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Leaves of Grass (1856)
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From the American Phrenological Journal .
AN ENGLISH AND AN AMERICAN POET.
LEAVES OF GRASS. Poems by WALT WHITMAN. Brooklyn, 1855. MAUD, and other
Poems. By ALFEED TENNYSON. London, 1855.
It is always reserved for second-rate poems immediately to gratify. As first-rate or natural
objects, in their perfect simplicity and proportion, do not startle or strike, but appear no more
than matters of course, so probably natural poetry does not, for all its being the rarest, and telling
of the longest and largest work. The artist or writer whose talent is to please the connoisseurs of
his time, may obey the laws of his time, and achieve the intense and elaborated beauty of parts.
The perfect poet cannot afford any special beauty of parts, or to limit himself by any laws less
than those universal ones of the great masters, which include all times, and all men and women,
and the living and the dead. For from the study of the universe is drawn this irrefragable truth,
that the law of the requisites of a grand poem, or any other complete workmanship, is originality,
and the average and superb beauty of the ensemble. Possessed with this law, the fitness of aim,
time, persons, places, surely follows. Possessed with this law, and doing justice to it, no poet or
any one else will make anything ungraceful or mean, any more than any emanation of nature
is.
The poetry of England, by the many rich geniuses of
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that wonderful little island, has grown out of the facts of the English race, the monarchy and
aristocracy prominent over the rest, and conforms to the spirit of them. No nation ever did or
ever will receive with national affection any poets except those born of its national blood. Of
these, the writings express the finest infusions of government, traditions, faith, and the
dependence or independence of a people, and even the good or bad physiognomy, and the ample
or small geography. Thus what very properly fits a subject of the British crown may fit very ill
an American freeman. No fine romance, no inimitable delineation of character, no grace of
delicate illustrations, no rare picture of shore or mountain or sky, no deep thought of the intellect,
is so important to a man as his opinion of himself is; every thing receives its tinge from that. In
the verse of all those undoubtedly great writers, Shakspeare just as much as the rest, there is the
air which to America is the air of death. The mass of the people, the laborers and all who serve,
are slag, refuse. The countenances of kings and great lords are beautiful; the countenances of
mechanics are ridiculous and deformed. What play of Shakspeare, represented in America, is not
an insult to America, to the marrow in its bones? How can the tone never silent in their plots and
characters be applauded, unless Washington should have been caught and hung, and Jefferson
was the most enormous of liars, and common persons north and south should bow low to their
betters, and to organic superiority of blood? Sure as the heavens envelop the earth, if the
Americans want a race of bards worthy of 1855, and of the stern reality of this republic, they
must cast around for men essentially different from the old poets, and from the modern
successions of jinglers and snivellers and fops.
English versification is full of these danglers, and America follows after them. Every body writes
poetry, and yet there is not a single poet. An age greater than the proudest of the past is swiftly
slipping away, without one lyric voice to seize its greatness and speak it as an encouragement
and onward lesson. We have heard, by many grand announcements, that he was to come; but will
he come?
| A mighty Poet whom this age shall choose |
| To be its spokesman to all coming times. |
| In the ripe full-blown season of his soul, |
| He shall go forward in his spirit's strength, |
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| And grapple with the questions of all time, |
| And wring from them their meanings. As King Saul |
| Called up the buried prophet from his grave |
| To speak his doom, so shall this Poet-king |
| Call up the dread past from its awful grave |
| To tell him of our future. As the air |
| Doth sphere the world, so shall his heart of love— |
| Loving mankind, not peoples. As the lake |
| Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, |
| Shall he reflect our great humanity; |
| And as the young Spring breathes with living breath |
| On a dead branch, till it sprouts fragrantly |
| Green leaves and sunny flowers, shall he breathe life |
| Through every theme he touch, making all Beauty |
| And Poetry forever like the stars. ( Alexander Smith .) |
The best of the school of poets at present received in Great Britain and America is Alfred
Tennyson. He is the bard of ennui and of the aristocracy and their combination into love. This
love is the old stock love of playwrights and romancers, Shakspeare the same as the rest. It is
possessed of the same unnatural and shocking passion for some girl or woman, that wrenches it
from its manhood, emasculated and impotent, without strength to hold the rest of the objects and
goods of life in their proper positions. It seeks nature for sickly uses. It goes screaming and
weeping after the facts of the universe, in their calm beauty and equanimity, to note the
occurrence of itself, and to sound the news, in connection with the charms of the neck, hair, or
complexion of a particular female.
