Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman

      INTRODUCTORY NOTE¹

      Walt Whitman

      by Bliss Perry

       Walt Whitman had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding over the question, “What, after all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?” His personality is unique. In many respects he still baffles our curiosity. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast majority of American men and women “good old Walt” is still an outsider.

      Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle to the Sun.” It cries, “Benedicite, Omnia opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!” That is the real motto for Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Like St. Francis, and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he chants “I know I am deathless.” Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott’s poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his “inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years.” Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the “single man” of Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address. “I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out.” Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.

      So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman’s life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman’s own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Whitman’s father was a carpenter, who “leaned to the Quakers.” There were many children. When little “Walt”—as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter—was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried typesetting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible.

      The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the “Democratic Review,” a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, “mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall,” and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferryboats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on “The Brooklyn Eagle” and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter’s trade with his father, and brooded over a book—“a book of new things.”

      This was the famous “Leaves of Grass.” He set the type himself, in a Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book had a portrait of the author—a meditative, gray-bearded poet in workman’s clothes—and a confused preface on America as a field for the true poet. Then followed the new gospel, “I celebrate myself,” chanted in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote to Whitman from Concord: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

      Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote “Drum Taps” and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody