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I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it
the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very
happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of
what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the
temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the
name as real
HERE are thirty-two Poems, which I send you, dear Friend and Master, not having found how I could satisfy myself with sending any usual acknowledgment of your letter. The first edition, on which you mailed me that till now unanswered letter, was twelve poems—I printed a thousand copies, and they readily sold; these thirty-two Poems I stereotype, to print several thousand copies of. I much enjoy making poems. Other work I have set for myself to do, to meet people and The States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue; but the work of my life is making poems. I keep on till I make a hundred, and then several hundred—perhaps a thousand. The way is clear to me. A few years, and the average annual call for my Poems is ten or twenty thousand copies—more, quite likely. Why should I hurry or compromise? In poems or in speeches I say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something.
Master, I am a man who has perfect faith. Master, we have not come through centuries, caste, heroisms, fables, to halt in this land today. Or I think it is to collect a ten-fold impetus that any halt is made. As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and sereams of disputants, so America. Let all defer. Let all
Swiftly, on limitless foundations, the United States too are founding a literature. It is all as well done, in my opinion, as could be practicable. Each element here is in condition. Every day I go among the people of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, and other cities, and among the young men, to discover the spirit of them, and to refresh myself. These are to be attended to; I am myself more drawn here than to those authors, publishers, importations, reprints, and so forth. I pass coolly through those, understanding them perfectly well. and that they do the indispensable service, outside of men like me, which nothing else could do. In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth.
The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language—all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female—to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been
What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live—yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood.
With composure I see such propositions, seeing more and more every day of the answers that
serve. Expressions do
All current nourishments to literature serve. Of authors and editors I do not know how many there are in The States, but there are thousands, each one building his or her step to the stairs by which giants shall mount. Of the twenty-four modern mammoth two-double, three-double, and four-double cylinder presses now in the world, printing by steam, twenty-one of them are in These States. The twelve thousand large and small shops for dispensing books and newspapers—the same number of public libraries, any one of which has all the reading wanted to equip a man or woman for American reading—the three thousand different newspapers, the nutriment of the imperfect ones coming in just as usefully as any—the story papers, various, full of strong-flavored romances, widely circulated—the onecent and two-cent journals—the political ones, no matter what side—the weeklies in the country—the sporting and pictorial papers—the monthly magazines, with plentiful imported feed—the sentimental novels, numberless copies of them—the low-priced flaring tales, adventures, biographies—all are prophetic; all waft rapidly on.
I see that they swell wide, for reasons. I am not troubled at the movement of them, but greatly pleased. I see plying
A profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves. Always waiting untold in the souls of the armies of common people, is stuff better than anything that can possibly appear in the leadership of the same. That gives final verdicts. In every department of These States, he who travels with a coterie, or with selected persons, or with imitators, or with infidels, or with the owners of slaves, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a man, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a woman, or with any thing less than the bravest and the openest, travels straight for the
Just so long, in our country or any country, as no revolutionists advance, and are backed by the people, sweeping off the swarms of routine representatives, officers in power, book-makers, teachers, ecclesiastics, politicians, just so long, I perceive, do they who are in power fairly represent that country, and remain of use, probably of very great use. To supersede them, when it is the pleasure of These States, full provision is made; and I say the time has arrived to use it with a strong hand. Here also the souls of the armies have not only overtaken the souls of the officer, but passed on, and left the souls of the officers behind out of sight many weeks' journey; and the souls of the armies now go en-masse without officers. Here also formulas, glosses, blanks, minutiæ, are choking the throats of the spokesmen to death. Those things most listened for, certainly those are the things least said. There is not a single History of the World. There is
not one of America, or of the organic compacts of These States, or of Washington, or of Jefferson, nor of Language, nor any Dictionary of the English Language. There is no great author; every one has demeaned himself to some etiquette or some impotence. There is no manhood or life-power in poems; there are shoats and
Up to the present, as helps best, the people, like a lot of large boys, have no determined tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, and of their destiny, and of their immense strides—accept with voracity whatever is presented them in novels, histories, newspapers, poems, schools, lectures, every thing. Pretty soon, through these
America, having duly conceived, bears out of herself offspring of her own to do the workmanship wanted. To freedom, to strength, to poems, to personal greatness, it is never permitted to rest, not a generation or part of a generation. To be ripe beyond further increase is to prepare to die. The architects of These States laid their foundations, and passed to further, spheres. What they laid is a work done; as much more remains. Now are needed other architects, whose duty is not less difficult, but perhaps more difficult. Each age forever needs architects. America is not finished, perhaps never will be; now America is a divine true sketch. There are Thirty-Two States sketched—the population thirty millions. In a few years there will be Fifty States. Again in a few years there will be A Hundred States, the population hundreds of millions, the freshest and freest of men. Of course such men stand to nothing less than the freshest and freest expression.
