. In 1848 he was induced by a stranger who had taken a fancy to him to go to New Orleans as editor of the Crescent newspaper, but within a year he was back again in New York, where for the next few years he maintained a half-loafing, half-working connection with several papers and periodicals.

It was during this period that he made himself so thoroughly familiar with the middle and lower strata of New York City life. He spent hours of every day riding on Broadway vehicles and on Fulton ferry boats and making himself boon companion of all he met. He knew the city as Muir knew the peaks and mountain gardens of the Sierra, and he took the same delight in discovering a new specimen of humanity on a boat or an omnibus that Muir might take in finding a new plant on an Alaska glacier.

I knew all the drivers then, Broadway Jack, Dressmaker, Balky Bill, George Storms, Old Eliphant, his brother, Young Eliphant (who came afterward), Tippy, Pop Rice, Big Frank, Yellow Joe, Pete Callahan, Patsey Dee, and dozens more; for there were hundreds. They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good will and honor, under all circumstances.[85]

Almost daily, later ('50 to '60), I cross'd on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath—the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—hurrying, splashing sea-tides—the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes.... My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere—how well I remember them all.[86]

* * * * *

I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.[86]

The earlier Whitman is a man par excellence of the city as Muir is of the mountains and Thoreau of the woods.

I

A jungle of writings has sprung up about Whitman; as many as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perry and Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrangement. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscriminatingly. The "Chants Democratic," for instance, of the earlier editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is important, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in his evolution often tells much concerning his art.

There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material at critical points in Whitman's life, notably during that formative period preceding the first issue of Leaves of Grass. In his later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all autobiographical; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very ordinary poems and stories and editorials—how ordinary we can easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved—suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue of the Amaranth or the Gem would be unlike the book of Amos. What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the result of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extending over a period of years? Did it come as a sudden inspiration or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his soul. At one period we have verses like these:

Then suddenly without warning we have this:

That is the problem of Walt Whitman, a problem the most baffling and the most fascinating in the later range of American literature.

II

There can be little doubt that the primal impulse in the creation of Leaves of Grass came from the intellectual and moral unrest of the thirties and the forties. Whitman caught late, perhaps latest of all the writers of the period, the Transcendental spirit that had so unsettled America and the rest of the world as well. "What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!" Emerson had cried in 1844. Who "will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the 'Transcendental Movement' of thirty years ago"? Lowell had asked in 1865. "Apparently set astir by Carlyle's essays on the 'Signs of the Times,' and on 'History,' the final and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by 'Sartor Resartus.' At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham À Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny.... The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to set at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the newer and fairer creation was to be hatched in due time."[87] Whitman was a product of this ferment. He took its exaggerations and its wild dreams as solemn fact. He read Emerson and adopted his philosophy literally and completely: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." "He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness." "Insist on yourself; never imitate." "Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him." "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string." "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do," and so on and on.

All criticism of Whitman must begin with the fact that he was uneducated even to ignorance. He felt rather than thought. Of the intellectual life in the broader sense—science, analysis, patient investigation—he knew nothing. When he read he read tumultuously, without horizon, using his emotions and his half conceptions as interpreters. A parallel may be drawn between him and that other typical product of the era, Mrs. Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science cult. Both were mystics, almost pathologically so; both were electric with the urge of physical health; both were acted upon by the transcendental spirit of the era; both were utterly without humor; and both in all seriousness set about to establish a new conception of religion.

To Whitman the religious leader of an era was its poet. He would broaden the conception of the Poet until he made of him the leader and the savior of his age.

With assurance really sublime he announced himself as this poet of the new era, this new prophet of the ages:

He hails as comrade and fellow savior even Him who was crucified:

He too would give his life to the lowly and the oppressed; he too would eat with publicans and sinners; he too would raise the sick and the dying:

The poetic message of Whitman, the new message that was, as he believed, "to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion," he summed up himself in the phrase "The greatness of Love and Democracy"—Love meaning comradeship, hearty "hail, fellow, well met" to all men alike; Democracy meaning the equality of all things and all men—en masse. He is to be the poet of the East and the West, the North and the South alike; he is to be the poet of all occupations, and of all sorts and conditions of men. He salutes the whole world in toto and in detail. A great part of Leaves of Grass is taken up with enumerations of the universality and the detail of his poetic sympathy. He covers the nation with the accuracy of a gazetteer, and he enumerates its industries and its population, simply that he may announce, "I am the poet of these also."

