The appearance of Walt Whitman's new book of poems, conjointly with Ward's "Indian Hunter," is not without significance. Both Whitman and Ward are representative men. In them, for the first time, the full strength of our American life receives expression - receives assertion. We have had in our Poetry and Art idealizations of loftier aspiration - imaginations of finer conceit - but they were not grounded in our soil; even though American in their reference, they were foreign to our New World; they belonged rather to some modern school of thought, than to our modern and American life - they were not the outgrowth of that new movement in civilization which America inaugurates.
In all human organizations, whether those of personal or of national life, there is the moment of consciousness as self, as individual - a moment full of original force.
This "I Am" of youth, may include more or less of meaning according to the status of organic development. The youthful self-assertion of one age implies more than the assertion of an anterior epoch. Life is an ever on- flowing tide; each successive wave strands the human consciousness upon a higher look-out. The earlier ages expressed their consciousness of life, through the imagination, by mythical rites and symbols. America now first in the world's history experiences this life as superior to all forms - as ever forming -itself never bounded by form - as the common life, common as the "leaves of grass" - as the great fraternizing element - as the all-sufficient - the vast, indomitable, sole Fact. In literature - Whitman, in art - Ward, are they who come forward to express this New-World self-assertion of ours, in all its boundless and fierce strength. Both fling aside the buskin and come down to the common ground; they state that which is, and thereby give the fact - the thing -its truest and highest idealization; for the fact - the thing - thus simply and absolutely given, is at once spiritual and material - is ideal.
As an artist - that is, as one who gives a complete and harmonious externalization to his feeling - Mr. Whitman is much inferior to Mr. Ward. Still the poet may be said to be more truly artistic than if he were more ostensibly so. He sets out to assert himself - the conscious American life as superior to restrictions of time and place, as all-containing, all-sanctifying. His inartistic looseness of style and expression is quite consistent with this mood. The poet, in consequence, presents himself to the mind as a more congruous and artistic whole than if he had modeled his verse in accordance with all the unities of Art.
In Whitman's last collection, we observe a much greater regard for beauty of form than the Leaves of Grass displayed. The latter work was full of the ungoverned vigor of life-consciousness; the present exhibits a tendency to define this vigor by lines of beauty. We accordingly discover greater regularity of rhythm, and more unity of conception in the grouping of details.
But our present object is to introduce an extract from Drum Taps, which may, we hope, incite the reader to a serious study of the works of its author - the most remarkable outgrowths of our New-World life. As the earlier poems were not a bouquet of garden flowers, but leaves of grass plucked by the handful from the bosom of nature, with here and there a wild blossom, fresh, juicy, wet with the dews of morning, so the recent ones - referring to that upheaving of the Great Life in human action which has marked our times - are not the elaborate martial strains of the parade-ground, but the vigorous "drums taps" of the column in march.
Modern verse has nowhere a nobler ring. This is our American war-song, good not only for the battle-field, but for the labor-field - the present, still more than the past; for ours are not the "piping times of peace;" our American life is on the march, filing through the passes of outgrown formalism, outflanking the hosts of slavery, gaining the mountain heights of an all-comprehending vision.
In our next number we shall give some extracts from Drum Taps, illustrative of the author's great power of word-picture-making, in which, as might be expected from his close hold upon the fact of life, he stands preminent among the poets of the times.