Poets here, literats here, are to rest on organic different bases from other countries; not a class set apart, circling only in the circle of themselves, modest and pretty, desperately scratching for rhymes, pallid with white paper, shut off, aware of the old pictures and traditions of the race, but unaware of the actual race around them—not breeding in and in among each other till they all have the scrofula. Lands of ensemble, bards of ensemble! Walking freely out from the old traditions, as our politics has walked out, American poets and literats recognize nothing behind them superior to what is present with them—recognize with joy the sturdy living forms of the men and women of These States, the divinity of sex, the perfect eligibility of the female with the male, all The States, liberty and equality, real articles, the different trades, mechanics, the
A word remains to be said, as of one ever present, not yet permitted to be acknowledged, discarded or made dumb by literature, and the results apparent. To the lack of an avowed, empowered, unabashed development of sex, (the only salvation for the same,) and to the fact of speakers and writers fraudulently assuming as always dead what every one knows to be always alive, is attributable the remarkable non-personality and indistinctness of modern productions in books, art, talk; also that in the scanned lives of men and women most of them appear to have béen for some time past of the neuter gender; and also the stinging fact that in orthodox society today. if the dresses were changed, the men might easily pass for women and the women for men.
Infidelism usurps most with fœtid polite face; among the rest infidelism about sex. By silence or obedience the pens of savans, poets, historians, biographers, and the rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts, are unmentionable and to be ashamed of, to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them. This filthy law
has to be repealed—it stands in the way of great reforms. Of women just as much as
To poets and literats—to every woman and man, today or any day, the conditions of the present, needs, dangers, prejudices, and the like, are the perfect conditions on which we are here, and the conditions for wording the future with undissuadable words. These States, receivers of
Of course, we shall have a national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon—with the states around the Mexican sea—with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa—with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island—with all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis—there is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen
and freemen of The States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception whatever—each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that new moral
Those shores you found. I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you.
Receive, dear Master, these statements and assurances through me, for all the young men, and for an earnest that we know none before you, but the best following you; and that we demand to take your name into our keeping, and that we understand what you have indicated, and find the same indicated in ourselves, and that we will stick to it and enlarge upon it through These States.
WE have before us one of the most extraordinary specimens of Yankee intelligence and American eccentricity in authorship, it is possible to conceive. It is of a genus so peculiar as to embarrass us, and has an air at once so novel, so audacious, and so strange as to verge upon absurdity, and yet it would be an injustice to pronounce it so, as the work is saved from this extreme by a certain mastery over diction not very easy of definition. What Emerson has pronounced to be good must not be lightly treated, and before we pronounce upon the merits of this performance it is but right to examine them. We have, then, a series of pithy prose sentences strung together—forming twelve grand divisions in all, but which, having a rude rhymical cadence about them, admit of the designation poetical being applied. They are destitute of rhyme, measure of feet, and the like, every condition under which poetry is generally understood to exist being absent; but in their strength of expression, their fervor, hearty wholesomeness, their originality, mannerism, and freshness, one finds in them a singular harmony and flow, as if by reading, they gradually formed themselves into melody, and adopted characteristics peculiar and appropriate to themselves alone. If, however, some sentences be fine, there are others altogether laughable; nevertheless, in the bare strength, the unhesitating frankness of a man who "believes in the flesh and the appetites," and who dares to call simplest things by their plainest names, conveying also a large sense of the beautiful, and with an emphasis which gives a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is than any thing we have, in all conventional forms of word, deed, or act so far known of, that we rid ourselves, little by little, of the
To give judgment on real poems, one needs an account of the poet himself. Very devilish to some, and very divine to some, will appear the poet of these new poems, the "LEAVES OF GRASS;" an attempt, as they are, of a naive, masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, imperious person, to cast into literature not only his own grit and arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, regardless of models, regardless of modesty or law, and ignorant or silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except his own presence and experience, and all outside the fiercely loved land of his birth, and the birth of his parents and their parents for several generations before him. Politeness this man has none, and regulation he has none. A rude child of the people!—No imitation—No foreigner—but a growth and idiom of America. No discontented—a careless slouch, enjoying to-day. No dilletant democrat—a man who is art-and-part with the commonalty, and with immediate life—loves the streets—loves the docks—loves the free rasping talk of men—likes to be called by his given name, and nobody at all need Mr him—can laugh with laughers—likes the cheap ways of laborers—is not prejudiced one mite against the Irish—talks readily with them—talks readily with niggers—does not make a stand on being a gentleman, nor on learning or manners—eats cheap fare, likes the strong-flavored coffee of the coffee-stands in the market, at sunrise—likes a supper of oysters fresh from the oyster-smack—likes to make one at the crowded table among sailors and workpeople—would leave a select soiree of elegant people any time to go with tumultuous men,
Other poets celebrate great events, personages, romances, wars, loves, passions, the victories and power of their country, or some real or imagined incident—and polish their work, and come to conclusions, and satisfy the reader. This poet celebrates himself; and that is the way he celebrates all. He comes to no conclusions, and does not satisfy the reader. He certainly leaves him what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of the Paradisaic tree of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be erased again.
