Since Whitman insisted upon being called "Walt" instead of Walter, so let
it be. The name accords with the free-and-easy style of his verse. If you
can find some abridged selections from that verse, read them by all means;
but if you must search the whole of it for the passages that are worth
reading, then pass it cheerfully by; for such another vain display of
egotism, vulgarity and rant never appeared under the name of poetry.
Whitman was so absurdly fond of his "chants" and so ignorant of poetry that
he preserved the whole of his work in a final edition, and his publishers
still insist upon printing it, rubbish and all. The result is that the few
rare verses which stamp him as a poet are apt to be overlooked in the
multitudinous gabblings which, of themselves, might mark him as a mere
freak or "sensation" in our modest literature.
Biographical Sketch
Ordinarily when we read poetry we desire to
know something of the man who wrote it, of his youth, his training,
the circumstance of his work and the personal ideals which made him
view life steadily in one light rather than in another. In dealing
with Whitman it is advisable to leave such natural curiosity
unsatisfied, and for two reasons: first, the man was far from
admirable or upright, and to meet him at certain stages is to lose
all desire to read his poetry; and second, he was so extremely
secretive about himself, while professing boundless good-fellowship
with all men, that we can seldom trust his own record, much less
that of his admirers. There are great blanks in the story of his
life; his real biography has not yet been written; and in the
jungle of controversial writings which has grown up around him one
loses sight of Whitman in a maze of extravagant or contradictory
opinions. [Footnote: Of the many biographies of Whitman perhaps the
best for beginners is Perry's Walt Whitman (1906), in
American Men of Letters Series.]
Traits and Incidents
Let it suffice then to record, in catalogue fashion, that Whitman
was born (1819) on Long Island, of stubborn farmer stock; that he
spent his earliest years by the sea, which inspired his best verse;
that he grew up in the streets of Brooklyn and was always
fascinated by the restless tide of city life, as reflected in such
poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; that his education was scanty
and of the "picked up" variety; that to the end of his life, though
ignorant of what literary men regard as the a-b-c of
knowledge, he was supremely well satisfied with himself; that till
he was past forty he worked irregularly at odd jobs, but was by
choice a loafer; that he was a man of superb physical health and
gloried in his body, without much regard for moral standards; that
his strength was broken by nursing wounded soldiers during the war,
a beautiful and unselfish service; that he was then a government
clerk in Washington until partly disabled by a paralytic stroke,
and that the remainder of his life was spent at Camden, New Jersey.
His Leaves of Grass (published first in 1855, and
republished with additions many times) brought him very little
return in money, and his last years were spent in a state of
semipoverty, relieved by the gifts of a small circle of admirers.
Whitman's Verse
In a single book, Leaves of Grass, Whitman has
collected all his verse. This book would be a chaos even had he left his
works in the order in which they were written; but that is precisely what
he did not do. Instead, he enlarged and rearranged the work ten different
times, mixing up his worst and his best verses, so that it is now very
difficult to trace his development as a poet. We may, however, tentatively
arrange his work in three divisions: his early shouting to attract
attention (as summarized in the line "I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world"), his war poems, and his later verse written after he
had learned something of the discipline of life and poetry.
The quality of his early work may be judged from a few disjointed lines of
his characteristic "Song of Myself":
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her that it is just as lucky to die, and I know
it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am
not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown, gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.
I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.
The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck'd my trowser ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
Thus he rambles on, gabbing of every place or occupation or newspaper
report that comes into his head. When he ends this grotesque "Song of
Myself" after a thousand lines or more, he makes another just like it. We
read a few words here and there, amazed that any publisher should print
such rubbish; and then, when we are weary of Whitman's conceit or bad
taste, comes a flash of insight, of imagination, of poetry:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
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?
There are, in short, hundreds of pages of such "chanting" with its grain of
wheat hid in a bushel of chaff. We refer to it here not because it is worth
reading but to record the curious fact that many European critics hail it
as typical American poetry, even while we wonder why anybody should regard
it as either American or poetic.
