"Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass."
New York Saturday Press, 19 May 1860, p. 2.
We announce a great Philosopher - perhaps a great Poet - in every way an original man. It is Walt Whitman. The proof of his greatness is in his book; and there is proof enough.
The intellectual attitude expressed in these Leaves of Grass, is grand with the grandeur of independent strength, and beautiful with the beauty of serene repose. It is the attitude of a proud, noble, vigorous life. A human heart is here in these pages - large, wild, comprehensive - beating with all throbs of passion - enjoying all of bliss - suffering all of sorrow that is possible to humanity. "This is no book," it says; "whoever touches this, touches a man." It is the electrical contact of a great nature. [eighteen-line extract from "Song of Myself"]
Such is the intellectual attitude of the Leaves of Grass; such the position and purpose of their author. To accept everything as liberally as Nature accepts everything; to rightly appreciate all laws and all things, each thing in its place; to realize, reflect, and reproduce the emotions of every heart and the experiences of every person; to recognize and assert the universal harmony of creation; to know the beautiful union of Body and Soul in the individual, sublime in the present, and with a sublime destiny for the future; to repose in the certainty of infinite development and progression; to assert the individual above all things, knowing that 'nothing endures but personal quality'; to express for all mankind what all mankind feel without the power of expressing; to live the comprehensive life of the Philosopher, of the Poet, broad and vigorous, all lives in one, -reaching up into heaven, reaching down into hell, stretching backward over all the Past to gather up its results, throbbing with all the vital activity of the Present, making the Future glorious with more than hope, - this is the aim and the mission of Walt Whitman, this the felicity of his life as expressed in his poems. No man could utter himself more fully and truly. No book exists anywhere more beautifully in earnest than this. To the intelligent, sympathetic mind, none can explain itself with keener accuracy.
[twenty-one-line extract from "Starting from Paumanok"]
The leading idea in the philosophy of the Leaves of Grass is the idea of grandeur and supremacy in the Individual. It asserts that there is nothing more divine than the human soul, and impels to a knowledge of living motive behind each thing and every action. It will have the singer and not the psalm, the preacher and not the script he preaches. It will not ignore the Body, but asserts its beauty and the divine harmony of Body and Soul.
... "I believe in you, my Soul - the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other... .
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and
clean,
Not an inch, nor a particle of an inch, is vile, and none shall be less
familiar than the rest.... .
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, and feeling are miracles, and each tag and part of me is a
miracle. -
It finds all things embraced and comprehended in the individual, to whom indeed the universe belongs and who belongs to the universe. It recognizes the common brotherhood of mankind, and the same human nature repeated in every person. Its aspiration is for a noble race of human creatures, healthy and beautiful, living delightfully, in sympathy with Nature, their perfect lives in a perfect world.
Perhaps the scope and significance of Walt Whitman's poetry may be more clearly indicated by contrasting its character with that of the poetry ordinarily accepted and popular at the present time. The latter is rhymed and measured. It is sometimes powerful with passion and sometimes stately with thought. It is generally sweet and graceful - expressing mild and monotonous sentiments in a thousand respectable ways. It is gay for a feast and sorry for a funeral. It is sweet as to Spring-time, and thoughtful as to sober Autumn days. It rhymes 'kisses' with 'blisses,' and expresses its writer's willingness to partake of the same. It mourns persistently for dead infants, for those who are snatched away in beauty's bloom, and for blighted blossoms generally. It has an amatory tendency, of a sentimental description, and wastes a good deal of miscellaneous sweetness. It presents its author as one who desires burial under a sweet-apple tree, and will not have a decent graveyard on any terms; it affects to ignore and despise the human body; it dwells fondly upon the sublime nature and destiny of the soul; and passing smoothly over all that is significant in this actual present life, it hints lugubriously at another and a better world. On the other hand these poems of Walt Whit- man concern themselves alike with the largest and with the pettiest topics. They are free as the wandering wind that sweeps over great oceans and inland seas, over the continents of the world, over mountains, forests, rivers, plains, and cities; free as the sunshine are they, and like the sunshine ardent and fierce. Nothing in the creation is too sacred or too distant for the lightning glance of their aspiration; nothing that in any way concerns the souls and the bodies of the human race is too trivial for their comprehension. Everywhere they evince the philosophic mind, deeply seeking, reasoning, feeling its way toward a clear knowledge of the system of the universe.
[nineteen-line extract from "Song of Myself" and "Starting from Paumanok"]
In this liberal scope of vision and purpose are indicated the insight and the earnestness characteristic of a poetic nature. Other elements of that poetic nature are evident in the vigor of imagination and splendor of imagery which make certain of these poems so truly remarkable. In the 'Salut au Monde'; in the poem called 'A Word Out of the Sea' - which, under the title of 'A Child's Reminiscence,' was printed in this paper last December; in the poem of 'Brooklyn Ferry'; in that of 'Sleep Chasings,' and that of 'Burial'; - in these, and in others, such qualities largely and beautifully appear.
Some reflections may properly be submitted here, relative to the form in which Walt Whitman's poems are embodied and expressed. It is a form so rough and rugged - so careless, variable, and peculiar - that perhaps it is very natural the poetry should sometimes degenerate into prose. Something is to be said, however, in defence of this system of versification. It is at least original. The theory would seem to be, as Walt has variously indicated, that always the thought or the passion of the poet should determine itself in natural, congenial expression. It is assumed in this theory, and indeed it is very true, that much of the verse ordinarily written, is written without a sincere motive, and has therefore neither power nor value. It is further assumed that the styles of versification generally accredited and employed are inadequate to the utterance of earnest thought and feeling. Consequently, Walt Whitman, who presents himself as the Poet of the American Republic in the Present Age, who is actuated by a sincere motive, and has earnest thought and feeling to express, refuses to confine and cripple himself within the laws of what to him is inefficient art. Reverencing the spirit of poetry above the form, he submits that the one shall determine the other. That his volume is poetic in spirit cannot rationally be denied; and, whatever the eccentricities of its form, no critical reader can fail to perceive that the expression seems always the suitable and natural result of the thought. It is indeed tame and prosy in the conveyance of any commonplace idea or feeling, but it rises and melts into sweet and thrilling music whenever impelled by the beautiful impulse of a grand thought or emotion.
A fine example of this felicity of style occurs in the following beautiful passage, which also delightfully illustrates the poet's ardent and profound love of Nature:
"I am He that walks with the tender and growing Night,
I call to the earth and sea, half-held by the Night.
[twenty-six additional lines extracted from "Song of Myself" and "To Think of Time"]
Of the defects in this book something also may properly be said. They are not trivial and they are not few. It is the law of a great nature to err greatly as well as to be greatly wise. Walt Whitman has exemplified that law. There are, as it seems to us, defects alike in his philosophy, art, taste, and style. It is fair to say there is much in his book that, like the peace of God, passeth all understanding, and that it does not lack passages which should never have been published at all. We may have occasion to refer to this book again, and to explain ourselves more fully in these regards. Meantime we submit, as appropriate in this connection, the following critical remarks from the North American Review:
"For the purpose of showing that he is above every conventionalism, Mr. Whit- man puts into the book one or two lines which he would not address to a woman nor to a company of men. There is not anything, perhaps, which modern usage would stamp as more indelicate than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged on the tables of our drawing-rooms. For all that, it is a pity that a book where everything else is natural, should go out of the way to avoid the suspicion of being prudish."
We should not conclude our notice of the Leaves of Grass without expressing our very great delight at the sumptuous elegance of the style in which Messrs. Thayer & Eldridge have published Walt Whitman's poetry. The volume presents one of the richest specimens of taste and skill in book- making, that has ever been afforded to the public by either an English or an American publisher.