The appearance of Whitman marks the first positive resurgence of masculinity in mid-century America. He came as the first loud protest against sentimentalism, against Longfellowism, against a prudish drawing-room literature from which all life and masculine coarseness had been refined. Whitman broke into the American drawing-room as a hairy barbarian, uncouth and unsqueamish, a Goth let loose among ladies, a Vandal smashing the bric-À-brac of an over-refined generation. He came in with a sudden leap, unlooked-for, unannounced, in all his nakedness and vulgarity like a primitive man, and proceeded to sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He mixed high and low, blab and divinity, because he knew no better. Like the savage that he was he adorned himself with scraps of feathers from his reading—fine words: libertad, camerado, ma femme, ambulanza, enfans d'Adam; half understood fragments of modern science; wild figures of speech from the Transcendental dreamers which he took literally and pushed to their logical limit. And he poured it all out in a mÉlange without coherence or logical sequence: poetry and slang, bravado and egotism, trash and divinity and dirt. At one moment he sings:

And the next moment be bursts out:

And he does it all honestly, unsmilingly, and ignorantly. It is because he had so small a horizon that he seems so to project beyond the horizon. To understand him one must understand first his ignorance.

But if he is a savage, he has also the vigor and dash and abounding health of the savage. He enters upon his work with unction and perfect abandonment; his lines shout and rush and set the blood of his reader thrilling like a series of war whoops. His first poem, the "Proto-Leaf," is, to say the least, exhilarating. Read straight through aloud with resonant voice, it arouses in the reader a strange kind of excitement. The author of it was young, in the very tempest of perfect physical health, and he had all of the youth's eagerness to change the course of things. His work is as much a gospel of physical perfection as is Science and Health. It is full of the impetuous passions of youth. It is not the philosophizing of an old savant, or of an observer experienced in life, it is the compelling arrogance of a young man in full blood, sure of himself, eager to reform the universe. The poems indeed are

The physical as yet is supreme. Of the higher laws of sacrifice, of self-effacement, of character that builds its own aristocracy and draws lines through even the most democratic mass, the poet knows really nothing. He may talk, but as yet it is talk without basis of experience. The poems are youthful in still another way: they are of the young soil of America; they are American absolutely, in spirit, in color, in outlook. Like Thoreau, Whitman never had all his life long any desire to visit any other land than his own. He was obsessed, intoxicated, with America. He began his reckoning of time with the year 1775 and dated his first book "the year 80 of the States." A large section of his poems is taken up with loving particularization of the land—not of New England and New York alone, but of the whole of it, every nook and corner of it. For the first time America had a poet who was as broad as her whole extent and who could dwell lovingly on every river and mountain and village from Atlantic to Pacific.

He glories in the heroic deeds of America, the sea fight of John Paul Jones, the defense of the Alamo, and his characterization of the various sections of the land thrills one and exhilarates one like a glimpse of the flag. What a spread, continent-wide, free-aired and vast—"Far breath'd land, Arctic braced! Mexican breezed!"—one gets in the crescendo beginning:

It is the first all American thrill in our literature.

The new literary form adopted by Whitman was not a deliberate and studied revolt from the conventional forms of the times: it was rather a discovery of Walt Whitman by himself. Style is the man: the "easily written, loose-fingered chords" of his chant, unrimed, lawless; this was Whitman himself. How he found it or when he found it, matters not greatly. It is possible that he got a hint from his reading of Ossian or of the Bible or of Eastern literature, but we know that at the end it came spontaneously. He was too indolent to elaborate for himself a deliberate metrical system, he was too lawless of soul to be bound by the old prosody. Whatever he wrote must loaf along with perfect freedom, unpolished, haphazard, incoherent. The adjective that best describes his style is loose—not logical, rambling, suggestive. His mind saunters everywhither and does not concentrate. In other words, it is an uneducated mind, an unfocused mind, a primitive mind.

