Whitman in France and Belgium

As early as 1860 the Saturday Press reprinted (or so it is claimed) an article published in Paris in the Bibliographie Impériale (which never existed) announcing the imminent publication of a French translation of Leaves of Grass by one V.H. (Victor Hugo? Who knows?). After praising the eccentric aesthetics of the American poet, the article quoted samples of the forthcoming translation, but sooner or later readers could not help but realize that what they were reading was not a true translation but a comic parody, expecially when they came to such lines as: O meère! O fils! O troupeau continental! . . . O toi-même! O Dieu! O moyen divin! O forts de la Halle barbus! O poètes! O dormeurs! Eau de Javelle! The last line with the pun on "O" was particulary satirical, and the exclamation point, which had lyrical value in the text, had become a point d'ironie.

The whole article was a joke. Actually, the first serious translation of some of Whitman's poems (preceded by a brief introduction) appeared only one year later in 1861. It was by Louis Etienne and was published in La Revue Européenne (November 1, 1861) under the title "Walt Whitman, poète, philosophe et 'rowdy.'" It was a severe indictment. Whitman was represented as "lawless" and embodying "American turbulence." He was "one more pantheist and St. Simonian in the land of emigration, . . . that republic which is not a state . . . but a still chaotic world." He practices "the religion of the flesh," Etienne also said, and "justifies crime and unreservedly lauds vice." Etienne, moreover, attacked the formlessness and incoherence of Whitman's poetry. Such a reaction was to be expected at a time when, under Napoléon III's rule, all liberal ideas were banned and democracy was regarded as synonymous with disorder and anarchy. Though Victor Hugo claimed he had put the red Phrygian cap on the dictionary in the 1830s and abolished all distinctions between "noble" and common words, French poets still wrote in a literary and ornate language, obeyed strict prosodical rules, and danced with their chains, as Voltaire had put it a century earlier, though he was no innovator himself. French readers therefore could only be horrified by Whitman's vocabulary and the lack of rhymes and set patterns in his poems. How could he dare speak of "the handkerchief of the Lord" when in translations of Othello, even Desdemona's handkerchief was chastely replaced by a diamond necklace. Whitman was definitely vulgar. The only acceptable American poet, in the opinion of French connoisseurs, was Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire had translated "The Raven" and "The Philosophy of Composition" two years before. Compared to Poe, Whitman was a savage and a "rowdy."

Things did not change radically after the fall of Napoléon III. In 1872 an influential critic, well-read in English literature, Mme. Blanc (Thérèse Bentzon) could still write in the Revue des Deux Mondes (June 1, 1872) an article entitled "Un poète américain, Walt Whitman: 'Muscle and Pluck Forever.'" She condemned him for the crudity and bad taste of his naturalism and for combining the worst excesses of Victor Hugo with "the most poisonous compositions of Baudelaire." (She must have been thinking of the six poems that a tribunal obliged Baudelaire to remove from Les Fleurs du mal in 1867.)

In 1877 Henry Cochin, the brother of the famous surgeon, still traumatized by the horrors of the Commune, violently protested in Le Correspondant against the dangerous anarchism and immorality of "To a Foil'd Revolter or Revoltress." This, he said, is "Democracy run wild, a form of insanity and megalomania." He also criticized the excessive length of some of Whitman's lines. He counted 101 syllables in one of them, whereas there were only 12 in the traditional alexandrine. It was really too much, he thought.

There were some signs of change, however. In the very year when Mme. Blanc published her attack, a more liberal and open-minded critic, Henri Blémont, came to Whitman's defense in a series of three articles in La Renaissance Littétaire et Artistique (June 8, July 6, 13, 1872). "He is not Art," Blémont wrote, "he is much more than that, he is life. He is emminently personal, but he includes the whole world in his personality. . . . He is Lucretius's ideal poet. Not only nothing human, but also nothing superhuman or even subhuman is alien to him." It was a dithyrambic eulogy based on the reactions of a number of English poets whose names Blémont mentioned in his article: W. M. Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, Moncure Conway, Roden Noel, and Swinburne, but it had no appreciable effect on French opinion, because apparently French readers were already discouraged by Whitman's lack of art and taste. This is the reason Leo Quesnel gave in an article in the Revue Bleue twelve years later (February 16, 1884), and, to his mind, Leaves of Grass would never be as popular in France as Great Britain because Whitman's poetry was untranslatable. "How could one manage to naturalize it?" he asked. "When translated, Whitman is no longer Whitman: his free and rich language . . . cannot be poured into the narrow and pure mould of romance languages."

