CHAPTER LXXX

THE GOOD GREY POET

Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major prophets--like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a means of swaying the souls of men.

Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors write in this fashion about his books, and do not lose their positions for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman’s lifetime; in the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene maniac. His first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a thousand copies printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he sent out free--and even some of these were returned, one by the poet Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was “as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics.” Another wrote that he “deserved the whip of the public executioner.” He was thrown out of a government position in Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman’s contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman published Emerson’s letter in the second edition of “Leaves of Grass,” Emerson was embarrassed--for in the meantime his horrified friends had persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how difficult it is to judge one’s contemporaries.

Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island. His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town. Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of “crank”; a slow-moving, rather stubborn youth, who wandered about from place to place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in life--a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying literature and life. Walt’s people loved him, but could not make him out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul.

He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job, he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own taste, taking no one’s opinions. When he was ready to express himself, it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling voice yet lifted in America.

It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could not understand what the poet was driving at.

Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the apple-picker?

Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, instinctive forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers.

Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to revive it--but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a necktie--he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the police.

The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his message its due proportion and no more. He was a clean man, living an abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his body.

The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals, bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said to Goethe: “This is a man!”

“The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.”

Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now emerging--and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle--I nourish

## active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of

rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration.

Is it poetry? That is a question over which battles are fought. It seems to me that words matter little; it is a kind of inspired chant, which moves you if you are susceptible to its ideas. For two years I steeped myself in the literature of the Civil War, while writing “Manassas”; and to me at that time “Drum-Taps” seemed to contain all the fervor and anguish of the conflict. But the everyday person, who does not rise to those heights, prefers “O Captain, My Captain,” which has the easier beauties of rhyme and fixed rhythm.

The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ... Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human body.

The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet!

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