In the works named above we have two not unmete representatives of the extremes of the Old and of the New World poetic ideal: Bothwell, the product of the severely critical, refined, and ultra-conservative author of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers; and Leaves of Grass, the wild, exuberant, lawless offspring of Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy, "One of the Roughs!"
[...]In contrast with this we have named the effusions of the Brooklyn Bard. If the accredited author of "Firmilian" has now shown us what a poem ought to be, assuredly Walt Whitman is wide of the mark. Externally and internally he sets all law, decorum, prosody and propriety at defiance. A tall, lean, sallow, most republican, and Yankee-looking volume, is his Leaves of Grass; full of egotism, extravagance, and spasmodic eccentricities of all sorts; and heralded by a sheaf of double-columned extracts from Reviews - not always the least curious of its singular contents. Here, for example, is a protest against the intrusion of the British muse on the free soil of the States of the Union, which must surely satisfy the most clamant demand for native poetics and republican egotism:
"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; everything receives its tinge from that. In the verse of all those undoubtedly great writers, Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare 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."- and here accordingly is something essentially different from all poets, both old and new.
The poet, unnamed on his title page, figures on his frontispiece, and unmistakeably utters his own poem:
"I celebrate myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe, and invite my soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease -
Observing a spear of Summer grass."
Such is the starting point of this most eccentric and
republican of poets; of whom the republican critic above quoted,
after contrasting with him Tennyson, as "The bard of ennui, and
the aristocracy and their combination into love, the old stock
love of playwrights and romancers, Shakespeare, the same as the
rest." -concludes by confessing his inability to decide whether
Walt Whitman is "to prove the most lamentable of failures, or the
most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature."
Assuredly, the Brooklyn poet is no commonplace writer. That he is startling and outre, no one who opens his volume will doubt. The conventionalities, and proprieties, and modesties, of thought, as well as of language, hold him in no restraint; and hence he has a vantage ground from which he may claim such credit as its licence deserves. But, apart from this, there are unmistakeable freshness, originality, and true poetic gleams of thought, mingled with the strange incoherencies of his boastful rhapsody. To call his Leaves poems, would be a mistake; they resemble rather the poet's first jottings, out of which the poem is to be formed; the ore out of which the metal is to be smelted; and, in its present form, with more of dross than sterling metal in the mass.
To find an extractable passage is no easy task. Here a fine suggestive fancy ends in some offensive pruriency; there it dwin- dles into incomprehensible aggregations of words and terms, which - unless Machiavelli was right in teaching that words were given us to conceal our thoughts, - are mere clotted nonsense! Were we disposed to ridicule: our selections would be easy enough; or gravely to censure: abundant justification is at hand. We rather cull - not without needful omissions - the thoughts that seem to have suggested the quaint title of Leaves of Grass.
"Loafe with me on the grass...... loose the stop from
your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want: not custom or
lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
............
I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest
brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my
brothers.... and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the Creation is love;
And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the
fields.
A child said, what is the Grass? fetching it to me with
full hands;
How could I answer the child?.... I do not know what it
is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of
hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name some way in the corners, that
we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child... the
produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting, alike in broad zones and
narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressmen, Cuff,
I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of
graves.
............
............
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the
surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
What is less or more than a touch?
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
............
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the
journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of
sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d' uvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of
heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any
statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of
infidels."
This passage is far from being the most characteristic of the
poem, and even in it we have stopped abruptly for one line more,
and........ Yet this will show that the punctuation is as odd as
any other feature of the work; for the whole is full of conceits
which speak fully as much of coarse vain-glorious egotism as of
originality of genius. Any man may be an original, whether in the
fopperies of the dress he puts on himself or on his poem. We are
not, therefore, disposed to rate such very high, or to reckon
Walt Whitman's typographical whims any more indicative of special
genius, than the shirt-sleeves and unshaven chin of his
frontispiece. If they indicate any thing specially, we should
infer that he is a compositor by trade, and, for all his
affectations of independence, could not keep "the shop" out of
his verse. But that he sets all the ordinary rules of men and
poets at defiance is visible on every page of his lank volume;
and if readers judge thereby that he thinks himself wiser than
all previous men and poets - we have no authority to contradict
them. That some of his thoughts are far from vain or common
place, however, a few gleanings may suffice to prove; culled in
the form, not of detached passages but of isolated ideas - line,
or fragments of lines: -
"The friendly and flowing savage.... Who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization or past it and mastering it?"
"The welcome ugly face of some beautiful soul."
"The clock indicates the moment.... but what does
eternity indicate?"
"Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, the vapor from
the nostrils of death,
I know I was even there.... I waited unseen and always,
And slept while God carried me through the lethargic
mist,
And took my time.... and took no hurt from the foetid
carbon."
"See ever so far.... there is limitless space outside of
that,
Count ever so much.... there is limitless time around
that.
Our rendezvous is fitly appointed.... God will be there
and wait till we come."
These doubled and quadrupled points, let us add, pertain to the
original, whatever their precise significance may be. Here again
is a grand idea, not altogether new; and rough in its present
setting, as the native gold still buried in Californian beds of
quartz and debris. Nevertheless it is full of suggestive thought,
and like much else in the volume - though less than most, - only
requires the hand of the artist to cut, and polish, and set, that
it may gleam and sparkle with true poetic lustre: -
"A slave at auction!
I help the auctioneer.... the
sloven does not half know his business.
Gentlemen look on this curious creature,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high
enough for him,
For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years
without one animal or plant,
For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled.
In that head the allbaffling brain,
In it and below it the making of the attributes of
heroes.
Examine these limbs, red, black or white.... they are
very cunning in tendon and nerve;
They shall be stript that you may see them.
Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh
not flabby, good sized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.
Within there runs his blood..the same old blood..
the same red running blood
There swells and jets his heart.... There all passions
and desires.... all reachings and aspirations:
Do you think they are not there because they are not
expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?
This is not only one man.... he is the father of
those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich
republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless
embodiments and enjoyments.
How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his
offspring through the centuries?
Who might you find you have come from yourself?"
"Great is life..and real and mystical..wherever and
whoever,
Great is death.... sure as life holds all parts
together, death holds all parts together;
Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the
light, death is greater than life."
Such are some of the "Leaves of Grass," of the Brooklyn poet who
describes himself in one of them as:
"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos!"
But if the reader - recognising true poetry in some of these, -
should assume such a likeness running through the whole as
pertains to the blades of Nature's Grass, we disclaim all
responsibility if he find reason to revise his fancy.
In the two very diverse volumes under review it seems to us
that we have in the one the polish of the artist, which can
accomplish so much when applied to the gem or rich ore; in the
other we discern the ore, but overlaid with the valueless matrix
and foul rubbish of the mine, and devoid of all the unveiling
beauties of art. Viewed in such aspects these poems are
characteristic of the age. From each we have striven to select
what appeared most worthy of the space at command, and best
calculated to present them to the reader in the most favorable
point of view consistent with truth. And so we leave the reader
to his own judgment, between the old-world stickler for
authority, precedent, and poetical respectability, and the new-world
contemner of all authorities, laws, and respectabilities
whatsoever. Happily for us, all choice is not necessarily limited
to these. The golden mean of poesie does not, we imagine, lie
between such extremes. There are not a few left, both in England
and in America, for whom old Shakspeare is still respectable
enough, and poetical enough, - aye and free enough too, in spite
of all the freedom which has budded and bloomed since that year
1616, when his sacred ashes were laid beneath the chancel stone
whose curse still guards them from impious hands. Nevertheless we
have faith in the future. We doubt not even the present. When a
greater poet than Shakespeare does arrive we shall not count him
an impossibility.