What good is it to argue about egotism? There can be no two thoughts on Walt Whitman's egotism. That is avowedly what he steps out of the crowd and turns and faces them for. Mark, critics! Otherwise is not used for you the key that leads to the use of the other keys to this well-enveloped man. His whole work, his life, manners, friendships, writings, all have among their leading purposes an evident purpose to stamp a new type of character, namely his own, and indelibly fix it and publish it, not for a model but an illustration, for the present and future of American letters and American young men, for the south the same as the north, and for the Pacific and Mississippi country, and Wisconsin and Texas and Kansas and Canada and Havana and Nicaragua, just as much as New York and Boston. Whatever is needed toward this achievement he puts his hand to, and lets imputations take their time to die.
First be yourself what you would show in your poem—such seems to be this man's example and inferred rebuke to the schools of poets. He makes no allusions to books or writers; their spirits do not seem to have touched him; he has not a word to say for or against them, or their theories or ways. He never offers others; what he continually offers is the man whom our Brooklynites know so well. Of pure American breed, large and lusty—age thirty-six years, (1855,)—never once using medicine—never dressed in black, always dressed freely and clean in strong clothes —
Amativeness large, ∗6; Philoprogenitiveness, 6; Adhesiveness, 6; Inhabitiveness, 6; Concentrativeness, 4; Combativeness, 6; Destructiveness, 5 to 6; Alimentiveness, 6; Acquisitiveness, 4; Secretiveness, 3; Cautiousness, 6; Approbativeness, 4; Self-Esteem, 6 to 7; Firmness, 6 to 7; Conscientiousness, 6; Hope, 4; Marvellousness, 3; Veneration, 4; Benevolence, 6 to 7; Constructiveness, 5; Ideality, 5 to 6; Sublimity, 6 to 7; Imitation, 5; Mirthfulness, 5; Individuality, 6; Form, 6; Size, 6; Weight, 6; Color, 3; Order, 5; Calculation, 5; Locality, 6; Eventuality, 6; Time, 3; Tune, 4; Language, 5; Causality, 5 to 6; Comparison, 6; Suavitiveness, 4; Intuitiveness, or Human Nature, 6. ∗ The organs are marked by figures from 1 to 7, indicating their degrees of development, 1 meaning very small, 2 small, 3 moderate, 4 average, 5 full, 6 large, and 7 very large.Phrenological Notes on W. Whitman, by L. N. FOWLER, July, 1849.—Size of head large, 23 inches. Leading traits appear to be Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self-Esteem, and markedly among his combinations the dangerous faults of Indolence, a tendency to the pleasures of Voluptuousness and Alimentiveness, and a certain reckless swing of animal will.
Carlyle represents a cotemporary reviewer taking leave of the Belles-Lettres department somewhat in this abrupt manner: "The end having come, it is fit that we end—Poetry having ceased to be read, or published, or written, how can it continue to be reviewed? With your Lake Schools, and Border-Thief Schools, and Cockney and Satanic Schools, there has been enough to do; and now, all these Schools having burnt or smouldered themselves out, and left nothing but a wide-spread wreck of ashes, dust, and cinders—or perhaps dying embers, kicked to and fro under the feet of innumerable women and children in the magazines, and at best blown here and there into transient sputters, what remains but to adjust ourselves to circumstances? Urge me not," continues this desperate Literateur, "with considerations that Poetry, as the inward Voice of Life, must be perennial, only dead in one form to become alive in another; that this still abundant deluge of Metre, seeing there must needs be fractions of Poetry floating, scattered in it, ought still to be net-fished, at all events, surveyed and taken note of. The survey of English metre, at this epoch, perhaps transcends the human faculties; to hire out the reading of it by estimate, at a remunerative rate per page, would, in a few quarters, reduce the cashbox of any
extant review to the verge of insolvency."
Such is the humorous but essentially truthful picture of the condition and product of the creative faculties during the second quarter of the present century. The great poets, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Schiller, had fulfilled their tasks and gone to other spheres; and all that remained, with few exceptions, were weak and feeble echoes of their dying strains, caught up and repeated by numerous imitators and pretenders. And so has it ever been; the visions and
perceptions of one man become the creed and superficial life-element of other minds. Swedenborg is worthy to be enrolled among the master-minds of the world, because he entered for himself into the
But Divine Providence, leading forth the race, as a father the tottering steps of his children, causes the outward form on which all men are prone to rely, to be forever changing and passing away before their eyes. The seeds of death are ever found lurking in the fairest external appearances, till those externals become the mere correspondences and representatives of interior realities, and then, though enduring as the fadeless garments of the blest, they are ever-varying, as those robes of light change with each changing state. The Coming Age will recognize the profoundest truths in the internal thought of the Swedish sage, while his most tenacious adherents will be forced to admit that, in externals, he often erred, and was not unfrequently deceived. But the discovered error will not only wean them from a blind and bigoted reliance upon frail man, but confirm the sincere lovers of truth in loyalty to her standard. So, also, the Spiritualists are being taught a severe but salutary lesson, that if they will penetrate into the heavenly Arcana of the Inner Life, they must do so by purifying and elevating their own minds, and not by "sitting in circles" or ransacking town and country to find the most "reliable Mediums." Still no step in human progress and development is in vain; even the falls of the child are essential to its discipline. The mistakes and errors of men are needful while in their present imperfect state. They are to the seekers of truth what trials and losses are to those in the pursuit of wealth; they but enhance the value of the prize, and confirm the devotion of the true aspirant, as frowns rekindle the ardor of lovers.
Moreover, as man must ever enter into the kingdom of a new unfolding truth with the simplicity and teachableness of little children, it is well that the outer form of the old disappear, that the new may stand alone in its place. It seems also to be a Law that when a change entire and
But in the transition period in which we now are, many varieties of Mediumship must be expected. There are those who stand in rapport with the diseased mentalities of the past and present, and pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age; they are the sponges who absorb the waste and impurities of humanity. They are also like running sores that gather the corrupt humors and drain the body of its most noxious fluids. There are others who come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life. These give crude, and in themselves, false notions of the state of man after death; yet they prepare the way for more truthful disclosures; if in no other way
There are other mediatorial natures who are in mental and heart-sympathy with man, as he now is, struggling to free himself from the tyranny of the old and effete, and to grasp and retain the new life flowing down from the heavens. And as the kindling rays at first produce more smoke than fire, so their lay is one of promise rather than performance. Such we conceive to be the interior condition of the author of "LEAVES OF GRASS." He accepts man as he is as to his whole nature, and all men as his own brothers. The lambent flame of his genius encircles the world—nor does he clearly discern between that which is to be preserved and that which is but as fuel for the purification of the ore from its dross. There is a wild strength, a Spartan simplicity about the man, and he stalks among the dapper gentlemen of this generation, like a drunken Hercules amid the dainty dancers. That his song is highly mediatorial, he himself asserts, though probably he is unacquainted with the Spiritual developments of the age.
"Through me," he sings, "many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of slaves, Voices of the diseased and despairing, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of threads that connect the stars, And of the rights of them the others are down upon. Through me forbidden voices—voices veiled, Voices indecent, by me clarified and transfigured."
We omit much even in this short extract, for the book abounds in passages that can not be quoted in drawing-rooms, and expressions that fall upon the tympanums of ears polite, with a terrible dissonance. His very gait, as he walks through the world, makes dainty people nervous, and conservatives regard him as a social revolution. His
(Extract of several pages)
Such are the graphic pictures which this new world-painter flings from his easel and dashes upon the moving panorama of life. His night-thoughts are not less striking, as, borne by the Muse, he looks into every chamber, and hears the quiet breathing of slumbering humanity.
As the volume advances toward its conclusion, the Spirit of the poet becomes calmer and more serenely elevated. But everywhere his sympathy is with man, and not with conventionalisms.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
We can not take leave of this remarkable volume without advising our friends, who are not too delicately nerved, to study the work as a sign of the times, written, as we perceive, under powerful influxes; a prophecy and promise of much that awaits all who are entering with us into the opening doors of a new Era. A portion of that thought, which broods over the American nation, is here seized and bodied forth by a son of the people, rudely, wildly, and with some perversions, yet strongly and genuinely, according to the perception of this bold writer. He is the young Hercules who has seized the serpents that would make him and us their prey; but instead of strangling, he would change them to winged and beautiful forms, who shall become the servants of mankind.
WALT WHITMAN'S LEAVES OF GRASS.—Our account of the last month's literature would be incomplete without some notice of a curious and lawless collection of poems, called "LEAVES OF GRASS," and issued in a thin quarto, without the name of publisher or author. The poems, twelve in number, are neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps think, without any idea of sense or reason. The
(Extract.)