New York Times,
19 May 1860, Supplement, p. 1.
Five years ago a new poet appeared, styling himself the representative of America, the mouthpiece of free institutions, the personification of all that men had waited for. His writings were neither poetry nor prose, but a curious medley, a mixture of quaint utterances and gross indecencies, a remarkable compound of fine thoughts and sentiment of the pot-house. It was not an easy task to winnow the chaff from the wheat, the tares came up in such heavy luxuriance that they stunted the chance kernels of the grain, and nothing but the most vigorous of threshing was adequate to the elimination of one pure thought. That first edition of the Leaves of Grass was the earliest appearance of Mr. Walt Whitman as an author. For a debutant, he was sufficiently egotistic and assuming. He announced, with a degree of confidence which could only have been the natural result of unparalleled self-conceit, that his mission lay in the reformation of the public taste, that the American people were to be enlightened and civilized and cultivated up to the proper standard, by virtue of his superior endowments, and that, being "a Kosmos," and inclined to "loafe" at his ease, and "invite his soul," he could afford to wait for the public's warm appreciation of his self-sacrifice, and to recline in a comfortable attitude until the world saw fit to come round to him. Two years after the publication of the first thin and unprepossessing volume of the Leaves, a larger edition appeared, and that again is followed by a third and still more pretentious book, the present issue from the Boston house of Thayer & Eldridge.
Mr. Whitman has added to this volume a large collection of his writings which have never been given to the public. If possible, he is more reckless and vulgar than in his two former publications. He seems to delight in the contemplation of scenes that ordinary men do not love, or which they are content to regard as irremediable evils, about which it is needless to repine. Mr. Whitman sees nothing vulgar in that which is commonly regarded as the grossest obscenity; rejects the laws of conventionality so completely as to become repulsive; gloats over coarse images with the gusto of a Rabelais, but lacks the genius or the grace of Rabelais to vivify or adorn that which, when said at all, should be said as delicately as possible.
Yet it would be unjust to deny the evidences of remarkable power which are presented in this work. In his hearty human sympathy, his wonderful intensity, his fullness of epithet, the author shows that he is a man of strong passion, vigorous in thought and earnest in purpose. He is uncultured, rude, defiant and arrogant, but these are faults of his nature which have not been tempered by severe training. Occasionally, a gleam of the true poetic fire shines out of the mass of his rubbish, and there are tender and beautiful touches in the midst of his most objectionable and disagreeable writings. A rough diamond, much in need of cutting and grinding and polishing, he has great intrinsic worth, but the impurities which cling about him must keep him out of the refined company he desires to enter. To be an agent for the civilization of men, he must first himself become civilized. He can do no manner of good by throwing filth, even though a handful of pure gold be sometimes mingled with a cast from his moral cesspool.
Nearly two hundred poems, of all sizes and qualities, are contained in this edition. Two dozens of these are properly the Leaves of Grass, grouped under that title, and mainly published in former editions. "Chants Democratic and Native American" comprise twenty-one curious specimens of composition, which are neither metrical nor harmonious. Fifteen others are collected under the comprehensive heading of "Enfans d'Adam," and are humanitary. Fifteen others are "Messenger Leaves." Four hundred and fifty pages of these productions establish the industry of the writer; and the fact that a respectable house has undertaken their publication, illustrates a lively faith in the eagerness of the public for the reception of novelties.
Some of the finer passages in this intricate maze of incongruous materials occur in the first hundred pages. Take the following weird conceit:
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 guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say, Whose?
.... . Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation:
.... . And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
In "Chants Democratic," the poet discourses of strong wills, and mirrors the image of the reformer.
How beggarly appear poems, arguments, orations, before an electric deed!
How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man's or
woman's look!
All waits, or goes by default, till a strong being appears;
A strong being is the proof of the race, and of the ability of the universe;
When he or she appears, materials are overawed,
The dispute on the Soul stops,
The old customs and phrases are confronted, turned back, or laid away.
Again, he studies faces, and draws sharply-lined portraits:
This face is a life-boat; This is the face commanding and bearded; it asks no odds of the rest; This face is flavored fruit, ready for eating; This face of a healthy, honest boy, is the programme of all good.
Yet the tendency to fall into the vulgar, apparently ineradicable in Mr. Whit- man's composition, leads him to interlard with these such expressions as "abject louse, asking leave to be" - "milk-nosed maggot, blessing what lets it wrig to its hole" - "dog's snout, sniffing for garbage." He will be gross, and there is no help for it.
The egotism of the book is amusing. Mr. Whitman is not only "a man-myself, typical before all," but he is "a man thirty-six years old in the year 79 of America, and is here anyhow" - but, being here, lies in libraries "as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead," thereby evincing a hearty contempt for scholastic culture; but nevertheless avowing a stern determination to:
.... . make a song for these States, .... . and a shrill song of curses on him who would dissever the Union.
It is fair to presume that this "song of curses," should it ever come to be sung, will be "shrill," and loud, not to say foul and abusive. Mr. Whitman is master of the art.
A better passage is that in which he describes the effect of music upon himself:
The orchestra wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possessed
them,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror;
It sails me - I dab with bare feet - they are licked by the indolent waves,
I am exposed, cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
There is great power in this passage - rude strength, unpolished but vigorous.
A lover of nature, he sees all natural things through a pleasant medium. Trees, birds, fish alike delight him; he loves:
The cheerful voice of the public road - the gay fresh sentiment of the road.
He sees Deity in everything:
.... . finds letters from God dropped in the street - and every one is signed
by God's name.
He loves the stillness of night, and apostrophizes it with passionate vehemence;
Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing Night! Night of south winds! Night of the large, few stars! Still, nodding Night! Mad, naked, Summer Night!
It is needless to multiply extracts from these extraordinary productions. We make room for one more passage - a description of the close of a sea-battle, which is strongly tinted;
Toward twelve at night, there, in the beams of the moon, they
surrendered to us.
Stretched and still lay the midnight;
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking - preparations to pass to the one
we had conquered -
The captain on the quarter-deck, coldly giving his orders through a
countenance white as a sheet;
Near by, the corpse of the child that served in the cabin,
The dead face of an old salt, with long white hair and carefully curled
whiskers;
The flames, spite of all that could be done, flickering aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty -
Formless stacks of bodies, and bodies by themselves; dabs of flesh upon
the masts and spars -
Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder parcels, strong scent,
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore,
death-messages given in charge to survivors,
The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull,
tapering groan -
These so - these irretrievable.
We infer that this is not the last of Mr. Walt Whitman. In point of fact, he gravely tells us that he is "around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless and can never be shaken away;" he sings "from the irresistible impulses of me;" purposes to make "the Poem of the New World;" and "invites defiance to make himself superseded," avowing his cheerful willingness to be "trod under foot, if it might only be the soil of superior poems," - from which latter confession it is clear that he regards himself as the fertilizing agent of American Poetry; perhaps all the better for fertilizing purposes that the rains and snows of a rough life have caused it to fester in a premature and unwholesome decay.
Boston Banner of Light 7 (2 June 1860), 4.
The people who have not yet heard of Walt Whitman are few indeed. This last enlarged collection of his poems makes a stout volume, to which the bold and tasteful publishers have given a dress altogether striking, unique and original. All sorts of things - hard and soft -have been said by the literary critics about this same Walt Whitman and his writings. One paper, in commenting upon another's indiscriminate praise of him, remarks that it is "into this gentle garden of the Muses that that unclean cub of the wilderness, Walt Whitman, has been suffered to intrude, trampling with his vulgar and profane hoofs among the delicate flowers which bloom there," &c.
Nobody who has read Whitman's poems, can question his originality. He betrays high culture, even when he seems almost swinishly to spurn it. We think that few writers of our day, if any, whether in prose or verse, have so seized hold of the spirit of things - no matter what, where found, or intertwisted with whatever associations - as this one before us. And the best proof of it is just that free habit of expression which all the literary poodles are happy to style "barbaric." It is time their snobbery was supplanted by strength of some sort even if it be barbaric. We have had soft flute-blowing long enough; now let us bear the jarring screech of a fife. Our poet they call nasty, because he scorns to be knavish; he has the right of it, beyond a question, calling a spade a spade, and a meat-axe a meat-axe; and in exercising his elephantine strength and motions, he doubtless takes a secret delight in the mere act of exercising them, and holding all napper- tandy forms and by-laws in scorn; he proudly refuses to so much as appease the prejudices of critics by respecting the commonly received statutes of the great Literary Republic.
This man's verse - wild, rapid, Ossi-anic, wailing, grand, humble, innocent, de- fiant, irregular, defective, overfull, and altogether inflexible as it is - forms, after all, the truest illustration, if not representative, of the real American Age that is, and is to be. He has searched all truth, all knowledge, all science. Even when his expression torments you, the great, surcharged soul that throbs and plays underneath, looks forth serious and awful, refusing to be satisfied with itself, unsettling all things, breaking up the heavens into new and sometimes terrific forms, and pointing down to abysmal deeps in human experience, to which even the most powerful sight of spirit has never penetrated. Above all other singers of songs - rude or rhyming - Whitman hints to you of your capacity; if you have not yet awakened to the possession of any, you cannot understand him, of course. Neither can you understand him wholly, at best; for his own writings prove that he does not, and never will entirely, understand himself. And this is the mystery that gives Life its deep meaning.
The whole body of these Poems - spiritually considered - is alive with power, throbbing and beating behind and between the lines. There is more here than mere oddity, and barbaric indifference to elegant forms of speech; there is a living soul - no matter whether its owner drove an omnibus once, or stands on State street and chaffers greedily every day for gold - and that soul insists on giving itself to its fellows, even if it has to rend the most sacred rules of speech to achieve its larger liberty. Carlyle did so, and triumphed; Whitman's way is as much his own, too. It is no way at all, to make up even literary judgment by examining the colors, and not the warp and woof. It is the texture of the stuff that tells, because it is that which is going to endure.
Thus much of the Poet Whitman; we leave our readers to examine his wonderful productions - so bizarre, so fine, so entirely out of and beyond all rule - and know for themselves, as they would know a familiar friend, the spirit that lives in them. The disjecta membra of the man's speech we throw to the hungry critics, who are ever delighted to snap up such meaty morsels; of the soul that burns through - nay, burns up - all the mere words, consuming the verbiage as fire licks up dried grass, we are but too eager to speak as it deserves; and with that soul all other growing souls will hasten to make themselves acquainted. Whitman comes to us - perhaps not a discoverer, but certainly a grand interpreter. One-sided and all sided - intense and indifferent - lazy and lashed into fury-spouting words and pouring out streams of rubies and diamonds - he is nothing more than the very child of nature, to whom accidentally has been given the name, Walt Whitman.
New York Illustrated News 2 (2 June 1860), 60.
In pursuance of our plan to give the patrons of the Illustrated News illustrated information in regard to all the new sensations of the day, whether in politics, art or literature, we present here a finely-executed portrait of Walt Whitman, the new American poet, the recent publication of a superb edition of whose poems Leaves of Grass is bringing him permanently before the American people as one of the most remarkable men of this day and generation.
Walt Whitman was born in Brooklyn, Long Island, May 31, 1819, and is yet a resident of the "City of Churches." He is a printer by trade, as many other men distinguished in the annals of this country have been; and, by the force of his own native genius, has risen from the case to become one of the great lights and leaders of literature - a poet whose broad and vigorous power and uncommon felicity of illustration is acknowledged wherever the English language is spoken. His first appearance before the public was in 1855, when he issued a small and unprepossessing edition of his Leaves of Grass, previous to which however, he had contributed some poems to the press, which attracted attention by their power and originality. On sending a copy of the first edition of his poems to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is acknowledged to be the foremost man in modern literature, he received the following letter in reply:
Concord, Mass.,
July 21, 1855.
Dear Sir: - I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of
Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America
has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us
happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile
and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the
temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find
incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the
courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can
inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long
foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this
sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.
It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that
I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my
benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York
to pay you my respects.
R. W. Emerson.
Walt Whitman.
This letter of the highest praise, from one of the greatest minds in the world, called the attention of many literary people to these new poems, and they were largely bought up. In 1856 he issued another and somewhat enlarged edition, which were speedily disposed of. An interim of four years has elapsed, and having had ample leisure in the meantime for composition of new pieces, he now comes before the public with a superb edition of his work, containing about twice as much matter as the first edition, the success of which has already been great, and must be enormous.
There is a great career in store for Walt Whitman, and we shall watch his future with interest. An interesting review of his work was given in the last number of the Illustrated News.
The Leaves of Grass is published by Thayer & Eldridge, of Boston, and the book - take it altogether - is, perhaps, the most magnificent specimen of typography ever issued by the American Press.
C.C.P.
"Walt Whitman's New Volume."
New York Saturday Press, 23 June 1860, p. 1.
- I do not ask a place for this letter in your columns because I feel that Mr. Whitman's poems need any justification; they justify themselves, and I have full faith that they will continue to do so long after the swarm of attacking critics are gone; nor do I hope to give more generous or appreciative praise to Leaves of Grass than you have given in your notice of the work, but because, being a woman, and having read the uncharitable and bitter attacks upon the book, I wish to give my own view of it.
I have read it carefully, and in reading, have found no page which made me blush, and no sentiment which might not be expressed by a pure man.
In humanity or art I consider that coarse and licentious wherein the soul is made subservient to the body. I am not shocked when I read the stories of the Old Testament: I see behind the apparently gross form, great meanings. Yet I find in the novels and the versification of modern literature, a subtle sensuality which, under the semblance of virtue, destroys all that is pure and elevated in the mind, leaving it enslaved by sensation and petty circumstance.
In Mr. Whitman's poetry, I see a breadth of view which overlooks distinctions. To him, nothing is base when used for a great purpose; he makes all things subservient to thought, and thus dignifies by his touch.
I find there an admirable courage. While we truckle to our bodies, trying to cheat ourselves and one another into oblivion of the potent physical facts, while we feed with exciting novels and amorous poetry those passions we dare not own, we are shocked, for sooth, when a great, earnest, sorrowful man gives us the facts which, gilded over with poor art, we accept readily enough: and when, with manly courage, he owns that he has sinned with prostitutes and felons, (and who has not?) we despise him. Was it not Christ who said of old, "Let him who is without blame among you cast the first stone"?
I find in these poems great ideas, large, cheerful, healthy views of life. No sentimentality, no weak or misplaced passion, but a wisdom which looks through all, behind all, beyond all, which sees the tendency of things, and rests content that all is well. I find a reverence so great and tender as not to despise the meanest thing, knowing that Nature has fashioned everything through ages of patient toil; a reverence which sees in the mud and slime of the pond the same fitness and beauty as in the dainty lily floating above it; which holds the 'woman just as great as the man;' and a mother. 'The melodious character of the earth, the finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go;' a reverence which recognizes in the distinction of sex, that great principle which asserts itself from the lowest to the highest forms of vegetable and animal life, a mystery equally holy with the mystery of birth, the mystery of death.
I find there a generosity, giving without stint. Nothing is too precious, nothing too great, nothing too holy to be bestowed. The experiences which most men in their selfishness hug close, which they call 'too sacred for the eyes of the world,' Mr. Whitman, like a true poet, deals out largely.
And I find more than all these: I find a wonderful knowledge of history, of philosophy, of mythology, of language, of mechanics and geography, of the customs of all peoples at all times; a knowledge which could have been acquired only by hard and long-continued study.
I find the highest artistic merits. A measure at once original and melodious, into which the words form themselves so naturally that we forget it is measure, and are awake of the thought alone. It is like the sound of the wind or the sea, a fitting measure for the first distinctive American bard who speaks for our large-scaled nature, for the red men who are gone, for our vigorous young population.
Yet grand, wild, free, and natural, as is Mr. Whitman's poetry, it is not careless or hap-hazard, anymore than Niagara, the Mississippi, the prairies, or the great Western cities, are hap-hazard; it is the result of patient labor, of intense thought; for it is the highest art which most closely imitates nature. Here we see not only boldness of conception, but finish of detail. What is there so graphic in the En-glish language that Mr. Whitman should be ashamed to place beside it the pictures of the 'Fall of Alamo,' 'The Mashed Fireman,' 'The Sinking Ship,' or any other of the hundreds of pictures scattered throughout the book. What so exquisitely delicate as to eclipse 'A Word out of the Sea.'
There are few poems which I can read with so intense a thrill of exultation at the greatness of my destiny, at the exquisite harmony and balance of the universe, at the boundless love brooding over mankind; that fill me with so strong a faith in the working together of all things for good, so great forbearance toward error - yet nerve me so resolutely to action, as these poems of Walt Whitman.
"Walt Whitman and His Critics."
Leader and Saturday Analyst [London],
30 June 1860,
pp. 614-15.
There is a tendency in the critical mind of America, and, for that matter, of other countries too, to create wonders where in the natural course of things, no wonder, or a very small wonder exists. Among American authors there is one named Walt Whitman, who, in 1855, first issued a small quarto volume of ninety-five pages, under the title of Leaves of Grass. In appearance and mode of publication it was an oddity, this same small volume, which, it appears, the author had printed himself, and then 'left to the winds of heaven to publish.' By the booksellers of the United States generally the book was ignored, but it could be obtained by the persevering applicant. Walt Whitman was then about thirty-six years of age, a native of Long Island, born on the hills about thirty miles from the greatest American city, and brought up in Brooklyn and in New York. Mr. R. W. Emerson, it seems, recognized the first issue of the Leaves and hastened to welcome the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said Emerson to the new avatar,
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.
This last clause was, however, overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing nothing to instruction. Fudge! The authority for so treating the author was derived from himself, who thus described, in one of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted the last from his title-page:
"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos, Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual," -
and in various other passages confessed to all the vices, as well as the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-headedness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individual writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writing. Notwithstanding the word 'Kosmos,' the writer was taken to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that there had been 'a long foreground somewhere' or somehow - not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with information, - but they saw it not, because it did not answer their purpose to see it.
The poem in which the word Kosmos appears explains in fact the whole mystery -nay the word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, but really includes everybody. It begins,
"I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."
In a word Walt Whitman represents the Kosmical man - he is the Adamus of the 19th century - not an Individual, but Mankind. As such, in celebrating himself, he proceeds to celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, and accordingly commences his dithyramb with the five senses, beginning with that of smell. Afterwards, he deals with the intellectual, rational, and moral powers; showing throughout his treatment an intimate acquaintance with Kant's transcendental method, and perhaps including in his development the whole of the German school, down to Hegel; at any rate as interpreted by Cousin and others in France, and Emerson in the United States. He certainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the Egotist as the only true philosopher; and consistently identifies himself not only with every man, but with the Universe and its Maker; - and it is in doing so that the strength of his description consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to them the like measure of equity.
Instead therefore of regarding these Leaves of Grass as a marvel, they seem to us as the most natural product of the American soil. They are certainly filled with an American spirit, breathe the American air, and assert the fullest American freedom. Nay it may be said also that they assert the fullest Yankee license. Respecting the latter feature, his American puffers, in the disguise of critics, charge the author with irreligion and indecency; and these charges are unblushingly reprinted by his publishers, among the critical recommendations of his performances, as if thereby they would attract a numerous class of prurient readers.
All this is undoubtedly an unworthy trade-trick, to be thoroughly denounced, condemned, and punished. That class of readers, however, will be disappointed, as the passages intended are only so many instances adduced in support of a philosophical principle; not meant for obscenity, but for scientific examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, medical, or physiological book, for the purpose of instruction. They chiefly relate to the sense of touch, and might be found in substance in any Cyclopedic article on the specific topic.
So much for the matter of the book. As to the manner, it is the same as that with which Mr. Martin Tupper has made us familiar in his Proverbial Philosophy, and Mr. Warren in his Lily and the Bee. There is nothing that we can see miraculous in such an imitation. The result is a rhapsody, somewhat Oriental in appearance, prose in form, but rhythmical in its effect on the ear, producing a disjointed impression, such as might be produced by a bold prose-translation of Klopstock's famous odes, which would then present so many unconnected assertions, expressed in extravagant diction. The style of the work is therefore anything but attractive - calculated rather to puzzle than to please. It is however, as a printed book, got up in a splendid manner, and is electrotyped for the sake of cheapness, the publishers evidently designing to sell it by millions, if possible.
Notwithstanding all its drawbacks, we have little hesitation in saying that they will probably succeed, - on the principle, perhaps, of the quack, who calculated there were many more fools than wise men in the world. No matter, if the fools are all made wise, by the perusal of these Leaves. They may be; it is not utterly impossible; but we doubt it.
Crayon 7 (July 1860), 211.
It seems as if the author of Leaves of Grass had converted his mind into a mental reservoir by tumbling into it ple-mle all the floating conceits his brain ever gave birth to. He manifests no other sign of mental capacity; for we find no trace of judgment, taste, or healthy sensibility in the work. It is a book of poetry such as may well please twenty-one year old statesmen and philosophers, and people who pride themselves more in being able to read and write than able to think. Such poetry(!) is characteristic of a country like ours, where there is abundance of everything to eat and drink, and to wear, and good pay for labor.
"Leaves of Grass."
Literary Gazette n.s. 4
(7 July 1860), 798-9.
Not the least surprising thing about this book is its title. Had it been called "Stenches from the Sewer," "Garbage from the Gutter," or "Squeals from the Sty," we could have discerned the application. But "leaves" - which, we take it, is the Transatlantic for blades -"of grass" have nothing of irreligion or indecency about them. Mr. Walt Whitman - for it is with that choice spirit we are now dealing - might as well let them alone. It is, for reasons we shall presently specify, rather a difficult matter to give the class of readers for whom we write, any adequate notion of this remarkable volume. Let them, however, imagine a Mormon, a medical student, and Miss Eugenie Plummer combining to draw up a treatise in the style of "Proverbial Philosophy," and they will have a faint idea of the last production of Mr. Walt Whitman.
The folly of the work is its least defect. The gregarious qualities of birds of a feather furnish matter for a very common aphorism, and we therefore see no reason to question the correctness of the subjoined assertion: -
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation; The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close, I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.
The following forms the conclusion of a pretty long rhapsody of the author concerning himself. We extract it because it is more decent and not more foolish than the rest of the volume: -
I too am not a bit tamed - I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness, after the rest, and true as any, on the shadowed
wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air - I shake my white locks at the run-away sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
It is related of poor crazy Nat Lee that when a small poet asked him if it was not very easy to write like a madman, he replied, "No; but it is very easy indeed to write like a fool, as you do." Doubtless Mr. Walt Whitman imagines he is writing like a madman, when, as a matter of fact, he is only writing like -Nat Lee's friend.
He tells us that the world is not devout enough - that he understands "Him who was crucified;" and in general tries to impress upon us that he is an apostle of no mean pretensions. But his creed, so far as we understand it, consists in a peculiarly coarse materialism. He tells us pretty roundly that he worships his own body, and people who would like to learn a great number of particulars about Mr. Walt Whitman's body, may find them in Mr. Walt Whitman's book.
Throughout the work there is a tone of consistent impurity which reaches its climax in some compositions entitled "Enfans d'Adam" - a designation which we can only explain by imagining it to contain some allusion to the Adamites, of which interesting, though as we had supposed, extinct sect, Mr. Walt Whitman is a very fair representative. For the downright foulness of some of these passages we do not believe that a parallel could be found even by ransacking the worst classical poets from Aristophanes to Au- sonius, and we are rather surprised that with John Lord Campbell on the woolsack, and a certain act of his still unrepealed on the statute-book, Mr. Walt Whitman should have found a London vendor for his uncleanly work.
This is more decided language than we generally employ, and our readers may ask us for some justification of it. Let us remind them of Lord Macaulay's description of Wycherley, which we can certainly apply to Walt Whitman. "His indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe because it is too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach." There are certain criminals whom even literary judges must try with closed doors, and our readers must deduce from our verdict that "the evidence is unfit for publication." We say, then, deliberately, that of all the writers we have ever perused, Mr. Walt Whitman is the most silly, the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting; if we can think of any stronger epithets, we will print them in a second edition.
"Leaves of Grass."
