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WALT WHITMAN




UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME:
J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE
HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS
THOMAS HARDY
By LASCELLES ABERCROMIBIE
WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMIAS
GEORGE GISSING
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER
ROBERT BRIDGES
BY F. E. BRETT YOUNG
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THO.NAS




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WALT WHITMAN
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
BASIL DE SELINCOURT
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXIV




BY TIlE SAME A UTTrOR
GIOTTO
WILLIAM BLAKE




NOTE
MY aim in the following study has been to lay
stress on aspects of the subject which court
misunderstanding or have received relatively
little attention hitherto.  Whitman's communication in its initial attack is so infectious
and clear that it would have been self-indulgence to expatiate upon it.








CONTENTS
FA G1
I. BIOGRAPHICAL                  9
II. THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM      55
III. THE FORM (ii) CONSTRUCTIVE
PRINCIPLES                   94
IV. THE FORM (iii) THE QUESTION OF
UNITY                        119
V. STYLE                        134
VI. PLAN                         164
VII. CHILDREN OF ADAM             188
VIII. CALAMUS                    o204
IX. DEMOCRACY AND THE INDIVIDUAL  221
X. CONCLUSION: WHITMAN AND AMERICA 241


7








I


BIOGRAPHICAL... Before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs
and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have
written.
EVERY aspect of a man's character is reflected
both in his life and in his work; but some are
more easily read in the one, some in the other
glass. In spite of all his efforts to communicate
his personality, Whitman remains in many respects so mysterious a figure that, although we
are concerned here with a literary rather than a
biographical estimate, we shall most readily
establish an understanding with our readers
by giving an outline of our hero's story and
placing his typical actions, ambitions and
achievements in what seems to be their natural
light. He was a born poet, and his genius is
not least exhibited in his recognition of the
dependence of expression upon experience.
This, again, makes an acquaintance with the
9




WALT WHITMAN


main facts of his history important to the
student of his art. Too many artists, confusing experience with experiment, look upon the
world as a training-ground in which to disport
themselves and become versatile and accomplished. Yet life does not yield its flavour to
him who would merely taste it; that alone is
true experience to which the whole personality
is pledged.  Nothing more distinguishes an
artist of the first from one of the second rank
than his instinct for living. To what extent
was this instinct Whitman's?
There is little in his antecedents to explain
the appearance of a great artist in the family.
HIe came of a race of small yeomen farmers,
and the Dutch stubbornness which he inherited from his mother might have been expected to emphasise New England's natural
bent towards taciturnity.  But mother and
father alike, as is clear froml the well-known
photographs, were persons of unusual and
emphatic character.  The father's face expresses a capacity for thought and idealism
which everyday cares have fretted into disuse
and tinctured with some bitterness; in the
mother's unconscious power rides, and we see
her meeting every situation, serene and adequate. Devotion to his mother was to be the
dominant feature of Walt's emotional life.
10




BIOGRAPHICAL


Born on the 31st of May, 1819, the poet was
the second of a family of nine children,
the first and last of whom, both boys, were
mentally defective, while another died in
infancy. He was therefore in effect the eldest
of a brood of six-two girls, four boys-and, inheriting all his mother's serenity, early assumed
the responsibilities of guide and counsellor.
The important facts of his childhood are
those which his own poems chronicle. He is
indeed said to have been noticed among a
crowd of Brooklyn children, and even to have
been kissed, by Lafayette at the age of five.
But whether this was a sign of Walter's precocity or of Lafayette's perception, history
does not tell us. Perhaps a mere accident has
been allowed to assume premonitory associations. The general effect we derive from the
sparse narratives extant, as well as from
Whitman's own memories and impressions, is
that in childhood he must have been a heavy
absorptive creature who might have been
liable to the penalties of extreme sensitiveness
but for the fact that his susceptibility was as
wide as it was keen.
There was a child went forth,
and if the impressions which the child received
were so vivid that they became a part of him,
11




WALT WHITMAN


they were also so various that there was little
danger of any part overbalancing the whole.
Words of his own were not needed to assure
us that the first and greatest of them was
the impression of the sea. His earliest impulse to composition came from the sight of a
ship under full sail, and the idea he was afterwards to form for his poetry was that the seashore should be an invisible influence in it, a
"pervading gauge and tally."
If sensitiveness and absorption are the words
of his childhood, those of his adolescence are
absorption and restlessness. The customs of
the still rapidly developing society to which he
belonged were all in favour of general intelligence and handiness. It was natural enough
that Walt should see in succession the workings
of a doctor's and of a lawyer's office; that he
should learn printing and carpentering, should
give a year or two to school teaching, and then
become founder and editor of a news-sheet,
printed by himself and by himself distributed
among the simple inhabitants of his native
Long Island. At the age of twenty he has thus
intuitively arrived at the career which fits
him; he is to be a recorder of life, an interpreter of ideas through the written word.
Nothing remains to be decided except the
scale and scope his work is to assume.
12




BIOGRAPHICAL


At what point he became conscious of a
mission we do not know; but his early work
shows that he had from the beginning a
strongly developed moral purpose and felt himself in a narrower sense than we might expect
vowed to the service of good causes. In his
first compositions he generally contrived to
exhibit the terrible end of the profligate's
career, or repentance instilled by the brave
words of the youth who still prays as he did by
his mother's knee. Trite as they are, these
pieces are readable, both for the vividness of
the narrative and also because we feel behind
them the sweetness and courage which they
imperfectly extol. The climax in this line was
a novel dedicated to the cause of Temperance,
though written, if legends are to be believed,
with occasional assistance from gin punch.
The word morality took on larger associations
with Whitman as his experience of life increased; but there is no evidence in his youth
of a period in which the conventional " good "
seemed counterfeit. Reaction and rebellion
were to be the weapons, rather, of his maturity.
His taste in literature was in accordance
with this view of him. We hear that he was
an omnivorous novel-reader and "devoured
everything he could get." Probably there
was little enough to be got in this line in Long
13




WALT WHITMAN


Island a century ago; and the boy's favourite
reading was in prose the Arabian Nights, in
poetry the works of Scott. There could be no
better indication of the essential simplicity of
his character. Subjugated as he was by the
largest and most indefinable aspects of Nature,
already, no doubt, living unconsciously in a
key dictated by his instinctive sympathy with
the sky and the sea, his mind fastened upon
common tangible objects and took pleasure in
the genial display of things which are displayed
easily and to advantage. This is a trait that
must be emphasised, because our understanding of his poetry turns on the background upon
which we place it, and it is difficult for the
sophisticated reader to supplyi a background
sufficiently obvious and unadorned. His simplicity was individual, but it was also racial.
Whitman is not the only great American writer
who at times misleads us by over-elaboration of
language, tempting us to look in his words for
more meaning than he intends them to convey.
What the sea was to him among the works of
nature, music was among the works of mainwas, or might have been.
Ah from a little child,
he writes in Proud Music of the Storm,
Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music;
14




BIOGRAPHICAL


but of true music, nevertheless, his experience
was small. Speaking of his dislike for 'pianotunes,' he concedes that he has never heard
the instrument well played, and his impression
of Beethoven's Septet, delicately appreciative
as it is and worthy of a poet, reveals that he
knew no other chamber-music. Perhaps it was
as well that music, like literature, should be
represented to him in its broader outlines.
Through life he brought to it an elemental
childlike impressionability and an inexhaustible
child's ardour, composing many of his poems
under the influence of emotions which it had
engendered. But the art was represented to
him in the main by opera, and whether in opera
he cared more for the musical or the dramatic
element it would be hard to say. He was a
devoted theatre-goer, and had strong histrionic sympathies. The singer, the stage, the
footlights, the whole machinery of effect, produced their effect upon him, and no artificial
heightening of pageantry or expression lifted
them for him too high. When Alboni, his
favourite cantatrice, or some renowned tragedian, a Keen or a Booth, was in the town,
he would be nightly in the pit, audience and
actors affording him between them a twofold
drama. Like Blake he inverted the old Greek
proverb, and by " Nothing too much " meant
15




WALT WHITMAN


not that nothing should but that nothing could
be so.
His experience with The Long Islander
brought him into contact with the journalistic
and Bohemian life of New York, where he
edited several papers and affected for a timea short time-the dress and demeanour of a
dandy. Here too, as Mr. John Burroughs tells
us, being " young, in perfect bodily condition,"
he " sounded all experiences of life, with all
their pleasures, passions and abandonments."
If the phrase were from the pen of a European
writer, we should know that not only the dandy
but the rake also had been among Walt's
affectations; and whatever its meaning it has
as it stands a sufficiently distasteful sound.
But what displeases us in it pleased Whitmanpleased him, at least, in his old age. Perhaps
the memory of his contributions to nursery
morality still irked him. The sentence had his
approval; he reflected with satisfaction that
our squeamishness would be puzzled and
offended by it, took it proudly to himself that
he had been a sad dog in his day (there was
always the gin punch after all), and probably
hoped we should end by crediting him with
sins of which he was innocent. The same miscalculated complacency appears in a letter
which he sent to John Addington Snymonds.
16




BIOGRAPHICAL


Referring, there, to experiences which left him
the father of six children, he writes: "My
life, young manhood, times South, etc., have
been jolly bodily and doubtless open to
criticism."  Was any action of his life more
open to criticism than the perpetration of this
sentence? Our natural deduction from it
would be that he was not only a sensationalist,
but devoid of even the sensationalist's instinctive delicacy.  Such an interpretation
would allow nothing for the pride of the
theorist or for the garrulity and forgetfulness
of old age. The whole course of Whitman's
life, the evidence of his relations and intimate
friends, his freedom from any breath of slander
(beyond what attached to him as the author of
an " immoral book ") show that he was at
the furthest remove possible from the crude
animal man whose conduct he sometimes
seems to glorify. He is, on the contrary, of
the shy, brooding, impassioned, devotional
type, for whom sex, with all its ideals and
reticences, lies at the core of being, so that
impulsive trifling with its instincts would have
affected him as a kind of moral suicide. We
have to imagine a man-a man of a kind
commoner, perhaps, in America than in
England-who retains through life a girlish
purity of mind and conduct, and though he


B


17




WALT WHITMAN


ignores nothing, becomes at last more communicative in language and less consistent and
discreet in action than the majority, because
he has never made a certain kind of surrender
and has preserved the fortress of his soul.
Whitman left New York in his twenty-ninth
year, and taking witl him his yloung brother
Jeff, of whom he had constituted himself a
kind of guardian, made a tour through the
States on his way to New Orleans, where he
was again to edit a paper. Throughout his life
in New York, work at the desk, though always
conscientious, had been no more than an
exercise which his necessities imposed. He has
been described as the idlest editor ever seen;
and what really engaged his activities was the
human spectacle, the majestic pageant, offered
by the great city with its harbours and bridges
and ships and thronging pavements. Time
that was spent lolling among the wharfmen or
hobnobbing with 'bus drivers was not lost
time; for Whitman lhad those rare faculties
which idleness instead of rusting ripens. There
can be no doubt that his trip South was taken
with conscious intention, that his new job
attracted him because of the new contexts
it would afford to his daily dreams and meditations.
This visit to the South, always associated
18




BIOGRAPHICAL


in his mind with the ecstatic and desolating
history of his loves, became typical to him of
the fusion of the Northern and Southern States
into a nation, and seemed to give him the right
to speak as representative of the whole. With
him as with his country the fusion was achieved
through agony and loss. Horace Traubel, the
young friend of his last years, pointing one day
to a photograph in the old man's room, was
told it was that of " a sweetheart many, many
years ago," but no further information was
forthcoming. Talk ceased, Whitman looked
out of the window, a new topic was started,
and the silence in which he wrapped this
phase of his career remains virtually unbroken.
What facts are covered by it?
Some of Whitman's admirers think of him as
a man whose life was centred about one woman,
a woman whom, through the prejudices of
her family, he was prevented from marrying.
Others suppose that his standard of morality
was loose, and that free talk about sex went
hand in hand in him with free action. Neither
of these points of view seems likely to be the
true one. No reader of Children of Adam or
of any other of Whitman's deliverances on the
subject of sex can fail to recognise that far
from being free, they are dictated, in every
line and word of them, by a scrupulous, a
19




WALT WHITMAN


sometimes too scrupulous, conscientiousness.
His point of view is that passion belongs and
must be seen to belong to the life of the soul. It
is because the paraphernalia and even the
disturbances of sex have a spiritual bearing
that he announces and recounts them. IIe was
not of the type to sow wild oats; and in his
maturity he certainly entered into no relations
which did not seem to him as he entered into
them to be in all their bearings spiritual.
But the problem so regarded becomes acuter;
for faults of no principle are more easily explained or overlooked than faults of principle.
What did his ideas of spiritual relationship
include? Clearly they did not include irresponsible attachments. Throughout his writing
upon sex, the procreative function is insisted
upon; his lovers-' lovers ' is not quite the
right word for them!-are parents; and we
can see that no life finally commends itself to
him or comes really within his purview except
that of the family. Yet, reading Whitman's
poems and the various accounts that have been
written of his life, I find it impossible to avoid
concluding that, while he may only once have
been deeply enamoured of a woman, his six
children were not all the offspring of one mother,
their father convincing himself, under the influence partly of his feelings, partly of confused
20




BIOGRAPHICAL


theory, that, as an exceptional man, loved now
by this woman and now by that, he could find
and give an adequate conjugal love in more
than one relationship. It seems to be generally
admitted that the woman who touched him
most nearly was of gentle birth, and rumour has
it that silence as to his connection with her was
exacted from him by her relations as a point
of honour. Are we to suppose then that these
strange relatives tolerated a recurring irregular
connection while refusing a regular one?
Whitman, we know, entertained at one time
the bitterest feelings about the haughty and
exclusive treatment to which he had been subjected. But is it certain that even when he
became a lover he really contemplated marriage? " I once thought wedlock not needful
to my development," he long afterwards confided to a friend, "but now I think that it
would have been better for me."    It is
possible at least that love found him a dedicated Bohemian, and that what was exacted of
him was that his unconventionality should
remain anonymous. There is a certain kind
of idealism to which the unreserving pledges of
marriage appear as an affront; and Whitman,
pledged already to transcendental union with
his country, may have felt that the serene
confiding joys of domesticity and its complete
21




WALT WHITMAN


personal surrender must not be his. Whatever le felt, the woman who loved him would
have felt also or striven to feel, and it may well
be, therefore, that it was a certain pride of
idealism thatt sundered them. All we know is
that Out of the Cradle Endlessly RockI:ing, the
world's supreme song8 of separation, is one of
the all but earliest Lcaves, and thus came from
Whitman's heart i-mmediately in the wake of
the grreat wave of enancipated passion that
launched his life-work.
But what, after all, must be thc biographical
interpretation of that incompa rable poem? It
was printed in the third edition of Leavcs of
Grass, the edition of 1860-61; Whitman first
visited New Orleans in '4, 9-'50. Nowr tle intervening years, years in wlhich. all1 or almost all
his mIost powerful songs were written, though
they found himl nominally at home in Brooklyn,
are years of some mystery for his biographer.
In a skeleton outline of his life, jotted down in
old age, he lets fall two significant observations:
"  ave lived quite a good deal in the Southern
States "; " Have visited, and partly lived in,
most of the Western and Eastern cities."
What is curious is that no record of any of
these visits has come down to us. Mr. Bliss
Perry, the poet's most recent and most authoritative biographer, has not a word upon
22




BIOGRAPHICAL


them. And there seems no period of his life into
which we can fit them, if we do not fit them
into these years. Placing them then here, we
bring one mystery into association with another
and so, I think, in a certain degree illuminate
both.
These unrecorded visits were, may we not
suppose it? Whitman's enforced or chosen
substitute for married life. How preserve the
complete anonymity which we know to have
been preserved, if not by passing freely from
one town to another? Why leave no record
of any of these visits and travels unless concealment were a part of their purpose? From
the outbreak of war to the time of his death, it
is quite clear that there is no woman in Whitman's life; and just before the war, he publishes that song which I have called a song of
separation, but which is surely a song, not of
separation only, but of bereavement. The
gentleness, the desolation, the note of irretrievable blind searching for an object once
so close and so dear, these and other touches
in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking point
to a core of personal experience in it, for which
a biographer must find some explanation. And
the simplest, perhaps the only adequate, explanation is that it is the song virtually of a
husband mourning for the death of one who
23




WALT WHIITMAN


was in all but name his wife. I-ow else shall
we account for its tender familiarities and our
own irrepressible tears?
There still remains the problem of his
relation to his children.  Mr. Bliss Perry,
in the course of a long and never quite convincing list of analogies between Whitiman
and Rousseau, remarks that "each man wrote
superbly about paternity and each deserted
his own children."  A  charge so dalning
should not have been made, unless evidence
could be produced to prove it. Mr. Perry does
not seem to know more on this point than
is known commonly. " Though unmarried,"
Whitman wrote to Symonds in the letter
already quoted, " I have had six childrentwo are dead-one living Southern grandchild,
fine boy, writes to me occasionally-circumstances (connected with their fortune and
benefit) have separated us from intimate relations." The words suggest an understanding
that money held in trust for certain children
would be forfeit if their relation to Whitman
became known; his action in holding aloof
could not in that case be called desertion;
indeed it is likely he would be himself the chief
sufferer. Were these, however, the only children? The expression 'one Southern grandchild' suggests  Northern  grandchildren24




BIOGRAPHICAL


children, in other words, of Northern children.
" Once," Whitman writes in a beautiful and yet
a strangely disturbing poem:Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
casually met there who detain'd me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together-all
else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately
clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
Must we then suppose that this faithfully
loving son, comrade and brother could draw
momentary sweetness from a relationship and
lull himself with a memory, while the vital
responsibilities it entailed fell upon the weaker
partner?   There is nothing     in  Whitman's
character to justify such a belief. If-as to me
seems possible, probable even-some humble
woman bore him a child or children (and
whatever her station she would be his "ideal
comrade," his "perfect equal ") it would be
consonant with what we otherwise know of him
that she should seldom see him and know no
more of him   than that he was "Walt," but
that he would leave her to struggle with the
25




WALT WHITMAN


problems of maintenance unaided is a suggestion which, till it is substantiated, we may disregard.
It is important, in touching this side of
Whitman, to leave no stone unturned. For to
many readers nothing that we have said or
could say would carry weight, if they suspected
the existence of shady margins to which we
preferred to make no allusion. If, it might be
argued, Once I pass'd through a populous city
is taken as autobiographical, ought not other
poems, such a poem     for example as Native
iomennts, to be taken in the same way?
Native momcnts-when you come upon me-ah you are
here now,
Give me now libidinous joys only,
Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and
rank,
To-day I go consort with Nature's darlings, to-night too,
I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the
midnight orgies of young men,
I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers,
The echoes ring with our indecent calls, I pick out some
low person for my dearest friend...
Does not Whitman here, readers may ask,
confess himself the most reckless libertine?
It will be the thoughtless reader who will ask
the question. There are obvious distinctions
between   these  two   poems as biographical
documents.    The one recounts an experience,
26




BIOGRAPHICAL


the other professes an aspiration; the one has
particularity, the other none. A man has only
to become familiar with any sensation and its
general aspects elude him; the first impression
becomes dulled and he revives it by fastening
on points of more or less incidental detail.
The implications of libertinage are pruriency,
dullness, fatigue. Native Moments is full of
freshness, zest and purity. It is ideal, rhapsodical. Some persons, happier or unhappier
than their fellows, are perhaps constitutionally
unaware what Whitman means by Native
Moments. The poem is not for them. To
those for whom it is intended, its aim and
effect are somewhat of the kind that Aristotle
claimed for Tragedy. It is a purge of passion.
Certain elements of our nature become through
the mere acknowledgment of them liberated;
they undergo a metamorphosis and lose their
power and sting. There are things which if
they can be said cannot be done, things done
by those only who would be ashamed to speak
of them. And so this poem. It is Whitman's
substitute for, his vicarious enactment of, the
deeds it celebrates. Instead of identifying him
with those who through weakness degrade
themselves, it removes him from them, while
yet it is a link of sympathy deliberately
forged and held, to bind them to him. The
27




WALT WHITMAN


same purpose shows itself in such pieces as
To a Commono Prostitute, perhaps also in Earth,
my Likeness. The last three lines of Native
Moments are its best summing up:
O you shunn'd persons, I at least do not shun you,
I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet,
I will be more to you than to any of the rest.
But let us return to the main outline of
Whitman's career. He soon threw up his job
in New Orleans, and, making on his way Nortl
a pilgrimage through what was at that time
the West, penetrated to Chicago and tlhe
great lakes. His return home, after an absence
of a year, found him still undecided as to the
form which the great venture of his life was to
take.  I-e edited yet another paper, had
thoughts of expressing himself by means of
oratory and wrote, his mother said, " barrels
of lectures."  The instinct for personal expression was what ruled him, and a poet
might have been lost to the world but for the
fact that Walt had no gift of delivery. For
some years he joined his father as a working
carpenter, and built wooden houses, reading
Emerson the while and thinking transcendentally. It was now at last that the conception
of a new poetry began to define itself to him.
He was already much more than a mere
journalist, having contributed prose, and verse
28




BIOGRAPHICAL


of the usual pattern, to the best periodicals of
the day. When at last he set hand to the
work with which the world identifies him, he
went about his task characteristically, forming
and maturing his style by dint of close,
ruminative deliberation. The substance of his
barrels of lectures was distilled into a dozen
poems, and after four years a slender volume,
Leaves of Grass, made its appearance.
Leaves of Grass was Whitman's presentation
of himself to the world, and part of the impulse that produced it was a determination
that, having been produced, it should go home.
Expecting indifference or antagonism, he had
in readiness three lengthy, explanatory, and
laudatory notices of his work, which reputable
journals published for him as anonymous reviews.  Long afterwards reprinted in the
volume of collected Personalia which was prepared under his direction and published by his
literary executors after his death, they serve to
give us a picture both of what he was in these
days and of what he wished to appear to be.
Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt
Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware
that there was ever hitherto such a production as a
book or such a being as a writer.... Of pure
American breed, large and lusty, age thirty-six
29




WALT WHITMAN


years,-never once using medicinne-nver dressed in
black, always dressed freely and clean in strong
clothes-neck open, shirt collar flat and broad,
coiuntenance tawny t.ransparenlt red, beard wellmottled with white, hair like lhay af'te-r it lias been
mowed in the field and lies to'ssed and streaked...
No discontented-a carele;ss slouch, enjoying to-day;
no dilettante demiocrat-a man who is art-and-part
with the commonalty and with immediate life...
loves the free rasping talk of men —likes to be called
by his given name and nobody at all need Mr. him —
eats cheap fare, likes the strong-flavoured coffee of
the coffee-stands in the market, at sunrisse ---would
leave a select soiree of elegant people any tic to go
with tumultuous men, rouighs, receive their caresses
and welcoIne, listen to their noise, oaths, smut,
fluency, laughter, replartee-and can preselrve his
presence perfectly among these, and the like of
these.
It is all well enough.   "First be yourself
what you would show in your poem" is its
motto, innocent of Milton, and neither to
the self-consciousness of it nor to the complacency nor even to the self-advertisement
need we demur.     Yet a lack of fundamental
coherency or squareness seems traceable. Selfconsciousness, if pressed so far, should be
pressed  further; it should    not refuse the
last turn. Let Whitman if he will take leave
of the select soiree and immerse himself in
30




BIOGRAPHICAL


natural delights and the society of the tumultuous. To whom does he imagine his
announcement of leave-taking to be made?
The roughs would not be roughs if they took
note of it; his remarks are really for the soiree,
and postulate the audience they affect to
despise. Literature is inevitably a divider of
men, and from whatever source its roots draw
sustenance, its fruit is for the few who have
achieved some culture and enlightenment.
Whitman persistently confused culture with
the weaknesses to which it gives rise; and in
the uncultured saw only the benefits accruing
to them from their condition of latency. It
devolved upon him to see and to declare
more. We touch here upon a point of real
insecurity in his character. He was without
the discipline of education and under-rated or
ignored its value. And so, in spite of his intellectual power, he misses the complete composure of the intellect. He wished to be, he
wished also to present the appearance of being,
a simple, natural man. And the incompatibility of these desires gave an assumed air to
his indifference, touched his nonchalance with
aggressiveness and plunged him into some
egregious faults of taste. It is the climax when
literature, the armoury of the mind, serves him
with weapons for an assault upon itself.
31




WOTALT WHIT MAN


The main fact about his first edition, printed
and published by himself in 1855, was that
it was read and understood by Emerson.
But neither Emerson's appreciation, nor tlhe
author's puffing, nor even the modicum   of
really discriminating praise which it received
from  several American and English papers,
sufficed to win a public for the book. Whitman,
undaunted, sacrificed facts to appearances and
brought out a second and enlarged edition in
the following year. What more handy as a
ram to breach the wall of public indifference
than Emerson's generous words? " I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. WR.W.
Emerson." stood in bold letters on the cover
of the new volume; while, in an appendix,
Whitman printed in full the now     familiar
letter from which these words had been extracted.  The same appendix contained his
astonishing reply:
Here are thirty-two poems whibc  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....
32




BIOGRAPHICAL


and so on, a really nauseous mixture of perverted feeling and fact. Emerson passed the
offence over, and we must do the like; but
who can wonder that it became, in Whitman's
circle, a point of bitter and futile questioning
whether the sage of Concord had remained
faithful to his first spontaneous verdict on
Leaves of Grass?   Whitman himself, who
acknowledged the obvious debt and derivation
of the book in printed homage to his Master,1
went so far late in life as to contend that his
knowledge of Emerson's Essays post-dated its
appearance. Things personal and impersonal
were indeed so subtly interwoven in his
poetry that his conscience became confused
on the subject. On the one hand, he could
show greatness in his identification of himself
with his book, as when he would attend some
lecture of which it was to be the theme and
bask visibly before a delighted audience in the
praise the enthusiastic orator would lavish
upon him. On the other, he could descend
to trivial misrepresentations unworthy of a
tradesman for the sake of producing impressions which, his work being what he believed it to be and what it was, might have
been trusted to look after themselves.  All
1 W1hitman's obligations to Emerson are indeed so obvious and
so inclusive, that it has seemed unnecessary to enter into any
discussion of ' sources' in this volume.
C               33




WALT WHITMAN


through life he continued to advertise himself
through the press whenever opportunity occurred, debating anonymously the question
whether or no the great American poet had
arrived, and so forth; and in anticipation of
death he spent several thousand dollars on
the preparation of what he considered an appropriate mausoleum. Appropriate enough it
is, except in the one particular of its origin,
and perhaps he would not have had it otherwise. But I suppose there is no avowal on
the monument that he erected it himself, and
so, except to the few who know all, it either
appears or is an imposture.
But to revert to his relation with Emerson.
Anxiety for the reputation of Leaves of Grass
never prejudiced Whitman's consistent love
and reverence for him. Personal intercourse
between the two was occasional but warm.
Whitman was never quite at home in Emerson's
company.   We hear of him, when on one
occasion he was Emerson's guest, calling out
for beer to be brought in a tin mug, a tiresome
piece of democrat's self-consciousness. But
the celebrated talk on Boston Common ideally
summarises their intercourse. There experience, sagacity and compromise encountering
obstinacy and intuition found more than their
match. "'What have you to say then to such
34




BIOGRAPHICAL


things? ' said Emerson, pausing in conclusion (Whitman's poems of sex had been
the theme). 'Only that while I can't answer
them at all, I feel more settled than ever to
adhere to my own theory and exemplify it,'
was my candid response. And thenceforward
I never wavered or was touched with qualms
(as I confess I had been two or three times
before)."
This talk took place in 1860, Whitman
having gone to Boston to see his third edition
through the press. Its nominal publishers
were Thayer and Eldridge, but the book retained, as Whitman's books always continued
to do, as much of his personal shaping as was
compatible with printed pages. Children of
Adam   and Calamus now    first took their
definite place in his scheme; and with one or
two notable exceptions the great songs which
together give Leaves of Grass its impact and
momentum had all been composed. This
Walt, whose lazy ways and neglect of the main
chance his family with tolerant affection deplored-for he missed a boom in the building
trade in Brooklyn in the early fifties-has in
these ten years heard and justified the final
call, has claimed and secured a place among
the masters of the world's literature. But
the period in which he is to live primarily
35