The application of these principles, and of many others equally peculiar, which are expounded in a style equally oracular throughout the long preface—is made passim, and often with comical success, in the poems themselves, which may briefly be described as a compound of the New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy. A fireman or omnibus driver, who had intelligence enough to absorb the speculations of that school of thought which culminated at Boston some fifteen or eighteen years ago, and resources of expression to put them forth again in a form of his own, with sufficient self-conceit and contempt for public taste to affront all usual propriety of diction, might have written this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet somehow fascinating book. As we say, it is a mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism, and, what must be surprising to both these elements, they here seem to fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony. The vast and vague conceptions of the one, lose nothing of their quality in passing through the coarse and odd intellectual medium of the other; while there is an original perception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness in our new poet, which belong to no other adept of the transcendental school. But we have no intention of regularly criticizing this very irregular production; our aim is rather to cull, from the rough and ragged thicket of its pages, a few passages equally remarkable in point of thought and expression. Of course we do not select those which are the most transcendental or the most bold.
(Extracts.)
As seems very proper in a book of transcendental poetry, the author withholds his name from the
title-page, and
ALT WHITMAN. Brooklyn, 1855. MAUD, and other
Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON. London, 1855.
It is always reserved for second-rate poems immediately to gratify. As first-rate or natural objects, in their perfect simplicity and proportion, do not startle or strike, but appear no more than matters of course, so probably natural poetry does not, for all its being the rarest, and telling of the longest and largest work. The artist or writer whose talent is to please the connoisseurs of his time, may obey the laws of his time, and achieve the intense and elaborated beauty of parts. The perfect poet cannot afford any special beauty of parts, or to limit himself by any laws less than those universal ones of the great masters, which include all times, and all men and women, and the living and the dead. For from the study of the universe is drawn this irrefragable truth, that the law of the requisites of a grand poem, or any other complete workmanship, is originality, and the average and superb beauty of the ensemble. Possessed with this law, the fitness of aim, time, persons, places, surely follows. Possessed with this law, and doing justice to it, no poet or any one else will make anything ungraceful or mean, any more than any emanation of nature is.
The poetry of England, by the many rich geniuses of
English versification is full of these danglers, and America follows after them. Every body writes poetry, and yet there is not a single poet. An age greater than the proudest of the past is swiftly slipping away, without one lyric voice to seize its greatness and speak it as an encouragement and onward lesson. We have heard, by many grand announcements, that he was to come; but will he come?
A mighty Poet whom this age shall choose To be its spokesman to all coming times. In the ripe full-blown season of his soul, He shall go forward in his spirit's strength,
And grapple with the questions of all time, And wring from them their meanings. As King Saul Called up the buried prophet from his grave To speak his doom, so shall this Poet-king Call up the dread past from its awful grave To tell him of our future. As the air Doth sphere the world, so shall his heart of love— Loving mankind, not peoples. As the lake Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, Shall he reflect our great humanity; And as the young Spring breathes with living breath On a dead branch, till it sprouts fragrantly Green leaves and sunny flowers, shall he breathe life Through every theme he touch, making all Beauty And Poetry forever like the stars. ( .) Alexander Smith
The best of the school of poets at present received in Great Britain and America is Alfred Tennyson. He is the bard of ennui and of the aristocracy and their combination into love. This love is the old stock love of playwrights and romancers, Shakspeare the same as the rest. It is possessed of the same unnatural and shocking passion for some girl or woman, that wrenches it from its manhood, emasculated and impotent, without strength to hold the rest of the objects and goods of life in their proper positions. It seeks nature for sickly uses. It goes screaming and weeping after the facts of the universe, in their calm beauty and equanimity, to note the occurrence of itself, and to sound the news, in connection with the charms of the neck, hair, or complexion of a particular female.
Poetry, to Tennyson and his British and American eleves, is a gentleman of the first degree,
boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring the ladies, and talking to them
in company with that elaborate halfchoked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license
of men among themselves. The spirit of the burnished society of upper-class England fills this
writer and his effusions from top to toe. Like that, he does not ignore courage and the superior
qualities of men, but all is to show forth through dandified forms. He meets the nobility and
gentry half-way. The models are the same both to the poet and the parlors. Both have the same
supercilious elegance, both love the reminiscences which extol caste, both agree on the topics
proper for mention and discussion, both hold the same undertone of church and state, both have
the same languishing melancholy and irony, both indulge largely in persiflage, both are marked
by the contour of high blood and a constitutional a version to anything cowardly
Meanwhile a strange voice parts others aside and demands for its owner that position that is only allowed after the seal of many returning years has stamped with approving stamp the claims of the loftiest leading genius. Do you think the best honors of the earth are won so easily, Walt Whitman? Do you think city and country are to fall before the vehement egotism of your recitative of yourself?
I am the poet of the body, And I am the poet of the soul. The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with
me,The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a
new tongue.I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. I chant a new chant of dilation or pride, We have had ducking and deprecating about enough, I show that size is only development.