Despite this pessimistic affirmation, Quesnel himself translated "With Antecedents" for the Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse in February 1886, and a very gifted young poet, Jules Laforgue, in the same year very successfully translated several "Brins d'herbe" from that "astonishing American poet, Walt Whitman," as he said. They appeared in three issues of La Vogue (June 28, July 5, August 2, 1886), a little magazine edited by the symbolist poet Gustave Kahn and devoted exclusively to poetry. Whitman was now launched. After this, he was officially recognized and adopted by the symbolists. Further translations and laudatory articles about him multiplied and appeared in quick succession. There were some good translations in particular by Francis Vielé-Griffin, a French symbolist who was born in America, and by Teodor de Wyzewa, who was of Polish descent. Vielé-Griffin translated "Faces" and "A Locomotive in Winter" (to stress Whitman's modernity) in La Revue Indépendante (November 1888), and Teodor de Wyzewa translated a fragment of "Salut au Monde!" for the Revue Politique et Littéraire (April 1892). Unfortunately, Jules Laforgue could not continue his translations. He died the following year, but he was succeeded by Léon Bazalgette two decades later.

In the meantime, as P. Mansell Jones has shown, Whitman's poetry and aesthetics seeped into the works of some of the symbolists, who like him, wanted to suggest meaning (particularly through music), rather than state it explicitly and who believed in being indirect rather than direct. He was therefore regarded as a bold forerunner by Teodor de Wyzewa. And indeed, there seems to have been a kind of preestablished harmony between Whitman and French symbolism. The two American-born French symbolists, Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, who could read Leaves of Grass in the original text, were especially susceptible to his influence. Their poems echo his ideas and themes, though they remained faithful to the rules of French prosody. Two Belgian poets were bolder: Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck. The former, in his later works, Les Villes tentaculaires (1895), Les Visages de la vie (1899), Les Forces tumultueuses (1902), and La Multiple Splendeur (1906), broke with the traditional stanzaic patterns and used long lines somewhat reminiscent of Whitman's free verse. He also, contrary to the French symbolists, sang modern industry and large cities, as Whitman had done, but in a pessimistic mode. He rejected, he said, "accepted rules and official parodies" and preferred to translate "what affected his whole being, his bones, his muscles, his nerves, thanks to an infectious emotion which passed from exterior things to his soul . . . a commotion . . . a deep interior upsurge which supplied him with the rhythm of his verse." The influence of Whitman on Maeterlinck was still stronger. In his Serres chaudes (1889), he imitated Whitman's repetitions of words and phrases, gave up rhyme and regularity, and created a variety of vers libre. In the poem entitled "Regards," he even closely followed "Faces" as translated by Vielè-Griffin.

Vers libre caught on very slowly in France, but it definitely had its origin in Leaves of Grass. The earliest examples were two poems in Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886), "Marine" and "Mouvement," and Rimbaud may very well have read the translations of Whitman published in La Renaissance Littéraire in 1872. Édouard Dujardin says so in his "Les premiers poètes du vers libre," in the Mercure de France (March 1921), though he quibbled about the difference between French vers libre and Whitman's verset. Anyway, it was in vers libre that Francis Jammes wrote his nature poetry, De L'Angélus de l'aube à l'Angélus du soir (1898) and Vivre en Dieu (1910), and Paul Fort his innumerable Ballades françes (1897–1937). Valéry Larbaud, a rich cosmopolite who could read Leaves of Grass in English, adopted a technique reminiscent of Whitman's in A. O. Barnabooth—ses poésies (1908), but the tone he used was humorous, and did Whitman à la blague.

An important factor in the growth of Whitman's reputation in France at the end of the nineteenth century was a critical essay by Gabriel Sarrazin in La Nouvelle Revue (May 1, 1888). It began with an extremely sympathetic study of Whitman's pantheism. Sarrazin equated Leaves of Grass with the writings of the great Oriental mystics and also detected Hegelian traits in the poet's philosophy. Whereas Whitman had so often been described as an illiterate "rough," a wild "rowdy," Sarrazin emphasized his culture. "He had read everything we have read ourselves," he concluded, and he praised his art and the breadth of his thought which reconciles "Jesus and Spinoza, the Brahmins and the Encyclopaedists, Lucretius and Fichte, Darwin and Plato." Whitman's disciples were delighted with such an enthusiastic and well-balanced tribute from a European.

As symbolism gradually lost its impetus, readers and writers became less sensitive to Whitman's art than to the content of his poems—to such an extent that the fragmentary translations by Daniel Halévy and Henry Davray, which appeared after 1910, were no longer in verse but in prose. Halévy even tended to concentrate exclusively on Whitman's political message, and in his "Chants démocratiques" he rendered "A Song for Occupations" by "Aux Ouvriers." A few years later, Elsie Masson, who also translated some of Whitman's poems (in free verse), characteristically entitled an article on the poet in the Mercure de France (August 1, 1907) "Whitman, ouvrier et poète."

