Poems by Walt Whitman

Reviews:

"Walt Whitman."
Chambers's Journal
of Popular Literature,
Science, and Art 45
(4 July 1868), 420-5.


Faint praise may harm the prose-writer, but there is nothing which predisposes us against a poet so much as extravagant praise; if we are not very young, and have little enthusiasm to spare about
anything, we especially resent it. The unreasonable laudation (now so common) makes us as unreasonably despise its object. 'As it is impossible to conceive a world without a Shakespeare, so we cannot picture it to ourselves without this new sweet singer, Jones.' Bother Jones! We that have known Keats and Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth and Coleridge, to be told that there has been no such poet as Jones!
 
Not a little ludicrous eulogy of this sort has been poured of late upon the American poet whose name stands at the head of this paper, but he is really noteworthy nevertheless. He is the first characteristic
poetical writer that the United States have produced. Longfellow is but Tennyson and water; and as for the other Transatlantic bards, they have produced solitary poems of great merit, but none which
might not have been written by an Englishman of genius, who had paid great attention to the
panoramas of the Mississippi or of the Prairies which have been unfolded from time to time in Leicester Square. Whitman's very faults are national. The brag, and bluster, and self-assertion of the man are American only; the fulsome 'cracking-up' of his own nation is such as would not be ventured upon by a British bard; the frequent bathos - the use of newspaper terms and of terms which have no existence out of New York, and in which you almost hear the American nasal twang, are all characteristic. He is Yankee to the backbone; Yankee, also, it must however be added, in his outspoken independence of thought, in his audacious originality, in his perfect freedom from conventional twaddle, and in his contempt for accidental rank of all sorts. He has named half his volume 'Chants Democratic,' and though they are not chants, nor anything like it, they are certainly democratic. He does not write verse at all, which is fortunate, for he would certainly not be particular about his rhymes; nor does he even write blank verse; but he has invented a certain rolling changeful metre of his own, with, as his English editor truly remarks, 'a very powerful and majestic rhythmical sense throughout.' He sometimes furnishes long strings of detached items - very like the list of goods furnished by shops to their customers; but they are 'not devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness' by any means.
 
The doctrine of nihil humanum, &c. was never pushed to such extreme limits as by Walt Whitman. If a man could gain the suffrages of the human race by flattering them with the sense of their
tremendous importance, this poet would be king of the world. Such is Mr Whitman's programme. If he did not speak 'the word of the modern' quite so often, or, at least, not borrow it from the penny-a-liner, it would be better for his fame. Also, through singing 'Man's physiology complete,' he has caused Mr Rossetti to be at the trouble of preparing the present 'Bowdlerised,' or excised edition of his works, to suit the  squeamish tastes of the Old Country. So
 please, ladies, be particular to ask for the above-mentioned edition. There is nothing in that which
 you may not read, or the book would not be noticed in these columns.

Whitman's poetry reminds us, as we have said, of no other poet, but in his prose we seem to recognise some kinship to Emerson's. Here is a fine passage from the preface to his Leaves of Grass (the titles of his poems are unattractive, being almost always affected or unmeaning), insisting upon the importance of human act, word, thought, and the indestructibility of their results.

'All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in a day or a month, or any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death, but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one name of word or deed - not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers - not peculation, or cunning, or betrayal, or murder - no serpentine poison of those that seduce women - not the foolish yielding of women - not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means -  not any nastiness of appetite - not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to sons, or
sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their boys - not of greedy looks or malignant
wishes - nor any of the wiles practised by people upon themselves - ever is or ever can be stamped on the programme, but it is duly realised and returned, and that returned in further performances, and
they returned again. Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason, whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary - to add, or subtract, or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or
illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that
a male or female does that is vigorous, and benevolent, and clean, is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe, and through the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is well - if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same - if the President or chief-justice is wise, it is the same - if the young mechanic or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. The interest will come round - all will come round. All the best actions of war and peace -  all help given to relatives and strangers, and the poor, and old, and sorrowful, and young children, and widows, and the sick, and to all shunned persons - all furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves - all the self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take the seats
of the boats - all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a friend's sake or opinion's sake - all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by their neighbours - all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of mothers - all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded - all the grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we inherit - and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient nations unknown to us by name or date or location
-all that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or not - all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands - and all that is well thought or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here - or that is henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any one -these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inure now, and will inure always, to the identities from which they sprung or shall spring.'
A fine lay-sermon, surely.

From common humanity our author rises to the American Citizen, with a portrait of whom he furnishes us, which will not easily be recognised by those who have only been accustomed to see English photographs of the individual in question. Other states, he says, indicate themselves by
their deputies, but the United States always most in its common people. 'Their manners, speech,
dress, friendships - the freshness and candour of their physiognomy - the picturesque looseness of
their carriage - their deathless attachment to freedom - their aversion to anything 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.'

In the meantime, however, Walt Whitman will try his hand.