It is indeed a strange voice! Critics and lovers and readers of poetry as hitherto written, may well be excused the chilly and unpleasant shudders which will assuredly run through them, to their very blood and bones, when they first read Walt Whitman's poems. If this is poetry, where must its foregoers stand! And what is at once to become of the ranks of rhymsters, melancholy and swallow-tailed, and of all the confectioners and upholsterers of verse, if the tan-faced man here advancing and claiming to speak for America and the nineteenth hundred of the Christian list of years, typifies indeed the natural and proper bard?
The theory and practice of poets have hitherto been to select certain ideas or events or
personages, and then
Of the spirit of life in visible forms—of the spirit of the seed growing out of the ground—of the spirit of the resistless motion of the globe passing unsuspected but quick as lightning along its orbit—of them is the spirit of this man's poetry. Like them it eludes and mocks criticism, and appears unerringly in results. Things, facts, events, persons, days, ages, qualities, tumble pell-mell, exhaustless and copious, with what appear to be the same disregard of parts and the same absence of special purpose, as in nature. But the voice of the few rare and controlling critics, and the voice of more than one generation of men or two generations of men, must speak for the inexpressible purposes of nature, and for this haughtiest of writers that has ever yet written and printed a book. His is to prove either the most lamentable of failures or the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature. And after all we have written we confess our brain-felt and heart-felt inability to decide which we think it is likely to be.
We had ceased, we imagined to be surprised at anything that America could produce. We had
become stoically indifferent
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual.
The words "an American" are a surplusage, "one of the roughs" too painfully apparent; but what
is intended to be conveyed by "a kosmos" we cannot tell, unless it means a man who thinks that
the fine essence of poetry consists in writing a book which an American reviewer is compelled to
declare is "not to be read aloud to a mixed audience." We should have passed over this book,
"LEAVES OF GRASS," with indignant contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics
attempted to "fix" this Walt Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature
to America—who shall form a race of poets as Banquo's issue formed a line of kings. Is it
possible that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in
the nostrils? We hope not; and yet there is a probability, and we will show why, that this Walt
Whitman will not meet with the stern rebuke which he so richly deserves. America has felt,
oftener perhaps than we have declared, that she has no national poet—that each one of her
children of song has relied too much on European inspiration, and clung too fervently to the old
conventionalities. It is therefore not unlikely that she may believe in the dawn of a thoroughly
original literature, now there has arisen a man who scorns the Hellenic deities, who has no belief
in, perhaps because he has no knowledge of, Homer and
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawpover the roofs of the world.
Is this man with the "barbaric yawp" to push Longfellow into the shade, and he meanwhile to
stand and "make mouths" at the sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not
ridiculous. That object or that act which most develops the ridiculous element carries in its
bosom the seeds of decay, and is wholly powerless to trample out of God's universe one spark of
the beautiful. We do not, then, fear this Walt Whitman, who gives us slang in the place of
melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. The depth of his indecencies will be the grave
of his fame, or ought to be if all proper feeling is not extinct. The very nature of this man's
compositions excludes us from proving by extracts the truth of our remarks; but we, who are not
prudish, emphatically declare that the man who wrote page 79 of the "LEAVES OF GRASS"
deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip. Walt Whitman libels the highest type
of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man: we, who may have
been misdirected by civilization, call it the expression of a beast.
The leading idea of Walt Whitman's poems is as old as
Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to the jail but I am handcuffed to
him and walk by his side,Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last
gasp.
To show this sympathy he instances a thousand paltry, frivolous, and obscene circumstances. Herein we may behold the difference between a great and a contemptible poet. What Shakspeare—mighty shade of the mightiest bard, forgive us the comparison!—expressed in a single line,
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
this Walt Whitman has tortured into scores of pages. A single extract will show what we mean. This miserable spinner of words declares that the earth has "no themes, or hints, or provokers," and never had, if you cannot find such themes, or hints, or provokers in—
(Extract.)
Can it be possible that its author intended this as a portion of a poem? Is it not more reasonable
to suppose that Walt Whitman has been learning to write, and that the compositor has got hold of
his copy-book? The American critics are, in the main, pleased with this man because he is
self-reliant, and because he assumes all the attributes of his country. If Walt Whitman has really
assumed those attributes, America should hasten to repudiate them, be they what they may. The
critics are pleased also because he talks like a man unaware that there was ever such a production
as a book, or ever such a being as a writer. This in the present day is a qualification exceedingly
rare, and may be valuable, so we wish those gentlemen joy of their GREAT
UNTAMED.
We must not neglect to quote an unusual passage, which may be suggestive to writers of the Old World. To silence our incredulous readers, we assure them that the passage may be found at page 92.
(Extract.)
The transformation and the ethereal nature of Walt Whitman is marvellous to us, but perhaps not so to a nation from which the spirit-rappers sprung.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun; I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags; I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
Here is also a sample of the man's slang and vulgarity:
(Extract.)