The result was that, despite Whitman's freshness and force and stirring Americanism, he made little impression in the decade following the first Leaves of Grass. Emerson's commendation of him had been caused by his originality and his uncouth power, but none of the others of the mid-century school could see anything in the poems save vulgarity and egotistic posing. Lowell from first to last viewed him with aversion; Whittier burned the book at once as a nasty thing that had soiled him. The school of Keats and Tennyson, of Longfellow and Willis, ruled American literature with tyrannic power, and it was too early for successful revolution.

III

The Civil War found Whitman young; it left him an old man. There seems to have been no middle-age period in his life. He had matured with slowness; at forty, when he issued the 1860 Leaves of Grass, he was in the very prime of youth, the physical still central. There had been no suffering in his life, no grip of experience; he spoke much of the soul, but the soul was still of secondary importance. He wrote to his mother in 1862:

I believe I weigh about two hundred, and as to my face (so scarlet) and my beard and neck, they are terrible to behold. I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals among the poor languishing and wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair. Many of the soldiers are from the West, and far North, and they take to a man that has not the bleached, shiny and shaven cut of the cities and the East.[88]

The world of the 1860 Leaves of Grass is a world as viewed by a perfectly healthy young man, who has had his way to the full. The appeal of it is physiological rather than spiritual. It ends the first period of Whitman's poetical life.

His next book, Drum-Taps, came in 1866. Between the two had come the hospital experience of 1862–1865, from which had emerged the Whitman of the later period.

He had been drawn into this hospital experience, as into everything else in his life, almost by accident. It had come to him after no hard-fought battle with himself; it was the result of no compelling convictions. The war had progressed for a year before it assumed concrete proportions for him. It required the news that his brother was lying desperately wounded at Fredericksburg to move his imagination. When he had arrived at the front and had found his brother in no serious condition after all, he had drifted almost by accident into the misery of the ambulance trains and the hospitals, and before he had realized it, he was in the midst of the army nurses, working as if he had volunteered for the service. And thus he had drifted on to the end of the war, a self-appointed hospital worker, touching and helping thousands of sinking lives.

And he gave during those three years not only his youth but also his health of body. He was weakened at length with malaria and infected with blood poisoning from a wound that he had dressed. Moreover, the experience drained him on the side of his emotions and his nervous vitality until he went home to become at last paralytic and neurotic. The strain upon him he has described with a realism that unnerves one:

The war allowed Whitman to put into practice all his young manhood's dream of saviorship. It turned him from a preacher into a prophet and a man of action, one who took his earlier message and illustrated it at every point with works. It awakened within him a new ideal of life. He had been dealing heretofore with words:

No longer does he exult in his mere physical body. Lines like these he now edits from his early editions:

Also lines like these:

He omits everywhere freely now from the early editions, not from the "Children of Adam," however, though Emerson advised it with earnestness. The Whitmans were an obstinate race. "As obstinate as a Whitman," had been a degree of comparison; and here was one of them who had taken a position before the world and had maintained it in the face of persecution. Retreat would be impossible; but it is noteworthy that he wrote no more poems of sex and that he put forth no more of his tall talk and braggadocio. Swiftly he had become the poet of the larger life: the immaterial in man, the soul.

Drum-Taps, 1866, gives us the first glimpse of this new Whitman. The tremendous poem, "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps," marks the transition. In it he declares that he had, with hunger of soul, devoured only what earth had given him, that he had sought to content himself simply with nature and the material world.

He does not condemn this earlier phase of his development:

Now for the first time he realizes the meaning of Democracy, the deep inner meaning of Man and America.

It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will sing of Men—men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant souls. Drum-Taps fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new life. America has risen at last—one feels it in every line. The book gives more of the actual soul of the great conflict and of the new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. "Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to parents; "The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! Beat! Drums!" arouses like a bugle call; such sketches as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are full of the thrill and the excitement of war; and finally the poems in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English.