Saturday Review 10
(7 July 1860), 19-21.
It is now four or five years since we reviewed Mr. Whitman's Leaves of Grass. On that occasion we were spared the trouble of setting forth the new poet's merits, as he or his publisher was good enough to paste into his presentation- copy a number of criticisms from American periodicals, which we were satisfied to reprint along with a few extracts illustrative of the volume they recommended. We cannot treat a new edition of Leaves of Grass in the same way. It is, we believe, the sixth or seventh which has appeared in the United States, and shows, both externally and internally, that Mr. Whitman is now much too confident in his own popularity and influence to care for directing English reviewers in the way they should go. The volume itself is splendid. The type is magnificent, the paper is as thick as cardboard, and the covers, ornamented with an intaglio of the earth moving through space and displaying only the American hemisphere, are almost as massive as the house-tiles which, according to Mr. Gladstone, are produceable from rags boiled to pulp. It is a book evidently intended to lie on the tables of the wealthy. No poor man could afford it, and it is too bulky for its possessor to get it into his pocket or to hide it away in a corner.
This is simply astonishing to us, for Mr. Whitman reappears with all his characteristics. He is still
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, breeding; No sentimentalist - no stander above men or women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest -in short, one of the most indecent writers who ever raked out filth into sentences. Such books as this have occasionally been printed in the guise of a scrofulous French novel, On grey paper with blunt type, but this, we verily believe, is the first time that one of them has been decorated with all the art of the binder and the pressman. The odd thing is, that it irresistibly suggests its being intended for the luxurious and cultivated of both sexes. We are almost ashamed to ask the question - but do American ladies read Mr. Whitman? At all events, it is startling to find such a poet acquiring popularity in the country where piano-legs wear frilled trousers, where slices are cut from turkeys' bosoms, and where the male of the gallinaceous tribe is called a "rooster." The theory that the affectation of an artistic object will justify any conceivable mode of treatment has never been carried farther.
Poetry of so singular a kind deserves some degree of analysis. Mr. Whitman's first characteristic is, that he is an Emersonian. It is curious to observe the effect of the secondary Carlylism of Emerson on a thorough American rowdy. It is generally the weak through over-refinement who are imposed on by that philosophy which pre-eminently affects to disdain conventionalities; but here is a "disorderly, fleshy, sensual" nature, which takes the disease in quite a new form. Mr. Whitman is a professed Pantheist, but he draws from his Pantheism some conclusions not dreamed of by his teachers. From the principle that all things are divine, he derives the inference that all things are equally beautiful and equally fitted for poetical treatment, and this is his justification for writing with the utmost minuteness on subjects on which Nature herself has sometimes been thought to command silence to everybody except doctors. Mr. Whitman's philosophy seems also to deny that man has any personality distinct from the rest of the universe. A very large part of his poetry is taken up with assertions that he is everything else, and everything else is he; nor do we remember to have come across a doctrine more convenient for a poet. It relieves one from the necessity of doing more than enumerating the various elements of which the moral and material worlds are composed, the various scenes of which they are the theatre, or the various passions they include, and then the enumeration may be closed with the remark that all these things are equally godlike, or are equally dear to the poet, or are equally part of him, or have an equal claim on him as a part of themselves. We take, almost at random, the following passage, to give a notion of Emersonianism done into verse by Mr. Whitman: -
Good in all,
In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,
In the annual return of the seasons,
In the hilarity of youth;
In the strength and flush of manhood,
In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
In the superb vistas of Death.
Wonderful to depart!
Wonderful to be here!
The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood,
To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak! to walk! to seize something by the hand!
To prepare for sleep, for bed - to look on my rose-coloured flesh,
To be conscious of my body, so amorous, so large.
To be this incredible God I am,
To have gone forth among other Gods - those men and women I love.
.......
I sing the Equalities,
I sing the endless finales of things,
I say Nature continues - Glory continues,
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.
These lines will show that Mr. Whitman has adopted a metre which, like
his philosophy, is calculated to make the labour of writing poetry much
slighter than it has been usually considered. He has a better ear than Mr.
Tupper, and his versification has occasionally a vague rhythm about it, but
it is evidently the free and easy Tupperian pseud-hexameter which he has
taken for his model. The elasticity of the rules by which this peculiar metre
is governed here and there receives startling illustration in Leaves of Grass,
as in the last two verses of the following extract: -
Who are you, indeed, who would talk or sing in America?
Have you studied out My Land, its idioms and men?
Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride,
freedom, friendship, of my land? its substratums and objects?
Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first year
of the independence of The States, signed by the Commissioners,
ratified by The States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
The same metrical oddities appear in another passage, which we quote
because it gives us Mr. Whitman's description - doubtless a faithful one - of
himself and his habits: -
His shape arises,
Arrogant, masculine, nave, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by
the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from
taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-
breathed,
Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-
blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back,
Countenance sun-burnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms,
.......
Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his
phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive,
of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, self-esteem, comparison,
individuality, form, locality, eventuality,
Avowing by life, manners, works, to contribute illustrations of results of
The States,
Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism,
Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his.
It will be seen that Mr. Whitman calls himself "nave," in the feminine. One of his peculiarities is that he mixes up French words, generally much misspelt and otherwise abused, with the English or American of his verses. In one poem, each stanza begins with "Allons." In another, the words "Accouche; accouchez" form a whole line; and elsewhere he calls upon the world to "respondez." But if his French is a new ingredient in poetry, still newer is his American slang, particularly journalistic and debating slang, with which he sometimes fills entire pages. Nothing can be absurder than the way in which the commonplaces of public speaking are occasionally intruded, as in this couplet: -
I say, nourish a great intellect, a great brain; If I have said anything to the contrary, I hereby retract it.
Or in the following: -
I, an habitu of the Alleghenies, treat man as he is in the influences of
Nature, in himself, in his inalienable rights.
I do not tell the usual facts, proved by records and documents;
What I tell (talking to every born American) requires no further proof
than he or she who hears me will furnish, by silently meditating alone.
The extracts we have given will perhaps lead the reader to wonder by what extraordinary hallucination as to the character of poetry Americans have been led to regard Mr. Whitman as a poet. Yet we are far from saying that he has nothing of the poetical fibre. He is certainly an unredeemed New York rowdy of the lowest stamp. He is absolutely without sense of decency. He has obviously no sort of acquaintance with the masters of his art, and his studies have been apparently confined to Mr. Tupper, his news-paper, and the semi- lyrical rhapsodies of the Boston transcendentalists. But his taste, now hopelessly perverted, seems to have been naturally delicate, and he has a very vivid imagination. When his pictures happen (as is rarely the case) to be neither befouled with filth nor defaced by vulgarity, they are, for the most part, strikingly presented. A sort of catalogue of scenes of American life, which, according to Mr. Whitman's easy method, is continued for half-a-dozen pages and results in nothing particular, gives a good idea of his descriptive power. We can only quote the beginning: -
Over the growing sugar - over the cotton plant - over the rice in its low
moist field,
Over the sharp-peaked farm house, with its scalloped scum and slender
shoots from the gutters,
Over the western persimmon - over the long-leaved corn - over the
delicate blue-flowered flax,
Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with
the rest,
Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze,
Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low
scragged limbs,
Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the
brush,
Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
Where the bat flies in the Seventh Month eve - Where the great gold bug
drops through the dark,
Where the flails keep time on the barn floor,
Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the
meadow,
Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering
of their hides,
Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen - Where andirons straddle
the hearth-slab - Where cob-webs fall in festoons from the rafters,
Where trip-hammers crash - Where the press is whirling its cylinders,
Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes out of its ribs -
there, and everywhere else, is Mr. Whitman.
We conclude with some lines which are more like true poetry than anything else in the volume. They are fished out from the very midst of a sea of foul impurities: -
Press close, bare-bosomed Night Press close, magnetic, nourishing Night!
Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars!
Still, nodding night! Mad, naked, summer night.
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breathed Earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains, misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed Earth! Rich, apple-blossomed Earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
Critic [London] 21
(14 July 1860), 43-4.