WALT W HITMAN


the poet's life, short as it has been, is almost
over. In April, 1861, came the outbreak of the
Civil \War.a
The war was tlhe test of \Wli- Ltilan's character,
and the heroism it evoked ill hinm throws a
compelling splendour of light backwards and
forwards over the whole course of his days.
Some have professed surprise that he did not
volunteer for service in the ranks, or have
thought it necessary to allege the streak of
Quakerism in his blood. But a poet, like a
general, has conflicting duties in war-time;
indeed it is a point of military virtue that he
should not needlessly expose his person. 1Whitman felt it his duty to determine not merely
what he could do but what he could do best
for his country. And it fell to his lot in thle end
not so much to risk death once as to die daily.
He surrendered his life drop by drop, and the
survivor of the war, though he survived it by
nearly thirty years, was a mutilated veteran.
Instinct, which time has proved to have
been inspiration, told him that he, of all men,
could provide for the great struggle its imaginative theatre.  So late as November, 1863,
when he had been already over a twelvemonth in the wards, he wrote to his friend
Charles Eldridge, " I feel to devote myself
more and more to the work of my life, whiich
36




BIOGRAPHICAL


is making poems. I must bring out Drum Taps.
I must be continually bringing out poems."
His brother George had volunteered for service
with the Union troops; down South, linked,
we may suppose, if not identified with the
Secessional cause, were other hearts with
which his own could not but beat. He remained at home during the first eighteen
months of the struggle, and it was there that
a large part of Drum Taps was composed. At
last, hearing that George had been wounded,
he set out for the front, and, once among the
scenes of the war, found his high and rarefied
poet's consciousness engulfed and obliterated
before daily and hourly calls upon his common
human sympathies. "During my two years
in the hospitals and upon the field," he wrote
from Washington to The New York Times in
December, 1864, " I have made over six
hundred visits and have been, as I estimate,
among from eighteen thousand to twenty
thousand of the wounded and sick, as sustainer
of spirit and body in some slight degree, in
their hour of need." Supporting himself by
ill-paid secretarial work in a Government
office, he devoted all his energies to nursing
(of which he had already had some experience
among his friends the 'bus drivers in New
York), spending as much as seven hours a day
37




WALT WHITMAN


in the wards, and not giving up, though his
health was repeatedly threatened, so long as a
single wounded man was left in Washington.
Any cash he could put by (his own wants were
confined now and always to the bare necessities
of life), and any he could collect from friends
or acquaintances, went to provide for the
soldiers those small luxuries and comforts which
he knew did more than anything to suggest the
atmosphere of recovery.  Sometimes, after
consultation with the doctor, there would be
an " ice-cream treat " for a whole ward; but
as a rule he would bring a variety of small
trifles, chosen to meet the whims of various
patients and make them feel that they were
remembered-for this man an apple, for that
a stick of candy, and so on; and never, while
funds lasted, were his capacious pockets without their supplies of stamps, writing paper, and
above all, though he was not himself a smoker,
of tobacco. This was action on an heroic
scale; but perhaps no one but Whitnlaln
could have supplemented it with the last and
most endearing touch. It is beautiful that
the poet should become a nurse; it is still
more beautiful that the nurse should not forget
he is a son. All through the strain and preoccupation of his work, Whitman never failed
to find time for a weekly letter to his mother.
38




BIOGRAPHICAL


These letters, long afterwards published under
the title of The Wound-Dresser, should be read
by any who doubt Whitman's claim to a
place in the communion of saints. Tenderness
and devotion are of course predominant
features in them:-"I believe no men ever
loved each other as I and some of these poor
wounded sick and dying men love each other "but perhaps their most noteworthy quality
is the complete self-possession they display.
Fully aware of the momentous nature of the
events which are passing on every side of him,
Whitman is never betrayed into a touch of
false fervour; never exaggerates any of his
feelings by a hair. He turns quite naturally
from tragic narrative to take his part in the
small cares of the daily life of the family:Well, Mother, I should like to know all the domestic
affairs at home; don't you have the usual things
eating, etc? Why, Mother, I should think you
would eat nearly all your meals with Mat. I know
you must when they have anything good (and I
know Mat will have good things if she has a cent
left). Mother, don't you miss Walt loafing around,
and carting himself off to New York toward the latter
part of every afternoon?
Or again, on a more serious topic:What to do about Andrew I hardly know-as it
is I feel about as much pity for you as I do for my
39




WALT WHITMAN


poor brother Andrew, for I know you will worry
yourself about him all the time. I was in hopes it
was only the trouble about the voice, etc., but I see
I was mistaken, and it is probably worse. I know
you and Jeff and Mat will do all you can-and will
have patience with all (it is not only the sick who
are poorly off, but their friends; but it is best to
have the greatest forbearance, and do and give, etc.,
whatever one can-but you know that and practice
it too, dear Mother).
Then, from the same letter as the last:As there is a limit to one's sinews and endurance
and sympathies, etc., I have got in the way, after
going lightly, as it were, all through the wards of a
hospital, and trying to give a word of cheer, if nothing
else, to every one, then confining my special attentions to the few where the investment seems to tell
best, and who want it most. Mother, I have real
pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of
saving quite a number of lives by saving them from
giving up-and being a good deal with them; the
men say it is so and the doctors say it is so-and I
will candidly confess I can see it is true, though I
say it of myself. I know you will like to hear it,
Mother, so I tell you.
After  so  much   assumed    arrogance, how
beautiful, how completely reassuring is this
unassumed humility!
We expect a poet to be vague and emotional
in his benevolences, and could forgive him if
40




BIOGRAPHICAL


he were so. Whitman is not. A remarkable
symptom of his power is the range of attention
he had for minute detail in the wants and
feelings of his innumerable patients.
"I find more and more," he wrote to a friend who
was helping him, " how a little money rightly directed,
the exact thing at the exact moment, goes a great
ways. To make gifts comfort and truly nourish
these American soldiers, so full of manly independence, is required the spirit of love and boundless,
brotherly tenderness, hand in hand with greatest
tact."
Among his thoughtfully chosen offices was
that of writing letters for the soldiers to friends
and sweethearts; and in the case of death,
he would often write, on his own account, to
the parents in the unknown home:MR. AND MRS. HASKELL,'-Dear Friends, I
thought it would be soothing to you to have a few
lines about the last days of your son Erastus Haskell,
of Company K 141st NY Vol.... I think he was
broken down before he came to hospital here-I believe he came here about July lth-I took to him....
I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent,
he was opprest for breath and with the heat, and
I would fan him... Sometimes when I would come
in he woke up, and I would lean down and kiss him,
he would reach out his hand and pat my hair and
1 The quotations are from a long and detailed letter about the
case; see "Traubel," With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 115.
41




WALT WHITMAN


beard.... I shall never forget those nights, in the
dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene.
the sick and wounded lying all around, and this dear
young man close to me, lying on what proved to
be his death-bed. I do not know his past life, but
what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble
boy.... Poor dear son, though you were not my
son, I felt to love you as a son, what short time I
saw you, sick and dying there.-But it is well as it is,perhaps better. Who knows whether he is not better
off, that patient and sweet young soul, to go, than
we are to stay? Farewell, dear boy,-it was my
opportunity to be with you in your last days,-I had
no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done
-only you did not lay there among strangers without
having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom
you gave your dying kiss.
Looking back on it, Whitman gave the war
a significance for his literary development
which it had not really possessed. In a farewell
essay he writes that " without those three or
four years and the experiences they gave,
Leaves of Grass would not now be existing,"
and   by  an   arrangement   which   violates
chronology he has made Drum Taps, which
contains indeed some of his most moving and
memorable passages, the pivot of his book.
He regarded himself and we regard him     as
peculiarly the poet of the war; yet, as we
have seen, the bulk of his most characteristic
42




BIOGRAPHICAL


expression preceded it. He was, indeed, always
more sensitive to truth of principle than to
accidents of fact; and the truth here was
that the national feeling which found its expression in the war had in him been strong
enough to anticipate such an expression, so
that, when the war came, the poems which it
might have evoked were written already,
leaving their writer at liberty to enact them,
and to exhibit in his own person a supreme
poem  of comradeship and love.   Nothing
that left Whitman's hand after the war has
quite the old unquenchable and intoxicating
bravura of independence, and we often feel
him striving for the effects he does not reach.
But the power on which those old frenzies
were stayed has been revealed to us; we
recognise in his message a greatness which
only devoted action could fitly crown.
Whitman lingered on in Washington some
years after the war was over, having obtained
permanent employment under Government as
a clerk with a salary which by '66 had risen
to 1600 dollars (~325). It was in this year
that his superior, a Mr. Harlan, finding, it is
supposed, a copy of Leaves of Grass in the
poet's desk, was shocked by it and dismissed
him.  Matthew  Arnold, writing to W. D.
O'Connor in acknowledgment of his torrential
43




WALT WHITMAN


manifesto, The Good Gray Poet, "doubted
whether here too, or in France, or in Gernany,
a public functionary would not have had to
pay for the pleasure of being so outspoken
the same penalty which your friend has paid
in America." But nothing cooled the ardour
of a panegyrist, who-it is well to rememberhad, in earlier days, opened his home to
Whitman and could yet regard him     as a
simultaneous reincarnation of Homer and the
Christ.  Whitman was soon reinstated in
another branch of the service and his dismissal
became an advertisement of his work. The
tide was in any case beginning to turn. Even
Arnold, who deplored his eccentricities, acknowledged his abilities, and so did every
other English critic of consequence.   His
name was also beginning to be widely known
in Europe.  Mr. WT. M. Rossetti's selection
from Leaves of Grass, published over here in
'68, was received so warmly that Whitman's
serene Americanism wavered. Feudalism hlad
accepted him, freedom had not; and there
was a tinge of reproach as well as of perplexity
in his triumph. Perhaps lie forgot that his
countrymen }had not enjoyed thosc reconciling
discretions which Emerson reconmmended but
Rossetti enforced.
Whitman's Washington period (lhe did not
44




BIOGRAPHICAL


vacate his post till '73) is one in which, mainly
through his letters to his mother and to the
young tram-conductor Doyle whom he treated
as his adopted son, he becomes for the first
time a perfectly familiar figure. From this
time forward we can follow him in all his
daily doings, and it is curious to observe that
the effect of this familiarity is to make us
more deeply aware of his personal aloofness.
We recognise that his daily life, whether in
work or idleness, is the deliberate expression
of some motive power which lies concealed.
The reason for this is perhaps twofold. On
the one hand, we are for the first time observing
his actual personality by the side of the
assumed personality of the hero of Leaves of
Grass, and find to our astonishment that the'
man is greater than the book, and different
from it; in fact, that he is its complement.
And then, his natural aloofness as a man is
emphasised by the fact that he is conscious
of having emptied his great reservoirs and is
endeavouring to refill them. His personality
does not overflow with the abundant expressiveness characteristic of previous years; he is
content to pass his " heyday," to " range the
high plateau" of his life, at the desk in a
Government office.
The strain of the war had culminated for
45




WALT WHITMAN


him in the assassination of Lincoln, for whonm,
through occasional glimpses of his " careworn
face " f'ronm Washingt)n pavelments, h-l hla
conle to feel deeply. When the news reacied
him he was at home recruiting his strength,
and his great lament was wrung from a heart
already strained almost to the breaking point.
That noble tribute would, otherwise, have
been still nobler.  Years passed, but the
strain never lifted. IHe produced notable
work, among other things the splendid prose
prophecy Democratic Vistas, and poems, like
Passage to India, which, if less convincing in
elan than their predecessors, show a continually
deepening spiritual consciousness. But the
achievement of his middle age was to be that
of patience under suffering, the acceptance
of premature diminishment.
In January, '73, trouble culminated in a
slight paralytic stroke. In May of the same
year his mother died, and, the grief and shock
overwhelming him, lie found himself physically
prostrated.  "Pete, my darling son, I still
think I shall weather it, but time only can
show," he writes in July, "Mother's death
is on my mind yet, time does not lift the cloud
from me at all"; and, a month later, " I
have the feeling of getting more strength,
and easier in the head-something like what
46




BIOGRAPHICAL


I was before Mother's death-I cannot be
reconciled to that at all yet-it is the great
cloud of my life-nothing that ever happened
before has had such an effect upon me." So
he passes into the slow and difficult years of
an eclipse from   which he is never fully to
emerge. But he writes as faithfully to his
"darling Pete" as he had written earlier to
his mother, and makes out of this very ebb of
his power material for one or two of the
sublimest of his poems. Have any doubted
his fundamental integrity of soul? They see
him now subjected to the last tests, and
proving himself against them victoriously.
"A batter'd wreck'd old man," he identifies
himself as he loved to do with another discoverer of a New    World, and in Prayer of
Columbus thus communes with and reports
himself to his Maker:Thou knowest my years entire, my life,
My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration
merely;
Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,
Thou knowest my manhood's solemn and visionary
meditations,
Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all
to come to Thee,
Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and
strictly kept them,
Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy
in Thee.
47




WALT WHITMAN


The spirit of the words, no more the
aggressive "Here I am" of his first confessions, lifts into higher contexts the unassumingi candour of his letters lomie.
Have any questioned, again, the solidity
of that rapport with Nature of which, in his
early poems, he made so much? Hie tells
us that in early life all his reading-spasmodic,
but wide, and calculated to acquaint him with
most of the masterpieces of the world's poetry.
and philosophy-had been conducted in the
open air and within sound of the sea, and
attributes to this the fact that he remained
self-poised  through  those  great doses of
vicarious  experience.  The  experience  of
Nature had been, we are to understand, his
touchstone of reality. Ile had tested his own
work by confronting it with the sea, the hills
and the grass of the prairie. But was there,
after all, a touch of affectation in that worship
of the wild, so loudly heralded? The hushed
voice of the paralytic in Specimen Days
silences every doubt.  "Timber Creek," the
retreat to which for two summers Whitman
daily tottered and where, from sun and stream,
sitting in the shade of the old oak or wrestling
with the hickory saplings, he bit by bit drew
strength and movement to his crippled limbs,
deserves, more than his self-erected monument,
48




BIOGRAPHICAL


to become a place of pilgrimage, perennially
associated with his name:In this dull scene, (as most folks would call it,) why
am I so (almost) happy here and alone? Why would
any intrusion, even from people I like, spoil the
charm? But am I alone? Doubtless there comes a
time-perhaps it has come to me-when one feels
through his whole being, and pronouncedly the
emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Schelling
and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know
not, but I often realise a presence here-in clear
moods I am certain of it, and neither chemistry nor
reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation.
All the past two summers it has been strengthening and nourishing my sick body and soul, as never
before. Thanks, invisible physician, for thy silent,
delicious medicine.
The great English poet who wrote that
"Nature never did betray the heart that
loved  her"   leaves us, through   a certain
desiccation that visited his old age, wondering
whether the love of nature he advocates had
in fact the persisting value he claimed for it.
For Whitman the society of hills or of trees
contained nothing which was not contained
in ampler measure in the society of human
beings; and its virtue was that it revealed,
with slow cumulative emphasis, truths which


D


49




WALT WHITMAN


the hum of affairs often obscures from us. He
felt no contrast between nature and humanity;
he felt merely that certain emotions which give
life its unity of tone and are implied in all
experience, may come home to the soul
more simply and therefore more convincingly
under the stars or within sound of the " mystic
surf-beat of the sea."  He loves nature not
because it is more, but because it is less, than
man and, being less, displays with greater
clearness the enduring and yet elusive outlines
of the truths of the spirit. So, when he is
too infirm to find nourishment in the strong
meat of human intercourse, he turns to Earth,
to Earth in her homeliest aspects, and drinks
in a forsaken marl-pit the milk of his convalescence.
From the point of view of our present study,
Whitman's last years may be dismissed as uneventful. They were full of such incident as
belongs to circumstances at once public and
retired. They show him beautifully making
the best of a life in ruins and at the end dying
heroically. Their story is too simple and too
familiar to need more than the briefest recapitulation. He passed them partly in his
brother George's home at Camden, Philadelphia, partly in a small house of his own in
the same small town, chosen not for its
50




BIOGRAPHICAL


amenities-it seems to have possessed nonebut because trains and trams were within
hearing and there was a lilac bush in the yard.
While with his brother, Whitman had a room
on the top floor from which he hobbled down to
meals.  George was not a kindred spirit,
"preferring pipes to poems," but the lonely
old man liked the atmosphere of a family,
and when Walt, his little namesake, died, felt
it more than the child's parents. As his
health improved he made various excursionsto Canada with his disciple Dr. Bucke, to
St. Louis to see his brother Jeff, and out West
as far as Denver and the Rockies. He still felt
himself to be America in epitome. The great
plains of Missouri exhibited anew to him the
measureless "eligibilities" of which he had
been a prophet, the tumult and splendour of
the mountains gave him the law his poems
had obeyed. More soberly, he assumes the
r6le of national spokesman, "wafting in
America's name " messages to our shores on
Tennyson's birthday or at Carlyle's death,
celebrating the murder of Lincoln annually
with a public lecture, and giving, as occasion
arose, sympathetic and discerning estimates of
the scope and quality of his fellow-craftsmen.
Gradually he became in Camden the centre of
a small coterie of enthusiasts. A man cannot
51




WALT WHITMAN


be a mark for pilgrimage and attract no
attention locally. Whitman attracted even
his Boswell, and entered with zest into quite
a variety of schemes which aimed at laying the
principles of Leaves of Grass and its author's
personality before the world.  All this is
tedious, and it led to the formation of a spurious
atmosphere about the man. He tells his young
biographer Traubel on no account to " prettify "
him and to put all the " hells and damns " into
his conversation; he puts some in himself
perhaps, so that Traubel may have them to put
in afterwards; in brief he sees that he is
getting a halo and is not quite so irreconcilable
as he would appear. But if there is an element
of lingering self-absorption and amiable weakness in his decline, these traits, once fairly
acknowledged, do nothing to affect the noble
continuity of the outline of his life; and we
should be poorer but for the last apostolic
babblings. Even the trivial indulgences, the
garrulity, of the old boy are acceptable parts
of our picture of him. For sustaining and enclosing all, his courage, his spiritual rectitude,
the spontaneous pleasure with which, as his
field of consciousness narrows, he welcomes
all that it still discloses to him, are as it were
his signature and ratification of the legacy
with which he has enriched the world.
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BIOGRAPHICAL


Whitman's life illustrates, perhaps in a
unique degree, that fusion of the physical
and the spiritual which is the prevailing theme
of his poetry:M6lange mine own, the unseen and the seenhe writes in his strange jargon; and how can
we but find in his fate a type and symbol of
the ideas he stood for? From the beginning
a trace of esoteric mysticism is discernible in
his work; he has in him that strain which, if
he choose to develop it, will lift him above
and away from his fellow-men, to pursue and
perceive arcana. Is it that the material ties
prove too strong, or is it through the promptings of some still deeper sanity?-whatever
the cause, he bends his visionary power upon
the common things of life, its routine, its
machinery, its universal pleasures, and through
them reaches out to that spiritual world of
which he is intuitively assured. Possessing
perfect health as a young man, he proclaims
health to be the chiming of the soul with the
universe through the bodily instrument; but
from the first he is conscious that the meaning
of life, thus viewed, appears only when its
richness and variety are related to the enclosing fact of death. He intends Leaves of
Grass to present the poetry of life and death
53




WALT WHITMAN


in equipoise. The equipoise is given otherwise than he intended and more intimately
than he knew. The book exhibits his crippled
faculties in their slow decay, while yet to the
last word the unconquerable spirit keeps its
integrity and purpose. Then, finally, he writes
the poetry of death, like that of love, in the
convincing characters of his example.


54




II


THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM
" His rhythm and uniformity he will conceal in the roots
of his verses, not to be seen of themselves, but to break forth
loosely as lilacs on a bush, and take shapes compact as the
shapes of melons or chestnuts or pears."
SALIENT among the problems with which
Whitman and his work confront us is that
of the form in which his poetic impulse clothed
itself.  To what extent are his Leaves a
natural and   coherent growth?    To  what
extent are their shapes vital shapes? And
how are we to discern what is vital in them
from  what is trivial or redundant?      To
answer these questions involves analysing,
however cursorily, the relation of the form to
the matter in poetry as a whole. It is arguable
that the highest kind of poetry rejects a
rhythmical plan or predetermined scheme of
any kind: that its form can be determined
by nothing else than the creative impulse
which takes as it arises the form proper to it.
The attainment of poetry will in this view
55




WALT WHITMAN


be the attainment of complete freedom. Can
any one believe that the true poem is dependent
for its unity upon preserving an equal number
of stresses in a line or lines in a stanza? Its
unity lies surely in the fact that it proceeds
from a continuously developing emotion; and
this, as it grows to the light, will open here a
leaf and there a tendril and here again a bud
or a flower, all unpredictably and each in
shape and size responsive to the various
degrees of light that fall upon it, adaptable to
no pattern.   So Walt Whitman must have
argued; and some of the greatest monuments
of emotional literature exist to assure us that
he was not wrong in believing that the essence
of poetry overflows all its moulds. His Leaves
of Grass was a deliberate challenge to the
conventional ideas of what is beautiful and
appropriate in verse.
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore
leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and
with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me!
It is a bracing if not a reassuring note.
Whitman in fact challenged so much that we
shall do well to search for the residue left unchallenged by him.     What is the ground
common to him and other poets?
56




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


The poet uses language and summons before
our minds, as language must do, an array of
thoughts and images, his object being to communicate the feeling which these thoughts
and images arouse in him. The feeling sometimes includes and transcends the thought and
imagery, sometimes merely insinuates itself
among the thoughts, touching their surfaces;
however that may be, it is more for the sake
of the feeling than for their own sake that
the thoughts and images are presented; the
feeling is the determining principle, the
creative centre of the work. Shelley's
Hail to thee, blithe spirit,
Bird thou never wertis not a piece of perverse ornithology. It
denies a fact in order to establish an emotion.
And to guard it against a literal interpretation,
the denial is couched in a peculiar form; it is
made rhythmically.
If a friend is with me and I use the expression "How delightful!" he can gauge at
once from his knowledge of my character and
from the tone of my voice what kind of
delight I am experiencing and how much of
it; but the words, printed upon the page of a
book, suggest no more than that some unknown
person has experienced an unknown quantity
57




WALT WHITMAN


of a feeling of which we know no more than
that he thought or professed to think it
pleasant. Now the problem in poetry is to
find some substitute for the tone of the voice.
The printed symbols are to be redeemed from
dumbness and so ordered that we shall recover in them the quality of the poet's mood,
the breath and emphasis of his expression.
They are to be the embodiment, not the mere
record, of his experience. We are to find in
them the unique spiritual impulse out of
which they came.
To convey this organic effect poetry falls
back upon something more primitive than
words. Birds and animals communicate their
feelings to one another by variations of tone
which the whole fraternity recognises and
which we ourselves can recognise to have
a direct significance.  Besides varying the
tone they express themselves also by varying
the rhythm of their cries. That highly-strung
creature, the blackbird, conveys excitement
in screams which are not only shrill but also
punctuated and distributed in an expressive
pattern. The coo of the turtle-dove in its
unflagging persistency and that of the woodpigeon in its soft retarded pressures would
express, even without help from the quality
of the notes, that brooding domesticity which
58




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


is characteristic of both these birds.  Not
only the tone of the voice, then, but, as we
see by these primitive examples, its rhythm
also, assumes a natural impress from the
feeling of the utterer. It follows that in so
far as words can be made rhythmical, their
rhythm, as dictated by the poet's feeling, will
convey to us immediately as we hear it, the
feeling which it is his purpose to convey.
So far we have Whitman with us wholeheartedly. His native instinct for rhythmical
expression is indeed abnormally powerful.
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
he writes of the sea in his first great poem,
and the rhythm of the line beckons of itself
unmistakably. A little later we have
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
and the rhythm lulls now and assuages.
Effects like these are common in Leaves of
Grass, and a great part of the pleasure it gives
us depends upon them.      Differences arise
when we go further and consider the conditions under which language and rhythm
are best associated. In poetry we have as
a rule not only rhythm but metre-a measurable something which is common to one line
after another, one stanza after another, a
59




WALT WHITMAN


uniform pattern which underlies their subtly
varying forms. Why is this? If rhythm is
an immediate expression of feeling, we might
have expected rhythm and feeling to change
obviously together, as, in Leaves of Grass,
they actually do. Putting aside our experience
of poetry and habit of mind in regard to it, we
see that its regularity is a curiously artificial
product and calls for explanation.
The explanation is to be looked for in the
nature of the rhythm in words and the limitations and difficulties imposed by it upon the
poet's art. One of the commonest fallacies of
the prosodist is that of supposing that our
normal pronunciations are susceptible of precise metrical analysis; that certain syllables
are long, definitively, and certain other syllables definitively short. On the contrary,
the problem of prosody is to strike averages;
not to discover the length of syllables, but
why and how it is convenient for certain
purposes to regulate or conventionalise their
length. When we speak with feeling, we here
dwell on a syllable or on a word, there run
rapidly forward, crowding a number of unimportant words or syllables together.  We
do this easily and naturally; and we can do it
because words have no strongly inherent
rhythm of their own. Their meaning as words
60




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


does not depend upon the length of time it
takes us to pronounce them. And so far as
their relation to feeling goes, they are indeterminate matter. They do not dictate a
rhythm to us; the more intense our feeling,
the more natural we find it to dictate to them,
and to no matter what combination of them,
any rhythm we will. Feelings, in live speech,
are in fact irrepressible, and can safely be left
to declare themselves after their own fashion.
This being so, the tendency of language has
been to consider clearness and practical convenience in the formation and articulation of
words, so that we may be provided with
a medium for the accurate exchange of information and ideas. Here then is the poet's
difficulty. The purposes of language are
opposed to his purposes. For the expression
of his feeling he must find in words and make
to appear from within through his use of them
the rhythms which feeling ordinarily forces
upon them from without. Like the pigeon
or the blackbird, he feels a certain measure
or pulsation appropriate to the emotion he
has to convey; but in order to convey it
he must find words to suggest it, and how is
this to be done? The emotion which we
convey in speech takes its own rhythm and
pulls the words this way and that to make
61




WALT WHITMAN


them fit it. In poetry the rhythm of the
emotion must somehow find its embodiment
in the words so that as we read the words we
recognise the rhythm and feel the emotion.
And since the same words are susceptible of
different rhythms according to the emotion
we put into them, how is it possible for us to
arrive at the poet's rhythm and emotion
through his words?
In brief, when we see a line of poetry before
us, to what is due our confidence that we feel
its rhythm as the poet intended it to be felt?
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with
full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is
any more than lie.
If we ask half a dozen of our friends to read
this aloud to us, we shall probably find that
to each of them the four clauses have a slightly
different shape and cadence.   In particular
the value of the words said, is, to, me, in the
first line will be variously interpreted, while,
in the   second, rhythmical ambiguity    will
extend to as many perhaps as eleven syllables.
For example, we may read:/        /         /
How could I answer the child?
or:/  /        /
How could I answer the child?
62




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


or:
How could I answer the child?
and again:/ /                       /
I do not know what it is any more than he
or:/ / /        /     /
I do not know what it is any more than he
or:/        I /          /           /
I do not know what it is any more than he.
and so on almost indefinitely. Our disposition
at first will be to assure ourselves that this
perplexity is fictitious; that to discuss the
rhythm of the lines is academical; that the
version which seems most natural to ourselves
is the correct one. Let me place my own
version before the reader as a test:A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with
full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is
any more than he.
I must not flatter myself he will accept it.
And though I have marked where, to my ear,
the stresses fall, I may still have failed to
convey to him what seems to me to be the
cadence of the lines. Now uncertainty of this
kind is, in varying degrees, unavoidable where
the rhythm is free; that is, where each line is
its own law and pattern. And yet, unless the
63




WALT WHITMAN


rhythm is communicated with exactitude,wherever, that is, the poet fails to make clear
to his reader what cadence he intends,-the
words are liable to lose their poetic quality
and to become lifeless. It is here that metre
can assist us; as a rhythmical scheme
separable from the words and exemplified in
them it provides a basis for mutual understanding.
Now the more mutual understanding is set
up between the poet and his reader, the wider,
the more resourceful becomes, clearly, the
poet's vehicle of expression. Reflecting again
upon the lines of Whitman just quoted, we
observe that our uncertainty as to their
exact rhythmical intention is hardly distinguishable from our uncertainty as to the
exact shade of meaning he intends them to
convey. What does this imply? It implies
surely a great sacrifice of expressive power.
For if the subtleties of a poet's rhythm are
only appreciable as the result of an appreciation
of the subtleties of his meaning, it is clear that
they cannot contribute anything to that meaning on their own account. But when the
rhythm follows a plan, we take its broad
outlines for granted; it is something known;
and this means that we have attention to
spare for the turns, the syncopations, the
64




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


irregularities, which contribute so much to its
expressiveness.
Again, the effect of a regular rhythm, perhaps as a result of its directness and immediacy,
is very soon played out; and to sustain it, to
keep the attention, variations must be introduced. The language of rhythm, in its more
developed phases, involves (as every musician
knows) a constant play of anticipation and
surprise. Effects are produced, meanings are
conveyed, by preparing the mind to expect
one thing and giving it another. Hardly is
a rule laid down before, now in one, now in
another direction, it is disregarded. And it
is in these variations, this embroidery, that
the value of rhythm as a medium of progressive
communication really consists. But, obviously,
if you are to depart from a rule, you must have
a rule to depart from. Variations imply a
theme. The significance of the irregularities
is their deliberate and measurable deviation
from a recognised basis of regularity. It is to
metre, then, that the poet turns for a basis of
regularity against which his irregularities may
play. Without it, he is limited to the broadest
outlines for his rhythmical expression, to
shapes that will impose themselves on the
unguided attention; and even these broad
outlines will often be ambiguous. For subtler
E               65