And here a spice of his republican insolence, his rank Yankeedom, and his audacious trifling with death:
Dig out King George's coffin, unwrap him quick from the , box up his bones for a journey, grave-
clothesgrave-clothes Find a swift Yankee clipper: here is freight for you, black-bellied
clipper,Up with your anchor! shake out your sails, steer straight toward
Boston Bay.The committee open the box and set up the regal ribs, and glue those
that will not stay,And clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the
skull.
We will neither weary nor insult our readers with more extracts from this notable book. Emerson
has praised it, and called it the "most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has
yet contributed." Because Emerson has grasped substantial fame, he can afford to be generous;
but Emerson's generosity must not be mistaken for justice. If this work is really a work of
genius—if the principles of those poems, their free language, their amazing and audacious
egotism, their animal vigor, be real poetry and the divinest evidence of the true poet—then our
studies have been in vain, and vainer still the homage which we have paid the monarchs of Saxon
intellect, Shakspeare, and Milton, and Byron. This Walt Whitman holds that his claim to be a
poet lies in his robust and rude health. He is, in fact, as he declares, "the poet of the body." Adopt
this theory, and Walt Whitman is a Titan; Shelley and Keats the merest pigmies. If we had
commenced a notice of "LEAVES OF GRASS" in anger, we could not but dismiss it in grief, for
its author, we have just discovered, is conscious of his affliction. He says, at page 33,
I am given up by traitors;I talk wildly, I am mad.
We have too long overlooked in this country the great poet who has recently arisen in America, of whom some of his countrymen speak in connection with Bacon and Shakspeare, whom others compare with Tennyson—much to the disadvantage of our excellent laureate—and to whom Mr. Emerson writes that he finds in his book "incomparable things, said incomparably well." The book he pronounces "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed;" at which, indeed, says Mr. Emerson in the printed letter sent to us—"I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion."
No illusion truly is Walt Whitman, the new American prodigy, who, as he is himself candid enough to intimate, sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He is described by one of his own local papers as "a tenderly, affectionate, rowdyish, contemplative, sensual, moral, susceptible, and imperious person," who aspires to cast some of his own grit, whatever that may be, into literature. We have ourselves been disposed to think there is in literature grit enough, according to the ordinary sense, but decidedly Walt Whitman tosses in some more. The author describes himself as "one of the roughs, a kosmos;" indeed, he seems to be very much impressed with the fact that he is a kosmos, and repeats it frequently. A kosmos we may define, from the portrait of it on the front of the book, as a gentleman in his shirt-sleeves, with one hand in a pocket of his pantaloons, and his wide-awake cocked with a dammee-sir air over his forehead.
On the other hand, according to an American review that flatters Walt Whitman, this kosmos is "a compound of the New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy."
But as such terms of compliment may not be quite clear to English readers, we must be content,
in simpler fashion, to describe to them this Brooklyn boy as a wild Tupper of the West. We can
describe him perfectly by a few suppositions. Suppose that Mr. Tupper had been brought up to
the business of an auctioneer, then banished to the backwoods, compelled to live for a long time
as a backwoodsman, and thus contracting a passion for the reading of Emerson and Carlyle?
Suppose him maddened by this course of
EAVES OF GRASS."
(Extracts and Interlineated remarks.)
We must be just to Walt Whitman in allowing that he has one positive merit. His verse has a
purpose. He desires to assert the pleasure that a man has in himself, his body and its sympathies,
his mind (in a lesser degree, however) and its sympathies. He asserts man's right to express his
delight in animal enjoyment, and the harmony in which he should stand, body and soul, with
fellow-men and the whole universe. To express this, and to declare that the poet is the highest
manifestation of this, generally also to suppress shams, is the purport of these "LEAVES OF GRASS." Perhaps it might have been done as well, however, without being always so purposely
obscene, and intentionally foulmouthed, as Walt Whitman is.
(Extracts and Interlineations.)
In the construction of our artificial Whitman, we began with the requirement that a certain
philosopher should have been bred to the business of an auctioneer. We must add now, to
complete the imitation of Walt Whitman, that the wild philosopher and poet, as conceived by us,
should be perpetually haunted by the delusion that he has a catalogue to make. Three-fourths of
Walt Whitman's book is poetry as catalogues of auctioneers are poems. Whenever any general
term is used, off the mind wanders on this fatal track, and an attempt is made to specify all lots
included under it. Does Walt Whitman speak of a town, he is at once ready with pages of town
lots. Does he mention the American country, he feels bound thereupon to draw up a list of barns,
waggons, wilds, mountains, animals, trees, people, "a Hoosier, a Badger, a Buckeye, a
Louisianian, or Georgian, a poke-easy from sand-hills and pines,"
&c., &c. We will give an
illustration of this form of lunacy. The subject from which the patient starts off is equivalent to
things in general, and we can spare room only for half the catalogue. It will be enough, however,
to show how there
The usual routine, the workshop, factory, yard, office, store, or desk; The jaunt of hunting or fishing, or the life of hunting or fishing. Pasture-life, foddering, milking and herding, and all the personnel and
usages;The plum-orchard and apple-orchard, gardening, seedlings, cuttings,
flowers and vines,Grains and manures, marl, clay, loam, the subsoil plough, the shovel
and pick and rake and hoe, irrigation and draining;The currycomb, the horse-cloth, the halter and bridle and bits, the
very wisps of straw,The barn and barn-yard, the bins and mangers, the mows and racks; Manufactures, commerce, engineering, the building of cities, and every trade carried on there, and the implements of every trade.