Foreign Opinion
The explanation is simple. Europeans have not yet rid themselves of the
idea that America is the strange, wild land Cooper's Pioneers, and
that any poetry produced here must naturally be uncouth, misshapen, defiant
of all poetic laws or traditions. To such critics Whitman's crudity seems
typical of a country where one is in nightly danger of losing his scalp,
where arguments are settled by revolvers, and where a hungry man needs only
to shoot a buffalo or a bear from his back door. Meanwhile America, the
country that planted colleges and churches in a wilderness, that loves
liberty because she honors law, that never saw a knight in armor but that
has, even in her plainsmen and lumberjacks, a chivalry for woman that would
adorn a Bayard,--that real America ignores the bulk of Whitman's work
simply because she knows that, of all her poets, he is the least
representative of her culture, her ideals, her heroic and aspiring life.
Drum Taps
The second division of Whitman's work is made up chiefly of verses written
in war time, to some of which he gave the significant title, Drum
Taps. In such poems as as "Beat, Beat, Drums," "Cavalry Crossing a
Ford" and "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" he reflected the emotional
excitement of '61 and the stern days that followed. Note, for example, the
startling vigor of "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," which depicts an old
negro woman by the roadside, looking with wonder on the free flag which she
sees for the first time aloft over marching men:
Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban'd head and bare bony feet?
Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
Another side of the war is reflected in such poems as "Come up from the
Fields, Father," an exquisite picture of an old mother and father receiving
the news of their son's death on the battlefield. In the same class belong
two fine tributes, "O Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomed," written in moments of noble emotion when the news came
that Lincoln was dead. The former tribute, with its rhythmic swing and
lyric refrain, indicates what Whitman might have done in poetry had he been
a more patient workman. So also does "Pioneers," a lyric that is wholly
American and Western and exultant:
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Later Poems
In the third class of Whitman's works are the poems written late in life,
when he had learned to suppress his blatant egotism and to pay some little
attention to poetic form and melody. Though his lines are still crude and
irregular, many of them move to a powerful rhythm, such as the impressive
"With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea," which suggests the surge and beat of
breakers on the shore. In others he gives finely imaginative expression to
an ideal or a yearning, and his verse rises to high poetic levels. Note
this allegory of the spider, an insect that, when adrift or in a strange
place, sends out delicate filaments on the air currents until one thread
takes hold of some solid substance and is used as a bridge over the
unknown:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect
them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul
Among the best of Whitman's works are his poems to death. "Joy, Shipmate,
Joy," "Death's Valley," "Darest Thou Now, O Soul," "Last Invocation,"
"Good-Bye, My Fancy,"--in such haunting lyrics he reflects the natural view
of death, not as a terrible or tragic or final event but as a confident
going forth to meet new experiences. Other notable poems that well repay
the reading are "The Mystic Trumpeter," "The Man-of-War Bird," "The Ox
Tamer," "Thanks in Old Age" and "Aboard at a Ship's Helm."
In naming the above works our purpose is simply to lure the reader away
from the insufferable Whitmanesque "chant" and to attract attention to a
few poems that sound a new note in literature, a note of freedom, of joy,
of superb confidence, which warms the heart when we hear it. When these
poems are known others will suggest themselves: "Rise, O Days, from Your
Fathomless Deeps," "I Hear America Singing," "There was a Boy Went Forth,"
"The Road Unknown," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." There is magic
in such names; but unfortunately in most cases the reader will find only an
alluring title and a few scattered lines of poetry; the rest is Whitman.
Democracy
The author of the "Song of Myself" proclaimed himself the poet of democracy
and wrote many verses on his alleged subject; but those who read them will
soon tire of one whose idea of democracy was that any man is as good, as
wise, as godlike as any other. Perhaps his best work in this field is "Thou
Mother with Thy Equal Brood," a patriotic poem read at "Commencement" time
in Dartmouth College (1872). There is too much of vainglorious boasting in
the poem (for America should be modest, and can afford to be modest), but
it has enough of prophetic vision and exalted imagination to make us
overlook its unworthy spread-eagleism.
Prayer of Columbus
As a farewell to Whitman one should read what is perhaps his noblest single
work, "The Prayer of Columbus." The poem is supposed to reflect the thought
of Columbus when, as a worn-out voyager, an old man on his last expedition,
he looked out over his wrecked ships to the lonely sea beyond; but the
reader may see in it another picture, that of a broken old man in his
solitary house at Camden, writing with a trembling hand the lines which
reflect his unshaken confidence:
My terminus near,
The clouds already closing in upon me,
The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost,
I yield my ships to Thee
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, O God, though the waves buffet me,
Thee, Thee at least I know.
Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present;
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine, unseal'd my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.
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