WALT WHITMAN


play of rhythm he will be obliged to fall back
upon the relation of sound to sense, and, instead of adding rhythmical to linguistic effects,
derive the one from the other.
Thus the first question which criticism has
to answer in regard to the form of Whitman's
poems is this: how far in discarding metre did
he reckon with the value of what he discarded? how much intelligence and craftsmanship, how much technical experience lay
behind his choice of spontaneous methods?
This decided, we shall be able to ask to
what extent his apparent irregularities conceal an order equivalent to that attained
in the conventional regularities of other
poets.
A curious feature of Leaves of Grass is the
frequency with which lines of a conventional
pattern are introduced in stanzas which, as
stanzas, are completely free. The hexameter is
quite a favourite; elegiac couplets several times
occur; the ordinary blank verse line is, of
course, the commonest of all. More than this,
even rhymes are resorted to occasionally.
The natural tendency of criticism is to take
these manifestations as a tacit admission by
the poet, only the more significant if it was
unconscious, of the virtue of the forms against
which he was in rebellion. Mr. Paul Elmer
66




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


More even goes so far as to say that the " prevalent effect " of Leaves of Grass is "that of a
hexametric cadence such as probably preceded the schematisation of the Homeric
poems," and his opinion clearly is that the
perception and acknowledgment of this by
Whitman himself would logically have involved him in a similar schematisation of his
own work. But Mr. More exaggerates the
relative frequency of hexameters, even if we
include under that heading a generous measure
of hexametristic lines. And his view of Whitman generally is hardly sympathetic enough
to reveal to him the positive grounds on
which Whitman's rejection of common forms
was based. Sometimes, no doubt, a sort of
instinct for formal composition takes Whitman,
as it might seem, at unawares; he has written
one or two splendid poems in which the
quality of his inspiration appears to demand
from him a consistent flow of rhythm, and
only habit, it might be argued, leads him to
refuse this. Some of the most majestic lines
in Prayer of Columbus and Song of the Universal
take a familiar pattern:Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
or: —
Love like the light silently wrapping all,


67




WALT WHITMAN


and these poems, with a few others, might,
perhaps, be called metrical in their entirety,
examples of a frustrated and magnified blank
verse. But I know of no poem which can fairly
be said to imply the hexameter as a base. And,
in the compositions just alluded to, it must be
noted that the magnificence of the verse is
bound up with its frustration. If the Song of
the Universal is great, its theme makes it so;
the versification is fumbling, and descends
more than once into a merely metristic prettiness. Indeed the poem, in spite of its beauty
and triumph at the close, is a laboured piece
of work. The opening paragraphs, in particular, betray a weak search for adventitious
decoration, a feature which is of all others the
most uncharacteristic of Leaves of Grass as a
whole. Lines like
As from tall peaks the modern overlooking,
Successive fiats absolute issuing,
would have been enough to destroy a lesser
poem, and their weakness lies precisely in
their relation to a norm; they have so far
demeaned themselves as to become Iambics!
Thus even those poems which come nearest
to metre owe their strength to their disdain
of it.
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


As a general rule the appearance in his work
of the waifs and strays of rhyme and rhythm
has a disquieting effect. They are momentary,
miscalculated ebullitions. Children of fashion
that have lost their way they are jostled by
the Bohemian crowd, which bestows upon
them and receives from them unkindly glances.
Thou Mother with thy equal brood,
Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity
only,
A special song before I go I'd sing o'er all the rest,
For thee, the future.
Could any passage be more accurately calculated than this to give displeasure? The
trivial skipping motion on a hackneyed idea
in the second line, the meandering complacency
of the third line,-first wilful violation of a
rhythm we have been led to expect, then
foolish insistence on a rhythm which is not
worth having when we have got it,-all these
things are bad enough to prepare us for the
worse that follows. The pity of it too is that
the disorder, the clash of poetry, pedantry, and
piano-tunes, is enjoyed, deliberately aimed at.
The opening lines of the Song of the Broad Axe
are another flagrant example:69




WALT WHITMAN


Weapon shapely, naked, wan,
Head from the mother's bowels drawn,
Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only
one,
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a
little seed sown,
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be lean'd and to lean on.
Half concealed    by   wayward    printing, we
have here in effect an eight-line stanza, in
which the lines are all equivalent and all
rhyme together. The one or two touches in it
of descriptive genius, the beautiful use of the
word 'wan', are not enough to redeem the
whole from absurdity; and again we must
note that the absurdity has been sought out,
enjoyed.   Another poem, which       begins in
high declamatory style:And now gentlemen,
lets us down after a little into the lamest jog
trot:Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and
Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling
and Hegel,
hexameters as worthless, as meaningless as,
once more, they are intentional. Turn even to
that noble threnody, When Lilacs Last in the
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM
Dooryard Bloom'd, and on the very threshold
a sheer barbarism confronts you:Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring.
What does this betray if not a childish, under
the circumstances a fatuous and even wanton,
pleasure in a silly jingle of words?1 There is no
1 After long turning over in my mind, tasting and retasting, the tercet of which this is the first line, I have come
to suspect in it a concealed rhythmical intention which would
make such harsh terms unjustifiable. The line at first sight
scans:
/     / /! /
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
and in this form is, to me, anathema. Yet Whitman, who
could write a line like:Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held...
cannot complain if readers attribute to him other barbarisms.
The true scansion of the tercet seems, however, to be this:l/    /! /          I
Ever-returning spring, ) trinity sure to me you bring, I
Lilac blooming perennial I and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
There is, that is to say, a sequence of five members, each of
them bearing three accents; and these trinities of accents
are, I suppose, a conscious symbolic reinforcement of the
idea of the trinity of recollections. The whole conformation
of the stanza would, according to this reading, be the result
of scrupulous and delicate adjustments; and the purpose of
the opening rhyme might be to prepare the reader's attention for an unusual effect. As a further instance of what
looks like conscious moulding to a norm, it may be observed
71




WALT WHITMAN


need to multiply examples. Clearly Whitman's
refusal of metre was the refusal of innocence,
not of experience.    One must doubt whether
his ear was capable of receiving the disciplined
music of such verse as Milton's, whether, in
fact, the verse of all the greatest poets did not
seem   sing-song to him.     Certainly, whatever
determined his choice of irregularity, his perception of the meaning of conventional forms,
his instinct and practice in the use of them,
were at a primitive level. He is far from
being unsusceptible to the charms of metre.
But they are Circe charms to him. Crying out
for an ideal of nonchalance and ease he escapes
a temptress.
It is true of all commanding poetry that its
form  is only   perfect when     it is secondary,
when it is an instrument, a vessel:The words of the true poems give you more than poems...
They do not seek beauty, they are sought,
Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty,
longing, fain, love-sick.
that the rather curious accentuation "su're to me you bri ng"
is echoed at the transition between the next two members
very beautifully ("c -e nnial and dro op- "). But the uncertainty
attaching to all this is instructive. Whitman seems to be
trying here to obtain effects to which a scheme is indispensable. And it is a good instance of the risks of metrical
antinomianism that it should permit so much care to be
directed to communicating what after all remains obscure.
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


To none does the truth apply more accurately
than to Walt Whitman's.    The echoes of
cultivated verse exercised a considerable influence upon him, and this influence, as far
as it went, was damaging. His own wild
music, ravishing, unseizable, like the song of a
bird, came to him, as by his own principles it
should have come, when he was not searching
for it. And his greatness as a poet, when we
regard his poetry on its formal side, is that
conventional echoes damaged him so little,
that in spite of unavoidable elements of wilfulness and reaction in his poetry, he was able to
achieve so real an independence.
Independence, it is necessary to remember,
was in his case essential to artistic success.
For he had to find the forms which would
be appropriate to a specific purpose. He
set out to discover a means of direct personal
appeal, capable of ranging from the levels
of a merely conversational tone, familiar but
always ardent, along the broad and copious
lower slopes of vivid description and specification, and up by the steps and steeps of impassioned argument and persuasion to those
heights of prophetic ecstasy and assurance
where speech itself is a song. And this he
73




WALT WHITMAN


actually achieves. He gives us poems which
represent severally all the different stages of
the ascent; he gives us other poems-and
these perhaps are the most characteristic of
him-in the course of which we pass imperceptibly from one stage to another, now
rising, now falling as the development of the
theme requires.
In all, the determining condition of the
form is this direct personal impulse. The
poem, as Whitman conceives it, is to remain
fundamentally a conversation. It is to be the
expression by me to you of the feelings which
are as much yours as mine, and would undoubtedly have been expressed by you to me
but for the accident of my being the more
garrulous fellow of the two. It is to act in the
field of spiritual needs much as the more
modern kind of advertisement does in the field
of material needs, button-holing its client,
assuring him that he is a brother, and confiding to him its knowledge of the common
perplexities of the life of man. How easily
this atmosphere of confidence and familiarity
raises a smile! It subsists largely upon illusions; but the illusions are harmless, for they
deceive nobody; and they are really worth
74




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


entertaining, even if they are a little wearisome
and over-persistent at times; for with them
come large reinforcements of that genuine
raciness and diffused good feeling which are
part of America's contribution to the civilisation of the world. There was more of strength
and perception and courage than there was of
weakness in Whitman's determination to turn
this unpromising    stuff to   poetic uses.   The
impromptu confab, in which equal takes equal
aside for a few words (or not so few!), this he
felt to be typical not only of his country but
also of his country's ideals. And it is in poems
where a conversational tone is the most
apparent that he is most completely himself.
As I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the
open air I resume,
I know I am restless and make others so,
I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws,
to unsettle them,
I am more resolute because all have denied me than I
could ever have been had all accepted me,
I heed not and have never heeded either experience,
cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,
And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing
to me,
And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing
to me,
75




WALT WHITMAN


Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with
me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is
our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and
defeated.
It is tempting at first sight to argue that this,
being mere prose, would be more sensible and
straightforward as a continuous paragraph.
Little, indeed, seems to be added to the composition by the scanty formalities in virtue
of which it claims the name of a poem. But
the question is not whether there is much or
little, but whether there is enough. For what,
after all, is the artist's essential quality, if not
to know how much exactly is enough and to
give no more?      "0,"   sings the forsaken
mocking-bird, with whom Whitman identifies
himself in perhaps the loveliest of his poems:-.. O I think you could give me my mate back again if
you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I
look.
"I am   almost sure I see her dimly"; that
quaver of uncertainty in the words is the
source of their power.     The sentimentalist
would have been quite sure he saw her clearly,
and would have demanded instant restitution!
Only passion can afford to take gradations, to
76




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


admit its doubts. The poem As I Lay exemplifies power of a similar kind. The theme
resolves itself into a series of autobiographical
reflections; yet, in their total effect, these
reflections touch us intimately; and the
effect, so far as form contributes to it, results
from the fact that we have been asked to
stray upon the borderland of prose and poetry
by a guide confident of his power to keep
us on the right side of the border.
The beauty of the poem, formally, is that
it is content to hang its existence upon a thread.
Each line is a single contributory thought
floated to us on a contributory breath. The
single impulse which produced the whole has
divided itself into a succession of waves of
impulse, which vary in height and volume,
each, whether by sympathy or by contrast,
affecting the height and volume of the rest.
Take one instance only of the workings of these
subtle compensations: who can read the
words " Dear camerado " at the beginning of
the last line but one, without an instinctive
recovery of the cadence of the first line of the
piece, with the blending emotions of intimate
affection, calm concession, confiding resignation, which were expressed in that and the
line following? The intervening lines, it is
77




WALT WHITMAN


equally obvious, have been, as waves, a kind
of complementary reaction.    The tide has
been stationary; there has been a retirement, a
back-wash. But the water as it continues to
move continues to prepare us for a new pressure of advance; and in the last two lines this
new pressure has arrived. Swiftly and smoothly
it spreads over a fresh stretch of sand and
leaves us at the end with an exquisite sob or
falter as, in its completion, it disappears.
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with
me, and still urge you, without the least idea what
is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and
defeated.
We must note further as an essential feature
of the form at which Whitman is aiming that
each poem he writes has to be judged by an
intrinsic standard. Most of the conventional
forms with which we are familiar have their
fixed possibilities and limitations; to adopt
the sonnet form, the In Memoriam quatrain
or that of Omar Khayyam, is to entitle the
reader to more or less specific expectations,
and he will judge a poem written in these
metres according to the degree in which it
fulfils what he expects of them or replaces his
expectation by something better. The form
of Whitman's conversational poem depends on
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM
the course the conversation takes and the
temper which has initiated it; and whether
the form is perfect or not in a particular case
we can decide only by familiarising ourselves
with the unique requirements of the case in
point. Thus, in the example that follows, the
tone of conversation has passed into that of
soliloquy; the mood is too intimate, too
remote, to admit of the idea of any but an
impersonal utterance; we picture the soul of
the poet addressing as it were some shadow of
itself:
Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears,
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the
sand,
Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the
sand?
Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild
cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps
along the beach!
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind-O belching
and desperate!
O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking-O then the
unloosen'd ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!
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WALT WHITMAN


The form here is of such exquisite sensitiveness
that it is with an effort we remember the
offences its author could commit. The lines
"O who is that ghost" and " What shapeless
lump is that " serve just to maintain the air
of realistic familiarity that Whitman loves.
He takes advantage of the ballast they provide
to soar up into heights of suggestion and
impressionism where he is equally at home.
The storm, the human creature out in it,
exchange  forces,  appearance,  personality
almost, from line to line. The tears are the
rain, but who is it that is weeping? The
night, the tempest, the seashore are part of
the solitude and the despair they cover, part
of the outpouring of passion and sorrow which
they liberate, echo and absorb. And how
does language take the impress of hints so
vague and so conflicting and of an integration
so profound? All through the piece alliteration, though never obtruding itself, and indeed
never appearing till it is sought out, adds significance to the choice of the words by coaxing
the reader to dwell upon them and so helping
him to pass naturally over gaps whether of
grammar or idea which might otherwise check
him; he may observe next how every line,
sensitive to the cadence of the first, divides
itself sympathetically into a succession of
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


lesser impulses, of which there are usually,
but not always, three; and finally, as the
sign of a still more vital sensitiveness, he will
note the repetition of the keynote of the piece,
the word "tears."     The word is not only
repeated, but variously placed in successive
lines, so that by maintenance of the emphasis
upon it its structural significance may be fully
brought out. Then, at what is structurally the
centre of the piece, there is a cessation; four
lines of release and tumult follow which are
silent of it; and so we are prepared for the
beauty and inevitability of the final cadence
in which it returns.
In Tears! Tears! Tears! we have a piece
of poetic architecture which is at once completely original and completely satisfying. To
measure the achievement it represents, let us
oppose to it an example of merely conventional
melodiousness. Here, from Spenser's Teares
of the Muses (a poem which extends to 600
lines), is the first verse of the mourning of
Melpomene:O who shall powre into my swollen eyes
A sea of teares that neuer may be dryde,
A brasen voice that may with shrilling cryes
Pierce the dull heauens and fill the ayer wide,
And yron sides that sighing may endure,
To waile the wretchednes of world impure?
F                81




WALT WHITMAN


A passage like this brings vividly before us a
vicious tendency to which verse-writing is
subject even in the hands of true poetswhen the form evokes rather than expresses
the feelings of which it is the mould. To call
the tendency vicious is not to deny that it
sometimes produces exquisite poetry, if never
poetry of a kind which Whitman would have
recognised. And though he would have been
wrong to see nothing but artifice and insincerity in it, these are, nevertheless, besetting
dangers.  Let any reader, who will deal
strictly with himself, turn the pages of his
most cherished master;-how many works will
he find of which he can say that their form,
however appropriate to the feeling, completely
fills it, that nowhere a line, a phrase, a word
has been inserted for form's sake? The sincerer our devotion to poetry, the more readily
we recognise that even in works called great,
the form is apt to be a convenient mantle
which, though it serves indeed to reveal the
living gestures of the poet, serves also to give
an average effect of dignity to transitional
moments, when he is recovering from one
gesture and preparing for the next. Form, as
Whitman made use of it, avoids this pitfall.
Not pre-existing as a mould to be filled, it
cannot attract the feeling that is to fill it. It
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


waits upon the feeling, and the feeling when it
comes is the more likely to be genuine and
sincere.
Hardly, however, are we free of one snare
before another has us. Does it follow because
a feeling is sincere that its expression is of value
or importance? Obviously not. A poet may
be mistaken in his estimate of the interest and
vitality of some moment of seeming inspiration; and the artifices of form which were but
lately his temptation become now his test and
his guide. For the structural conformities to
which he pledges himself impose upon him, as
it were, a minimum standard of intensity, a
qualitative pattern, to which his feeling, if it
is to unify and justify itself, must rise; and
thus they give both to himself and his readers
a rough standard by which to judge externally
of the strength and value of the poetic impulse.
At times, then, metre may tempt the poet to
produce mere formalities or to mistake formalities for forms, but at other times (and these the
more frequent) he will be protected by it
against the dangers of a formless emotionalism.
Here precisely is Whitman's point of weakness.  Unconfined, he is also unsustained.
Accepting no conventional necessities, he can
surrender to aimlessness what he has vowed to
freedom. Poet of the inexpressible, he can
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WALT WHITMAN


forget that though expression fails when thought
has been transcended, it also and more usually
fails because thought has been neglected or
faultily  applied.  The   ' leaf' following  is
typical of but too many even among those that
belong to the period of his maturity:A leaf for hand in hand;
You natural persons old and young!
You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and
bayous of the Missiissippi!
You friendly boatmen and mechanics! you roughs!
You twain! and all processions moving along the streets!
I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for
you to walk hand in hand.
The intrusion here of the Mississippi, with its
branches and bayous, is something quite inexplicable; and the flowing rhythm   of the line,
its conscious alliterations and repetitions, emphasise the intrusion and make it ludicrous.
From   the  line "You twain! and all processions moving along the streets " one might
fairly infer that there is a kind of procession
in America that is called a " twain "; possibly
that is the case. The whole piece is neither
individualised nor universalised, neither seen
nor thought; and it is the informality of the
writing that makes its incoherence possible.
The same sort of incoherence involves some
of the longer poems in disaster. Perhaps the
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


most desperate case is that of the Song of the
Exposition. Man's conquest of the material
world in his arts, crafts, sciences, manufactures is endowed in this laboured recitative
with all the lustre of a spiritual attainment of
which the most to be said is that material
conquest makes it possible. The show takes
place in a glorified Crystal Palace,
High rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades...
Bronze, lilac, robin's-egg, marine and crimson,
and this palace is to add an eighth to the seven
wonders of the world; while the Muse herself,
Bluff'd not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial
fertilizers,
settles herself down in the midst of the monstrous brood and promises to be at home. The
poem is indeed a series of crying discrepancies
between thought and form. A rudimentary
sense of humour, courageously called in to fill
the breach, merely reveals its gaping amplitude.  " One stately house," the assurance is
gravely accorded to us:One stately house shall be the music house,
Others for other arts-learning, the sciences, shall all be
here,
None shall be slighted, none but shall here be honor'd,
help'd, exampled.
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WALT WHITMAN


Throughout the piece a noble idea writhes
and torments itself in the effort to dignify an
inappropriate    occasion.   In  vain   Whitman
acknowledges and even vaunts the more uninspiring details associated with his theme.
His ecstasy does not interpenetrate with them;
his manifest labour is so great that it is no
surprise to find him in one passage completely
losing touch with his own thought:To you ye reverent sane sisters,
I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art,
To exalt the present and the real,
To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk
and trade,
To sing in songs how exercise and chemical life are never
to be baffled,
To manual work for each and all, to plough, hoe, dig...
For every man to see to it that he really do something,
for every woman too;
To use the hammer and the saw, (rip, or cross-cut,)...
To work as tailor, tailoress, nurse, hostler, porter,
To invent a little, something ingenious, to aid the washing,
cooking, cleaning,
And hold it no disgrace to take a hand at them themselves.


How beautiful, what a reflection upon the
rest, is the first line of this pathetic descent
into imbecility! The mental shuffle which
occurs at the words "To manual work "where the word " to " is taken up imitatively
in a sense which the grammar and the thought
86




THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


equally refuse-gives the signal for a general
stampede of the faculties. Why specify of the
saw that it must be rip or cross-cut? How
invent without ingenuity or aid the washing
without taking a hand?       And then, alas!
what an air of self-congratulation in the
rhythm of the last line! At the climax of the
poem sense and grammar are again sacrificed
for the sake of a rapture which even so is not
attained:
Now here and these and hence in peace, all thine O Flag!
And here and hence for thee, O Universal Muse! and thou
for them!
What form     except Whitman's would have
enabled an artist to flounder so hopelessly
among the shallows, now plying fins, now
wings, and ignorant all the time whether he is
on land or in the water or the air? 1
Whitman's failures, numerous as they are,
do not affect his stature as a poet. His successes, and the fact that his successes include
some of the longest and most audacious of his
works, suffice to establish his power in conception and creation and the quality of his
touch as an executant. Among his greatest
gifts is his command of the music of words,
1 It is only fair to remind readers that the Song of the Exposition
was composed by request for use at a public ceremony at a time
when the condition of Whitman's health made sustained effort
impossible to him.
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WALT WHITMAN


the freedom   with which he can throw     off
phrases equally remarkable for their significance and for their beauty. And it is worth
noting here that the free structure of his work
enabled it in a peculiar degree to accommodate the concentrations of poetic motive to
which this gift gave rise. We know how the
vague films of the oyster shell are knitted into
a pearl under the influence of a creature vaguer,
filmier than themselves. Similarly in Whitman,
poetry is, on the one hand, diffused, a nourishing, penetrating fluid, a living milk; on the
other hand, it is always ready to crystallise
itself at need; and the two conditions, instead
of destroying, seem naturally to explain and
support one another. His form, not demanding a poetical manner from him, is not cast
down by the appearance of the jewel of poetry
when occasion brings it forth, but is ready,
exists in fact, to provide a natural setting for it.
O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
he cries out, in one of his most solemn moments,
using accents and entering with them into
an atmosphere that recalls the religious illumination and self-effacement of an Ezekiel or an
Isaiah. In all but the next line he is
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil
upon me I have not once had the least idea who or
what I am.
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


And how can we but wonder that in these two
utterances, apparently so different in tone, a
community of substance and feeling should
announce itself!  The fact is indubitable.
Both take their place in a paragraph permeated,
irradiated, by the splendour of its opening
line.
The intrusion of what is ordinarily called
form would make transitions of this kind, with
the action and reaction, the underlying principle of compensation they involve, impossible. Nor need we go outside Whitman's
own work for proof of this. In Pioneers, Dirge
for Two Veterans and elsewhere, he has endeavoured to combine his familiar thought
and method with a concession to formal
regularity. The result is always the same.
The thought loses its distinctive flavour. Something has clouded and adulterated the flow of
a stream which was only delicious to us when
its waters were absolutely pure.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
There is little enough form, one might suppose, in such a stanza; and yet there is
enough to raise a doubt about the aptitude, the
89




WALT WHITMAN


connection, the value even, of the sentiments
which are expressed in it; there is enough to
give the expression of love it contains an appearance of insincerity, to expose it as trivial
in fact, while it affects to be solemn. The
cause is simply clumsiness, inexperienced handling. And we must remark that Dirge for
Veterans would be condemned to failure if only
because of its resemblance to one of Whitman's ordinary 'leaves.' It has the same
apparent carelessness of manner, the same
apparent disconnectedness of the materials
brought together to form the picture, the same
iteration of each detail till its significance for
the whole is grasped. It has in fact all the
features so appropriate and so necessary in a
leaf of grass so inappropriate and so superfluous in a wreath of flowers. The phrases in
the poem which should have been pearls-for
instance, that wonderful description of the
full moon looking down upon a new-made
graveThe sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,these, instead of lending their poetry to their
surroundings, are robbed by their surroundings
of the poetry inherent in them, and must be
torn from their setting if they are to be appreciated.
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


This is but another way of saying that
Whitman in the bulk of his work had found
by intuition the form which his genius required. His conception of poetry, his poetic
habit, demanded, on the one side, spontaneity;
they demanded, on the other, universal simplicity and receptiveness. The forms of poetry
are artificial. Language submits to discipline
in order to assume them, and disciplined
language cannot express spontaneous feelings.
The appearance of spontaneousness can only
be obtained by an allowance for the requirements of the form, by an imaginative effort so
perfect that we are unaware it has been made.
This involves a certain conventionalisation of
the feeling to be expressed. Most of the shades,
the hesitations, the convergences, the conflicts of impulse have to be obliterated. The
tentative processes of growth escape, as it
were, through the meshes of the measured
line and stanza; what these give to us is the
clear movement and outline which, when the
growth is achieved, represent and announce
its characteristic features. There is a sense,
obviously, in which such handling was beyond
Whitman's scope; there is a sense also in
which it was not good enough to attract him.
His nature was too crude for poetry; but it
was also too sensitive; poetry was, in a
91




WALT WHITMAN


sense, too crude for him. One of the most
perfect of his compositions takes for its theme
a metaphysical, an elusive, yet for all that a
very familiar emotion-The Terrible Doubt of
Appearances-and the poet reaches his climax
of perplexity in the amazing line:Maybe seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they
indeed but seem) as from my present point of view,
and might prove (as of course they would) nought
of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from
entirely changed points of view;
This heap of stumbling contraries, this litter
of words, this rubble of ideas, is in its place
pure poetry.    Whitman's point is to express
the disorder, the commotion of feeling which
accompanies a certain confusion and distress
of the mind, to express the state of reasonable,
of seemingly final, uncertainty, before which
philosophy itself becomes powerless, and to
express this in such a way that having felt it
we may also feel its resolution:To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd
by my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long
while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words
and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I
am silent, I require nothing further...
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THE PROBLEM OF THE FORM


Everything in the piece, every word and
detail, every repetition and parenthesis, every
concession and modification, is part of a
single effect; and the effect, when we have it,
is an effect of beauty, a revelation of life in its
conditions and inner principle, a picture of
spiritual growth and conquest. All depends
upon Whitman's fearless use of a form which
aimed primarily at the expression of gradations,
and which rejected set patterns as too clumsy
to admit of faithfulness to the imperceptible
ebb and flow and interplay of vital emotion.