IV

In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.

It [Leaves of Grass] is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word—colonial—comprehends and stamps our literature.... At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctly and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life.

The defense fell for the most part on deaf ears. It had been Whitman's dream that the great poet of democracy was to be the idol of the common people, the poet loved and read even by the illiterate.

But the common people heard him not gladly: they preferred Longfellow. The American average man—"en masse"—sees no poetry in him. Moreover, he has been rejected very largely by the more educated. It has been his curious experience to be repudiated by democratic America and to be accepted and hailed as a prophet by the aristocratic intellectual classes of England and of Europe generally. Swinburne, W.M. Rossetti, Symonds, Dowden, Saintsbury, Tennyson, and very many others accepted him early and at full value, as did also Freiligrath, Schmidt, and BjÖrnson. A cult early sprang up about him, one composed largely of mystics, and revolutionists, and reformers in all fields.

In 1871, Whitman issued what unquestionably is his most notable prose work, Democratic Vistas. It is pitched in major key: it swells O'Connor's piping note into a trumpet blast. Boldly and radically it called for a new school of literature. The old is outgrown, it cried; the new is upon us; make ready for the great tide of Democratic poetry and prose that even now is sweeping away the old landmarks.

To the new era it was what Emerson's American Scholar was to the period that had opened in the thirties. It was our last great declaration of literary independence. Emerson, the Harvard scholar, last of a long line of intellectual clergymen, had pleaded for the aristocracy of literature, the American scholar, the man thinking his own thoughts, alone, the set-apart man of his generation; Whitman pleaded for the democracy of literature, for an American literature that was the product of the mass, a literature of the people, for the people, and by the people. Emerson had spoken as an oracle: "What crowded and breathless aisles! What windows clustering with eager heads!" Whitman was as one crying in the wilderness, uncouth, unheeded save by the few. Emerson was the clarion voice of Harvard; Whitman was the voice of the great movement that so soon was to take away the scepter from Harvard and transfer it upon the strong new learning of the West. His message was clear and it came with Carlyle-like directness:

Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day.

Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literati, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life.

He has this to say of the poets who thus far had voiced America:

Touch'd by the national test, or tried by the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what-not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.

America has not been free. She has echoed books; she has looked too earnestly to the East.

America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here.

Our literature must be American in spirit and in background, and only American.

What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own—the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always instead, a parcel of dandies and ennuyÉs, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rimes, the five-hundredth importation—or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel'd rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest.

America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only.

Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused her departure—restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has in the past, and does the present.

The book came winged with a double message: it was a defense and an explanation of Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, and it was the call for a new era in American literature. In both aspects it was notable, notable as Wordsworth's early prefaces were notable. It was both an effect and a cause. The same impulse that launched it launched also Thoreau and the nature school, Bret Harte and the Pike County balladists, Mark Twain and the vulgarians, Howells and realism, and all the great wave of literature of locality. Its effect and the effect of Leaves of Grass that went with it has been a marked one. After these two books there could be no more dilettanteism in art, no more art for mere art's sake, no more imitation and subservience to foreign masters; the time had come for a literature that was genuine and compelling, one that was American both in message and in spirit.

V

1871 was the culminating year of Whitman's literary life. He was at the fullness of his powers. His final attack of paralysis was as yet a year away. For the exhibition of the American Institute he put the message of Democratic Vistas into poetic form—"After All, not to Create Only"—a glorious invitation to the muses to migrate to America:

a perfect hexameter line it will be noted, as also this:

And the same year he put forth an enlarged and enriched Leaves of Grass, including in it the splendid "Passage to India," celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal, a poem that is larger than the mere geographic bounds of its subject, world-wide as they were, for it is a poem universe-wide, celebrating the triumphs of the human soul.