Every one recollects the story of the Scotch dramatic author who, when Gar- rick assured him his genius lay neither for comedy nor tragedy, asked him "Where the de'il it did lie?" Now Mr. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass puzzle us nearly as much as the Scotsman's query did the great actor. Are we criticising in these Leaves prose or poetry? or rather something of an epicene gender, which unites in itself the bad qualities of both one and the other? So far as our perusal of the handsome volume before us has extended - and we must admit that nothing can be more tasteful than its paper and typography - we have scarcely been able to find a single consecutive sentence or expression out of which a meaning can be cudgelled. Taking an odd line here and there, and sometimes even as many as half a dozen, we can extract some hazy nonsense out of them; but what they have to do with those which go before or follow, or why they should be styled "Chants Democratic," or "A Leaf of Faces," or "Calamus," or anything else but "sheer nonsense," we have in vain tried to find out. Nor are we, that we know of, dealing with the productions of a lunatic. Mr. Walt Whitman is sane enough to do the poetry for an American newspaper or two: from whose columns these Leaves are reprints. In this degenerate land of Britain the only persons who nowadays keep a poet are, we believe, the members of an eminent Jewish clothing firm; and though we do not profess to be well versed in the lays of the bard in question, our impression is that they are quite as musical, and at least ten times as intelligible, as these Leaves of Grass. After all, a horrible idea strikes us that our native land is not entirely guiltless of the paternity of this production. Can it be possible that Mr. Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy has inspired Mr. Walt Whitman with the idea of his Leaves? We have most of us probably heard and read of persons who solved mathematical problems or composed poetry while asleep; and we think it just possible that the author of Proverbial Philosophy may unconsciously, while suffering from a fit of the nightmare, have had something to do with the composition of these American Leaves. At least we trace in them some wild fantastic resemblance to his style; such as to make us pretty sure that Mr. Whitman has occasionally "tasted the simple store and rested one soothing hour" with the English poetaster whose words we quote.
We give the five opening paragraphs or stanzas of a lucubration headed simply "Walt Whitman."
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my Soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
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.
The atmosphere is not a perfume - it has no taste of the distillation, it is
odourless,
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.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzzed whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of
blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-
coloured sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn.
The sound of the belched words of my voice, words loosed to the eddies
of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and
hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed
and meeting the sun.
Now we assure our readers that these "belched words," to speak la Walt Whitman, are a perfectly fair, honest specimen of the four hundred and fifty- six pages of the volume before us.
"Walt Whitman" extends over eighty pages, and contains three hundred and seventy-two paragraphs and stanzas. We are particular in stating these items; and lest our readers should suppose we are unfairly mutilating this production, we assure them that we give each paragraph in full in making the following extracts, and that, so far as we can make out, each is perfect in itself.
In the ninety-sixth stanza we are asked What is man anyhow? What am I? What are you?
Possibly the four following paragraphs which we quote may be supposed to answer this question:
All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over.
That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth,
That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but
threadbare crape, and tears.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids - conformity
goes to the fourth-removed,
I cock my hat as I please, indoors or out.
Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
Our poet goes on to say (105):
I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, I see that the elementary laws never apologise, I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.
And again (109):
I am the poet of the body, And I am the poet of the soul.
Presently he dissects his own individuality a little more closely:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, breeding,
No sentimentalist - no stander above men and women, or apart from
them,
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say, I also return.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging - through me the current
and index.
I speak the pass-word primeval - I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of
on the same terms.
The succeeding "voices," though, as the writer tells us, they are "voices indecent, by me clarified and transfigured," strike us, so far as they can be conjectured to mean anything, as retaining all their pristine indecency.
And in this way our American nonsense-verse writer maunders on for some hundred pages, sometimes "doting on himself - there is that lot of me, and all is so luscious;" now "snuffing the sidle of evening," whatever that may be; or asking -
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large - I contain multitudes.
Verily we for once agree with him when he says:
I am untranslatable: I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
One of the most curious whims of Mr. Walt Whitman is to give his readers from time to time inventories of the various component parts of some thing or person. Thus (in pages 300-2) we might for a brief moment fancy ourselves poring over a manual of surgery. The mention of the word "body" enables him to write down about one hundred and fifty different items which belong, or may be supposed by poetical licence to belong, to the human form divine. Some of the terms, as "neck-slue," "man-balls," "inward and outward rounds," "the flex of the mouth," are to us rather vague; and we scarcely wonder at their exciting "the curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of his own body or another person's body." So again we have lists, extending over more than a page, or an iron-monger's and carpenter's shop or store, &c. &c., interspersed with such lyric strophes as the following:
Because you are greasy or pimpled, or that you was once drunk, or a thief,
or diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute, or are so now, or from
frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar, and never saw your
name in print, do you give in that you are any less immortal?
There are some other specimens of Mr. Walt Whitman's muse - for we have now discovered that this amazing rub-bish is meant for poetry - which we had rather not quote, for decency's sake; and we fancy our readers will by this time one and all be inclined to cry, Ohe jam satis! Nevertheless we have not altogether wasted their time. They ought to know that this pure unmitigated trash is read and admired by not a few persons in America; and that what would go far in England to stamp its inditer as a lunatic has earned in America for its writer a poet's crown.
Me quoque vatem Pastores dicunt; sed non ego credulus illis,
says Virgil's modest swain. Not so, however, with Walt Whitman. He tells us many times over that he is a son of song; and that the "daughter of the lands" (which we suppose means America) has been "waiting for a poet with a flowing mouth and indicative hand" - a vision realised doubtless in himself.
We shall conclude with saying that one of the most curious traits of this volume is the crazy earnestness with which the writer believes in his own poetical infallibility. He is not only a poet, but the poet; not only a teacher, but the teacher. To be sure, it follows that if Mr. Walt Whitman really be a poet, and if the contents of this book really be poetry, what Shakespeare and Milton have written must be styled by some new name. Sense, grammar, and metre are but very minor parts in the composition of poetry; but nevertheless, pace Walt Whitman, poetry cannot exist without this humble triad.
"Leaves of Grass."
Spectator 33
(14 July 1860), 669-70.
America is unreasonably impatient to possess a great national poet as intrinsically her own as Shakespeare is English, Burns Scotch, Goethe German, and Dante Italian. She may have an emperor sooner - ubsit omen! Young as she is, the land of the stars and stripes has within her plenty of the stuff of which emperors can be made; but poets are a choicer growth, and need more years than the Union numbers from its birth to acclimatize their race in a new country. Of the few poets born in America, not one is distinctively American in his poetry; all are exotics, and their roots are nurtured by pabulum imported from the old country. In process of time, the foreign stock will accommodate itself to the new conditions by which it is surrounded; it will gradually undergo a transformation of species and become racy of the soil, but the soil itself must meanwhile pass through a corresponding change. It is still too crude; there is in it, as Oliver Wendell Holmes avows, "no sufficient flavour of humanity," such as inheres in every inch of ground belonging to some of the ancient seats of civilization. These truths are plainly discerned by the most cultivated minds in the States, and by them only; others believe that a great poet has actually arisen amongst them, and they hail his appearance with the more rapture because there has certainly never been anything like him in the guise of a poet since the world began. In the year 1855, this prodigy, this "compound of the New England transcendentalist and the New York rowdy," as a friendly critic calls him with literal truth, put forth the first issue of his Leaves of Grass -videlicet Scurvy grass - twelve poems, or rather bundles, in ninety-five pages, small quarto. The book was immediately pronounced by Ralph Waldo Emerson to be "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Other critics followed suit, and Walt Whitman became as famous as the author of the Book of Mormon. A second edition of his Leaves of Grass, with twenty additional bundles, making together 384 pages, was published within a year after the first; and now there lies before us a new, enlarged, and glorified edition, for which the publishers "confidently claim recognition as one of the finest specimens of modern book-making." The paper, print, and binding are indeed superb; but one thing these gentlemen have forgotten: where are the phallic emblems, and the figures of Priapus and the Satyrs that should have adorned the covers and the pages of this new gospel of lewdness and obscenity? Its frontispiece should have been, not the head and shoulders of the author, but a full-length portrait drawn as he loves to depict himself in his "poems" - naked as an Anabaptist of Munster, or making love like Diogenes coram populo - with his own lines for inscription: -
"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, breeding,
No sentimentalist - no stander above men and women, or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
.......