Poetry, to Tennyson and his British and American eleves, is a gentleman of the first degree,
boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring the ladies, and talking to them
in company with that elaborate halfchoked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license
of men among themselves. The spirit of the burnished society of upper-class England fills this
writer and his effusions from top to toe. Like that, he does not ignore courage and the superior
qualities of men, but all is to show forth through dandified forms. He meets the nobility and
gentry half-way. The models are the same both to the poet and the parlors. Both have the same
supercilious elegance, both love the reminiscences which extol caste, both agree on the topics
proper for mention and discussion, both hold the same undertone of church and state, both have
the same languishing melancholy and irony, both indulge largely in persiflage, both are marked
by the contour of high blood and a constitutional a version to anything cowardly
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and mean, both accept the love depicted in romances as the great business of a life or a poem,
both seem unconscious of the mighty truths of eternity and immortality, both are silent on the
presumptions of liberty and equality, and both devour themselves in solitary lassitude. Whatever
may be said of all this, it harmonizes and represents facts. The present phases of high-life in
Great Britain are as natural a growth there as Tennyson and his poems are a natural growth of
those phases. It remains to be distinctly admitted that this man is a real poet, notwithstanding his
ennui and his aristocracy.
Meanwhile a strange voice parts others aside and demands for its owner that position that is only
allowed after the seal of many returning years has stamped with approving stamp the claims of
the loftiest leading genius. Do you think the best honors of the earth are won so easily, Walt
Whitman? Do you think city and country are to fall before the vehement egotism of your
recitative of yourself?
| I am the poet of the body, |
| And I am the poet of the soul. |
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with
me,
|
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a
new tongue.
|
| I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, |
| And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, |
| And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. |
| I chant a new chant of dilation or pride, |
| We have had ducking and deprecating about enough, |
| I show that size is only development. |
It is indeed a strange voice! Critics and lovers and readers of poetry as hitherto written, may well be excused the chilly and unpleasant shudders which will assuredly run through them, to their
very blood and bones, when they first read Walt Whitman's poems. If this is poetry, where must
its foregoers stand! And what is at once to become of the ranks of rhymsters, melancholy and
swallow-tailed, and of all the confectioners and upholsterers of verse, if the tan-faced man here
advancing and claiming to speak for America and the nineteenth hundred of the Christian list of
years, typifies indeed the natural and proper bard?
The theory and practice of poets have hitherto been to select certain ideas or events or
personages, and then
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describe them in the best manner they could, always with as much ornament as the case allowed.
Such are not the theory and practice of the new poet. He never presents for perusal a poem
ready-made on the old models, and ending when you come to the end of it; but every sentence
and every passage tells of an interior not always seen, and exudes an impalpable something
which sticks to him that reads, and pervades and provokes him to tread the half-invisible road
where the poet, like an apparition, is striding fearlessly before. If Walt Whitman's premises are
true, then there is a subtler range of poetry than that of the grandeur and life of events, as in
Homer, or of characters, as in Shakspeare—poetry to which all other writing is subservient, and
which confronts the very meanings of the works of nature and competes with them. It is the
direct bringing of occurrences and persons and things to bear on the listener or beholder, to
re-appear through him or her; and it offers the best way of making them a part of him and her as
the right aim of the greatest poet.
Of the spirit of life in visible forms—of the spirit of the seed growing out of the ground—of the
spirit of the resistless motion of the globe passing unsuspected but quick as lightning along its
orbit—of them is the spirit of this man's poetry. Like them it eludes and mocks criticism, and
appears unerringly in results. Things, facts, events, persons, days, ages, qualities, tumble
pell-mell, exhaustless and copious, with what appear to be the same disregard of parts and the
same absence of special purpose, as in nature. But the voice of the few rare and controlling
critics, and the voice of more than one generation of men or two generations of men, must speak
for the inexpressible purposes of nature, and for this haughtiest of writers that has ever yet
written and printed a book. His is to prove either the most lamentable of failures or the most
glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature. And after all we have written we confess
our brain-felt and heart-felt inability to decide which we think it is likely to be.
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