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III


THE FORM (ii)
CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES
O'JR understanding of Whitman's form is incomplete till we see what it excludes; for a
thing has no positive if it has no negative
qualities. Of course the idea of Leaves of Grass
was to be all-inclusive; the poem was conceived in a spirit of universal hospitality, and
such a spirit would be unfavourable to conscious method of any kind, would be likely to
pride itself on having none. But this more or
less inevitable pose must not bluff the critic.
The form of a work which aims at impressing
us with the spiritual coherence of all things
may well share the elusiveness of its theme
and be as inapprehensible as life itself. Yet
unless some connecting thread, however fine,
holds its divergences in a unity, the aim is unaccomplished.
Form in verse means, as a rule, metre.
AlWit)man felt rightly that no metre or combination of metres could serve the peculiar
purpose he had in view. At the same time he
94




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


was not averse, as we have seen, to the introduction of metrical fragments here and there,
and even shows a partiality for jingling
effects. If we are right in thinking that he
made a mistake in this, we have only to
analyse the grounds on which our judgment
rests, and we shall find the principle of exclusion which we are looking for.
But first let us note that the mistake itself
was of secondary importance. The primary
requisite for the form of Leaves of Grass was
that its spaciousness should be recognised and
that the composer should write to scale. No
one afflicted with sensitiveness about the minor
literary proprieties would have been likely to
rise to the careless amplitude of manner
necessary to the filling of so gigantic a mould.
We recognise this easily enough if we compare
the master with his followers, the originator
with the mimics. The normal writer of Whitmanesque verse feels in every line the influence
of the metre he has dispensed with and exhibits
the affectations of a disdainful culture. But
Whitman, like all who bring a revelation
through art, is faithful to nature, and his
method turns upon the discovery of nature in
what had seemed unnatural. He aimed at
being himself in his poetry, and this required
him to stand out as poetry personified in
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WALT WHITMAN


solitary relief against the whole poetic achievement of the past. He seemed to ask less than
others of the Muse. It devolved upon him to
give more. Choosing informality, he chose in
effect a form which permitted him no concealment, no breathing-space. We cannot wonder
if he did not stay to consider what his ideals
denied to him; his task was to be ready with
what they exacted. Only the intrusion, the
conspicuous and abiding presence of matter
inconsistent with the common forms could
justify his departure from them.
Yet if he rather transcends than refuses
metre, it is not the less true that recognisably
metrical lines are out of keeping with the
spirit of his poetry. His lines are not metrical;
what are they, then? We glanced earlier at
an objection often taken to the form of Leaves
of Grass to the effect that it has a spurious
emotionality; that the line-system has the
same relation to poetry as the habitual use of
italics has to prose. The objection, we think, is
inapplicable; but obviously the presentment of
a composition in lines is meaningless and otiose,
unless the lines have some common measure
and are identities in nature as well as in name.
The identity of the lines in metrical poetry
is an identity  of pattern.  The identity
of the lines in Leaves of Grass is an identity
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


of substance; and this is in effect by far
the subtler and more exacting condition of
the two. Tyrannous spontaneity allows the
poet so little respite that every line must,
as it were, contain his personality in the
germ. Whitman himself never, I think,
formulated this demand, and in the course of
his work he frequently overrides it. But it is
a natural deduction from his admitted principles. He looked upon each of his poems as
the leaf or branch of a tree. The line is to the
poem what the poem is to the work as a whole.
To say this is to say that certain forms are
excluded, that certain kinds of line will not do.
A quotation from early manuscript passages
written before Whitman had quite found his
bearings will show better than anything else
what his form rejects and why. Among the
variorum readings given in the third volume of
the Camden Edition of the collected works
(p. 128) we find the following:There is no word in my tongue,
No array, no form of symbol,
To tell his infatuation
Who would define the scope and purpose of God.
Readers familiar with Leaves of Grass will at
once feel a want of equivalence in these four
lines; and what does the sensation point to


G


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WALT WHITMAN


if not to the presence of equivalence in Whitman's lines generally?    Each true line of
Whitman's comes to       us, as I have     said,
floated separately on an independent breath.
Like the sea-waves to which he himself so
often compared them, his lines are not less
recognisably units because of their variable
shapes and sizes. And in the third of those
quoted above, some principle of equivalence
is violated. It is violated, therefore it exists.
The words " to tell his infatuation " are merely
transitional;  they   explain  what precedes,
prepare for what follows, and offer the mind
no substantial resting place. The passage as
it continues becomes still more instructive:Mostly this we have of God: we have man.
Lo, the Sun:
Its glory floods the moon,
Which of a night shines in some turbid pool,
Shaken by soughing winds;
And there are sparkles mad and tossed and broken,
And their archetype is the sun.
Of God I know not; -
But this I know;
I can comprehend no being more wonderful than man;
Man, before the rage of whose passions the storms of
heaven are but a breath;
Before whose caprices the lightning is slow and less fatal;
Man, microcosm of all Creation's wildness, terror, beauty
and power,
And whose folly and wickedness are in nothing else
existent.
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


The weakness here is quite as obvious, if
not quite so transparent. In the first passage
one of the lines was like a plank bridging a
chasm over which the reader walked insecurely,
feeling as if there were nothing under him.
Here the effect is of a succession of steppingstones. The lines are independent, but they
are discontinuous. And the reason soon appears.
The observations of the first stanza are not
really made for their own sake; they are made
with a purpose: in fact, in order to prepare us
for a simile. Even their independence, therefore, is apparent rather than real. It is not
independence; it is insulation. The turbid
pool, the soughing winds, do not appear before
us substantively; they are counted out like
symbols, and each has its stage in the process
of ethical deduction in which the simile is
applied. The lines that hold them are, in
fact, dependencies; they are not full lines;
they demand their unit of attention from us
and do not satisfy it.
It is to the junction in them of these two
seemingly incompatible qualities, continuity
and independence, that Whitman's mature
lines owe their integrity, and it is this that
dictates their behaviour in company, so to
speak, explaining the shape of the poems, their
formal development, and the difficulties and
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WALT VWHITMAN


resources of the craftsman.       The line is a
personality, the poem is a battalion, the book
is an army. To illustrate the point, let us
quote a paragraph in full:Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd gates, ever provoking questions,
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the
darkness why are they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh
me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat
and lank?
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and
melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those
trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?
What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore
as I walk by and pause?
What gives me to be free to a woman's and man's goodwill? what gives them to be free to mine?
The importance of continuity to the form is displayed at once here in that epanaphora, that
taking up of words or phrases, which is a pronounced characteristic of the style of Leaves of
Grass. Each line hangs by a loop from the line
before it. The motion is like the motion of walking; we continually catch up our foremost foot
and take a half step beyond. It is of course
the substantial self-sufficiency of the lines that
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


necessitates this interlocking. And their equivalence turns upon their relation to a progressive, an accumulating idea. For example, the
repetition of such a phrase as "the efflux of
the soul," though it lengthens the line in which
it occurs, does nothing to help that line to take
us further; it has a different function; it
joins the line more closely to its predecessor
than the pronoun "it" would do and, by
demanding less attention from the reader,
decreases the weight of the line, thus actually
preserving the equivalence it seems at first
sight to impair.
In what sense, then, finally are the lines
Here is the efflux of the soul
and
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd gates, ever provoking questions,
equivalent lines? We have seen that their
equivalence is in their content; to say this is
to say that it is in their context also-that it
depends upon their association together. They
have not the equivalence that two lines of
blank verse have and which they have equally
whether they stand next to one another or
not. The second is equivalent to the first only
as consequent upon it. In the first, an image
is, as it were, posited: the conception of the
soul as a radiating centre. In the second, the
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WALT WHITMAN


same image is elaborated. Suppose then that
for the second line, stumbled at first sight by
its length and complexity, we substitute
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd gates,
and stop there, we shall find, not only that
the line has lost poetry, but that it has lost
equilibrium  also. Why is this?  Surely because, in the line as Whitman wrote it, we take
the phrase
comes from within through embower'd gates
transitionally, and because it is when so taken
that its true value appears. If we emphasise
it, as would be necessary were it to stand alone,
we lose its suggestiveness and go searching for
some precise significance which we do not find.
But if we pass by way of it to the words
ever provoking questions
and look to them for the first purpose of the
line, the phrase falls into its relative place
with beautiful accuracy.   Is it because the
gates are embowered that the questions are
provoked? This, or something like it, gives
the line, no doubt, its coherence of idea. But
the point is that a mystical and an everyday
expression have been weighed together and
that their effect is felt in their juxtaposition.
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


We weigh them in this way together because
they are placed before us as constituents of a
single line; and, having so weighed them, we
find that the momentum set up by
Here is the efflux of the soul
is preserved and carried one stage further.
The equivalence of the two lines is thus an
equivalence of movement and of weight.
The problem of each succeeding line will be
the same; to preserve the movement, to advance
it by a stage and to maintain equilibrium in
the advance. Reading to the end of the paragraph with this idea in view, we shall find that
each line solves the problem in its own way.
One has an element of surprise, another brings
us into closer contact with the object, a third
has its expanding generalisation, a fourth its
illuminating detail; and the line in parenthesis is especially noticeable, niched there like
some light obstacle in flowing water and revealing the current which it checks. To put the
matter in general terms: the constitution of
a line in Leaves of Grass is such that, taken in
its context, the poetic idea to be conveyed by
the words is only perfectly derivable from
them when they are related to the line as a
unit; and the equivalence of the lines is their
equivalent appeal to our attention as con103




WALT WHITMAN


tributors to the developing expression of the
poetic idea of the whole.
Thus the progress of Whitman's verse has
much in common with that of a musical composition. For we are carrying the sense of
past effects along with us more closely and
depending more intimately upon them than is
possible in normal verse. What we can achieve
at any point of our structure depends upon
the trains of association we have set up, the
number of balls we have kept spinning, the
speed and quality of movement we have
attacked or attained. And just as the context limits, so it also lays its claim upon us.
For if no line can do more than maintain and
add its unit to the general flow, none may do
less. And just as in music, so here; it is impossible to lay down any rule for the maintenance of equivalence of effect, for the retaining
of attention and accumulation of interest to
the close. The condition of the effect that
we are to produce now is the effect we have
produced up to now; it lies with the modifications we have produced in our hearer's
receptivity, the anticipations we have formed
there.  Here a fortissimo seems necessary;
but its place is taken perhaps by a pianissimo,
perhaps by a silence, and the effect is sustained. There we have a diminuendo; its
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


point lies in the crescendo that preceded it;
and behold! while the sound lessens, the
meaning    grows.    Throughout, the     test  is
whether the emotional pitch propounded is
maintained, whether the piece continues to
expand in significance as it expands in volume.
Perhaps it is because the significance of
words accumulates faster than that of notes
of music that frequent division into paragraphs becomes necessary, and also the frequent interpolation of parenthetical reflections.
We go back and begin again where we began before in order, not that we may travel the same
route a second time, but that we may travel
to the same goal by a neighbouring route:Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first,
Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first.
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well
envelop'd,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful
than words can tell.
Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient
this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter'd this port and however calm these
waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we
are permitted to receive it but a little while.
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WALT WHITMAN


These lines exhibit splendidly the alternating
crescendo and diminuendo spoken of above.
In " Traveling with me you find what never
tires " we come immediately to a climax;
there is no carrying the idea further; we must
have a line of silence and start afresh. " The
earth never tires " takes up the idea again, and
in a sense is an addition to it; but it is a concessive, an explanatory addition; it is a concrete example and suggestion, and, as such, is
taken as platform for a new " flight into the
wordless." The poet soars, using a marked
crescendo, which comes freely because the
theme is simple. The line " I swear to you"
is an easy and yet an enjoyable fortissimo.
Again there is a pause; and then a new theme
develops (the transitoriness of life on earth),
needing tenderer handling; and so we have
the deliberate and delicious diminuendo which
brings the paragraph to a close.
The use of parenthesis is a recurring feature
of Whitman's technique, and no explanation of
his form can be adequate which does not relate
this peculiarity to the constructive principles
of the whole. He frequently begins a paragraph or ends one with a bracketed sentence,
or begins or ends some section of a poem with
a bracketed paragraph, sometimes even begins
or ends a poem parenthetically. Thus the
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CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


Song of the Exposition opens with the beautiful
aside:(Ah little recks the laborer,
How near his work is holding him to God.
The loving Laborer through space and time.)
and the last piece in Calamus significantly
closes:Be it as if I were with you. (Be not so certain but I am
now with you.)
This persistent bracketing falls well into the
scheme we have laid down of independent units
that serve an accumulating effect. The bracket,
one need not remark, secures a peculiar detachment for its contents; it also, by placing them
outside the current and main flow of the sense,
relates them to it in a peculiar way. And
although for the time being the flow is broken,
it by no means follows, as we saw, that our
sense of the flow is broken; on the contrary,
it is probably enhanced. We look down upon
the stream from a point of vantage and gauge
its speed and direction. More precisely, the
bracket opening a poem or paragraph gives us,
of course, the idea which that whole poem or
paragraph presupposes, while the closing
bracket gives the idea by which what precedes
is to be qualified and tempered. We have
thus as it were a poem within a poem; or
107




WALT WHITMAN


sometimes, when a series of brackets is used,
we have a double stream of poetry, as in By
Blue Ontario's Shore where the waters blend
and yet remain discriminate, a deeper and
more personal current of feeling persisting
under the strength and buoyant onrush of
the surface. All this carries out and amplifies
the peculiar formal significance of Leaves of
Grass, with its strange submission of words
to unfamiliar musical associations. Continuity
and independence being Whitman's opposing
principles of composition, independence emerges
in the bracket into relative prominence. The
disjunctive spirit of language asserts itself;
literature contemplates music.
But the analogy with music is still unexhausted. Not only is the method of progression
similar, the means of progression have also much
in common. The chief difference between musical and verbal expression, as a rule, is that
words, carrying each their mnodicum of meaning, have done their part when they have
delivered it, while notes, being meaningless
except in combination, develop new meanings
by presenting a single combination in varying
contexts or with varying accompaniment.
In fact, repetition, which the artist in language
scrupulously avoids, is the foundation and
substance of musical expression. Now Whit108




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


man, for reasons we have touched on, uses
words and phrases more as if they were notes
of music than any other writer. As we shall
see elsewhere, it was to him part of the virtue
and essence of life that its forms and processes
were endlessly reduplicated; and poetry,
which was delight in life, must somehow, he
thought, mirror this elemental abundance.
Language generally expects us, when an object
has been mentioned, to hold that object in
view until all that has to be said about it has
been said. But the object, if it were actually
before us, would continue to assert itself in a
thousand ways, and its persistency-its refusal, as it were, to believe that it can be
monotonous to us —is its reality, and if its
reality, then surely its poetry also.
You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful
ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate
henceforward.
Why should not words imitate things and keep
up the same patient knocking at the mind's
doors until we genuinely admit them?
The meaning of repetition lies of course in the
fact that it is impossible to have the same experience twice. If there is to be value in the
repeating over and over of some form of words,
there must be something in them or in their
109




WALT WHITMAN


varying contexts to enable the mind to pass
from a first to a second impression of them,
and from a second to a third and a fourth,
feeling at each stage that more is added in
discovery than is lost through the trouble of
treading the old path.   Words, we must
recollect, are partly vehicles of truth, partly
vehicles of emotion; they may exhibit a
simple relation or suggest a complex one. Now
the more complex the relation suggested, the
more familiar we must be with the words that
suggest it if we are to profit by every breath
of suggestion they contain. We have only to
grasp the sense of a geomctrical proposition
and we have done with the words of it; we
have no disposition to say them over. But
the words of a poem we often learn by heart
and repeat them to ourselves as we might repeat
a prayer. We are conscious that they proceed
out of a certain state of feeling which we
desire to enter into and to make our own; to
enter into a state we must become familiar
with it as an experience; and so we repeat
the poem over and over to ourselves, at each
repetition experiencing more intimately and
more profoundly the spiritual state reflected
in it. The poem thus becomes less and less
a form of words to us and more and more a
key to life. The reason is that the disposition
110




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


of the words demands from the mind that is to
understand them a corresponding disposition.
They emanate from and represent a harmony
into which we enter only by reproducing it in
our own being.
What applies to our deliberate repetition of
a poem to ourselves can be applied to the
handling of a poem by its composer if he so
chooses. His object is not to state truths but
to convey feelings; and the feeling with which
we hear a certain form of words may well
depend precisely upon the fact that we are not
hearing it for the first time, the feeling itself
changing and developing as its occasion is
repeated. Lyric poetry acknowledges the virtue
of repetition in the refrain, which, though in the
main a concession to the forms of the musical
accompaniment, has its value in reviving and
sustaining the implied emotional mood.
But there is a further point. A truth necessarily continues true. Of an emotion our chief
test is the degree to which it admits of constancy; feelings are habitually proved and
established by a frequent reiteration of the
expression of them. Now poetry gives us this
assurance as a rule by the elevation of manner,
the unified tone, the remoteness, which are
in themselves evidences of sustained feeling,
being unattainable without it. Repetition
111




WALT WHITMAN


(with certain exceptions irrelevant here) is thus
more otiose in poetry than in prose. For the
web of expression is more tightly woven, every
word has full force, and a higher concentration
is demanded of the reader who is to assimilate
the mood. The poem does not so much rise
to a certain altitude, as exist there; and the
danger is not that we may doubt the emotion,
but that we may fail to recognise the objects
to which it attaches-a failing which sometimes extends beyond a poet's readers to the
poet himself.
Now the absence of recognised formalities
which is characteristic of Leaves of Grass robs
language of these high-pitched associations,
and obliges us to interpret it in accordance
with the dictates of mere common sense.
When Whitman bids us
Behold this compost, behold it well,
we know that if we take up a handful of garden
soil and turn it over in our hands, we shall be
quite in the spirit of his intention. It was one
of his ideals in poetry not to lose sight of these
everyday simplicities. Yet a form or style
which begins from and reverts to such simplicities must forge instruments of some kind
to carry it from the simplicities to the profundities.  Poetic exaltation is not the less
112




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


necessary because it is not presupposed. And
of Whitman's instruments for obtaining it,
repetition-repetition of forms, of phrases, of
themes-is perhaps the chief. It is not only
that it assists him, as we have seen, to carry
out the principle of accumulating weight, his
first law of construction. It is also that by it
he brings home to us the increasing value for
emotion of expressions the value of which,
at first hearing, seemed to lie in their very
divorce from it, in their cool substantiality.
His most astonishing effects are thus often
produced by means least compatible with
ordinary poetry, the means, like the effects
they serve, being peculiarly his own. Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry is perhaps the greatest and
boldest example of them:Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high-I see
you also face to face!
Beginning thus with the common attitude to
common objects, we find ourselves gradually,
as it were, intermingled with them and caught
up through the medium of the poet's interpretation into the sentiment and atmosphere
they create:Ah! what can ever be more stately and admirable to me
than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?


H


113




WALT WH-ITMTAN


Without losing touch with our own experience,
we make a passage from natural to impassioned
vision. We do more than read poetry. We feel
it in its process and formation; not lifted into
another world, but acquainted with the deepening and extending vistas of the world we live
in:
Flow on, river! flow withl the flood-tide, and ebb with the
ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor
me, or the men and women generations after me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful
hills of Brooklyn!...
You have waited, you always wait, you duimb, beautiful
ministers,
We receive vou1 w-ith free sense at last, and are insatiate henccforwa'rd.
Not you any more sha.ll be able to foil us, or withhold
yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside-we plant y-(ell
permranently within us,
We fathom you not —we love you-there is perfection
in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
There is in this a living presentment of the
condition out of which all poetry springs.      It
is sometimes made a criticism       of Whitman
that, instead of writing poetry, he writes
114




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


about it and tries to explain what it is. Often
he does so; but often when he seems to be
doing so, he is in reality doing much more.
He is communicating not merely a poem, an
example of poetry, but the spiritual attitude,
which if we can assimilate it, will make us
according to our measure poets ourselves. No
process of explanation serves here.  It is
work for the greatest of poets in their moments
of greatest inspiration.  Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry is such a 'poem of poetry'; it summarises experience, offers a new key to that
dark door, would endow us with a new experiencing faculty. A purpose so sublime may
well have demanded this strange blend of the
ecstasies of music, the exactitudes of speech.
It will be pertinent to observe, finally, that
Whitman has discovered and elaborated in
Leaves of Grass a form for which other poets
seem to have searched in vain. What after all
was Goethe seeking for in those splendid
lyrics Prometheus, Ganymed and their like, if
not some principle of equivalence for his lines
which would be independent of metrical ties or
would at least enable him to override them?
Such a lyric as Prometheus has of course a
sustained exaltation of manner, a conciseness
of symbolic allusion, which Whitman never
aims at and which, even if he had aimed at it,
115




WALT WHITMAN


he probably could not have compassed. But
considering it on its formal side only, may we
not attribute to the lack of Whitman's 'substantial equivalence' that element of trickery
or experimentation which the lines seem       so
often to display?  The poet halts, as it were,
between two principles, only half conscious of
their antagonism, with the result that justice
is done to neither:Ihr naihret kummerlich
Von Opferstcuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestitt,
Und darbtet, warcn
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvoller Thorcn.
Irony towers here, and it is piled up on something like the substantial principle, until at
the word 'waren' the spell is broken, and we
revert to measurement by syllables. The next
stanza:Da ich ein Kind war,
Nicht wusste wo aus noch ein,
Kehrt' ich mein verirrtes Auge
Zur Sonne, als wenn druber war'
Ein Ohr, zu horen meine Klage,
Ein Herz, wie mein's,
Sich des Bedrangtcn zu crbarmen.

116




CONSTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLES


exhibits precisely those faults of which Whitman was sensitive in his first drafts for Leaves
of Grass. The actual line division is not the
real one. There is an inherent discrepancy
between the style and the form. Exactly the
same defect appears in the English imitations
of Goethe to which Matthew Arnold was so
much addicted. Some of his best thought is
to be found in work which he has thrown into
this irregular recitative; but the poetic result
is, by general admission, unsatisfactory. Sometimes his themes are Whitmanesque:They see the Scythian
On the wide steppe, unharnessing
His wheel'd house at noon.
He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal,
Mare's milk, and bread
Baked on the embers: all around..
Such a passage as this fails, again, precisely for
lack of any determining principle in the lines,
anything to assure us that, in the absence of
metrical regularity, they do not simply begin
and end at haphazard. Mere variableness is
not only unpleasing but unintelligible. In
order that change should have a meaning, we
must have with it an instrument for measuring
it, a standard to which it may be applied.
Whitman makes an original contribution to
poetic craft in that he discovers and exhibits a
117




WALT WH TIMAAN


new standard, a new basis for variation. The
freedom of his lines is pleasurable to us and
conveys an intelligible impression only in so
far as we instinctively recognise the common
principle they exemplify, and measure them
by tacit reference to it.


118




IV


THE FORM (iii)
THE QUESTION OF UNITY
OF all Whitman's claims on behalf of Leaves
of Grass, none seems more whimsical, none is
harder to accept, than that which would
erect the whole book into an artistic unity.
Yet the analysis of his form which has been
given in the last two chapters will not have
been justified unless it induces the reader to
accept this final proposition with some seriousness. So long as eulogy of the work is confined
to a more or less vague rapture, associated with
the idea that form is transcended in it, the
statement that the poems constitute an organic
whole may be taken to mean no more than
that, since they are formless, there is nothing
to prevent any number of them from adhering
together and, finally, from being bound up in
a book to every page of which we recognise
one author's name as equally appropriate.
But just in so far as we can trace in the parts
the workings of a spirit of shaping imagination,
119




WALT WHITMAN


we shall be prepared to admit the possibility
of some more vital cohesion in the work as a
whole.
What is the test of artistic unity in a work?
Leaves of Grass clearly exceeds altogether
the span of human attention. It could not
be assimilated at a sitting even by a reader
who had preparatorily acquainted himself
with every page in detail. Or even supposing
that there exists somewhere the giant appetite
which could thus absorb and experience the
work in its totality, it is not in reference to
abnormal power of this kind that we should
call it one.  Literature of course abounds
with works which are recognisably coherent
without being readable at a stretch. It is no
more necessary to a work that the experience
of it should be unbroken when it is read than
when it is written. To compose a work of art
may be the business of a lifetime, and it may
also conceivably take a lifetime to assimilate
it: to arrive, by repeated fragmentary readings
and re-readings, at the point of view from which
the work emanated. The question is not how
long it takes the average man to arrive at a
comprehensive view of the work, but whether
the work is inherently comprehensible at all,
whether all its parts do contribute anything
appreciable to one another or are dependent
120




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


for any portion of their meaning upon their
relation to one another and to the whole:
not whether we can experience it continuously,
but whether the experience, when we get it,
has continuity, is a continuous experience.
Such a word as " comprehensible" is, of
course, inadequate to the situation. There is
nothing to prevent a number of works of art
from being put before us one after another in
such a way that we can see meaning in the
arrangement of them and recognise that they
set one another off, while yet we can find no
inherent affinity in them and nothing but what
is accidental and external in their relation to
one another. Their relation will in this case
be comprehensible and will appeal to a different
faculty from that to which they make their
separate appeal as works of art. If a number
of works are to form a unity together, it is
necessary that there should be in each of them
some quality which all the others reinforce,
not merely in the sense that they explain but
rather in the sense that they fulfil one another,
so that each has in it, as it were, some seed
which the rest exhibit in its germination, in
the varying stages of its growth or in its full
development. The unity of a work of art is
in fact that most composite and concrete of
phenomena, an emotional unity, and its parts
121




WALT X WHI ITMAN


are only true parts when they have a different
effect upon the reader who feels them as parts
only and upon the reader who feels them as
emanating from the spirit of which the whole
is the explicit revelation.
Leaves of Grass, when we first open it, affects
us as a volume of quotations, where occasional
oases are embedded in long stretches of desert
territory, a scrapbook most pages of which
we hurriedly turn over, merely allowing our
eyes to alight here and there in admiraition of
some item or group of items. The ]numnl er of
readers who have passed beyond this stage of
unfamiliarity is, I suppose, few.  For the
qualities in the book which repay close attention do nothing to provoke it, lying hid until it
is given. Superficial appearances all point to
the completest detachment and disconnectedness in the parts. A book of lyrics has at least
so much unity that it gives you a succession of
pieces all executed at a recognisable emotional
level.  But in this, while certain obvious
emotions appear in-woven in tie fabric or
stand out in spots of colour, tie general effect
is that of a common patchwork quilt, made up
of fragments out of the rag-bag. Nevertheless,
the student of Milton who reads one book of
Paraidise Lost is in a better position to gauge
the value and significance of the whole poem
122




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


than the student of Whitman who judges him
by chosen morsels-even though the choice be
well and wisely made.
To admit an apparent chaos is to claim that
the unity of the work if it exists is elusive and
profound. The connecting principle, the constructive motive, must be of sufficient subtlety
to interfuse itself with these jarring and conflicting elements, to find its expression equally
in all the diverse currents that meet and contend at the surface. It must be " large and
contain multitudes." It must be a circumambient atmosphere. Let us note at once then
that to provide such an atmosphere was
Whitman's conscious aim from the beginning.
His Song of Myself was not put forth as a
completed work, but as the first word of a body
of poetic composition which, he confidently
announced, was to be his chosen occupation
through life. And hardly has he made his
bow and introduced himself, before he lays
down a distinction between " perfumes," the
more or less artificial and specialised flavour of
the products of literary art, and the effluence
which his own work is to breathe forth:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are
crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not
let it.
123




WALT WHITMAN


The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
or again, making use of the metaphor which
gave his work its name:This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the
water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
To aim at providing such an atmosphere, to
be personally in love with it even, does not
necessarily imply power to write a book which
will enable others to breathe it in. And yet
the unity which Whitman set out to attain
and which, when he viewed his work in retrospect, he claimed to have expressed in it, can
scarcely be better indicated than in these
metaphors of his own first choice. The extraordinary patience he displays, his willingness
to appear trite, foolish, extravagant, crude,
monotonous, indecent, are really the measure
of the largeness of his design, of his consciousness of the space to be filled, of the scale and
system required of him in the balance, the
compensations, the proportion of his work.
Thus what seems inartistic in his craftsman124




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


ship is often in fact the very sign of his artistic
perception and of his faithfulness to his vision;
for the appearance of artistry is precisely
what would have destroyed the real flavour
of his art.
The more intimate our knowledge of Leaves, -
of Grass becomes, and the more we apprehend j
the mutual relations of the parts and feel I
the spirit and purpose underlying them, the
more we find that in every page and by means
of the unlikeliest passages, phrases and words,;
that spirit and purpose are actually conveyed.i
Poems which had no significance when we
first read them, betray a delicate appropriateness and become endeared, if for no other
reason, because of the contentment with which
they occupy their subsidiary place in the
design. In fact, it is borne in upon us that
a sustained exaltation pervades the work, and
that the large tolerance and hospitality characteristic of it are not so much evidence of
undiscriminating taste as of undeviating
courage and determination.
Of course the claim we are now making for
Whitman cannot be finally substantiated at
less cost than that of an open-minded study
of Leaves of Grass in the light of it. But we
can point to a few signs, offer a few suggestions
which may be in their degree corroborative.
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WALT WHITMAN


First we may name a mysterious quality
attaching to Whitman's perhaps unexampled
power of emotional appeal. I-Ie has of course
written poems-poems such as Out of the
Cradle or that less famous but hardly less
sublime and tender piece beginning: ---
On the beach at night
Stands a child with her fatherwhich are so overpowering in their immediately
recognisable beauty, that no mystery attaches
to the effect they produce upon us.    But,
apart from these, there are many passages in
Leaves of Grass which, read with their context,
affect us deeply, and which yet, if we attempt
to come to close quarters with them as if to
force them to yield up the secret of their
power, seem   to dissolve away under our
hands. A curious point is that this almost
irresistible pathos frequently attaches to words
which betray, of themselves, no emotional
content whatsoever. Such a line as
Lo, 'tis autumn,
some easy phrase like
Cool blew the moderate night-wind,
sometimes even those strange solecisms which
at first we deride, the "omnes, omnes," or
"allons," or " melange mine own," or " the
126




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


Great Camerado, the lover true for whom I
pine," these and their like, when their associations collect about them, are capable of
bringing us to the verge of tears. I do not
suggest that two readers equally familiar
with Leaves of Grass would find their feelings
touched in this mysterious way by the same
passages. I suspect rather that the appeal of
the work is floating and suffused, and that
what happens is that feelings derived from
larger contact with it concentrate themselves
more or less arbitrarily upon a word here and
a phrase there, so that these come to act as
symbols and reminders of an elusive virtue
which binds the whole together.
Another sign is Whitman's undeniable faculty
for the perception and presentment of what
we must here call subsidiary atmospheres. It
would be absurd to claim for a poet that he
had felt and expressed the atmosphere that
bathes the world, the atmosphere of universal
reconciliation, unless we could show that he
was alive to the distinguishing atmospheres of
things, their peculiar colour and flavour, their
contribution to the white light in which they
merge. Our difficulty here will be, as before,
the substantiation of what we have to say.
On the subject of atmosphere it is easier to be
graceful than to be cogent, and quotation
1.27




WALT WHITMAN


generally removes the very quality which it
is proposed to exemplify. No one questions
Whitman's power of creating an object in a
phrase, and in so far as this power depends
upon that fuller vision of the object which
implies awareness of its atmosphere, our point
is won. But had he the faculty of communicating this sort of vision on a larger
scale? The reader who doubts this should turn
to such a poem as To a Locomotive in Winter,
withdrawing  attention  from  the  splendid
climax,
climax,   Fierce-throated beauty!
and observing the successive touches of description and their effect as a series, some of
them as bold in their meticulous conscientiousness as others in their impressionistic freedom.
The meticulousnesses   such seemingly crude
interpolations as
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods,may appear to be destructive of atmosphere.
The effect of them perhaps belongs to the
larger composition of which the study of the
engine is a detail. Yet the engine itself remains clothed in appropriate poetry; with
its 'twinkling wheels,' its 'train  of cars
merrily following,' it has been ' merged in
verse.'
128




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


A scene of public rejoicing, if only because
its obvious flavours impose themselves and have
to be transcended, is a more exacting subject.
This is how Whitman expresses it:When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her
pavements,
When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud
roar I love,
When the round-mouth'd guns out of the smoke and smell
I love spit their salutes,
When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and
heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin
haze...
The last line has one of those delicious inconsequences which only poetry can afford,
and upon which only masters of their medium
can venture. From the roar of the cannonade,
"alerted " by it, we pass to the vapour idly
adrift above our heads, and, born of this
opposition of silence and clangor-as though
a link had been found between its gorgeous
palaces and the cloud-phantasms into which
they must dissolve-the whole city rises before
us, bathed in light, a beautiful apparition.
Of course, the strength of Whitman's handling in this respect comes out notably in his
treatment of those topics which are, so to
speak, all atmosphere. The section of Leaves
of Grass entitled Sea-Drift contains the sea, as
I              129




WALT WHITMAN


nothing else in literature contains it, "leaves
of salt lettuce," " scales from shining rocks,"
' weeds and the sea-gluten," and the oceanwaves " reproachfully rolling sands and drift,
knowing not why."   Whitman too is without
an equal when he touches upon all those
great amplitudes of nature, of which the sea is
but oneThe large unconscious scenery of my native land,
the night and stars, sunrise, noon, sunset, the
"rolling earth." To say that he impersonates
these things would be to introduce into his
treatment precisely that touch of unreality
which he is great enough to have dispensed
with. The more we consider the point, the
more Leaves of Grass appears before us as
essentially a study of atmospheres, the atmosphere of youth and aggressiveness in the
Song of Myself and other early pieces, the
atmosphere of maturity and equipoise in the
main bulk of the work, and finally t.he atmosphere of old age and contentment, thle ' ineffable grace of dying days."  Nor does death
balk him. Viewing it as he does not in its
effects but in its essence, it does not pass for
him into a mere natural fact, it remains a
theme for poetry.
Give me your tone, 0 Death, that I may accord with it.
130




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


is his strange apostrophe, and all night the
sea whispers to him and " very plainly before
daybreak" the " low and delicious word"
Death, death, death, death, death.
A vision of death " serenely arriving, arriving," a vision which passes beyond death the
accident or catastrophe and indifferent goal to
find in it the implication and fulfilment of life,
is really formulated and held in Leaves of
Grass.  And here, so far as Whitman convinces us, he can convince by nothing but by
the atmosphere with which his words are
endowed and through which they thus succeed
in evoking illumination in a region of mystery.
Is he merely throwing, over a subject to which
it is inapplicable, the veil of an unreflective
optimism, or has he really discerned something specific and significant? It is a question
of atmosphere; and to judge of it securely
the reader must study his work in its larger
conformation.  His decision as to whether
Whitman has effectively seized and expressed
the " tone of death," and his feeling as to the
final unity of Leaves of Grass as a work of art,
will be interdependent. For the quality of
the atmosphere enveloping the whole lies
precisely in its balance of positive and negative ingredients, in its exhaustive claim for
131




WALT WHITMAN
life and its calm perception of life as a means
and an instrument, in its equal assertion of the
known life and the unknown, and its final reference of all experiences to the experiencing soul.
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles,
talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating
thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite
floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs,
The hurrahs for popular favourites, the fury of rous'd
mobs
I mind them or the show or resonance of them-I come
and I depart.
The import of this haphazard envisagement of
concrete things is in their power of ballast.
For the more a man shows us that he has seen
what we see, the more we can believe him
when he professes a new vision. So it is that
a passage like that just quoted is balanced
and explained, to a poetical perception, in a
poem like this:Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted
soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of
human tears?)
132




THE QUESTION OF UNITY


I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.
(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)
Shall we praise here the exquisite observation,
raised in the second stanza to an almost unimaginable beauty, or the exquisite suggestiveness, to which every word in the first stanza
seems to make its individual contribution?
Or shall we not rather praise the perfect fusion
of the two, the mind so keyed that the clouds
move for it and the winds blow with spiritual
dignity, while the soul, enlarged, becomes
worthy of the sublimest aspects of its dwellingplace?


133




V


STYLE
I hear you whispering there 0 stars of heaven,
O suns-0 grass of graves-0 perpetual transJfers and promlotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?.... The poet is the equable man..
He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round
a helpless thing.
IN the handling of style as of form Whitman
set out with clearly marked intentions. The
nicety with which he considered every problem
incidental to his work appears in such details
as his avoidance of English place names (even
his native New York is always Manhattan in
his poetry) and his preference for the bare
Fourth-month, Fifth-month, etc. of Quaker
phraseology over April, May and the rest,
with their aroma of literary and historical
associations. Among his earliest notes and
jottings, now published by his executors, we
find " Make no quotations and no reference
to any other writers" "     It seems to me to
134




STYLE


avoid all poetical similes-to be faithful to the
perfect likelihoods of nature-healthy, exact,
simple, disclaiming ornaments." These seemingly artificial deprivations had their positive
sanction; they were to prepare the way for
a poetry "hasting, urging, resistless,...
florid, spiritual," for " the Strength, Command
and   Luxuriance of Oratory," for " a new
burial service" (with the past for corpse) "a
book of new things."       " Lumber the writing
with nothing-let it go as lightly as a bird
flies in the air or a fish swims in the sea ";
this is the central idea of all.
We have     seen that Whitman      aimed   at
transcending form as form is commonly understood; he endeavoured also, more quixotically
and not less resolutely, to transcend language,
to emancipate the mind from the bondage of
accepted symbols.
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? those curves, ang'zs, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are
in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you....
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so
conceal'd either,
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly.
135




WALT WHITMAN


A poet seldom starts out with a formulated
perception and acknowledgment of the limitations of his instrument. He tends to regard
poetry as the vindication of the power of words,
the proof of the limitlessness of their appeal.
But Whitman insists that language is a close
system, a web of artifices, and that the highest
use of it is that which will never allow the
medium   of interpretation to usurp the place
of the thing to be interpreted.
I swear I begin to sec little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken
m-aflliings of thel  c It. t. i
The stranlge verb to "itflly"  thle strange substantive "rajpportt   ai'(  words whichl he uses
familiarly, as a kind of leit motiv running all
through Leaves of Grass, to keep these ideas in
view. He feels that the mind, in its efforts to
subdue and understand the world, sets up
arbitrary boundaries, is imprisoned in figments
and condemned to the company of the skeleton
survivals of its own past.   Language itself
becomes a crystallisation of dead memories
instead of a highway to truth. Truth requires
us to retain a sense of undiscovered margins,
to keep the perceived in relation to the unperceived, to hold open the doors of possibility,
to prevent achievement from casting its shadow
136




STYLE


before it and blocking out our vision of a
developing future.
This is often concealed from us by the fact
that the use of words is largely a matter of
practice  or   inherited  faculty.    The   childprodigy sits at the piano and interprets
Beethoven without grasping the significance
of the experience he records. Other prodigies
similarly work wonders with chords and arpeggios played upon the instrument of speech,
words being the centre and pivot of their consciousness, a suggestion of experience, even a
substitute for experience, instead of a derivation from it.   In the din and confusion of the
multitude of words written and spoken, we
forget wherein the value and meaning of language lies.
O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or
her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps,
anywhere around the globe...
For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and
removing obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a
man, a woman, the divine power to speak words.
137




WALT WHITMAN


To put it otherwise, the art of language at its
highest, the art of poetry, exists to acquaint
us through words with the larger poetry of life
itself. True poetry is not a distillation, a
fortified essence, from which the impurities of
the world have been driven off and its dregs
purged away. It is a shadow, an indirection,
a faint reflex. It is an abstraction; and its
function is to refer us to the concrete and
transcendent reality from which it has been
derived.  The living, 'real' poem  has the
same organic harmonies as its derivative, and
adds to them the qualities of action, solidity,
development. It is not a composition but a
personality. It is man himself, with the world
he conquers, the world he inaugurates.
Poetry is thus for Whitman the sought,
the unfound; for there is only one perfect
poem  possible, the living universe.  Every
individual repeats that poem as best he can
in the terms which his own life provides; every
vessel of consciousness is in potential relation
with the whole. In proportion as these potentialities are realised, the individual becomes
a more and more responsive medium for the
translation of them and, if he have the gift of
words, may be impelled to write. But the
essence of what he writes is and must be its
implicit reference to the one, the only, poem,
138




STYLE


its reception and radiation of divine light.
Whitman founds all upon this implicit essence,
making it a constant theme and an acknowledged stimulus in the treatment of lesser
themes. It is as if in him the spirit of poetry,
returning upon itself, attains self-consciousness.
His domain, as a result of this attitude,
grows uncontrollably.
Tout bonheur que la main n'atteint pas n'est qu'un reve
was the doctrine of the well-moderated Frenchman; and Blake, from a different point of
view, represents the universe as being for each
man his plot of ground with the sun and stars
that rise and shine upon him. Whitman, with,all the stress he lays upon the futility of any
substitute for experience, cannot tolerate the
thought of limitations. The joy of life, the
food of poetry, lies for him in its declared
relation to the sum of all things. The implicit
must become explicit. His poetry is his desire
for poetry, his method a method of continuous
expansion. His object as a writer is to exhibit
the universe in samples, with a hint that every
sample is an index of the quality of all the
wares: to present, at one and the same time,
the distinctness of the details of experience
and their fluidity, the sharp contrasts and the
unfailing reconciliation.
139




WALT WHITMAN


The key to an understanding of the style
of Leaves of Grass is the perception that, while
a deep intuition dictated the poet's aim, his
tactics were as a rule primitive, owing their
success, when they succeeded, to the sustaining virtue of the intuition. The tactics, though
primitive, were reactionary and in that sense
sophisticated; and it is as well to recognise
that the blending in him of the reactionary
and the primitive was Whitman's salvation.
On other terms he would have had no choice
but to be dumb. The circumstances of his
life were such that he could not have learned
the full technique of poetry and retained his
natural plastic genius; he could not have
mastered completely both the art of literary
expression and the self it was his mission to
express. His bluntness and aggressive selfconfidence were protective traits but for which
his creative impulse must have been diverted
or checked. Art is long, life is short, and there
is a point at which the burden of traditions
and accomplishments becomes unbearable.
The stores of poetry accumulated in the literature and experience of his race were to Whitman an encumbrance. He felt it necessary to
begin again from the beginning.
He felt it necessary; he did not find it
possible. When a development has occurred,
140




STYLE


a man may fall in with it and do his part in
carrying it forward, or he may resist it and
kick against the pricks. The one thing from
which he is debarred is the being or behaving
as if there had been no development. Whitman's poetry was intended for simple persons;
but though blunt, it is not simple. Simple
poetry is poetry that sings and rhymes; and
hand in hand with these amenities goes the
coloured language appropriate to the emotions
out of which they spring. Conversational
poetry however rapturous, is as unpleasing
to the popular mind as the formalities of verse
would be in conversation. Whitman postulates in us the habits and preconceptions
against which he is protesting. His is a literary
effort, and its literariness is its " burial" of the
past, its attempt to shake free from tradition.
His love of the catalogue is a case in point.
If a man walks on four feet like an animal, his
action derives heightened significance from the
fact that, other men walking on two and
expecting him to do the same, they examine
the cause of his idiosyncrasy. If a poet discards all the accepted associations of his art,
he gains for his work at least the prominence
of peculiarity, with a direct appeal to the
emotion of wonder. Whitman's writing is
deliberately exceptional. He is sustained in
141




WALT WHITMAN


his work by the pleasure it gives him to be
unlike everybody else. To feel and resist the
pressure of convention is one of his characteristic joys. The catalogue owes its place in his
poetic structure to the fact that it is the last
thing the reader would expect to find there.
Here, extended before us, is a calculated
violation of all canons, a piece of writing
the effect of which is to turn all other writing
upside-down. But it would have been insolent
and useless to shock our minds in this way,
unless, the shock applied, new   themes and
meanings, a new power of perception, were to
be opened up to us. The irresponsible reader
skips Whitman's catalogues; the critic cannot
afford to imitate him. Even here he can maintain that the positive side of the performance,
if not the most prominent, is at least the most
important and the most vital.
The objections to specification as a literary
method are so obvious that we need not rehearse them. Whitman, whatever his faults,
is under no misconception as to the principles
on which his lists are made or the effect they
are likely to have upon a reader. " 0 lands,"
he writes, summarising that strangest and most
courageous of all his chants, Our Old Feuillage,
0 lands! all so dear to me-what you are (whatever it is),
I putting it at random in these songs. beeomne:i
part of that, whatever it is.
1 — 42




STYLE


and later
Singing the song of these my ever-united lands...... these me,
These affording in all their particulars the old feuillage
to me and to America, how can I do less than pass
the clew of them, to afford the like to you?
"I putting it at random in these songs, whatever it is," " how can I do less? " the claim is
so moderate and so candid that only arrogance
could refuse to hear it out. The point to
Whitman is that the multiplicity, the inexhaustibility of things must somehow be reflected in poetry, unless, indeed, the bonds of
truth and beauty are to be severed. He sets
out to bring before us the many-faceted realities of the world, and the initial poetic fact to
him is plenty. The philosopher might quarrel
with us were we to say that, if being is good,
more being is better. But to Whitman a leaf
or a butterfly is embodied perfection, and two
leaves or two butterflies, though not more
perfect than one, embody twice as much perfection and are twice as much to be desired.
Spaciousness, fertility, and even the redundance of the vital processes were inspiration
to him, and he would gladly have counted the
drops of water in the sea and the stars in the
sky. He is a beginner in poetry, but there is
143




WALT WHITMAN


this of the master in him, that he begins with
delight.
Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of
motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic
songs.
Thus he brings as first positive quality to his
lists an insatiable love of detail and the artist's
instinctive conviction that his pleasure will
be communicated. They are sadly abbreviated
examples of the lists he would like to have
drawn up. To this abbreviating emotionthese lines left out-they owe their charm.
Yet it is the essence of a list that it should
contain not only what is interesting but also
what is uninteresting.   Few would say that
Whitman's were disqualified in this respect;
and perhaps the general impression would be
that he has wantonly choked them with mere
items. If the whole hulk does not sink into
oblivion, is it not, readers will urge, because
some detail is here and there made vivid, and
that these vivid details, like water-tight compartments, buoy it up?    Take, for example,
such a passage as the following:144




STYLE


You whoever you are I
You daughter or son of England!
You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ
in Russia!
You dim-descended, black, divine-soul'd African, large,
fine-headed, nobly-form'd, superbly destin'd, on
equal terms with me!
You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you
Prussian!
You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France! etc. etc.
The absurdities and anomalies of this are
plain.  Is it pretended that the order of
mention, the relative prominence given to one
name or another, are more than accidental?
Is there sense or reason in saying " Spaniard
of Spain" and in not saying " Norwegian of
Norway ": in mentioning the Frenchwoman
and not the Spanishwoman; in suggesting
that there are Frenchmen and Spaniards
who do not belong to France and Spain, or
that if there are, they are to be excluded?
Such objections have a certain irrelevance and
inconclusiveness. The claim they would dispose of is a claim that Whitman does not
advance. His shifting styles of nomenclature,
the trifling illogicalities of his enumeration,
are merely formal. His hope is that they will
keep our attention alert enough to accept, not
indeed every item of the list, but the list


K


145




WALT WHITMAN


itself and the fact that it has been held worth
making, as something solid, something to be
reckoned with. It is as if we were required
to walk through a gallery of pictures, with a
guide whose object it was to show us not the
pictures but the picture-gallery; and that to
this end we must both walk through the
building and walk out of it. Whitman is not
content until he has brought us out finally
into the open.   When he has us there, he
does not pretend that we have seen the pictures.
We have glimpsed at them; we know that
they are there. He does not mention all the
tribes of the earth in his inventory; yet he
hopes to convince us that for a certain purpose
he has virtually brought them forward every
one. "They are all in the dictionary."  Yes;
but they are in the dictionary for a different
reason.  Here they are mentioned il order
that we may wish them all " Health and Good
Will" and understand that
Each of us is inevitable,
Each of us limitless-each of us with his or her right
upon the earth,
Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any of us is here.
The purpose of the list, with its haphazard
items, is to form our minds to this universal
146




STYLE


receptiveness, to give concreteness to our idea
of universality and to our sense of brotherhood.
The occasional prominence of a vigorous detail
is to assure us further that the more we achieve
such an attitude, the more there will be for us
of poetry in the world. And the essential point
in connection with the stylistic presentment
of the whole is, that the vigorous details, but
for their occurrence in a list, would absorb
our attention to themselves, while, placed as
they are, they distribute their vitality, acting
not as the air-tight compartment, but as the
life-giving lungs. So it is that after
You Roman! Neapolitan! you Greek!
we have
You lithe matador in the arena at Seville!
You mountaineer living lawlessly on the Taurus or
Caucasus!
You Bokh horse-herd watching your mares and stallions
feeding!
You beautiful-bodied Persian at full speed in the saddle
shooting arrows to the mark!
and such a line as the last, if it is lungs and
reviving oxygen to the others, requires the
others as a context and enters into its meaning
from the fact that they are there, a body
needing  breath.    These  remarks must be
applied to Whitman's style in general.    For
147




WALT WHITMAN


Leaves of Grass is not, after all, a poor mince
pie, food for the Jack Homers of literature.
Its vivid phrases lose their real flavour when
they are picked out; they owe something
even to the clumsinesses and solecisms which
we pick out for ridicule. There is organic interaction between the parts.
The catalogues, then, have direct artistic value
as an expression of Whitman's delight in the
mere fact of being, and on this delight the
whole fabric of his style securely reposes.
They have their obvious absurdity, but they
have no touch of deeper impropriety or irrelevance. They represent, at its extreme, his
essential virtue, the quality which makes
Leaves of Grass the perfect title for his work.
For his poems have in a unique degree the
attribute of diffused equivalence. The parts
are all interchangeable; every key fits every
door; every sentence seems to put forward
a new instance of the ever present, ever
elusive truth. The sentiment throughout is
as if, by slowly accumulating perceptions and
discoveries, some vast, half-obliterated fresco
were being rescued from obscurity, the significance of each detail being that it is a detail
and that it is in its place:Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark
green leaves.
148




STYLE


There is an exquisite piece of restoration!
Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and
junior Buddha,
there is another! and the supply of touches
of this   kind  is inexhaustible.   Taken   at
random, these two consort together well, and
reveal at once affinities we could hardly
otherwise have suspected. Viewing Whitman
in this light, we may say that it is his achievement to have drawn up, as if in precis form, an
inventory of the life of the world.
It is not only in his lists, however, that we can
discern his impulse to penetrate the formalities
of verbiage and seize and present to us the infinite real. The construction of many of his
sentences and paragraphs, his eccentric grammar or absence of grammar, some of the
minor predilections and some of the chief
architectural principles we find in his work,
are traceable to his desire to keep words in
subservience and to do justice to the culminating poetry of concrete things. One of
his familiar tricks is the contented use of a
detached string of present participles:We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving...
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering,
thieving, threatening..
Fulfilling our foray.
149




WALT WHITMAN


The effect both here and wherever Whitman
makes use of it is always ugly, but the grammatical incompleteness is intended     to  emphasise what to him is the chief fact about
this and about every theme: the impossibility
of summarising and disposing of it. When we
read that
The boy st0ood oni ti l) urlnig) dckc, et(.
what is left upon our minds is; that an action
took place and is now over and done wit]h.
And all logical utterance has more or less the
same tendency, expressing only a fraction of
what it implies and leading us to forget that
it implies anything.     Whitman    resorts to
tricks and artifices in order to remind us of the
implications of speech.   The participial sentence, with its emphasis upon the unfinished,
is one of these tricks. Another is total omission
of the verb:Once Paurnanok,
When the lilac scent was in tie air anid Fifth-nmonth gra.,r:;
was growing,
Up this seashore in some briars.
Two feather'd guests from Alabiama, two toe-therr,
And tihir nest, and four lightL-green eggs spotted with
brown.
A  finished statement fastens our attention
not upon objects but upon some modification
150()




STYLE


they undergo. In this, we have a mere form
of introduction. We hear of an island which
is to be the scene of a drama, of the persons by
whom the drama is to be played. The
materials of the action are, as it were, thrown
down, and left lying before us in their undefinable solidity. For a parallel we must go
to Plato's dialogues, where sophists and philosophers open discussion by gravely admitting
the existence of the object to be discussed.
apeTrjv TL KaXeid; 'There is something, Gorgias,
that you call virtue?' 'Yes.' "   Yet another
expedient is vague disregard of the formal
requirements of words, and deliberate modelling of the sentence to suit margins of implication:
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight...
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in
the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again...
A passage like this springs from the desire to
bring together facts, feelings and associations,
151




WALT WHITMAN


so numerous, so diverse, that no normal
sentence could accommodate them. Its coherence depends upon equivalences and relations which the niceties of common construction would be too rigid to allow. Yet the
habit of violating grammar is to be deprecated;
for the rules represent the gathered experience
of writers as to how meaning is conveyed. An
exception is often expressive just because it
is an exception; and there is no need to object
to Whitman's anomalies, taken severally. But
a line like
From such as now they start the scene revisiting
not only violates grammar, but leaves us uncertain what kind of violation has taken
place. It is a recurring weakness in Whitman's emancipated constructions that, mingled
in with emancipation, there is the fumbling
and bungling of imperfect technique. The
nine liberties which he takes, meaning to take
them, suffer from the tenth which he takes
without knowing that he has taken it.
In so far as Whitman is a great stylist, it is
not his daring unconventionalities that make
him so, though these in themselves are such as
to argue greatness of a kind. He is great
because, having chosen his method, he takes
the consequences of his choice with con152




STYLE


summate pliability and responsiveness. He
has been reflecting on the uses of language,
and has struck out a line of his own for the
use of it. In spite of this his writing is free
from the taint of theory, has none of the
rigidity of conscious rebellion, is not the less
easy because he has determined to make it
so. He takes no word or phrase as having the
weight, meaning or implication he has decided
shall attach to it; he does not dictate to
language, but faithfully allows it to dictate
to him, quite undisturbed by its fluidity,
ready to interweave together and present as
one the remotest aspects of his theme. The
crowning example of his power in this is the
song of the mocking-bird in Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking. The bird, like his poet,
counts over the natural objects which surround him, apostrophising the sea, the breakers,
the moon, the shore, the stars, the wind. But
the items of the list, passing under the spell
of personal passion, become as it were the
instruments of an orchestra; each plays its
individual part in a lyrical symphony, and
each is in turn identified with the central
motive of the whole.
Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind, every one lapping, every one
close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.
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WALT WHITMAN


The bird's note, the motion of the waves, the
languorous aspect of the moon, the largest
and most evanescent suggestions of love in the
forces and forms of nature, its fanciful and
accidental illusions in the heart of a little
creature, all are blended together in a, succession   of   half-descriptive,  half-imitative
touches, the whole scene and every actor in it
being presented to us indifferently from without and from within. Years before " futurism"
was heard or thought of, the core of aspiration
in its incoherencies has been felt and rendered.
Even love's logic of despair is not left out:But soft! sink low!
Soft! let me just murmur,
And do you wait a moment you ihusky-nois'd sea,
For somewhere I belicve I heard my mate responding to
me,
So faint, I m-rust be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come
immediately to me.
Whitman surmounts all difficulties by ignoring
them, by resting in complete security upon his
obtained results, at every point perceiving
what has been expressed and judging what
foundation has been provided for further expression.
Thus while the aim of his style is objectivity,
its achievement is impressionism. He gives to
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STYLE


his words not solidity but atmosphere; and
what is the solidity of words if not their
atmosphere? The problem of the writer is
that words are not things, that they have laws
peculiar to them. To put two things together
and to put the names of them     together are
different operations. The catalogue, with its
great haul of tangibilities, here finally declares
itself; for the wider the net is thrown, the
fainter, the more dream-like are the specimens
we bring in. All depends upon the subtlest
suggestions and evocations. Did we seem to
vaunt our brutal indifference to all artistry?
it is only the obvious contrivances that we
despise!You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
You haggard, uncouth, untutor'd Bedowee!
You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian!
you Feejee-man!
The whole passage affects one like a charm, so
curious-magical are its harmonies. One might
compare it to Rossetti:Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys...
but the comparison would only bring out
Whitman's superior fibre, and the immense
value to his composition, for pure beauty, of
its apparent carelessness.
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WALT WHITMAN


Perhaps what is finally most delightful in
Whitman's style is the natural and constant
interplay of the two qualities which I have
tried to bring into relief, his childlike objectivity and his magical suggestiveness. The
objectivity does not pall, because the child is
a magician; the suggestiveness is not teasing,
because the magician is a child. Throughout
a lengthy poem he will perhaps deal purely in
suggestions, marshalling his objects for the
sake of the hints they may contribute of some
remote and fleeting analogy; yet these objects
will be as temperately and lovingly handled as
if their presence before us were a poem    in
itself:Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my
bay, she was 600 feet long...
or
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in
the twilight, and the belated lighter...
Indeed their presence is a poem. Whitman
tells us how he would walk the shore of his
beloved Paumanok " thinking the old thought
of likenesses " or " seeking types "; but the
truth is that he has the secret of that emancipated vision to which all types are transitory
things, and dissolve one into another. For the
task of the poet is to provide contexts through
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STYLE


which glimpses of the universal similitudes
will appear; and the less he cleaves to such
accidental connections as take his eye, the
more a poet is he. The simile, the symbol in
Whitman is, what he determined to make it, a
presupposition of his artistry-condensed into
some seemingly casual epithet or implied in
the collocation of a series of plain sentences.
Thus he can exhibit the shyest mysteries as
coolly as the commonest facts; for the common fact has never lost for him its mystery or
its shyness: —
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and
give them shape!1
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable
showers!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are
so dear to me!
Was there ever a lovelier incantation!
Hitherto we have dealt principally with the
formation and texture of Whitman's style; a
still more engrossing theme is its tone and
colour. Leaves of Grass exhibits from this
point of view the merging tints of the spectrum,
passing from a deep warm scarlet to a pale
transparent blue. The progression presents
This is not the only sentence in Leaves of Grass that gives us
as it were a poetic foreboding of the metaphysic of M. Bergson;
the fascination for Whitman of the "curious" fact of time will
occur to every reader.
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WALT WHITMAN


itself as a progression of experience and
character.  What higher tribute could be
paid to it? The style is the man; but mnan,
whenl he takes pen in lhand, is apt to be a
creature preoccupied withl tlle concealment or
display of secondary accommodations and
vanities, so that we have to infer him from his
mannerisms.   Whitman, when we first read
him, seems full of mannerisms. But a closer
acquaintance convinces us that these are
living characteristics, not literary antics. His
one great act of rebellion left him free to be
his real self, provided his strength and endurance were equal to the task. They were
so, and his writing exhibits to us therefore
the natural development of a great personality.
In the Song of Myself the note is defiance.
The poet, in a rapture of mystical affirmaltion,
glorifies the whole apparatus of human egotism,
the evil and the good. The sotul steps forth to
the sound of the trumpet, clairning the Universe
for its freehold, cleaving the air with the
rigour and determination of its call.   The
whole pageant of life passes before us, with
shawms and cymbals acconmpanying.     Great
things are not too great for the procession,
nor small too small. The feature of the style
is its blend of aggressiveness and fidelity, of
delicacy and magnificence. The heat of the
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STYLE


creative impulse is equally divided between
the determination to impress and the determination to take all impressions; we cannot
distinguish between its malleability and its
force.  Quotation will not illustrate these
qualities; for the proof of them is that they
are sustained. There is nothing for it but to
read the poem. Its fifty-two pages are surely
as varied and as invigorating as anything in
literature.
The tremendous buoyancy of this early
manner to some extent overreaches itself,
involving Whitman in inflated expressions,
spasmodic transitions and a want of recognisable architecture. With the further maturing of his power, it was a disadvantage to him
that in the Song of Myself he had, in a sense,
covered all his ground. The dangers attaching
to expansion, application and repetition often
beset him in the remainder of his work. He
frequently explains, instead of presenting,
truth and finds the temptation to revive his
past self irresistible.  But his instrument,
when he can disencumber it, has a mellower
and soberer sound, and we realise that a new
range of experience has been opened up to
him. The relation of inner to outer, of the
soul to the world, which the Song of Myself
heralded and claimed, is now the poet's achieve159




WALT WHITMAN


ment. The world is less a challenge and provocation to him, more an associate, a parable,
a persuasion. The first demonstrativeness has
served its turn therefore; defiance is put by;
the prevailing note is a meditative tenderness;
we pass to a more withdrawn, a more penetrative portrayal. Instead of sentences that leap
keen as the lightning flash, we have the pulsings
and fluctuations of an enveloping aurora,
electric messages out of some warm summer
night, intimate, brooding and diffused; while
in the landscape lit by these soft shimmerings
the timider denizens of the mind come forth
and hidden affinities are confided:
As I wend to the shores I know not...
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and
closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift..
You friable shore with trails of debris,
You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
What is yours is mine my father...
Kiss me my father,
Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the
murmuring I envy.
Here poetry is action. The drama which the
soul enacts behind closed doors, unwatched it
may be by itself even, is played with the sea160




STYLE


shore for a stage and the sea and the sky for
chorus. The style is that in the man which
has gone to the subjugation of these vast influences conveying itself to us in the fewest
words and the simplest sentences that it can
find.
We pass to a further stage when, with a new
return of the inner upon the outer life, the
focus of action changes and the style becomes
a clear transcript, the poetry of which is inseparable from that of the deeds it records.
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the
hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there
untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen
blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the
first just lift the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with wellgray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step-and who are you my child
and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?


