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Leaves of Grass (1856)
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From the London Leader .
TRANSATLANTIC LATTER-DAY POETRY.
LEAVES OF GRASS. Brooklyn, New York, 1855. London:
Horsell
"Latter-day poetry" in America is of a very different character from the same manifestation in the
old country. Here, it is occupied for the most part with dreams of the middle ages, of the old
knightly and religious times; in America it is employed chiefly with the present, except when it
travels out into the undiscovered future. Here our latter-day poets are apt to whine over the times,
as if heaven were perpetually betraying the earth with a show of progress that is in fact
retrogression, like the backward advance of crabs; there, the minstrels of the stars and stripes
blow a loud note of exultation before the grand new epoch, and think the Greeks and Romans,
the early Oriental races, and the later men of the middle centuries, of small account before the
onward tramping of these present generations. Of this latter sect is a certain phenomenon who
has recently started up in Brooklyn, New York—one Walt Whitman, author of "LEAVES OF
GRASS," who has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet, and by
Englishmen as a kind of fool. For ourselves, we are not disposed to accept him as the one, having
less faith in latter-day prophets than in latter-day poets; but assuredly we cannot regard him as
the other. Walt is one of the most amazing, one of the most startling, one of the most perplexing
creations of the modern American mind; but he is no fool, though abundantly eccentric, nor is his
book mere food for laughter, though undoubtedly containing much that may easily and fairly be
turned into ridicule.
The singularity of the author's mind—his utter disregard of ordinary forms and modes—appears in
the very title-page and frontispiece of his work. Not only is there
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no author's name, (which in itself would not be singular) but there is no publisher's name—that of
the English bookseller being a London addition. Fronting the title is the portrait of a bearded
gentleman in his shirt-sleeves and a Spanish hat, with an all-pervading atmosphere of
Yankeedoodle about him; but again there is no patronymic, and we can only infer that this
roystering blade is the author of the book. Then follows a long prose treatise by way of preface
(and here once more the anonymous system is carried out, the treatise having no heading
whatever); and after that we have the poem, in the course of which a short autobiographical
discourse reveals to us the name of the author.
A passage from the Preface, if it may be so called, will give some insight into the character and
objects of the work.
Other states indicate themselves in their deputies—but the genius of the United States is not best
or most in its executives or legislatures nor in its ambassadors, or authors, or colleges, or
churches, or pariors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors; but always most in the common
people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendships; the freshness and candor of their
physiognomy, the picturesque looseness of their carriage, their deathless attachment to freedom,
their aversion to any thing indecorous, or soft, or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the
citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states, the fierceness of their roused resentment,
their curiosity and welcome of novelty, their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy, their
susceptibility to a slight, the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the
presence of superiors, the fluency of their speech, their delight in music, (the sure symptom of
manly tenderness and native elegance of soul,) their good temper and open-handedness, the
terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to
him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of
it.
This "gigantic and generous treatment," we presume, is offered in the pages which ensue. The
poem is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical "lengths," like the measured
prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, or some of the Oriental
writings. The external form, therefore, is startling, and by no means seductive, to English ears,
accustomed to the sumptuous music of ordinary metre; and the central principle of the poem is
equally staggering. It seems to resolve itself into an all-attracting egotism—an eternal presence of
the individual soul of Walt Whitman in all things, yet in such wise that this one soul shall be
presented as a type of all human souls whatsoever. He goes forth into the world, this rough,
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devil-may-care Yankee; passionately identifies himself with all forms of being, sentient or
inanimate; sympathizes deeply with humanity; riots with a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force
and fervor of his own sensations; will not have the most vicious or abandoned shut out from final
comfort and reconciliation; is delighted with Broadway, New York, and equally in love with the
desolate back-woods, and the long stretch of the uninhabited prairie, where the wild beasts
wallow in the reeds, and the wilder birds start upward from their nests among the grass;
perceives a divine mystery wherever his feet conduct or his thoughts transport him; and beholds
all things tending toward the central and sovereign Me. Such, as we conceive, is the key to this
strange, grotesque, and bewildering book; yet we are far from saying that the key will unlock all
the quirks and oddities of the volume. Much remains of which we confess we can make nothing;
much that seems to us purely fantastical and preposterous; much that appears to our muddy
vision gratuitously prosaic, needlessly plain-speaking, disgusting without purpose, and singular
without result. There are so many evidences of a noble soul in Whitman's pages that we regret
these aberrations, which only have the effect of discrediting what is genuine by the show of
something false; and especially do we deplore the unnecessary openness with which Walt reveals
to us matters which ought rather to remain in sacred silence. It is good not to be ashamed of
Nature; it is good to have an all-inclusive charity; but it is also good, sometimes, to leave the veil
across the Temple.
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