He even dates from the United States era; in 1856, he writes: Yet he is so good as to say that former experience and instruction have not been  altogether thrown away; he is grateful, only let it be distinctly understood, that he is under no slavish sense of obligation; that the gratitude must be reciprocal. If eligible? One would think he pictured himself as an investment. You must not be put off your liking, reader, by these blots. 'Whitman is a poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then
the volume and torrent of his power carry the disfigurements along with it and away.' He is really a
fine fellow. It is as the poet of his own day, of his own nation (as also of Humanity, though in a less degree), that Whitman is to be considered. Half a century ago, he would have been wholly unintelligible; and half a century hence, it is possible that he will be forgotten; but he will leave much seed behind him, and perhaps found a school whose pupils will be greater than their master. His messages to the Poor and
Fallen (who will most certainly never receive them, by the by) are full of tenderness and fraternal love, but never of pity: why should they be pitied, who are as high as the highest, and as good as the best? Nay, even crime does not cut them off from their equality with him, or him from his sympathy
with them. Whitman does not pretend to read 'the riddle of the painful earth;' but he takes leave to admire, after his fashion, the great Cosmos; Yet it is Man, and not external Nature, which has his worship: Whitman is practical beyond all poets before him; and, indeed, in one sense (but not in the
anti-theological one), material. It delights him to contemplate the visible instruments of labour, and
he sings, in minutest detail, the works which they accomplish. The axe leaps, and the solid forest, says he, gives blind utterances, and the manifold shapes arise in his mind's eye, which are hewn out of the wood. These picturings may be somewhat weird and fanciful, but they are expressed with power, and the conception of them is certainly original and striking. They are, however, too prolonged, and remind one of what somebody writes of the minuteness of Crabbe's verse - that he was like a broker
appraising furniture.

Under the unsatisfactory title of 'Assimilations,' Whitman describes the influence of association upon the human mind, and, incidentally, depicts most graphically the surroundings and circumstances of the
somewhat unenviable home in which he himself was reared.
 

In Mr Rossetti's Preface, we learn in plain prose what Walt Whitman's life has been. Walt, it appears, is merely a characteristic appellation; he was named Walter, like his father before him, who was first a farmer, afterwards a carpenter and builder (hence, doubtless, that eulogy on the axe), and an adherent to the religious principles of 'the great Quaker iconoclast, Elias Hicks,' of whom, if our readers have never heard, they are no worse off than we are. 'Walt - born in 1819 - was schooled at Brooklyn, a suburb of New York, and began life at the age of thirteen, working as a printer, later on, as a country teacher, and then as a miscellaneous press-writer in New York.' He changed his pursuits, after the national fashion: became newspaper editor, and then builder, like his father; from 1837 to 1848, was, we fear, a rowdy, since his American biographer informs us that, during that period, 'he sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions, pleasures, and abandonments;' but in 1862, on the breaking out of the Civil War, he undertook the (gratuitous) service of nursing the
wounded. He was a Northerner, of course, but the Southern sick were tended by him with equal care; 'the strongest testimony is borne to his self-devotion and kindliness;' and in a Washington
hospital, when attending upon a case of gangrene, he absorbed the poison into his system, and was
disabled for six months. In 1865, he obtained a clerkship in the Department of the Interior; but this was taken from him when he published his audacious Leaves of Grass. 'He soon after, however, obtained another modest, but creditable post in the office of the Attorney-general. He still visits the
hospitals on Sundays, and often on other days as well.'
 
The poet is 'much above the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned.... . He has light-blue eyes, a florid complexion, a fleecy beard, now gray, and a quite peculiar sort of magnetism about him in relation to those with whom he comes in contact.... . He has always been carried by
predilection towards the society of the common people; but is not the less for that open to refined and artistic impressions.' As 'an accessible human individual,' he is thus described by a writer in the
Fortnightly Review: 'Having occasion to visit New York soon after the appearance of Walt Whitman's book, I was urged by some friends to search him out.... . The day was excessively hot, the thermometer at nearly 100 , and the sun blazed down as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze.... . I saw stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at the terrible sun, the man I was seeking. With his gray clothing, his blue-gray shirt, his iron-gray hair, his swart sunburned face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-white grass - for the sun had burned away its greenness - and was so like the earth upon which he rested that he seemed almost enough a part of it for one to pass by without recognition. I approached him, gave my name and reason for searching him out, and asked him if he did not find the sun rather hot. "Not at all too hot," was his reply; and he confided to me that this was one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing "poems." He then walked with me to his home, and took me along its narrow ways to his room. A small room of about fifteen feet square, with a single window looking out on the barren solitudes of the island; a small cot; a
washstand, with a little looking-glass hung over it from a tack in the wall; a pine-table, with pen, ink, and paper on it; an old line-engraving, representing Bacchus, hung on the wall - and opposite, a similar one of Silenus: these constituted the visible environments of Walt Whitman. There was not,
apparently, a single book in the room.... . The books he seemed to know and love best were the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in his pockets while we were talking. He had two studies where he read: one was the top of an omnibus; and the other a small mass of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island.... . The only distinguished contemporary he had ever met was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn, who had visited him.... . He confessed to having no talent for industry, and that his forte was "loafing and
writing poems:" he was poor, but had discovered that he could, on the whole, live magnificently on
bread and water.... . On no occasion did he laugh, nor indeed did I ever see him smile.'

If he does not laugh, he is humorous enough in his poems, although, it may be, without being aware of it. Under the head of 'Wonders' - and if he has the bump of Wonder, I am afraid he has not that
of Veneration - he thus discourses:
 

The notion of nudging one's self to listen is capital, but suggests that there may be a tinge of
Irish-American in Mr Walt Whitman's otherwise pur sang (as he would term it). Here is something
which, while reminding one in its form of Mr Martin Tupper, would, if the idea should be attributed to him, give that respectable gentleman a fit:
  We cannot more fitly conclude our notice of this really remarkable man than by quoting his most
characteristic poem. It is from the Leaves of Grass, and is called 'Burial.' It expresses very
strikingly in his strange rhythm the thought that has struck most of us who have any egotism. How strange that the world should have wagged on for ages before we came into it, and how still stranger (and more audacious) that it will still continue to wag on, when we have ceased to wag.  The poet considers the universalness of this thing called Death But the particular illustration which Walt Whitman characteristically selects of Burial is by no means
that of the President, but of an old Broadway stage-driver. It is so graphic, that it might be a sketch by Dickens, and yet it has a weird sort of rhythm about it that separates it from prose of any sort:
 

Return to Index.