L


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Then to the third-a face nor child nor old, very calm,
as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know yolu-I think this face is the
face of the Christ him;self,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he
lies.
There is something here which the man that
has attained to it cannot leave behind. Little
more need be said. Nor need we follow in this
chapter the symptoms of effort and uncertainty,hat fell upon Whitman with his paralysis.
Some of his greatest utterances belong to that
period of prostration and stand out among the
ruins crowned with the harmony and beauty
of crumbling walls, unroofed, open to heaven:
With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight,
or
All those hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth'd,
or
Love that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang.
-He carried with him   to the last a faculty of
trance-like perception which enabled him to
throw a gleam of poetry over any and every
detail of his experience. We noted fidelity as
one of the earliest qualities of his style. As his
initiative weakens, fidelity becomes a more and
more prominent and precious quality, until
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STYLE


finally in the Annexes, in Sands at Seventy and
Good-bye My Fancy, fidelity and frailty join
hands, and the quality of the poetry is its
transparent exactitude, as if a mirror were
held up before us by a hand satisfied simply
that it should not tremble:Soon shall the winter's foil be here;
Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt-A little
while,
And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and
growth......Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the delicate
miracles of earth,
Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents
and flowers,
The arbutus under foot, the willow's yellow-green, the
blossoming plum and cherry;
With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their
songs-the flitting blue-bird;
For such the scenes the annual play brings on.
The contentment which is the charm      of these
last almost impalpable utterances is our final
index of what is greatest in Leaves of Grass.
Whitman is a writer who has divested himself
of encumbrances and distinguished beauty
from ornamentation. So, at the end, by his
flickering candle, he still sees infinite things,
and as more and more is taken, the less and
less that remains with him is poetry.


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PLAN
The threads that were spun are gathered, the weft crosses
the warp, the pattern is systematic.
Leaves of Grass has so little in common with
other books whether of prose or poetry that the
appreciative reader needs, in a peculiar degree,
to derive from the book itself the principles by
which to pass judgment upon it. His difficulties are increased by the fact that the work
is as uneven as it is strange. The whole-a
blend of conscious and unconscious art, of
passion and reflection-expresses a constant
purpose.  But the poet's power of realising
this purpose varied immensely at different
periods of his life; and being a poor critic of
his own writings, he finally arranged them
without regard for their poetic value, considering merely in what order the thought of
each would be most effective in its contribution to the thought of all. His plan, though
it is significant, is in many ways so misleading
that, if the quality and range of his achieve164




PLAN


ment have been obscured, the fault lies really
at his own door. For his manner underwent
changes and developments of an unusually
subtle kind. He lost in power as he grew older,
he gained in perception; and we could no
more spare the later than the earlier work.
Yet before we can judge finally of the results
he attained, we must have traced in his career
as an artist the symptoms of this parallel
growth and decline, and we must also have
distinguished his activity as a compiler from
his activity as a poet.
The general purpose of his book, of course,
is that it shall be the deliberate and progressive
unfolding of the conscious life of a man who is
at once individual and typical; and it is so
arranged as to present first the foundations
and implications of such a life and to fill in
afterwards the various stages of experience
and reflection. Obviously certain stages of
experience must be enacted before they can
receive full literary expression. Only as Whitman grows old can we really hear in his poetry
the note of age. Yet the requirements of his
scheme were clear to him almost from the
beginning, and his concluding poem So Long
was written at the age of forty. Perhaps he
had some apprehension that he might not live
to realise and be his book; if so, his appre165




WALT WHITMAN


hension was justified. Leaves of Grass is an
unfinished work. The latter half of the book
is a makeshift. While then its progression is
confused by the retrospective patchings of the
compiler, it is confused also by the anxious
anticipations of the poet.
In order not to press too hard the division
between them, it is well to remember that in
Whitman there was a more or less persisting
reconcilement of these two opposites. It was
his intention from the first to write in such a
way that his poems should derive light from
one another, only making their last essential
communication when felt through the atmosphere of the whole book. He was deliberately
working at a big mosaic and the fitting together
of the pieces, though it may seem a mechanical
process and in any case might have been done
better, was nevertheless quite in accordance
with the spirit of his work. The lapses in perception which it involved were accidental and
were brought about by the same failure of
power which left the original design of the
work unrealised.
His plan as a compiler turns upon a principle
of rough equivalence. The cubes of his mosaic
are of various sizes, but to enable them to
co-operate they are sorted into two groups,
large and small, on the understanding that a
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PLAN


collection of small cubes is to be equivalent to
one large one. In other words, a certain
number of important poems stand on their
own feet (the reader should consult the List of
Contents in Leaves of Grass) while the rest fall
under subtitles and illustrate some phase of
experience in their combination. But it was
characteristic of Whitman to consult his printer
also and to bear in mind the mechanical exigencies for which the printer stands; we get therefore four short pieces-Youth, Day, Old Age,
and Night, Reversals, Transpositions, A Paumanok Picture-intercalated and made to
appear more important than they are simply
in order to avoid gaps in the page.'
These disposed of, the skeleton design of the
work becomes apparent. We notice first a
well-marked introduction, a beginning, a middle
and an end. At the middle, as the crowning
experience of maturity, we have Drum Taps,
and associated with it, Memories of President
Lincoln (his assassination being to Whitman
a symbolic event epitomising the significance
of the war), and By Blue Ontario's Shore (the
expression of the meaning of the war in its
bearing upon the democracy and literature of
a unified America). After this all is, in theory,
autumnal-the ripening of accumulated stores,
See Leaves of Grass, pp. 180, 276, 332, 361.
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WALT WHITMAN


thc severance of the fruit from the tree, the
farewell of the experiencing soul to those
" materials " which have been the instruments
of its experience. Before it come the introduction of the book to the reader and of its
hero to the world.
The introduction includes Inscriptions and
one important and noble poem Starting from
Paumanok which, though written like the concluding piece as early as 1860, expounds the
whole purpose of Leaves of Grass, sounding
together its three harmonising notes of individualism and religion and love. Then, with
the Song of Myself, the work begins in idea as
also it began in fact: a lyric rhapsody of fifty
pages' length lets the untamed, magnetic,
hungering, responsive personality loose among
the various and inexhaustible riches of his
native America and bids him see himself and
be himself in all. All is for the individual, for
the soul. The whole creation is to each man
severally as a lover.
Love being Whitman's keynote, an orgelpunkt that is to sound all through his poems,
the fusion of two beings in one, the mutual
self-expression and self-surrender which belong to the love of the sexes, is his image of
the relation of the soul to the world. The aim
of the processes of life is the development of
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PLAN


individuality, of identity, through " materials,"
that is, through our various contacts with the
physical world. The sexual relation is the
foundation and so, if you will, the symbol of
those contacts. Therefore, as soon as, in the
Song of Myself, the typical complex personality,
the world's lover, has been put upon the stage,
Children of Adam follows, a series of pieces
dedicated specifically to sex; while next to
Children of Adam comes Calamus, complementary to it. Action and expression are love.
But there is that without which no action or
expression would be possible, and that is love
too. When we pray, we endeavour to adjust
ourselves newly to the world-as it were, to
start our lives afresh; and instinctively, in
order to give ourselves more completely to a
renewed experience, we withdraw from the
world of experience for a time, we shut our
eyes. Calamus is the celebration of the shut
eyes of love, of the love that rises above
materials and is the condition of our relation
to them.
After Calamus, the presuppositions of life
having been celebrated, we have a series of
constructive songs, Whitman's solidest contribution to the developing and crystallising
experience of man. Nor is it by a coincidence
that the first and last of these relate him to
169




WALT WHITMAN


the world, the earth-the first chiefly to the
earth in its diversities, the earth as a treasurehouse of history, the theatre of the life of men,
the last to the earth as a unified condition of
spiritual life, perhaps itself a single spiritual
being, " the divine ship sailing the divine sea."
Of the remainder, the Song of the Open Road
proclaims the spirit of progress, the advancing,
conquering soul to which nothing is and nothing
can be inimical except surrender and accepted
routine; Crossing Brooklyn Ferry exposes the
spiritual structure and substance of so-called
material things, and since it has been said that
all experience is love, endeavours to induce a
state of mind in which we shall see why this
is so and how it can be so; The Answerer shows,
again, how poetry is the mating of the soul
with materials and the terms on which alone
their union can be consummated; and then
Our Old Feuillage, lovingly, inimitably, illustrates these qualities in concrete detail for the
American citizen.
The central place in the group is given characteristically to A Song of Joys.  Whitman
took pleasure in these small points of suggestion; the reader will humour him.
So far (we have reached page 148) there has
been no poem of importance in the book which
does not present Whitman in the fullness of
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PLAN


exuberant and conscious power; but discrimination now  becomes necessary.   The four
songs following all relate to typical conditions
and activities of American life.  The first,
Song of the Broad Axe, belongs to his first
period, but it lacks coherence. Already in
Whitman's time the axe had ceased to be an
effective symbol of American life, and his contrast between the American axe of freedom
and the European axe of the executioner is a
conceit. The atmosphere of forced imagemaking which produced such an absurdity
impairs the tone of the poem. The Song of the
Exposition, dating from 1871 (two years before
Whitman's paralysis), introduces a new timbre
into the work. No longer "august master of
beauty," the poet strains after effect and
mouths rhetorically, and this in spite of the
fact that his theme is congenial to him: weAmerica, that is-are to produce poetry to-day
and to produce it not by idealising it in the
past but by realising that we are ourselves its
repository, that it is present in the most
homely details of our lives:She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware.
The Song of the Redwood Tree (true ' song of the
broad axe' this) represents yet another style,
being still later in date and sounding those
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WALT WHITMAN


deliberate retrospective harmonies which are
characteristic of almost all Whitman's best
work after the war, the work of a man whose
mysticism has passed from the stage of rapt
seizure to that of experience and calmness.
A Song for Occupations takes us back once
more to his vividest and most assertive
manner; but again we find a tang of artificiality
and wrongheadedness. Perhaps this came of
the pretence or of the effort to attract and
appeal to the working classes, as such. Whitman must have felt from the beginning that
they would be the last to listen to him.
As we approach the central tableland of the
work, it is natural that we should encounter
a tendency to fit in more or less arbitrarily
pieces that have no very precise bearing upon
the general design of the book and are valuable
chiefly for their reinforcement in new lights
or from new angles of ideas already broached.
Birds of Passage and By the Roadside, which
precede Drum  Taps, Autumn Rivulets whiclh
comes after it, are groups composed in the
main of incidental and illustrative pieces.
But Whitman    kept the idea of progress
steadily in view. The contclts of Birds of
Passage and By the Roadside suggest that the
climax of the pilgrimage of life is still to be
reached, while in Autumn Rivulets the process
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PLAN


of distillation begins. Yet even there the soul
still looks and moves forward, although its
earthly life is in the main a retrospect.
Birds of Passage opens significantly with the
Song of the Universal, the theme of which is
so perfectly in Whitman's vein, that although
the poem  was written in the period of his
greatest prostration (1874-5) and is weak in
its recurrent use of conventional phrase and
rhythm, it attains to greatness. To You is
but another Song of the Universal, perfectly
exhibiting however Whitman's unique principles of composition. The whole section aims
at clarifying that conception of a developing
individual which is the root idea of Leaves of
Grass. Its title is chosen, of course, to suggest
the thought of immortality.
A Broadway Pageant is perhaps placed next
because while its theme associates it with the
middle section of the work, with the period when
the faculties and activities of experience are
at fullness and poise, it yet anticipates the war
and has no direct bearing of any kind upon
Drum Taps. The reception in America of the
first embassy from an Eastern nation suggests
to Whitman that a new stage has been reached
in the history of the human spirit.
The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed,
The ring is circled, the journey is done.
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WALT WHITMAN


He foresees the time when all that the West
owes to the East wvill be made good and whetl
the ideas of progress and fraternity will
genuinely unite tine world.  It was a bold
prophecy  to  have  madci  on  provocation
seemingly so slight in 1860; who would have
supposed that in little more than fifty years
Republican government would have been attempted in China?
Sea Drift precedes Drum Taps in part
because the experiences it records and the
poems in which those experiences are recorded belonged in point of fact to Whitman's
earlier life; but there is also a symbolic
appropriateness in the position assigned to it,
since it contains the first explicit celebration
in Leaves of Grass, not of the idea merely, but
of the experience, of death and the mystical
associations that cling about it, typified to
Whitman's mind peculiarly by the sea. Here,
before the individual life is merged in the
national, we have personality revealed at its
core, in the anguish of bereavement, in the
prostration of the soul before the fact of death
and the thought of what lies beyond it, in its
ignorance of what that beyond may be, in the
sense of the insignificance of this proud individual, now at last beaten, humiliated,-him
of whose claims and assertiveness and in174




PLAN


satiability we had heard so much:Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,)...
These things (while with them, under them,
sounds still the note of confidence and security)
it was necessary to explore and express and to
relate them to the period of fullest maturity,
of conscious manhood. By the Roadside is a
transitional section merely. After As I ebb'd
with the Ocean of Life, the way to Drum Taps
is prepared; and nowhere more intimately
than in Sea Drift can we realise how great was
the poet whose voice those drums were to overwhelm.
The middle section of the book (pp. 219-276)
requires no further exposition; but a few
minor distinctions in style must be alluded to.
In Drum Taps, for example, pieces such as
First, 0 Songs for a Prelude, or Song of the
Banner at Daybreak, or A Centenarian's Story,
pieces in which Whitman shows himself
kindled, sometimes a little artificially, by the
thought of the struggle rather than by the
facts of it, are a class apart. There is in these
and one or two others a touch of the inflation
to which he is subject whenever he is not
deeply at home with his theme, and which has
sometimes been supposed an essential charac175




WALT WHITMAN


teristic of his poetry. Needless to say it is in
such pieces as Vigil Strange or A Sight in Camp
that he is himself, and in these there is still the
complete formal mastery, which from    this
time forward, with his broken health, we are
less and less able to rely on finding in his work.
The assassination of Lincoln gave him a
unique opportunity; but When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd, majestic as it is, does
not maintain the proud aloofness of rhythm
which never forsakes him  at his best.  Its
passages of conventional melody, verging upon
sing-song, have no doubt made the dirge more
popular than it otherwise could have been;
and have led it to be accepted as the very
thing they prevent it from being-a type of
his work.
By Blue Ontario's Shore is perplexing at first,
because though it speaks of the war as
past, it is yet written, the bulk of it, in the
style of the first period. It was in 1856, of
course, that Whitman described himself as one
who walks the States with a barb'd tongue:by 1865 such a description would have been
both uncharacteristic and inapplicable. But
the demand for America of a national voice, a
school of poets, who should bring her ideals
home to the minds of the people and fuse them
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PLAN


together, seemed to him even more urgent and
irresistible after the war than it had done
before it; and he therefore recasts this song
of poetry and democracy and brings his ideals
into relation with the reviving hopefulness of
national life after the struggle. The reader has
only to compare the parenthesis in section 11,
Angry cloth I saw there leaping
with the passages on either side of it, to feel
at once the kind of weakness into which
Whitman's later manner betrays him:I stand again In leaden rain
Your flapping folds saluting.
Whenever his theme imposes upon him an
effort beyond his strength, he succumbs to
" prettiness."
In Autumn Rivulets mixture of styles becomes
rampant, and from this point onward Leaves of
Grass is a mere medee. Most of the 'rivulets'
have an intelligible link with the idea expressed
in the introductory poem As Consequent, but
they lack the subtler and only true artistic
connection, the connection of tone and flavour.
We said earlier that Whitman's arrangement
of his poems followed subject only; the statement was of course too crude. For wherever
we have art at all, subject and treatment are
M               177




WALT WHITMAN


indistinguishable, and Whitman is aware that
it is not by their obvious labels but by their
ultimate suggestions that poems must be
classified. It is on this account precisely that
our confusion now becomes serious. We are
on the look-out for hints and indirections, for
meanings dropped by the way; and these
hints and meanings too often contradict one
another. Warble for Lilac Time gives, we may
imagine, the note that Whitman would have
liked to sound continuously through Autumn
Rivulets, but even those 'leaves' which are
autumnal in date by no means always sound
it clearly.  There was a Child Went Forth,
This Compost, To a Foil'd European Revolutionnaire, Unnamed Lands, Song of Prudence, Who
Learns My Lesson Complete, are all in Whitman's earliest manner, while there are few of
the more incisive pieces in the section that
had not appeared already in the edition of
1860. At the period of life which Autumn
Rivulets theoretically represents, the measure
of Whitman's artistic success is the measure of
his contentment. The eagle's wings are clipped;
his soarings are never again to show the serene
ecstasies of old. Yet what he can do, he still
does majestically, and his renunciations give
him command of a spiritual depth and intimacy which he has not touched before.
178




PLAN


The series of great songs that follow exhibits in various ways the new limitations
under which the poet had to work. The idea
of them was to develop more specifically than
had been done earlier the spiritual and mystical
side of man's experience. In theory they
should have been a balance to the series that
ended with the Song of the Rolling Earth,
should have stood to it in the same relation as
that in which Calamus stands to Children of
Adam. They were to be the songs of that
aspect of the mystery of life to which, as
Whitman believed, death is the key. They
were to proceed from that point of view, and
to be the work of one "triumphant, disembodied, dead." The purpose was not wholly
unfulfilled. Significantly enough, the first of
them gives us a tossed and tossing paean in
praise of music and the virtue of sound, " the
soul's celestial dream," a poem full of intermittent splendour and bathos. The second,
Passage to India, is more peculiarly representative; developing in these new contexts a
theme treated already in A Broadway Pageant,
it sings the love that would enfold the world
and cannot rest until the world is enfolded and
unified; until the soul, passing out beyond
the world, in conscious aspiration embraces
and claims all:
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WALT WHITMAN


O Sun and Moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
Passage to you...
Prayer of Columbus, which is next in order, is
again unique. Written confessedly at a time
of physical prostration, it all but sinks into
a scheme of regular blank verse. But the
theme, in its last seriousness, allows the poet
no sacrifice of his characteristic exactitude
and, in its individuality and perfection in
weakness, the piece is a strange comment on
Whitman's normal manner. We can scarcely
measure the strength of the very strong except
when it leaves them.
The Sleepers and To Think of Time are makeshifts. It is almost amusing to taste again in
them the recklessness, the loose-woven textures
of the expansive poet of '55. It is like bathing
and buffeting the waves after having examined
the fragile shells and faint patterns on the beach.
Their position is easily explained; for the next
section is to contain the first intimation of the
approach of death. And yet how strange is
their note of half-blended groping and positivism, and how irrelevant to the developing
purpose of the book! The wlole of the latter
part of Leaves of Grass, we can scarcely assert
it too often, exists only as a sketch. The
framework-Whispers of Heavenly Death, From
180




PLAN


Noon to Starry Night, Songs of Partingindicates the trend of the idea; but the outlines are filled in, for the most part, with
irrelevant matter; and the further we go, the
more we feel how mistaken was Whitman's
desire to give his poem an appearance of
balancing parts. Still, we must beware of
allowing too free a rein to our imaginative
demands. If the sections with which we are
now dealing disappoint us because of the incongruities they contain, we owe it to Whitman
to take note of the associations of ideas which
to his mind successfully overrode those incongruities.
Such a poem as Chanting the Square Deific,
for instance, derives and was intended to
derive weight from its position in the volume.
It was written during the war, though with
full power; and it is easy to see why, if Whitman was anywhere to explain, as he does here,
his theogony, he would wish to suggest that
familiarity with death and acceptance of it
were necessary to an inclusive conception of
the Divine nature.  Whispers of Heavenly
Death aims, in fact, at representing the reflections of a man, whose powers are still at
their height, upon the subject of his passage
to the unseen. It was no part of the design of
Leaves of Grass that failing power should
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WALT WHITMAN


appear in it (for that the annexes were reserved). The closing and completing experiences of life, with the larger and larger
emergence of their unknown background, were
to be treated, not indeed till life had yielded up
and fully exhibited the contents of its treasurehouse, but yet before the vital mechanism
gave any symptoms of a decline. It was for
this reason that the scheme of the book was
blocked in, as we saw, so  arly; and only
Whitman's peculiar, yet intelligible, insistence
upon the war as the representative experience
of his life necessitated the grouping of all
about Drum Taps. Another idea now emerges.
Before Drum Taps there were, particularly in
Sea Drift, but also in an occasional hint
casually dropped-in Youth, Day, Old Age and
Night, for instance-aniciatcipations of themes
more proper to the concluding sections; similarly, in these concluding sections, reminiscent
feelers arc from time to time thrown back and
the sense of the progress of life is combined
witl the sense of its underlying solidarity.
The title of the next group of poems From
Noon to Starry Night enforces this idea; and
the first piece in the group, clearly written
as an introduction, shows that Whitman
could not quite trust the idea to convey itself.
Autumn Rivulets and Whispers of Heavenly




PLAN


Death had also each their explanatory and
artificial foreword; and in all this explaining
we may trace in the poet's mind the dominance
of conscious over unconscious motives. The
formal and stylistic hesitancies of As Consequent and Thou Orb Aloft derive from the
fluctuations of Whitman's purpose as he adopts
the function now of the guide, now of the
artist. In the same way Thou Mother with Thy
Equal Brood is " placed " in a really atrocious
introductory paragraph.  The piece began
originally with what is now its second stanza,
its object being to depict the life of America
-that is, of the typical democracy-as a
summary of all that the past has bequeathed,
the seed out of which the unknown future is to
spring: that future which is to be greater,
more resolute and more aspiring as the race
continues to lay with increasing security the
foundations of its self-knowledge.
To this world of towering possibilities, the
individual, growing old, says his good-bye, his
temporary good-bye. Such is the thought
with which Whitman would bring us back to
the main current in From Noon to Starry Night.
The position of Faces, the first piece of the
group, is a challenge. Perhaps its scorching
candour connects it with the full glare of
noon:
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WALT WHITMAN


This now is too lamentable a face for man,
Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it,
Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it wrig to its
hole.
Yet the note of progress is dominant:The Lord advances and yet advances,
Always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand
bringing up the laggards...
and the poem    closes, accidentally it would
seem and yet appropriately, with a picture of
old age.   Whatever gave it its place, Faces
has the finished, balanced, original, unpredictable periods of Whitman's best work, and
his genius for word-impressionism is perhaps
nowhere seen to better advantage; nor, we
must add, his early follies.   The full-grown
lily face that "speaks to the limber-hipp'd
man near the garden pickets " reminds us of
a confession made in late life that he would
sooner cut off his right hand than write again
some of his first passages. 0 Magnet South,
Mannahatta, Excelsior, are early poems showing
the same strong perfectness of form; The
Mystic Trumpeter, To a Locomotive in Winter,
suggest failing power sustained by inspiring
themes, while A Riddle Song, What best I See
in Thee and As I Walk these Broad Majestic
Days illustrate decline as well in conception as
184




PLAN


in execution. The ideal flavour of this group
(a flavour suggested by its name and position
rather than by anything very clearly traceable
in its contents) comes out best perhaps in the
short poem By Broad Potomac's Shore. A
Clear Midnight reminds us of a vein of poetry
missing in Leaves of Grass, though there are
beautiful suggestions of it in Night on the
Prairies and elsewhere. Certain passages in
Specimen Days (particularly the meditation
at the time of Carlyle's death) show that
Whitman was qualified to relate human passion
and experience to the emotional influences of
the sky as fully as in Sea Drift he related them
to those of the sea. Only from a hint or two
dropped here and there or pieced together
from that unpretentious, that almost lisping
prose which is the most poetic creation of his
later life, can we gather what the evocations of
the Starry Night ought to have been.
In Songs of Parting we revert to a simpler
general idea, though finding the same incompatibilities in the poems that realise it. Years of
the Modern is not, as from its position we feel it
should be, a poem composed in late life; it is
placed here to suggest that what it expresses
is what Whitman wished to express in the
same breath as his farewell: the " more
august dramas" of the future are still the
185




WALT WHITMAN


focus of his attention. So Long, as we saw,
and Song at Sunset also, are both early
poems, the end of which they speak having
been imaginatively foreseen. Pensive on her
Dead Gazing, Ashes of Soldiers, and Camps of
Green have all been brought forward from Drum
Taps, of which they originally formed part, so
as to emphasise the significance of the war in
retrospect, and to express the fact that his
experience in the war and the hospitals was
to Whitman the gift and the illumination of
his life:Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist
pcrennial dew,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.
Poetically, ideally, Whitman was after all
right in making Drum Taps his centre-piece. He
saw that the love that would be infused through
materials must reject commerce with them except upon its own terms, and that the spiritual
life, a continuous struggle for mastery, could
recognise something analogous to itself even in
the crude instruments of destruction. The soul
builds with materials, but only that by their
means it may build up itself; and though its
dependence upon them is more and more
brought home to us as we see the material and
186




PLAN


spiritual welfare of mankind advancing collaterally, the last word is death, departure,
independence, liberty.  Liberty is the allenclosing thought; the soul that has once apprehended the conditions of liberty must
acquiesce in the destruction of anything rather
than that they should be destroyed. It is
Whitman's triumph that, perceiving this, he
mingles at once tenderly and remorselessly in
his poems the thought of love and the thought
of rebellion.