The poems grouped around this splendid outburst, as indeed all the rest of his poems until illness and age began to dim his powers, are pitched in this major key. No poet in any time ever maintained himself longer at such high levels. His poems which he entitled "Whispers of Heavenly Death," are all of the upper air and the glory of the released soul of man. Not even Shelley has more of lyric abandon and pure joy than Whitman in such songs as "Darest Thou Now, O Soul":

And what deeps and abysses in a lyric like this:

And then at last, paralyzed and helpless, his work done, the body he had gloried in slipping away from him, there came that magnificent outburst of faith and optimism that throws a glory over the whole of American poetry, the "Prayer of Columbus":

Sometime the poems of Whitman will be arranged in the order in which he wrote them, and then it will be seen that the poems by which he is chiefly judged—the chants of the body, the long catalogues of things (reduced greatly by the poet in his later editings), the barbaric yawp and the egotism—belong to only one brief period in his literary development; that in his later work he was the poet of the larger life of man, the most positive singer of the human soul in the whole range of English literature. If the earlier Whitman is the singer of a type of democracy that does not exist in America except as an abstract theory, the later Whitman is the singer of the universal heart of man. The Whitman that will endure emerged from the furnace of the Civil War. In his own words:

Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.[89]

And again,

I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged or been fashion'd or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than democratic America, and from the absolute triumph of the national Union arms.[90]

He is not always easy reading; he is not always consecutive and logical. He said himself that the key to his style was suggestiveness.

I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.

He is oracular; he talks darkly, like the priestess in the temple, in snatches and Orphic ejaculations, and we listen with eagerness. Had he been as clear and as consecutive as Longfellow he would not have had at all the vogue that has been his. Somehow he gives the impression constantly to his reader, as he gave it in earlier years to Thoreau, that there is something superhuman about him. He is a misty landscape illuminated by lightning flashes. We feel that we are near lofty mountains; now and then we catch glimpses of a snowy peak, but only for a moment. The fitful roll of the thunder excites us and the flashes sometimes terrify, and the whole effect of the experience is on the side of the feelings. There is little clear vision. Or, perhaps, a better figure: taking his entire work we have the great refuse heap of the universe. He shows it to us with eagerness; nothing disgusts him, nothing disconcerts him. Now he pulls forth a diamond, now a potsherd, and he insists that both are equally valuable. He is joyous at every return of the grappling hook. Are not all together in the heap; shall the diamond say to the potsherd, I am better than thou? He was early touched by the nature movement of the mid century. With half a dozen poems he has made himself the leading American poet of the sea. In all of his earlier work there breathes the spirit of the living out-of-doors until he may be ranked with Thoreau and Muir and Burroughs. It was the opinion of Burroughs that "No American poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman, or is more cautious in his uses of it." He is not the poet of the drawing-room—he is the poet of the vast sweep of the square miles, of the open sky, of the cosmos. "Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air," he contended; "is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as art is." And it was his mission, as he conceived it, "to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete."

He is not a scientist with Nature; he does not know enough to be a scientist, and his methods and cast of mind are hopelessly unscientific. He is simply a man who feels.

You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river, or marine nature generally. I repeat it—don't want to know too exactly, or the reasons why.

Such a paragraph is worth a chapter of analysis, and so also is a poem like this:

His intellect is not so developed as his emotions. He cannot think; he can feel. And after all is not the essence of all poetry, of all the meanings of life, of the soul, of Nature in its message to man, a thing not of the intellect but of the sensitive spirit of man?

VI

Of Whitman's poetic form there is still much to learn. In its earlier phases there was a sprawliness about it that at times was almost fatal to poetic effects, but he grew more metric with every edition and more and more pruned out the worst of his lines, such for instance as this:

His lines are not prose, even the worst of them. There is a roll about them, a falling of the voice at stressed intervals, an alternate time-beat, crude at times, violated often, yet nevertheless an obedience to law.

It is impossible for any poet, however lawless and apathetic to rules, to compose year after year without at last falling into a stereotyped habit of manner, and evolving a metric roll that is second nature. That Whitman was not conscious of any metric law within himself goes without saying. He believed that he was as free as the tides of the ocean and the waves that rolled among the rocks—lawless, unconfined.