In the second decade of the twentieth century Whitman suddenly ceased to be the cult-object of small coteries of aesthetes or leftist intellectuals. His reputation spread in the general public thanks to the almost simultaneous publication of his biography and a complete translation of Leaves of Grass by Léon Bazalgette. The biography appeared first in 1908: Walt Whitman: l'homme et son oeuvre, in two volumes. It was published by an important publishing firm, le Mercure de France, which helped its diffusion. Bazalgette was an unconditional admirer of Whitman, and his book was a hagiography in the tradition of R. M. Bucke and Horace Traubel rather than an impartial biography. He had a tendency to speak through his heart as some people speak through their noses (to take up a phrase which André Gide applied to someone else). His Whitman was a supernatural figure, an inspired prophet rather than a mere poet, the founder of a new religion. As for Bazalgette's translation of Leaves of Grass, it was similarly idealized but extremely awkward and flat, for he was no poet and was attracted to Whitman only by his religious and political themes. It followed the text too closely, and, though it rendered the poems verse by verse rather than in prose, it had no rhythm whatever. Yet, as it was the first time French readers had a chance to read the whole of Leaves of Grass, it was extremely popular and was reprinted several times.

Bazalgette's translation appeared at a time when a movement called unanimisme founded by Jules Romains was developing. Fernand Baldensperger defined its aim as "a sort of pantheistic and pansocial vision where the poor individual is more or less absorbed." There were undeniable echoes of Leaves of Grass in Jules Romains's La Vie unanime (1908), which celebrated the collective soul of large city crowds, and in the poems of other members of the group (sometimes called "L'Abbaye" [de Créteil]), Georges Duhamel and Georges Chennevière, who were also, like Whitman, "lyricists of the body."

But Whitman did not remain the exclusive property of those who felt a transcendental presence behind the material appearances and/or believed in Man-en-Masse. The aesthetes were not long in reacting. They were grouped around the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a literary magazine founded in 1905, which soon became very influential. They championed a new form of purified and rationalized symbolism, and André Gide was their leading spirit. He strongly objected to Bazalgette's translation, which he thought both inartistic and "prettified"—"prettified" because, in particular, it completely censored Whitman's homosexuality. (Bazalgette systematically translated "love" as "affection.") It gave a distorted and idealized image of the poet. Gide therefore welcomed with enthusiasm the introduction that he had invited Valéry Larbaud to write for a collection of translations of Leaves of Grass which he planned to publish as early as 1914 and which was eventually published in 1918 under the title of Walt Whitman: Oeuvres Choisies (see selection 1). Larbaud completely destroyed the legend built around Whitman by his American admirers, denying, to begin with, that Whitman was ever a workman. He was a typographer who became a journalist, a great solitary, not a "great camerado," and Bazalgette's biography was, in Larbaud's opinion, the work of a disciple rather than a critic. He explained the growth of Whitman's philosophy by the triple influence of the German idealists (and more particularly, Hegel), the formation of the American nation before his very eyes, and Emerson's Essays. He did not especially care for Whitman's ethics and politics and attached much more importance to the tone of Leaves of Grass, to what he called "expression" and "effusion." He concluded that, though the doctrine it contained would sooner or later be considered mere deadwood like Dante's theological niceties, Whitman's poetry would be saved by its original rhythm and its style, which replaced eighteeth-century "poetic diction" for which Wordsworth had in vain tried to find a substitute.

Besides Larbaud's introduction, the 1918 Oeuvres Choisies contained Laforgue's and Vielé-Griffin's translations, as well as new ones by Louis Fabulet, André Gide, and Larbaud himself. It was for several decades the best translation available and the most influential, though, by a strange aberration, "Song of Myself" was hardly represented at all.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, more and more people were becoming interested in Whitman. They saw him as a "teacher of energy" (Maurice Barrès's phrase). Philéas Lebesque in particular proclaimed: "We have had enough of depressing pessimists!" He saw above all in Whitman a prophet, the author of new Vedas and a Nordic poet like himself. He contributed with Paul Fort, Chennevière, Jules Romains, and Bazalgette to a review called L'Effort. A little later, Henri Guilbeaux founded a movement along the same lines, "Le Dynamisme," which took over L'Effort, now called L'Effort libre. The Swiss adventurer Blaise Cendrars obeyed Whitman's call, allons!, and sang with verve his journey across Asia in his Prose du Transsibérien (1913), which actually was not in prose but in free verse. Like Whitman, he thought that "merely existing is true happiness."

During the Great War, which was a "European Civil War," Whitman once again served as a comforter, just as he had during the American Civil War. Bazalgette translated The Wound-Dresser (Le Panseur de Plaies) (1917). Georges Duhamel, then an army doctor, bore it in mind when he wrote La Vie des martyrs (1917). Like Whitman, he healed some men "by talking to them in a low voice, smiling at them or stroking their foreheads."