(Extract continued.)
Now let us compare with this a real auctioneer's catalogue. We will take that of Goldsmith's
chambers, by way of departing as little as we can from the poetical. For, as Walt Whitman would
say (and here we quote quite literally, prefixing only a verse of our own, from "A Catalogue of
the Household Furniture with the select collection of scarce, curious, and valuable books of Dr.
Goldsmith, deceased, which, by order of the admr, will be sold by auction, &c.,
&c.)
(The Examiner's burlesque of Walt Whitman.)
"Latter-day poetry" in America is of a very different character from the same manifestation in the
old country. Here, it is occupied for the most part with dreams of the middle ages, of the old
knightly and religious times; in America it is employed chiefly with the present, except when it
travels out into the undiscovered future. Here our latter-day poets are apt to whine over the times,
as if heaven were perpetually betraying the earth with a show of progress that is in fact
retrogression, like the backward advance of crabs; there, the minstrels of the stars and stripes
blow a loud note of exultation before the grand new epoch, and think the Greeks and Romans,
the early Oriental races, and the later men of the middle centuries, of small account before the
onward tramping of these present generations. Of this latter sect is a certain phenomenon who
has recently started up in Brooklyn, New York—one Walt Whitman, author of "LEAVES OF GRASS," who has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet, and by
Englishmen as a kind of fool. For ourselves, we are not disposed to accept him as the one, having
less faith in latter-day prophets than in latter-day poets; but assuredly we cannot regard him as
the other. Walt is one of the most amazing, one of the most startling, one of the most perplexing
creations of the modern American mind; but he is no fool, though abundantly eccentric, nor is his
book mere food for laughter, though undoubtedly containing much that may easily and fairly be
turned into ridicule.
The singularity of the author's mind—his utter disregard of ordinary forms and modes—appears in
the very title-page and frontispiece of his work. Not only is there
A passage from the Preface, if it may be so called, will give some insight into the character and objects of the work.
Other states indicate themselves in their deputies—but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures nor in its ambassadors, or authors, or colleges, or churches, or pariors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors; but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendships; the freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the picturesque looseness of their carriage, their deathless attachment to freedom, their aversion to any thing indecorous, or soft, or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states, the fierceness of their roused resentment, their curiosity and welcome of novelty, their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy, their susceptibility to a slight, the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors, the fluency of their speech, their delight in music, (the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul,) their good temper and open-handedness, the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.
This "gigantic and generous treatment," we presume, is offered in the pages which ensue. The
poem is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical "lengths," like the measured
prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, or some of the Oriental
writings. The external form, therefore, is startling, and by no means seductive, to English ears,
accustomed to the sumptuous music of ordinary metre; and the central principle of the poem is
equally staggering. It seems to resolve itself into an all-attracting egotism—an eternal presence of
the individual soul of Walt Whitman in all things, yet in such wise that this one soul shall be
presented as a type of all human souls whatsoever. He goes forth into the world, this rough,
We were attracted by the very singular title of the work, to seek the work itself, and what we
thought ridiculous in the title is eclipsed in the pages of this heterogeneous mass of bombast,
egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense. The beastliness of the author is set forth in his own description
of himself, and we can conceive no better reward than the lash for such a violation of decency as
we have before us. Speaking of "this mass of stupid filth," the Criterion says: "It is impossible to imagine how any man's fancy
This book should find no place where humanity urges any claim to respect, and the author should be kicked from all decent society as below the level of the brute. There is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.
☞ The Poems of
LEAVES OF GRASS,
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR,
May be ordered at any Book-Store or Newspaper Depot, or especially of
FOWLER & WELLS, 308 Broadway, New York.
Their place of business is the principal Agency for the Work, wholesale and retail. A note written to them, giving the writer's address, and enclosing $1 00, will procure a bound copy, post-paid, by return mail.
They supply Booksellers at a liberal discount.
'LEAVES OF GRASS' may also be purchased or ordered by mail, or the country-trade supplied,
from the following Agencies:
☞ Any communication by mail, for the author of
Leaves of Grass, can be directed to him, namely,
WALT WHITMAN, care of
FOWLER & WELLS, 308 Broadway, New York.