Arrogant, masculine, nave, rowdyish,
Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman,
Saunterer of the woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea,
Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to
toe, free for ever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-breathed,
Ample limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-blooded, six feet
high, forty inches round the breast and back,
.......
Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined,
Reminder of animals, meeter of savage and gentleman on equal terms.
Never offering others, always offering himself, corroborating his phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive, of copious
friendship, firmness, self esteem, comparison, individuality, form,
locality, eventuality.
Avowing by life, manners, works, to contribute illustrations of the results of the States,
Teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism,
Inviter of others continually henceforth to try their strength against his."
.......
I too am not a bit tamed - I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
Such is the man, and such the sort of poetry, which have inaugurated "an athletic and defiant literature," destined, it is said, to supersede for the great republic the effete theories and forms that still amuse the senile decrepitude of the old country. Vast beyond comparison are the immunities enjoyed by the new school of poetry; it needs no intellectual capital to work with, disdains all submission to the laws of art as well as to the restraints of common decency, and may yawp away to its heart's content, never bothering itself about such trifles as rhythm or melody, rhyme or reason, metre or sense. Never was there so free and easy a school, and surely its founder, who announces himself as a "teacher of the unquenchable creed, namely, egotism," will not find it a very hard task to teach the young American idea how to shoot in that direction. Walt Whitman's egotism is twofold -swaggering and brutish by virtue of his rowdyism, all conglomerating and incomprehensible by virtue of his pantheistic transcendentalism. As a rowdy, he asks, "Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?" since, after the closest inquiry, "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." Presently rising into a pantheistic strain he exclaims: -
"Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touched from,
The scent of these arm pits, aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
If I worship any particular thing, it shall be some of the spread of my own
body."
A perfectly logical deduction from the premises. Since all things are divine, Walt Whitman's body, with each several part and function of it, is divine, and it becomes him to sing hymns to them all. To refrain from celebrating their praises would be rank impiety. Another corollary from the same principle is that there is not a pin's point to choose between good and evil: -
"What blurt is this about virtue, and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me - I stand indifferent, My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown."
All things being good, and equally good, all are alike fit for the poet's use, and he may jot them down pell-mell, without regard to order, proportion, or perspective. If he wish to cram as much poetry into his pages as they can hold, he has only to fill them with compendious inventories of all sorts of things. Pages by the score of Walt Whitman's poetry are made up of simple enumeration: -
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, is almost as rich a line as any among them, and so is -
Moses, Homer, Neptune, Hercules, Wat Tyler, and Tycho Brahe. According to the Emersonian jargon, the Ego and the Non Ego are one. The "eternal and universal I" embraces and comprehends all nature. Walt Whitman is everything, and everything is Walt Whitman. He is here, there, and everywhere at the same moment. He is not born yet; he is dead and buried, alive and kicking. He is his own father and mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, lots of cousins, and all their progenitors; likewise his own children, nephews, and nieces, and all their posterity, for ever and ever. He is you and I, and the beef we eat, and the butcher that kills it, and the fire that cooks it; and he got drunk upon himself tomorrow, and will wake with a headache yesterday. Our own heads ache in trying to make head or tail of some of the polyphone utterances of this Protean, ubiquitous, and multitudinous person. Here is a whole poem of his, hers, its, or theirs, printed in duplicate, the [first version of each numbered section] being by Walt Whitman's Ego, and the other by his Non Ego, a writer in the New York Saturday Press: -
"1. With antecedents,
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumulations of past ages,
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am,
With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece, and Rome,
With the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Alb, and the Saxon,
With antique maritime ventures - with laws, artisanship, wars, and journeys,
With the poet, the skald, the saga, the myth, and the oracle,
With the sale of slaves - with enthusiasts - with the troubadour, the crusader, and the
monk,
With those old continents whence we have come to this new continent,
With the fading kingdoms and kings over there,
With the fading religions and priests,
With the small shores we look back to, from our own large and present shores,
With countless years drawing themselves onward, and arrived at these years,
You and Me arrived - America arrived, and making this year,
This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.
"1. With antecedents and consequents,
With our fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and the family at large accumulated by past
ages,
With all which would have been nothing if anything were not something which
everything is,
With Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Peoria, and New Jersey,
With the Pre-Adamite, the Yarab, the Guebre, the Hottentot, the Esquimaux, the Gorilla,
and the Nondescriptian,
With antique powwowing - with laws, jaws, wars, and three-tailed bashaws,
With the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, and Ralph Waldo Carlyle,
With the sale of Long Island railway stock, - with spiritualists, with the yawper, with the
organ-grinder and monkey,
With everybody and everything in general and nothing and nobody in particular, besides
otherbodies and things too numerous to mention,
Yourn and Mine arrived, - the Arrival arrove, and making this Nonsense:
This Nonsense! sending itself ahead of any sane comprehension this side of Jordan.
2. O but it is not the years - it is I - it is You,
We touch all laws, and tally all antecedents,
We are the skald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight - we easily include them, and
more,
We stand amid time, beginningless and endless - we stand amid evil and good,
All swings around us - there is as much darkness as light,
The very sun swings itself and its system of planets around us,
Its sun, and its again, all swing around us.
2. O, but it is not the Nonsense - it is Mine, - it is Yourn,
We touch all 'effects,' and tally all bread-sticks,
We are the Etceteras and Soforths, - we easily include them, and more;
All obfusticates around us, - there is as much as possible of a muchness;
The entire system of the universe discomboborates around us with a perfect looseness.
3. As for me,
I have the idea of all, and am all, and believe in all;
I believe materialism is true, and spiritualism is true - I reject no part.
3. As for Mine,
Mine has the idea of my own, and what's Mine is my own, and my own is all Mine and
believes in it all,
Mine believes meum is true, and rejects nix.
4. Have I forgotten any part?
Come to me, whoever and whatever, till I give you recognition.
4. Has Mine forgotten to grab any part?
Fork over then whoever and whatever is worth having, till Mine gives a receipt in full.
5. I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews,
I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god,
I see that the old accounts, bibles, geneaologies, are true, without exception.
I assert that all past days were what they should have been,
And that they could no how have been better than they were,
And that today is what it should be - and that America is,
And that today and America could no how be better than they are.
5. Mine respects Brahma, Vishnu, Mumbo-Jumbo, and the great Panjandrum,
Mine adopts things generally which are claimed by Yourn,
Mine asserts that these should have been my own in all past days,
And that they could not no how have been nobody else's,
And that today is neither yesterday nor tomorrow, - and that I-S is is.
6. In the name of These States, and in your and my name, the Past,
And in the name of These States, and in your and my name, the Present time.
6. In the name of Dogberry, - and in Mine and Yourn, - Bosh!
And in the name of Bombastes Furioso, - and in Yourn and Mine, - Gas!
7. I know that the past was great, and the future will be great,
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
(For the sake of him I typify - for the common average man's sake - your sake, if you are
he;)
And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there is the centre of all days, all
races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that has ever come of races and days, or ever will
come."
7. Mine knows that Dogberry was an Ass and Bombastes Furioso a likewise,
And that both curiously conjoint in the present time, in Yourn and Mine,
And that where Mine is, or Yourn is, this present day, there is the centre of all
Asininities,
And there is the meaning to us, of all that has ever come of Yourn and Mine, or ever will
come."We must not leave our readers under the impression that there is nothing in Walt Whitman's book but nonsense, coarseness, and filth. He has strong perceptive faculties and a vivid imagination, and he can express his human sympathies in language that becomes a man. Look on this picture: -
"Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels - I myself become the wounded person, My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe, I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken, Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, Heat and smoke I inspired - I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades, I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels, They have cleared the beams away - they tenderly lift me forth. I lie in the night air in my red shirt - the pervading hush is for my sake, Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy, White and beautiful are the faces around me - the heads are bared of their fire-caps, The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches."