187




VII
CHILDREN OF ADAMi
'What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?
Listen dear son —listen America, daughter or son,
It is a paitSJul thing to love a man or womlanz to excess, and yet
it satisfies, it is great,
But there is sonething else very great, it makcs the whole
coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with conltinuous hands
sweeps and providesfor all.
"DON'T you on the whole regret having written
your poems of Sex?" the poet was asked by
one of the many pilgrims who visited him in
his old age at Camden. " Don't you on the
whole regret that I am Walt Whitman? " was
his rejoinder. Children of Adam, without a
doubt, reveals his foundations to us, and to
have withheld or withdrawn these poems
would have been to abjure his calling. But
the foundations have a twofold aspect. Internally what supports him is his intuitive conviction that every physical process has its
spiritual significance, that the body is the
188




CHILDREN OF ADAM


counterpart of the soul. Externally, he has
the buttress of his natural gift of self-assertiveness and antagonism. His aim, in Leaves of
Grass, was not so much to make a statement
of the truth in equipoise as to make a statement which, thrown in the scales against
accredited views, would correct their bias and
leave the balance adjusted accurately. He
felt, for example, how much there was to be
said on the side of conservatism, and would
sometimes insist in conversation that he was
a conservative himself. But he could trust
the case for conservatism to get itself stated
elsewhere; brute nature iterated it tirelessly;
he therefore threw his whole weight upon the
side of progress. His attitude to formal religion seems ridiculous or worse, until we
recognise the same thought under it. Similarly
in regard to sex. Nature's instincts of reticence
had proved themselves, he thought, not only
trustworthy, but too trustworthy. The demand of the future was for candour, not so
much because candour was natural as because
it was necessary: because without it there
could not be the complete envisagement of
this subject which was essential to an advancing civilisation.
The design of Leaves of Grass demanded from
Whitmana cluster which should be devoted
189




WALT WHITMAN


to the praise and solemnisation of sex. The
source of his inspiration was a belief in the
complete goodness of the universe; and the
test of such a belief is, of course, its behaviour
in the face of disturbing circumstances. What
is more disturbing than the helplessness of our
nature before the mechanical necessities imposed upon it by its association with the
physical world? Man is a mere toy, liable to
be crushed at any moment by blind forces;
and in his sexual nature it often seems as if
this blindness had taken its closest hold,
exhibiting the material mechanism as part and
parcel of himself, as a law  imposed from
within him. Such is the
wearisome condition of humanity
which our own poets deplore, and such also was
the thought of Sophocles, as we see in the
stern rebuke he administered to that dullard
who, in his old age, fondly enquired of him
whether he was still a follower of Aphrodite,
and learned that the poet considered himself
as one freed at last from cruel masters.
But, human life on earth being, in Whitman's
view, a phase only in the destiny of individuals,
he holds that the human spirit attains through
its apparent subjection to the physical world
the differentiation, the identity which gives it
190




CHILDREN OF ADAM


its essential value. It becomes a "person,"
or, at least, enriches its personality. And if the
spiritual life were really at the mercy of the
material, if "matter were conqueror," his
whole scheme would, of course, break down.
The world is good because the soul is not in
bondage, but has entered into a partnership
with a reserve of ultimate independence:I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.
To deprecate the material conditions of our
life is thus, in Whitman's eyes, to miss the fundamental purpose for which we live. We are
here to prove our souls, to refresh and to refine,
to temper and to develop them by a continually
widening experience; and, such being his
belief, he finds a corroboration of it in the
mechanical arrangements which bring us here.
The fact that nativity presupposes the fusion
of two bodies may be regarded, if we please,
as an accident of evolution; it may be merely
by a coincidence, too, that we describe the
emotion that brings a father and a mother
together by the name of love. But if the
emotion in which the family originates is
indeed the same as that in which religion finds
the mirror of God, it is conceivable also that
191




WALT WHITMAN


the very machinery of generation as it were
epitomises the relation of the soul to created
things. We are here in order to surrender ourselves to the world in an embrace and to
realise ourselves through an inclusive union.
Sexual analogies are, of course, in a sense a
commonplace of poetry. In all this, it might
be argued, Whitman does not go beyond what
every one who is capable of entering into a poet's
mind allows. That is true; and yet there is
a difference. The difference is that in poetry
generally what we find is more or less illuminative allusion and comparison, whereas what
Whitman offers he offers as a kind of germinal
truth. The controlling influence of his life was
his sense of a personal relation with the spirit
that is interfused through all things, and like
many to whom this sense has been present he
could look back to a time in his life when it
first illuminated him. Yet his description of
this experienceI mind how we lay such a transparent summer morningwas one of the passages that the censor of
morals wished him   to  withdraw.   Again,
though he theorises on this subject, he is never
a mere theorist; his conviction coming to him
from deeper, more visionary sources, theory
and didactism overtake him only in certain
192




CHILDREN OF ADAM


applications and developments of a truth he
has seen. Among his passages of purest poetry
are those in which he celebrates the nuptials of
the soul and the world:Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset-earth of the mountains mistytopt!...
Far-swooping elbow'd earth-rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.
Prodigal, you have given me love-therefore I to you
give love!
O unspeakable passionate love.
The Song of Myself is built up out of this
analogy, taking it, as we have seen, for a
foundation and rising to it for a climax:There is that in me-I'do not'know what it is-but I know
it is in me.
Wrench'd and sweaty-calm and cool then my body
becomes,
I sleep-I sleep long.
I do not know it-it is without name-it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friendSwhose embracing awakes
me...
Do you see 0 my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death-it is form, union, plan-it is
eternal life-it is Happiness.
N                193




WALT AHITMAN


If what Whitman here expresses is the truth
he takes it to be, it is necessarily a two-edged
truth; it devolves upon him to show in the
experiences of sex themselves the quality in
virtue of which they sunmmarise the meaning
of life. IHe only partially succeeded in this,
but the attempt he makes is so noble that those
who fully grasp and conquer his meaning will
forgive errors by the way, and will probably
come to recognise in Children of Adam an
acceptable statement of a certain necessary
stage of spiritual growth. The reader who
grasps Whitman's intention without offence is,
we must suspect, more civilised than the
reader who is shocked by it. His idea might
be put thus:-A man is not a complete man,
nor a woman a complete woman, while they
refuse to recognise, with all its implications,
the faculty which made them   and through
them may make others. Very few are or can
be at present complete in this sense; let that
be recognised. But sooner or later the individual must rise to a perception of the sacredness of the fountain of life within him, and he
will attain to this perception through trust,
through a determination to find himself and be
himself even in what may seem destructive or
disintegrating impulses rather than in any inclination to distinguish himself from them and
194




CHILDREN OF ADAM


cast them off. It is in order to promote a sane
self-realisation, to prevent the lurking of unacknowledged impulses in the dark corners of
life, that Whitman writes Children of Adam, and
in it relates,-as far as he can, exhaustively,the psychology of sexual desire to the physiology of procreation.
A cardinal weakness which more or less
affects all his utterances on this subject is that
while his theories point inevitably to marriage
as the consummation of the sexual life, he
lacked the slowly accumulating experiences,
disciplines, and revelations of which normal
marriage is the vehicle and therefore celebrates
as detached episodes events and impulses which
imply a continuous relation. And this weakness is the greater, because we cannot feel it
accidental to him that his life was a roving
life. Whatever the circumstances that separated him from the mother of his children, the
very fact that accepted severance did not
preclude the arrival of a family is a certain
indication of temperament. The catastrophe
of his life had something in it that was appropriate to him. To this extent he must be called
an " immoral " figure.
There is as it were a fabric of experience of
which Whitman had grasped the plan, but
which he had not in his own life built up; and
195




WALT ~vWHITMAN


as a result of this, his attitude becomes in
various ways misleading. It is expressive of
his peculiar turn of mind that he attempts to
represent sex as in a special sense a fusion of
the past and future of mankind.    He calls
man in his sexual nature Adam, endeavouring
to recover the simplicity and splendour of
primitive relations, while yet it is clear that
the relations he celebrates are to be realised
in an ideal future to which humanity must
grow. He seems here half enamoured of an
illusion of which elsewhere he is free, the illusion of the " return to Nature."  He connects
the reticence of the civilised man and woman
with "parlours," " delicatesse," and degeneration, and seems not to see its necessary connection with personal dignity.   He writes
that:Without shame the man I like knows and avows the
deliciousness of his sex,
Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.
We may wonder in what circumstances or in
what company such an avowal could be made
-without doubt, a company of dismal theorists. Even if he meant only "acknowledges"
"avows to himself " the note is still a false
one; for shame is our equivalent for pudeur,
and to attempt a dissociation of this feeling
196




CHILDREN OF ADAM


from the sexual impulse would be as it were
to substitute the word " sire" for " father "
or as if one should treat honour as accidental
to the idea of a gentleman.
The eleventh section of the Song of Myself
illustrates in an extreme form the confusions
in which Whitman was involved. His aim in
this passage is to extol the bare fact of sexual
attraction. He puts before us the picture of
a number of young men bathing, and watched
without their knowledge by a young woman
who desires to join them and in spirit does join
them and gives her caresses to them all:Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to herand so on. Whitman expected his readers to
be shocked and disgusted by the candour of
his description; but he expected them slowly
to recover from their shock and brace themselves to a manly recognition of truth. Yet
his would-be simple picture turns out to be a
tissue of follies and absurdities. His aim is
realistic, but he has misrepresented feminine
psychology. The young woman would not
have cared to see the manly form, but to be
seen by the manly eye; her sex would not
have driven her to be surreptitious in watching
but to be conspicuous in avoiding the bathers.
197




WALT WHITMAN


Again, an animal left solitary becomes liable,
no doubt, to undifferentiated desire, which the
appearance of members of the other sex precipitates. But in the species man, this fundamental instinct is confronted with other instincts, less imperious perhaps, and yet not
less authoritative-instincts responsive to the
higher organisation of the life to which he has
been raised and in which alone his sexual
nature can unfold itself. These instincts call
upon him to reserve his passion so that he may
dedicate it to a partner of his choice. And
this implies that the normal animal impulses,
wholesome and inescapable as they are, cannot be, in human society, the themes for confident self-congratulation and rejoicing.
Whitman is to be honoured as a man who
made great sacrifices for the sake of an ideal
and was willing to incur distrust, contempt,
and vilification. We do not detract from the
honour due to him when we point out that his
ideal was imperfect. One feature of it which
is all strength is his insistence upon the equality
in honour and mutual responsibility of the
two parties to a sexual relation. As to the
social conventions which have allowed differences of physical mechanism  to become a
means for the exploitation of one sex by the
other, he does not deign to mention them.
198




CHILDREN OF ADAM


His hymns of sex are hymns of the two sexes
entering in reciprocal allegiance into a shared
life. And this being so, he appears inevitably
as a feminist. The woman's function predisposes her, of course, to a sheltered life; but
civilisation, recognising this, has, sometimes
under the name of chivalry, given her more
shelter than she needs and produced at last
in her a constitution barely adequate to the
duties of maternity. The duty of a civilised
community, Whitman holds, is to recognise
the differentiations of sexual function with a
view to redressing rather than intensifying the
inequalities of opportunity to which they give
rise. And one of his chief services to this
cause is that he succeeds in bringing a real
mutuality of feeling into his conception of the
relations of the sexes. He is free from the false
sentiment in men which sets up for worship an
ideal of romantic ineffectuality. Yet he did
not quite recognise that the demand he makes
upon society to bring woman forward does not
apply to woman in her sexual nature. It is as
if he expected from the female the positiveness
and even the initiative which are proper to the
male, not seeing that a true development,
while it will enable both sexes to understand
one another, can never lead to any exchange
or modification of fundamental impulses. With
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WALT WHITMiFAN


regard to this mutual understanding, the paramount duty is, of course, with men. For their
own nature offers no problems to analysis,
while the feminine instinct, with its attributes
of envelopment and containedness, just because it is pervasive is evasive also; so that
women who understand men so well understand themselves at present very imperfectly,
while men have hardly made a start towards
understanding them.
The chief disappointment of Children of
Adam lies in its failure to express the central
truth to which, one would have supposed,
Whitman's whole philosophy of life was leading him. His governing perceptions in Leaves
of Grass derive their light from two sources,from his recognition of a pervading intersimilitude that binds all things together in one
spiritual life, and from his recognition of the
infinite and inexhaustible diversity of the selfpoised, self-directing existences that breathe
this common divine air. He is thus equally
the poet of the universal and of the individual.
But in treating of sex, while, as we have seen,
his insight into its more mysterious implications, his presentment of it as the fountain of
beauty and power, as Life undifferentiated
and universal,-while all this belongs with
what is most inspired in him, his attitude to
200




CHILDREN OF ADAM


it as a specific social problem suggests a mind
removed and therefore fumbling. He still, it is
true, speaks in clear, forcible terms, and draws
on unfailing stores of righteous enthusiasm.
But beyond saying that sex like all else is good,
he gives little direction to his enthusiasm, and
does nothing to show us under what conditions
its implicit goodness will be realised. He seems
indeed to make the fundamental mistake of
supposing that the forms of truth as he has
seen them in that upper transcendental air
have only to be brought down and applied,
like a transfer, to actual human life for all the
conditions of what is right and beautiful to be
fulfilled. In brief he sings not only sex the
principle of life, but also sex the realisation,
the source of lives, in the same universal
language.
Yet this subject, more than all others,
awaited and demanded the final differentiating
word, the word which he is tireless in applying
to literature, history, politics, however extreme
the paradox in which the application seems to
involve him:O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony are you and me,
Its endless gestations of new states are you and me...
Underneath all individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to
one single individual-namely to you.
201




WALT WHITMAN


Sex is celebrated, of course, as the origin or
vehicle of the life of individuals:Underneath all nativity,
Underneath all the Expression of love for men and women.
But there is something more to be said and he
does not say it. For surely if, as he believes
and we believe, persons are the final unanalysable, concrete, everlasting fact; if the evolution
of the world is a progress of personalities; if
experience is the slow unfolding of personalities in the light they shed for one another and
the light they share; if moreover it is of the
essence of these personalities that each is
individual and unique; where are we to look
for the ultimate and specific meaning of a
sexual relation but in the very fact of the
uniqueness of the two selves who engage in it?
Its law, its mechanism, is universal, and a
matter relatively insignificant. What is essential and inescapable is that two irreducible
realities confront one another. It is not in the
last resort an affair of organisms or impulses
or gratifications; these aspects come and go
and take a larger or a smaller proportion.
Permeating all, the factor that always tells
and cannot be eluded while the soul lives is
that here souls, in their uniqueness, are present
to one another, here souls interact: that from
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CHILDREN OF ADAM


this union, since emotion is essential to it,
they cannot be withdrawn. This truth never
escapes the perception of the young lover
while still, in the dawn of manhood, he retains
the half-mystical instinct of his inexperience;
and however far experience and disillusion
pervert the mind, the truth still holds that it
is not mere indulgence or dissipation that
make vice vice, but, accompanying these
things, the acceptance of the presence of
another person to suffer or to share a wrong.


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VIII


CALAaMUS
0 slender leaves... I permit yozu to tell in your own wcay
of the heart that is under you...
I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or
inhale your faint aroma but I believe afew will.
AN air of mystery hangs about Whitman's
Calamus poems;-his poems of " adhesiveness "
or the love of man for man. He advocates
and to a certain extent himself practised an
affectionate demonstrativeness which is uncongenial to the Anglo-Saxon temperament
and which those Englishmen who forget that
there are two sides to the Channel find even
shocking. The result of this and of one or
two expressions which occur in the poems is
that he is quite generally suspected of a
particularly unpleasant kind of abnormality.
Addington Symonds, in his delightful monograph, throws the balance more heavily than
was warranted in a direction along which
other studies had led him, and hints that one
purpose of Calamus was to provide a way of
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CALAMUS


redemption for instincts of that kind. From
what Horace Traubel tells us it would appear
that he wrote to Whitman several times with
questions about the meaning of Calamus,
and the remarks in his Study show that even
when he finally had Whitman's response he was
not convinced by it. "I often say to myself
about Calamus," Whitman remarks to Traubel
-" perhaps it means more or less than what
I thought myself; perhaps I don't know what
it all means-perhaps never did know. My
first instinct about all that Symonds writes is
violently reactionary-is all for no, no, no.
Then the thought intervenes that maybe I do
not know all my own meaning."
In spite of Whitman's warnings that Calamus
was not an attempt to reinstate Greek customs,
Symonds develops the parallel between the
ethic it displays and that of the martial
Dorians at considerable length. But he only
quotes one piece which really has any bearing
on his analogy; and does not notice that even
in Earth, My Likeness the final emphasis is laid
upon reticence, fear even of avowal, by a poet
who has fearlessly placed the whole of his
character before us and acknowledged all the
impulses, bad and good, of which he is cognisant
in himself:


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WALT WHITMAN


Earth, my likeness,
Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
I now suspect that is not all;
I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible
to burst forth,
For an athlete is enamour'd of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in
me eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.
What then is the motive and justification of
Earth, My Likeness if its meaning is not what
Symonds supposes it to be? In the first place,
it includes what Symonds says is not included
in Calamus, a recognition of an element of
danger attending all highly-pitched personal
emotion, the danger of an irruption of sex into
a sphere in which it has no meaning. But in
the second   place, Whitman     would not be
content unless this dislocation of impulse, a
dislocation after all so common, were acknowledged in his poems.
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you
is a thought which he would extend to those
whose aberrations society finds unmentionable
just as much as to those whose aberrations it
perhaps mentions too glibly. This is, I believe,
the only passage in Leaves of Grass that can be
construed   as an   allusion  to  sodomy.    Its
meaning even so is not quite clear.      But I
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CALAMUS


interpret it as expressing recognition of an
impulse capable of leading to that act,
coupled with an assertion that the impulse,
and obviously far more the act itself, is an
unmentionable one. We have only to add
that for Whitman there is nothing that can be
done that cannot be mentioned.
Freed from the breath of this suspicion,
Calamus appears as one of the most beautiful,
if still as one of the strangest, of the subsidiary
clusters of Leaves of Grass. In Children of
Adam the functions of the body in that love
into which bodily functions necessarily enter,
were dealt with frankly; and the criticism
put forward in the last chapter loses much of
its force when we remember that Children of
Adam is the praise of an abstraction, and that
after it comes Calamus and fills in the blank
spaces. "He does not celebrate love at all.
It is as if the beasts spoke," wrote Thoreau in
an early letter, and in the minds of most of his
readers Whitman continues to stand as a man
great, perhaps, but, unfortunately, shameless.
Curiously, then, the note on which Calamus
opens and which it maintains, is the note of
shame, of pudeur. Sex, to Whitman's mind,
is in all its operations as clear as daylight.
Behind it the mysteries and the forces of life
lie concealed; but its work in connection with
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WALT WHITMAN


those mysteries is transparent, and the difficulties connected with it come of the intensity
and urgency of the instinct, difficulties only
increased by dissimulation. Children of Adam
is his protest against the suspicion that there
is something shameworthy in the facts of the
sexual nature in themselves. It is the praise
of sex as distinguished from the praise of
love, while Calamus is the praise of love as
distinguished from the praise of sex.
Immediately in Calamus the sense of bashfulness, of reticence, which he cast aside so as
to appear unaware of it, when he was dealing
with physical desires and processes, comes over
him with irresistible force. Why is this? The
sense of shame might be described as a refusal
of the spirit to identify itself with and acknowledge itself in the material vehicle through
which it works. We are ashamed when we
feel that our actions do not properly represent
us or do justice to us; we are ashamed when
appearances belie us or when we have allowed
them to belie us or have been led away by
them so as to belie ourselves. No more shame
attaches inherently to the organs of sex than
to any other bodily instrument. But to the
emotion of love shame attaches peculiarly,
because it is the endeavour to dedicate the
entire self and because life provides no single
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CALAMUS


vehicle for such a dedication. Love endeavours
to imprint upon appearances meanings fuller,
more comprehensive than they can bear; and
thus it involves, in its very essence, an appeal
to confidence and generosity, and the risk of
misunderstanding and humiliation.
This seems to be the idea that underlies, or
at least to be one of the ideas that underlie,
that lovely and tantalising poem Scented
Herbage of My Breast. Its aim is to associate
together the ideas of love and death, to suggest
that the true meaning of the relationship of
souls transcends all the shows of life and is
the fundamental purpose of the world. One
of the chief difficulties is that the language,
being throughout tentative and metaphorical,
fits itself or seems to fit itself to the more
obvious and more sentimental ideas which
rising first in our minds oust Whitman's.
The frequently quoted interrogation
(What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)
may seem to lend itself to a mood of pensiveness in which the mystical and the languorous
merge. Whitman's mood is quite free from
that taint:I will sound myself and comrades only, I will never again
utter a call only their call,
I will raise with it immortal reverberations through
the States,...


0


209




WALT WHITMAN


Through me shall the words be said to make death
exhilarating,
Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord
with it.
His point is that for the perfect emotion of
love the condition to which he regards death
as introductory is anticipated in this life, so
that the whole material world and the body
itself as a part of it are transcended and appear
in their true light as instruments of spiritual
progress:
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the
atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to
prefer.
Calamus is thus the celebration of the ideal
relationship of soul to soul; and in order to
divest this relationship of sexual associations,
Whitman confines his hymns of it to the love of
one man for another. But he does this by a
poetic licence merely. It is equally of course
the relation of woman to woman, or of man to
woman in the rare cases in which difference of
sex becomes irrelevant.    Nor of course is it
suspended in relations which are founded upon
sex. It is suspended only when sex perverts
or prevents a relationship.
The shame we feel in the voicing of this
emotion Whitman connects with the fact that
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CALAMUS


the expression of it, the interchange of it is a
fundamental need. In loving and being loved
the soul comes to knowledge of itself, and finds
sustenance, a summons to action, the motive
and the meaning of life. But only the soul
loves, and the only object of love is another
soul; and to know the soul of another is as
difficult as to know one's own. Everywhere
the dawning or developing impulse finds itself
checked by barriers of appearance or thwarted
by its own want of faith. Our shame when we
love is our implicit knowledge that love is the
only reality, rising up in rebuke of the explicit
denials and shortcomings which daily life
exhibits. The life of love is
The life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the
restand when we love or ask for love, we as it
were offer ourselves as embodiments of this
all-containing life, so that our first thought is
of our own unworthiness.
But the Calamus poems are mysterious in
another relation, in relation to the personality
of their author. Here let us first note that the
'I' of Leaves of Grass at the same time is and
is not Whitman. It represents an identity
detached from the confining accidents of
existence, of which it can avail itself when it
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WALT WHIT MAN


will, while yet when it will it transcends them.
The 'I' has three stages. It begins as 'Walt'
in his individual personal life. Next, it is that
personal life regarded not as ' Walt's' merely,
but as anybody's; the individual is made
typical. Finally, it is the individual, and yet
typical, life regarded not in its attainment but
in its promise; it is the ' I ' as it is revealed
when everything accidental is parted aside and
the enclosed seed of perfection, the soul of the
soul, has been laid bare. But no distinction
is observed in the poems between these three
stages. They blend together, and the purpose
of the book is to draw the reader imperceptibly
from one to another, and so at last to reveal
him to himself. Until he grasps this, the autobiographical directness of some of the poems
puts him off his guard:What think you I take my pen in hand to record?
The battle-ship, perfect-model'd, majestic, that I saw
pass the offing to-day under full sail?
and often as he reads the more mysterious confessions and declarations of the transcendental
'I' their drift is concealed from him.
Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?
The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps
destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect
to be your sole and exclusive standard..
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CALAMUS
This   clearly   is the 'I' which        "waits"      for
each one of us within ourselves, that " bird of
passage " which "through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui... picks its way."
Different again is the ' I' of
These I singing in spring collect for lovers,
(For who but I should understand lovers and all their
sorrow and joy?);
for the actual and the ideal ' I ' are interfused
here, as we see in the continuation of the
passage:
Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I
pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing
not the wet.1
The beauty of it turns precisely upon its attribution    to  the   ideal 'me' of actions          which
bring the casual, sauntering, musing Walt irre1 Some readers may suspect the present writer of laying too
much stress on supposed hidden or secondary meanings in Calamus
and elsewhere; others will quarrel with him for overlooking traces
of a scheme of mystic symbolism. To his mind it is one of the
symptoms of Whitman's power that, having in him so strong a bent
towards mysticism, he recognised that the best expression of the
"inexpressible" was to be found in terms of common speech and
action. In the passage above and in some others he clearly uses a
familiar image for its secondary suggestions. Briefly, "the garden,
the world," is human life (cf. Children of A dam, p. 79), and the
C' passing of the gates " introduces us to the region of the beyond.
It is in this beyond that we reach the pond-side where the poet
wades in " fearing not the wet"; and it is here that we find
growing, lifting its " tomb-leaves " out of the water, the Calamusroot which is Whitman's emblem of the love that is stronger than
death. Readers interested in following out the more mystical side
of Whitman's poetry and experience should consult Mr. Henry
Bryan Binns's excellent Lfife.
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WALT WHITMAN


sistibly before us; it is the mingling of the
poetry that suggests a mood and the poetry
that reveals an image.    Whitman goes on:Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker
they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever
is near me,
Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,...
Icrc, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of
sage,...
But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that
I reserve,
I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself
am capable of loving.
What is this capacity? what is this ideal
love? Every soul is, in WVhitman's eyes,
capable of it; and he only claims for himself
capacity, not attainment. Indeed, Calamus
bears out the impression which his history on
the whole leaves with us, that he passed
through life with the profounder personal
longings of his heart unrealised. His relation
to his mother, to his brother Jeff, to his young
friend Pete Doyle, prove his natural gift for
that interchange of details and trivialities on
which the continuance of vitality in any
friendship  so  much    depends.    But his life
214




CALAMUS


gives us no instance of a close and inclusive
relation prolonged on equal terms and we are
led to wonder whether he possessed the
faculty which he most celebrates, the faculty
of loving intercourse with equals. The question
is one which a biographical psychologist might
pursue almost endlessly; but the main fact
to be held in view is that a man of his stature
has little opportunity of intercourse with
equals, and will probably meet none. Emerson
was much older than Whitman; and even
Emerson, much as he surpassed Whitman in
intellect and in the range of his more sophisticated perception, had-who can doubt it?-a
smaller store of that indescribable, undifferentiated power of beneficence and initiative,
that central radiance, which is the final
measurement of men. Lincoln was perhaps an
equal; but even had the two men met, it does
not follow because they were equals that they
would have understood one another personally.
We cannot bring Whitman to the test here;
in regard to his private relations perhaps we
can say no more than this, that he seems to
handle them most perfectly in cases where the
disparity between himself and his friend is
most marked. From this it might be argued
that he was not good at sustaining the appearances of equality when the conditions of
215




WALT WHITMAN


sustainment were of the subtler kind; for in
a broad sense, friendship, of course, equalises
all. Yet it mav also be, that the men more
nearly capable of understanding him   would
be themselves lacking in the breadth, reserve
and simplicity of nature required for comradeship with him.   Whatever the explanation,
Whitman's loss is the world's gain.
I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not
return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songshe confesses. And one of the most curious
features of his work is that his claim to set up
a personal relation with each one of his readers
justifies itself. Thus he partly transcends that
constantly bewildering dilemma which seems
to present a choice to us between individual
and universal love.
There is always the temptation to suppose
that love as it becomes diffused becomes impersonal: that those to whom every man is a
brother must take from   their friends what
they give to the world. Nor does the fact that
an idealist like Shelley denies this affect us,
if we seem to see in his own conduct an example
of what he denies.    Now   Whitman insists
always upon individuality, the relation to a
person, as essential to love; the love which
he extols as the most perfect is the love of
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CALAMUS


friends who mutually single one another out
and find spontaneous happiness in a unique
spiritual affinity. Obviously no man can in
this sense love everybody. Conversely, if a
man is ignorant of such a love as this, can he,
we might almost ask, love anybody? In
theory, but not in theory alone, the reality of
life to Whitman was individual men and women.
He had faults of egotism and pride which even
the splendid directness of self-expression attained in Leaves of Grass did not dispel. But
he perfectly apprehended the difference between dreams and actualities in the sphere of
the emotions; and when he speaks of the
"ocean of love within him    which he freely
pours forth" we can analyse his words and
reduce them to a series of loving actions,
based upon loving perception of the differing
natures of the men and women who crossed
his path. The universal love of which he is a
prophet does not reduce itself to a vague
benevolence at the core of which we find the
worm   of comfortable self-deception.  It is
really the charity that begins at home:In things best known to you finding the best, or as good
as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest,
lovingest,...
Man in the first you see or touch, always in friend,
brother, nighest neighbour-woman in mother, sister,
wife217




WALT WHITMAN


Thus proved and substantiated, the power
of translating love into action has its limits
like all our other powers; yet it is the power
which at the same time goes and takes us
furthest, knitting us most widely and most
variously with our fellows, and it is in this
sense limitless that it transmits itself beyond
the original occasion of its exercise and in its
purer forms can, as it were, start waves of
harmony which will vibrate through all minds
that are attuned to them and so will encircle
the world.
It is impossible to love everybody; but it is
possible to feel so towards those with whom
life actually brings us into contact that all
who are touched by the reverberations of the
feeling realise that they are virtually included
in it. Perceiving this, and perhaps perceiving
also that something in him went out more
tenderly towards all he encountered than
could ever be returned to him, Whitman
conceived the idea of giving himself individually to all:Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that
you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none
better than you.


218




CALAMUS


So it has come about that Leaves of Grass, for
any one who cares to read it, contains this gift,
all but unique in literature, of personal intimacy, a love that wakes response. Whitman's note of strong, undiscriminating tenderness has a Christlike beauty of appeal; his
"neither do I condemn thee" (turn to The
City Dead-House, reader) vibrates with a
tumult of compassion; and when he admits
the wistful insecurity of love, it draws us to
him as nothing less human could do. He is
the man
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he
lov'd might secretly be indifferent to him,
he confides to us how
When I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with
them,
How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long,
Through youth and through middle and old age, how
unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive-I hastily walk away fill'd with the
bitterest envy.
He has, as it were, ripened and detached from
himself a seed, which, wherever planted, grows
to the image of the flower that bore it. It may
be that we do not accept his methods of expression and in the picture we form of the
219




WTALT WHITMAN


man dislike some traits as much as we are
moved by others; yet in a region lifted above
the conflicts of taste, we know that there has
been brought to us a new ideal of the relationship of soul to soul; and our hearts respond,
feeling, with him, that here is the purpose of
the world.