I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but I confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages—that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.[91]

But a study of Whitman reveals the fact that certain laws did more and more assume mastery over him. With every year the time-beat of his poems grew increasingly hexametric. One may go through his later poems and find on the average a full hexameter line on every page. I quote at random:

His ear unconsciously seemed to demand the roll of the dactyl, then a cesura after from five to seven beats, then a closing roll longer or shorter as his mood struck him. The greater number of his later lines open as if the line was to be a hexameter: "Over the breast of the spring," "Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat," "Passing the apple tree blows," "Coffin that passes through lakes," and so on and on.

But one can make a broader statement. The total effect of the poems after 1870, like the "Song of the Redwood," for instance, is hexametric, though few of the lines may be hexameters as they stand. One might arrange this song like this:

Crude hexameters these undoubtedly, requiring much wrenching and eliding at times, yet for all that as one reads them aloud one cannot escape the impression that the total effect is hexametric. May it not be that the primal time beat for poetry is the hexameter, and that the prehistoric poets evolved it spontaneously even as the creator of Leaves of Grass evolved it?

VII

To insist that Whitman has had small influence on later poetry because none of the later poets has made use of his chant is feeble criticism. No poet even can make use of his verse form without plagiarism, for his loose-fingered chords and his peculiar time-beat, his line-lengths, his wrenched hexameters—all this was Whitman himself. In all other ways he enormously influenced his age. His realism, his concrete pictures, his swing and freedom, his Americanism, his insistence upon message, ethic purpose, absolute fidelity to the here and now rather than to books of the past—all have been enormously influential. He is the central figure of the later period, the voice in the wilderness that hailed its dim morning and the strong singer of its high noon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman. (1819–1892.) During the lifetime of the poet there were issued ten editions of Leaves of Grass, with the following dates: 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881, 1888, 1889, 1891.

Among his other publications were the following: 1866. Drum-Taps; 1870. Passage to India; 1871. Democratic Vistas; 1875. Memoranda During the War; 1876. Specimen Days and Collect; 1876. Two Rivulets; 1888. November Boughs; 1891. Good Bye My Fancy.

Among the works published after his death the most important are: 1897. Calamus: a Series of Letters Written During the Years 1868–1880 to a Young Friend. Edited by R.M. Bucke; 1898. The Wound Dresser: Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion. Edited by R.M. Bucke; 1904. Diary in Canada. Edited by W.S. Kennedy; 1910. Complete Prose Works, 10 vols. with biographical matter by O.L. Triggs, 1902; Poems, with biographical introduction by John Burroughs, 1902.

Among the great mass of biographies and studies may be mentioned the following: The Good Gray Poet, W.D. O'Connor, 1865; Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, John Burroughs, 1867; Whitman: a Study, John Burroughs, 1893; In Re Walt Whitman, R.M. Bucke, H. Traubel, and T.B. Harned, 1893; Walt Whitman, the Man, T. Donaldson, 1896; Walt Whitman: a Study, J. Addington Symonds, 1897; Walt Whitman (the Camden Sage) as Religious and Moral Teacher: a Study, W. Norman Guthrie, 1897; Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, E.P. Gould, 1900; Walt Whitman's Poetry, E.G. Holmes, 1901; Walt Whitman the Poet of the Wider Selfhood, M.T. Maynard, 1903; Walt Whitman, J. Platt, 1904; A Life of Walt Whitman, Henry B. Binns, 1905; A Vagabond in Literature, A. Rickett, 1906; Walt Whitman; His Life and Works, Bliss Perry, 1906; Days with Walt Whitman. With Some Notes on His Life and Work, Edward Carpenter, 1906; With Walt Whitman in Camden (March 28-July 14, 1880), Horace Traubel, 1906; Walt Whitman. English Men of Letters Series. George Rice Carpenter, 1909; Approach to Walt Whitman, C.E. Noyes, 1910; Democracy and Poetry, F.B. Gummere, 1911; Walt Whitman, Basil de Selincourt, 1914. A bibliography of Whitman's writings is appended to O.L. Triggs's Selections, 1898.

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