[Moncure D. Conway].
Dial [Cincinnati] 1 (August 1860), 517-19.
Better dressed than we ever expected to see him, Walt Whitman again makes his bow, but with purpose unabated to "sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." The sensations of the roofs under this process are, as may be imagined, various and strong. "Some said that it thundered, others that an angel spoke." The Christian Examiner, with the unctuous air of one who has just read without blinking the accounts of Joseph and Potiphar, Judah and Tamar, pronounces it "impious and obscene." Mr. Emerson sends word, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." When doctors, etc. Well, we have gone to the book itself for a decision. The Leaves of Grass has been our companion out in the wild outlooks of Newport and Nahant, we have read it at night after following the throngs of New York by day, we have conversed with its music when the obligato was the whizz and scream of the locomotive which bore us across the continent, and have turned to it from the calm rush of the Father of Waters, from the loading here and there on its shores by the glare of pine- knot fires, from the eager crowd of men and women chatting, singing, gaming in the saloon, and we confidently announce that Walt Whitman has set the pulses of America to music. Here are the incomplete but real utterances of New York city, of the prairies, of the Ohio and Mississippi, - the volume of American autographs. To these formidable eyes the goddess Yoganidra, who veils the world in illusion, surrenders; to them there are no walls, nor fences, nor dress-coats, no sheaths of faces and eyes. All are catalogued by names, appraised, and his relentless hammer comes down on the right value of each.
We can not dwell on this remarkable work as much as we would like, because we wish to place here some extracts.
"O truth of the earth! O truth of things, I am determined to press my way toward you;
Sound your voice! I scale mountains, or dive in the sea after you."
"I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the
world."
voices.
"Oh, 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 waters
follow the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere around the globe.
Now I believe that all waits for the right voices;
Where is the practiced and perfect organ? Where is the developed soul?
For I see every word uttered thence has deeper, sweeter new sounds, impossible on less
terms.
I see brains and lips closed - I see tympans and temples unstruck,
Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose."
to a common prostitute.
"Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you;
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words
refuse to glisten and rustle for you."
the child.
"There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder, pity, love or dread, that
object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child;
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of
the ph be-bird,
And the Third-Month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the
cow's calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious
liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat-heads - all became part of him.
The strata of colored clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away by itself -the spread of
purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt-marsh and shore-mud -
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will
always go forth every day."
A friend of ours told us that once, when he was visiting Lizst, a fine gentleman from Boston was announced, and during the conversation the latter spoke with great contempt of Wagner (the new light) and his music. Lizst did not say anything, but went to the open piano and struck with grandeur the opening chords of the Tannhaser overture; having played it through, he turned and quietly remarked, "The man who doesn't call that good music is a fool." It is the only reply which can be made to those who do not find that quintessence of things which we call Poetry in many passages of this work.
We can not, nor do we wish to deny that biblical plainness of speech which characterizes these poems; we or nature are in some regards so untranslateable that in some of these pages one must hold his nose whilst he reads; the writer does not hesitate to bring the slop-bucket into the parlor to show you that therein also the chemic laws are at work; but to lose the great utterances which are in this work because of these, is as if one should commit suicide, refusing to dwell on the planet because it was not all an English Park, but had here and there a Dismal Swamp or a dreary desert. This Poet, though "one of the roughs," as he calls himself, is never frivolous, his profanity is reverently meant, and he speaks what is unspeakable with the simple unreserve of a child.
Westminster Review 74, n.s. 18
(1 October 1860), 590.
If Mr. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass had been printed on paper as dirty as his favourite topics, - if the book itself had presented the general aspect of that literature which usually falls under no other criticism than that of the police office, we should have passed it by without notice, as addressing only such a public as we have no concern with; but when a volume containing more obscenity and profanity than is perhaps elsewhere to be found within the same compass, presents itself in all the glories of hot-pressed paper, costly binding, and stereotype printing, and we believe as a fourth edition, it is manifest that it not only addresses, but has found a public of a much wider class, and it becomes a question how such a book can have acquired a vogue and popularity that could induce an American publisher to spend so much upon its outward setting-forth.
Perhaps loose thinking and tall talk are nowhere so efficacious in attracting notice as in the United States, and Mr. Whitman, by pretentiously assuming to be the exponent of Hegelian morality, by offering himself as the high- priest of that religion, whose sole dogma is comprised in the proposition Homo sibi deus, attracts and perplexes readers, whose natural good sense would otherwise soon cast aside his frightful fustian. That he has any direct acquaintance with those forms of German speculation on which he falls back for the justification of the language he makes use of, we think may be confidently denied, not only from the manner in which he conceives its problems, but from the absence of any German catch words with which he would otherwise have infallibly adorned his motley, for even an ignorance of its grammar does not daunt him when the French language offers a term to his taste. Mr. Emerson has much to answer for, and will in reputation dearly pay for the fervid encomium with which he introduced the Author to the American public. That to the public defence of polygamy and slavery, should now be added that of the emancipation of the flesh, is an indication of a moral disorganization in the States, which is of every evil promise. That a drunken Helot should display himself without shame in the market place, speaks sad reproach to the public that does not scourge him back to his cellar.
In form these poems, if poems they can be called, are composed in irregular rhythmical lines, after the manner of Tupper, and in fact they may be described by the following equation, - as Tupper is to English Humdrum, so is Walt Whitman to the American Rowdy. They have been praised as containing many poetical passages; in this opinion we cannot concur. That sometimes a poetical expression occurs among a dreary waste of rhetorical verbiage may be allowed, but this might have been expected - a naked savage has often a wild grace of movement that a civilized man can hardly possess, but certainly not display.
These Leaves of Grass are the symptoms of a moral fermentation in America, which no doubt will result in a broader and clearer life - but the progress is painful and the yeast nauseous.
[Review of Leaves of Grass (1860) and William Douglas O'Connor's Harrington].
Boston Wide World,
8 December 1860 [page number unknown].
'Sensation books,' or what are so called, are now the rage, and each successive production of this kind is more mysterious or murderous than its predecessor. Sir Rohan's Ghost, Households of Bouveries, Gold Bricks, and the like, are thrust down our throats whether we will or not. Their authors for the most part belong to the foggy or to the flippant schools of book-makers; for the former Emerson and his 'set' are partly responsible. These scribblers seem to fancy that it is a mark of genius to be mysterious; they hide one grain of thought in a bushel of chaff and have the assurance to ask us to look for it. Oh! for the days and works of Goldsmith, Addison and Irving, who drew from pure wells of English undefiled, and charmed us by their simplicity. The other day we noticed a commendatory notice (save the mark!) of Walt Whitman's Poems, by Emerson, and we looked over the volume of one who has been declared about 'to inaugurate a new era in American poetry.' Why, these 'poems' (prose run crazy) are the veriest trash ever written, and vulgar and disgusting to the last degree. There never was more unblushing obscenity presented to the public eye than is to be found in these prurient pages and how any respectable House could publish the volume is beyond my powers to comprehend. But enough of the 'nasty' school.
And now we have another 'sensation' book - an anti-slavery affair - one of the brood spawned by 'Uncle Tom.' It is called 'Harrington'; but it ought to be styled, 'A Glorification of Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, C. Burleigh and other gentlemen of their peculiar way of thinking.' Bur- leigh is said to look like the portraits of Jesus Christ. Parker resembles Socrates, Phillips, Cicero; and Garrison, Jove himself. And then the female characters are marvels of beauty and virtue. The house of Muriel, the heroine, is a perfect paradise of upholstery. But the hero, Harrington, is one of those
'faultless monsters, whom the world ne'er saw,'whose 'mission' it is to comfort the sable population of 'Nigger Hill.' It is absolutely sickening to read the manworship to be found in this volume, the only powerful writing in which is the description of Anthony's escape. As a work of art it will be as ephemeral as most books of its class. Checklist of Additional Reviews New Orleans Weekly Mirror, 9 June 1860, [page numbers unknown]. Boston Cosmopolite, 4 August 1860, [page numbers unknown].