220




IX


DEMOCRACY
AND THE INDIVIDUAL
She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever...
Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects
shall appear.
DEMOCRATIC government, the greatest experiment in which the human race has yet engaged,
is still on its trial. In his trumpetings of its
finality, Whitman lays open to the man of
affairs what seems his most ingenuous side.
Yet it would be a mistake to suppose him
blind to dangers. If democracy is the " destin'd conqueror," there are
treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
And death and infidelity at every step.
Indeed what makes his enthusiasm valuable
is that while he avoids iterating what depresses
and will always bring the positive aspect of
things into prominence, he sufficiently indicates his perception of the urgency of the
221




WALT WHITMAN


problem to convince us of his grit and candour:
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile
and tears...
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of
men and states,...
Health to emerge and joy, joy universal.
Ile has something of the sportsman's attitude
in the face of evil, and can tolerate no mewling
and whimpering over it; to be matched against
it, to stake all on overcoming it is the zest of
the adventure of life:O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one
can stand!
The aim of his democracy is to make, in this
sense, sportsmen of us all.
His belief in the possibility of it turns on
his belief in the immortality of the soul. The
belief is common; yet, in the minds of most
reflecting persons, we find it merging under
pressure into one of the following substitutes.
Some think that our immortality consists, not
in survival of death, but in the fact that God
always remembers the whole course of our
lives; others that it consists in the influence
222




DEMOCRACY


of our lives on history, the world bearing inscribed upon its rolls for ever the print of our
transient activities; others that it is the
faculty by which, while we live, we understand the nature of the things that never die
-love and truth and beauty-and identify
ourselves with   them.    These 'philosophic '
substitutes would have seemed to Whitman
merely evasive.
If all came but to ashes of dung,
If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are
betray'd,
Then indeed suspicion of death.
Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should
die now,
Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited
toward annihilation?
Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good.
In a man of Whitman's complete freedom and
sincerity of mind, who says what he thinks
is true, not what he thinks it will be good for
us to hear, this attitude is impressive. Moreover, though he is often a confused thinker,
he is not often, one might perhaps say he is
never, a confused feeler or a confused describer
of his feelings; and his career was such as to
submit this particular belief to the most search223




WALT WHITMAN


ing of tests; he saw human lives poured out
like water and in his own person knew the
experience of death in life for a period of
twenty years.
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd,
Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
I will cling fast to thee, 0 God, though the waves buffet
me,
Thee, thee at least I know.
The basis on which he himself rests his belief is twofold. In his immediate communion
with his fellow-men, with himself, with nature
and the Spirit of all, he believed his experience
to transcend the death of the body; he had
the intuition of an immortal life. His reading
of the concrete processes and development of
events in society and history corroborated this;
they were to his mind valueless, inexplicable,
on any other hypothesis. The immortality of
the soul was his first moral postulate. He uses
it to give a new meaning to old formulas.
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," the watchword   of Democracy, has     been  a  motto
much bandied about by revolutionaries whose
chief aim was levelling and vengeance; and
coming out of the mouths of unbelievers
the words strike us with their inconsistency
and with the blindness implied in them to
224




DEMOCRACY


obvious facts. We must sacrifice liberty if we
are to equalise men, equality if we are to set
them free. The spirit of fraternity suffers in
either case. An equalised society would have
to reckon with the resentment of men of naturally superior powers, and what is liberty if it
means no more than the liberty to be fraternal?
These objections do not apply to the motto as
Whitman uses it. His love of liberty perseveres in spite of knowledge and avowal that
its possession involves certain abuse.  His
doctrine of equality includes a recognition of
all the facts of inequality; he even insists upon
the necessity of them and upon the desirability
of increasing them. He can preach the ideal
of fraternity without cavil because he really
has the fraternal temper.
Under the ideal of liberty he claims for each
man the prerogative of his manhood; the right
to have an initiative, an experience of his own;
the right to develop will and character by
using them; the right to know that his sufferings, his failures if necessary, are in part at
least of his own making; the right to come into
unmediated touch with circumstance and be
a man among men, mixing in the clash and
melee; the right to begin to be. To suffer life
is not necessarily to be unhappy. Those to
whom the course of their lives, with ways and
P              225




WALT WHITMAN


means, is appointed from above may well, if
the appointment is a fairly wise one, lead the
most comfortable existences. The claim for
liberty is not a claim for ease, but for conditions in which, pleasant or unpleasant, there
is prospect of spiritual growth. The relation
of the belief in immortality to this ideal lies
in the weight of emphasis which is thrown
upon the value of each individual's life when
we believe that life to be susceptible of continuous development. If individuals merely
partake temporarily of the stream of life,
partly guiding, partly carried along by it
while their brief hours run, the argument that
each is severally of unique value, as representing  something  irreplaceable, something
which has finally to be reckoned with in the
scheme of things, breaks down. We may or
may not believe that the wisest course for
nations is to develop as large as possible a
number of their citizens, the belief will be a
matter for politics merely and the point at
which individuals and generations of individuals can rightly be sacrificed for the preservation of the higher life of the few remains
adjustable according to taste. But the belief
in personal immortality, the belief that the
individual soul is a centre of continuous and
illimitable growth, necessitates refusal to accept
226




DEMOCRACY


the final subordination of one soul to another
and cannot be content with any organisation
of society in which such subordination is
involved.
This leads us at once to the idea of equality.
It is only in relation to an immortal life that
the doctrine of the equality of men becomes
intelligible. What appears often to be meant
by those who say that men are equal is that
the inequalities we now observe in them are
due to the different circumstances by which
different persons are surrounded, so that if the
same opportunities could be given and preserved to all, an equality now only virtual
would be actualised. This seems nonsense,
and if individuality has in fact the value
implied in the claims that Whitman makes
for it, it would be a poor policy, even if
it were a practicable one, to execute those
claims in such a way as to damage the very
cause we set out to advance. For what is
individuality but differentiation? And what
would be the use of supplying conditions and
opportunities by common measure to persons
to whom, ex hypothesi, the same conditions
(even if the same could be supplied) would
never seem the same?
The equality Whitman celebrates is subtler
and more unseizable than this:227




WALT WHITMAN
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself..
is his motto.
Produce great persons, tile rest follows
he says in one breath, and in another:I only am he who places over you no master, owner,
better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically inI
yourself.
The inclusion of the Deity in this list should
satisfy the most exacting aristocrat.     True,
Whitman announces to all and sundry that
Tlere is no endowment in man or woman that is not
tallied in you,
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as
good is in you,
but, and here is always the underlying suggestion, this virtue, beauty, endowment, is a
possibility, not an achievement; it is what
waits; it is what is in you; and the question
is, when are you going to bring it out?
Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one,
and still pass on.
The equality of men thus conceived is simply
their immortality. Unequal as they are, it is
intelligible to call them equal in this sense:that the faculty of endless development which
they share reduces their inequalities to a
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DEMOCRACY


relative insignificance, since it removes them
together immeasurably from     the world of
perishable appearances.
Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the East and West are tame compared to
you,
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you
are immense and interminable as they.
Indifferent to the normal and familiar inequalities of life, this equality has nothing to
fear and everything to gain from the spirit of
freedom.
For to accept freedom is to forgo safety.
It is to launch forth upon an uncharted voyage,
to engage in an uncertain battle, ready to
accept the lessons of defeat. And the importance of raising ever the cry of freedom, is that
the nature of men acquiesces only too readily
in conditions of servitude. Nothing is easier,
nothing is more fatal, than to kow-tow. The
superiority of one man to another makes itself
so irresistibly felt that the knees of the lower
type fail under him and he succumbs like one
benighted in the snow. If we call " equality,"
it is to remind him of the goal he strives towards and which except by his own efforts he
can never reach. Whitman's equality is thus
a visionary equality, and his liberty, in our
final understanding of it, the last achievement
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WALT WHITMAN


of the human spirit. The root of the matter
is that life must be conducted so as to practise
men from the beginning in the exercise of the
qualities which lead them to their perfection.
The luxury of stagnation must be refused to
them, and into their lungs must be driven the
keen air that brings pain and growth.
These being Whitman's ideas, we have to
admit that they tempt him at times into
strange places.   He appeals direct to the
individual and concentrates his whole force
on producing in him a revived self-consciousness; he praises democracy because it has
the same aim    and sometimes forgets that it
is the essence of democracy to be an aim
rather than a fulfilment.   Where, he asks in
the Song of the Broad Axe, is the great city,
and his answer runs:Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common
words and deeds,...
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,...
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending
audacity of elected persons,...
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and
President, Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents
for pay.
The element of truth which these paradoxes
are to drive home appears more plainly when
he says:Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority.
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DEMOCRACY


His ideal is that each individual should be his
own law, needing no external restraints and
bowing down to no monument of others' virtue
because he is himself virtue's embodiment. In
a city where every citizen has justice thus
inscribed within him, the functions of the
officers of state will be merely formal, Whitman
thinks; they will be like butlers and footmen,
opening the door of the hall or the carriage
when the master goes in and out. His point
is that all the goodness available in the community at any time to sustain it is what is
brought to it by its living citizens and enacted
in their lives. Virtue cannot be imposed upon
the state, but is inherent in it,-inherent, that
is, in the individuals who compose it.
Here we touch the chief lacuna in his work.
He has two ideals, the ideal of the growing man,
and the ideal of the perfect state. The perfect
state is a democracy, but it is a democracy,
we seem to understand, because its citizens
are perfect. If we ask Whitman how the
perfect individuals are to consolidate themselves so as to work out and express their perfection in its communal form, his answer is,
by fraternity,-they are to love one another.
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone
upon,
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WALT WHITMAN


I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades
The life-long love of comrades.
This is splendid, but unconvincing. Love is
the motive power of unity, but before unity
can be actualised, the power must be translated into a complex system of social activities.
To put side by side, as Whitman does, the
two words " individuality " and " en-masse"
and to suppose that undifferentiated love will
bridge the gulf between them is simplicity
indeed. Or rather we might say that the word
"en-masse" pictures well the confusion to
which a number of loving and unorganised
individuals must find themselves reduced.
No sane critic, we shall be told, would
demand recognition from a poet of the mere
machinery of life, how much less of the
machinery of government! True enough;
the poet soars high above these things; the
world in which he is a native is a world in
which they have been subsumed. But Whitman is, in this respect, not typical. For he is
in a peculiar degree the poet of machinery.
He delights to show how the advance of mankind postulates a developing material substructure. The building of a trans-continental
railway or of a great canal, trade, the telegraph,
the post, the press, these and all else that draws
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DEMOCRACY


the minds of men into closer and more continuous communion, are, to his mind, great
civilising influences. They are the condition
of the attainment of human freedom. Bringing together the remotest parts of the world
and making of the whole one organism, they
are to inaugurate an enlarged humanity which
will outgrow the figments, the routine-life of
the past. The citizen of the future is to be
a world-citizen; the amplitude of the earth,
its "vast rondure," are to be repeated in
him.
Thus Whitman cannot claim the poet's
normal privileges. He who does not pretend to
do more than choose, is welcome to make what
choice he pleases. He who is for touching
every note of the scale cannot complain if we
remark on his omissions. In addition then to
the obvious machinery of rods and wheels, to
which Whitman does full justice, and to the
less obvious machinery of flesh and blood, to
which he sometimes does a little more than
justice, there is the machinery of the documents, formalities and common customs which
embody and preserve and give effect to the
associated life and experience of communities
and nations. These things cannot be superseded; least of all is it the idea of the true
democrat that there can be any superseding
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WALT WHITMAN


of them. Whether or no perfect men could
live without them is a theme for academic
discussion. The strength of democracy is that
it is not for the perfect but for the imperfect.
For the difficulty here as everywhere is to
secure a system which will not absorb the life
for which it exists to provide a channel. Everywhere the flame of the present is menaced by
the ashes of the past. Democracy is the ideal
because it alone takes cognisance of the need
for a continuous and automatic remodelling
of its machinery with a view to the sloughing
off of dead matter, appliances that have served
their turn, customs that have become mere
customs and so forth.   With its incessant
votings and canvassings, its suspicions and
elucidations, its struggles, victories and defeats, its hopes and disappointments in which
all according to their capacity have their share,
democracy is the workshop in which the wheels
are wrought over and the pattern brought up
to date. Year by year it sends superannuated
models to the scrap-heap and forges new
weapons to meet new needs. And the zest of
the enterprise comes of the perception that
serviceable machinery is not to be had at any
less cost and that the idea that proper arrangements once devised would settle our problems
for ever is a delusion.
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DEMOCRACY


It was part of Whitman's mission, one would
have supposed, to make these facts vivid.
No one is more forcible than he in presenting,
in other contexts, the principles they imply.
What blinds him, perhaps, is the too facile
distinction he draws between feudal Europe
where liberty is an ideal to be contended for,
and democratic America where it is attained.
The result is that he forgets some of his own
noblest announcements:
Now understand me well: it is provided in the essence of
things that from any fruition of success no matter
what shall come forth something to make a greater
struggle necessary...
and allows himself to be ensnared into the
belief that with the advent of the United States
the essential is permanently secure. Yet the
advent of liberty, rightly understood, is the
advent of the perception that permanent
security is impossible.
We were certainly entitled to expect Leaves
of Grass to include the lovingest enumeration
of all the functions and institutions, the
muscles, bones, organs and viscera of the
democratic body-politic. There should have
been songs of parish councils and town councils, of voluntarily formed leagues, unions and
societies, songs of presidents and chairmen,
235




WALT WHITMAN


of treasurers and secretaries and committees
and so on down to the mere voter or subscriber on the one side and up to the senator
or cabinet minister on the other. The theme
is forbidding, but other kinds of machinery
have the same defect, and it did not frighten
our Walt away from them. And the apparent
dullness might have been an incentive; for
all that is really necessary to life has the full
value of the life to which it is necessary. Yet
he turned a blind eye in this direction. Democracy to him meant certain spiritual conditions out of which he saw great individuals
emanating. These individuals were so great,
they were filled with so much spontaneous
good feeling for one another and the world,
that government became a dead letter, and
for the effective voice of the nation and seal
of its unity he looked not to its Parliament
but to its literature. Criticism reached him,
but did not penetrate:I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy
institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with
the destruction of them?)
With the destruction of them this:-and the
remark applies as well to his conception of
religion as to his conception of politics-that
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DEMOCRACY


he announces times or conditions in which
they will be outgrown:Allons! from all formules!
From your formules, 0 bat-eyed and materialistic
priests!
Such sweeping denunciation is not really a
symptom of enfranchisement. The intellect,
like the community, must indeed constantly
test and revise its formulas; and the process
is carried on, not because they are inessential, but because they are essential things.
The aim is to bring them forward, to keep
them level with the developing needs of
thought. The danger of a formula is not that
it is a formula, but that it may come to be
regarded as something more. Thought is impossible without instruments of thought, life
demands ordered and organised materials.
But the instruments become obstructions, the
materials cease to be organic and become
parasitic, unless the mind ceaselessly remakes
them, unless vitalising fluids tirelessly force
their way through every shred of tissue. Formulas of some kind, institutions, the expression and preservation of communal experience,
are as much a necessity to civilised life as
machinery to locomotion. The spirit of liberty
aims merely at keeping them in focus.
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WALT WHITMAN


We cannot then wholly acquit Whitman of
having, in a sense, sung the accidents rather
than the essence of liberty. And even in his
identification of the soul and the body, of the
material and spiritual worlds, there is an
analogous element of confusion. Room is left
as it were for a residuary vagueness. He seems
to suggest that materials, though they are the
vehicles of experience, are treated best when
they are treated casually. The opportunities
which were presented to human effort by the
size and wealth of the American continent
are no doubt responsible for this airiness; and
yet, as a result of it, an essential point is missed.
For our experience must remain vague and
tentative till we can check it: till the conditions
of our life bring the wheel full circle and enable
us or oblige us to compare the credit and the
debit sides of our account. So long as the life,
whether of an individual or of a community,
draws for its resources upon one blind margin
and pours its waste into another, it has not
attained its spiritual majority.
Yet his contribution here is not so much
misleading as incomplete. He sees and expresses the truth in its general aspect:No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of
account...
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality,
rectitude of the earth...
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DEMOCRACY


He lifts us to heights from which the promised land is visible, and vitalises so much we
took for dead that we are prepared for the
perception, already dawning, that nothing is
so. But on the whole it is rather the amplitude
than the rectitude of the earth that he celebrates, and as well in regard to the economic
as to the social machinery of life, he contents
himself with a more or less unfruitful detachment:I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised
riches,
I have given alms to every one that ask'd, stood up for
the stupid and crazy, and devoted my income and
labor to others...
It is what we should have expected; and yet
it does not quite fulfil our expectations. It
suggests rather the stock poetical attitude of
aloofness, of protest against materialism, than
the deeper vision which is always seeking for
the exact valuation of material things.
Whitman's life afforded him practically no
experience of the problem of poverty in the
state, and gave him therefore no qualification
for understanding the problem of surfeit. Yet
it is an obvious corollary to the position he
takes up, that the too-much or the too-little in
a man's material equipment equally disqualifies him for the purposes for which we are all
239




WALT WHITMAN


here-the knowing and adapting ourselves to
things as they are, the experience and impersonation of truth. Perhaps there is consolation
for the older countries of the world in the fact
that, if they are penalised materially in having
touched their boundaries and recognised the
limits within which they must work, they are
for that very reason qualified to draw better
and more enduring nourishment from   such
resources as they have. For they are in a
position to recognise, even if they are beaten
by, the terms of the final problem. The liberty
that depends upon our facilities for exploitation is an accident, not an attainment; it
allows us to evade the laws of existence, instead
of forming us by contact with them; it leaves
us loose, it does not make us free. The test
will come when all the wheels of the nmachine
are brought into that final contact for which,
if we are wise, we are preparing them. Then
we shall know whether the cogs are designed
rightly, whether they will run smoothly together or will grind and destroy the whole.
Then it will be decided whether we have
mastered our necessities and achieved freedom,
or whether our civilisation is still but a spoilt
child, and exists to the detriment of that longsuffering yet unforgetful world in which it is
at large.
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x


CONCLUSION:
WHITMAN AND AMERICA
I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth,
Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all.
OF all "adventures of a soul among masterpieces" Leaves of Grass affords, surely, the
strangest. The climax of its strangeness is
that it is deliberately strange; that strangeness has been achieved without the loss of
mastery. Whitman challenged all the received forms, demanded a new form appropriate to a new ideal, and, in the very act of
formulating his demand, fulfilled it. His work
has a peculiar and an increasing significance.
A prophet, he was without honour in his own
country; but whereas as a rule it is the
prophet's denunciations that alienate his
people from him, in Whitman's case it was his
complacencies. He epitomised his people so
perfectly that he could make no impression
upon them. To be in America so American
was to be superfluous. His mission (as he


Q


241




WALT WH ITMAN


himself recognised half wonderingly before the
end) was to give America to the world. Writing
for tile mechanic, the pioneer, the rough, he
forgot that the rough does not understand or
care for roughness, craving perpetually to be
smooth. His primary appeal is to those whose
ear he would not have thought or cared to gain,
to authors and teachers, to the cultured classes
in this old feudal world, to those who are
sophisticated and tired of sophistication, to
those who are chafing against limitations they
must abide by.
To his countrymen a vacuity, a proser, to
Europe a refreshment and an antidote, Whitman bides his time and remains in equipoise, a
figure to be assessed for his inherent value,
apart from the natural actions and reactions
which he excites. He is the poet of the
principle of life, of the pilgrimage and progress
of the soul, of perpetual effort and amelioration,
of the joy of spiritual growth. Whoever we
are, he will make a song of us and a song even
of the imperfections on our heads. But if he
sings what we have; it is for the sake of what
we may and shall have; and so he reduces
beauty and achieved goodness to the rank of
camp-followers, banishing the dream of perfection by showing the reality to be at once
inescapable and inapprehensible, bathing us
242




WHITMAN AND AMERICA


always in the flow   of an ever expanding
fountain, pouring upon us always the waters
of an ever rising tide. We can never tire of
discovering him, for to discover him is to
discover a new world, a new future, a new self.
In all this he is a representative American;
representative too in that he stands, at first
sight and perhaps finally, for the elevation of
thought over form. In his own words:The blood of the brawn beloved of time is unconstraint
or:For the great Idea,
That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.
This attitude, at once instinctive and deliberate with him, pervades his poetry and his
life. Engrossed by the philosophy which gives
everything to ideas, he yet had a natural
philosophy of his own, and the recent developments of thought enable us to describe it;
it was a kind of evolutionary vitalism. Art
and beauty charmed him but they left
him  dissatisfied; and the cause of his dissatisfaction was that they seemed merely to
summarise and rest contented with the past.
Beauty, to Whitman, was the sign of the fulfilled; but the idea, the poet's mission, was
the scheme and process of fulfilment, which
243




WALT WHITMAN


continually ran ahead and anticipated the
unfulfilled.
Whitman gave America to tlhe world, and
so constituted himself a national poet in a
new sense. The national poet, singing the
aspirations and the accomplishment of his
people, sings them as a rule in such a tone and
guise that they are recognised and acclaimed.
It was the problem of American life to Whitman that she had produced no such poet.
She had yet, he thought, to prove herself the
compact nation, the unity he believed her to
be, by giving birth to such a one. His loudest
and most insistent demand was for an art
which should be native to America, which
should have the pride, the fierceness and the
candour of the only emancipated people of
the world. It disappointed him to find that his
own muse was rejected. He believed in the
advent of a new race of poets, but he believed
himself to be at least their harbinger. How
was it that the America, to whom he owed and
to whom he had given all, failed to recognise
herself in him? He was baffled and he had the
right to be so. The key to the mystery gives
us the significance of his peculiar place in
literature.
It is so much a commonplace of criticism
that great art is produced at periods of intense
244




WHITMAN AND AMERICA


national activity and enthusiasm that the
connection between the two has passed almost
into a superstition. We think of the artist as
a rule as a man who has been endowed with
an abnormal capacity for feeling; yet the
essential distinction between the artist and.-other men is not that he feels more than they
do, but that he has a native impulse to the
expression of his feeling, to the expression of
-it in a particular kind of way. Art has two
aspects: if on the one side it is pure spontaneousness, it is hedged on the other with
dexterities and technicalities. The artist is a
man so practised in accomplishment that what
to others would be artifice is to him spontaneous impulse; and the difficulties of expression are so severe that accomplishment of
this kind involves inherited faculties adapted
to inherited conditions of life. The individual
does not attack the problem of expression in
its elements; he merely advances by a stage
the solution of it to which the manners and
customs of their country, the intellectual and
spiritual atmosphere of their age, have conducted his predecessors in the field.
Yet, if the impulse and faculty of expression
is the artist's peculiar attribute, the first condition of artistic expression is the existence of
the feelings which are to be expressed. The
245




WALT WHITMAN


artist must have supreme mastery over his
material vehicle, he must also have an abounding rapture, to maintain his assurance of a
message. The craft, itself so slowly perfected,
appears now as a system of hindrances which
the art must overcome; and here again the
artist remaining single-handed remains powerless. His exultation, if it is to triumph, must
be fostered. The logs which blaze merrily
when we bring them together lose their heat
when they are divided, and the glow from
which the light and flame of poetry rise is
more than a man can generate or maintain in
isolation. If he is to give himself wholeheartedly
to expression, what he expresses must, as it
were, be matter of course. It must be not his
own but everybody's feeling. It must be the
thought that finds expression through one because expression is demanded for it by all.
In other words before a national poet can
arise, the way must have been prepared for
him. The temper of his people must have put
on settled and salient characteristics which he
can translate. Poetry, if it is to appear in
miniature as a form of words, must first have
been incorporated on a majestic scale by the
community. It is the expression on the face
of life; and a nation, before it can have a
poetry of its own, must possess and include
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WHITMAN AND AMERICA


the qualities which that poetry is to show
forth. From experience grow ideas and from
ideas aspiration.
In America the process had been inverted.
The spirit had anticipated the people. Aspiration and ideas existed ready-made and were
engaged in finding experience and establishing
themselves. The flower and fruit of a civilisation had been borrowed; the vital movement
of the people was towards the formation of
roots and branches. Conditions were wanting,
therefore, for the rise of a school of native
craftsmen; and Whitman, though he did not
reckon with all the implications of this fact,
seized upon the essence of it intuitively. He
saw that there was no American tradition in
poetry, and that the English tradition, if only
because of its consanguinity, must be worse
than useless to him. He was prepared to
dispense with what he could not have. No
peculiarly American form, manner or associations had been elaborated; he must forgo
the thought of such a thing. But from the
sacrifice he would draw an advantage. His
country had given him no literary instrument;
his want of an instrument should be his escape
from the tricks and trials of the instrumentalist.
It was of the essence of the American spirit to'
assert that set forms were inessential; in him
247




W ALT V WHITMAN


they should become so.    He would launch
forth upon a career of spontaneous and unfettered self-expression. His instrument should
be himself.
Thus he turned his chief deprivation into a
source of power. The typically American
civilisation was in the womb of time.  His
country, therefore, before his devoted eyes,
merged into the type of an ideal future. Democracy and America are interchangeable
words in his vocabulary and it is the virtue of
America that she is democratic, not of democracy that it is American.   He preaches
fervently the doctrine of the unity of the
whole people; that the doctrine needed preaching is significant of his position. America, he
believed, was to achieve nationality and to
transcend it. The inspiration of his work,
perhaps for the first time in literature, is a
hope which leaves nationality behind, a hope
unrealisable until the nations look beyond
themselves and become limbs in the body of a
united race:
0 America because you build for mankind I build for
you.
Nevertheless, he made it deliberately his
business to "tally " the land, the people, as
they were; he laid himself open to all the
248




WHITMAN AND AMERICA
impulses which were astir in them, to all the
persistent and subtle influences of scenery, soil,
climate, occupations. His task completed, he
expected recognition.  Yet recognition did
not and could not come. For self-consciousness implies maturity; incompleteness cannot
recognise itself. With infallible sincerity and
intuition Whitman had held up the mirror of
art before an unformed race and had given
to it for its delectation the word 'growth.'
Growth is not a delectable word to those
whose task it is to be growing. There is even
a flavour of tactlessness in the use of it under
such circumstances. The idea of growth, the
growth of the spirit, does not present itself to
normal minds until the material preparations
for it have been completed. In the mind of
the poet a vicarious completion takes place.
The material incompleteness of his environment ceases to be a hindrance to him when
he sees in it a direct relation to the formative
principle within him. He takes it as a type of
the condition of spiritual progress, and finds
in it the essence of the meaning of life.
It was natural then that America should refuse
Walt Whitman. He could not give her what
she wanted; for he could only give her what
she had already given him. She gave him her
aspirations, universal, untried; she gave him
249




WALT WHITMAN


her opulence, her variety, her vast spaciousness, her wild margins evoking enterprise. The
counterpoise, the balance of the two, she
could not give, because she had not effected it.
America's accomplishment it will be for the
future to reveal. Poets, if that accomplishment proceeds organically from the conscious
life of a nation, will draw fire from it and find
new forms for its expression. They will reflect
a national achievement, and the nation will
recognise in them the reflection of what it has
achieved. In the meantime her contribution
to the world has been and is the infection of her
undaunted youth. The world as it grows old
keeps learning and keeps forgetting the meaning of what it has learned. A new start in a
new world brings out the first lessons of things,
their larger outlines, with reviving clearness.
America stands for the passionate reassertion
of certain beliefs which life, to those who look
back upon it, seems always to stultify, but
which, to those who can look forward, appears
as the very spirit and power of life itself-" the
urge, the ardour, the unconquerable will."
With these the spirit of Whitman was impregnated; and, burning with the determination to express them, he cast aside everything
that seemed to choke and imprison him,
counting the great traditions of poetry worth250




WHITMAN AND AMERICA


less in comparison to them, staking all on his
intuitive knowledge of poetry as a living
presence in himself. The work of the culminating poet is to celebrate conquests achieved,
to express an established civilisation; and his
fellows acclaim him, because he does but build
again in a new material what they, in the
common materials of life, have built already.
Whitman was poet not of the achieved but of
the achieving. "Man never is, but always to
be blest"; say rather, it is his blessing to become himself, an infinite process. The conditions of life in America in Whitman's time
were such as to change a commonplace into a
source of inspiration. Seeing everywhere the
scaffoldings of life thrown up, he too threw
up his scaffolding and proclaimed the eternal
significance of rope and pole. He rises thus
above nationality and becomes a universal
figure: poet of the ever-beckoning future, the
ever expanding, ever insatiable spirit of man:0 give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
0 if I am to have so much, let me have more!
THE END


WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH




Readt J Sbhortlty. Ui/borm withi this Volume
ROBERT BRIDGES
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
F. E. BRETT YOUNG
With a Frontispiece in Photogravure


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