Thanks to the combined influence of the Bazalgette and NRF translations, reinforced in 1926 by a translation of Specimen Days (Pages de journal) by Bazalgette, Whitman's influence reached its peak after the war in the 1920s. Only one author resisted it, Paul Claudel, who strongly disapproved of Gide's and Whitman's homosexuality and, for this reason, declined Gide's invitation to contribute to the NRF translation. Yet, his lyric poems, notably his Cinq grandes odes (1900–1908), were written in free verse akin to Whitman's. He probably had bought a copy of Leaves of Grass at the time of his first stay in the United States as French consul in New York and Boston. He said himself that he admired Whitman's cosmic inspiration, but he vigorously denied that he had ever been influenced by him as regards his ideas or his technique, which he claimed was wholly instinctive and personal.

Claudel was all the more shocked by Whitman's homosexuality when on April 1, 1913 (All Fools Day!), Guillaume Apollinaire published in the Mercure de France a description of Whitman's funeral, which, according to what an eyewitness told him, had been an orgy, a pretext for sexual perverts to drink and make merry in the cemetery until dawn. This was strongly denied by Stuart Merrill and led to a polemic in which even Eduard Bertz, the German critic, took part.

Despite this, Bazalgette became a more and more fervid worshipper of Whitman. In Le Poème-Evangile de Walt Whitman (1921) he nearly deified him and interpreted Leaves of Grass as a new Gospel. His friend Marcel Martinet, the literary editor of L'Humanité, the Communist daily, and one of the contributors to L'Effort, greeted its publication with the following words on July 13, 1922: "Dear Walt! . . . he re-opened to me the Paradise of the world. The words of dear Walt! They are not the words of a writer, but truly revolutionary words which can raise a dispirited man to his feet. . . ." Martinet was a poet himself, and his Eux et Moi: Chants d'identité in blank verse often reads like a serious parody of Whitman.

André Gide composed a new version of his rather decadent Les Nourritures terrestres (1897). Under Whitman's influence it became Les Nouvelles nourritures (1935). Instead of calling the young man for whom he was supposedly writing Nathanaël—"too plaintive" a name, he said—he now called him "comrade" and considered himself a "new Adam born for happiness." The Provençal novelist Jean Giono, who hated large cities, admired Whitman's cosmic poems. "I think of Whitman and of Paumanok, the fish-shaped island," he wrote in Présentation de Pan in 1930. He still thought of him a few years later when he put Le Serpent d'étoiles under the aegis of a line from Leaves of Grass.

By this time the existence of an autonomous American literature had at last been recognized by French academics, and in 1929 Jean Catel published his searching study of the genesis and growth of the first edition of Leaves of Grass under the title of Walt Whitman: La naissance du poète (see selection 2). The following year Catel, a poet and musician, devoted a second (slimmer) volume to Rythme et langage dans le première édition des "Leaves of Grass." Both books were pioneer work of the finest quality. Unfortunately, they have never been translated into English, which is why a sample of the first one is included here.

After World War II there was a renewal of interest in American literature, and in 1948 Paul Jamati published a small book on Whitman in the very popular series of Pierre Seghers's "Poèetes d'Aujourd'hui." It contained a fairly long biographical introduction in which he tried to put the clock back to Bazalgette's time. He saw in "Calamus" simply a celebration of brotherly love and in Whitman primarily the poet of Man-en-Masse. He consequently denounced as subverters of democracy all the critics who were attracted mainly to Whitman's art and personality. In the rest of the volume, he merely reprinted Bazalgette's translation of some of Whitman's poems.

In fact, this simplistic and ideologically oriented book had little influence. It was as a poet that writers continued to celebrate Whitman, as a number of them did in the 1960s and 1970s. Jules Romains thus declared in 1972: "Walt Whitman's poems are indeed poems in which the human soul reveals itself with simplicity and vigor (quite different in this respect from Edgar Allan Poe whose importance and greatness I do recognize)" (see selection 3). Jean Guéhenno, a member of the French Academy, an essayist, and a fervent admirer of Rousseau, saw in Leaves of Grass "the most intimate, the most carnal of books," like Montaigne's Essays, and celebrated Whitman as "the greatest bard of Democracy that ever was." Another Academician, Maurice Genevoix, whose novels about forests and poachers had made him famous, in Un Jour (written when he was eighty-six) deliberately illustrated Whitman's "Enough to merely be!" Jean-Marie Le Clézio, a much younger writer and author of political novels, wrote (directly in English, as he is a Mauritian): "Whitman is still among us. His eye and his voice still invent our shapes and our words. He is even the most alive of us all."

Since the end of World War II, Whitman's works have never ceased to be translated and studied. Thus in 1951 Pierre Messiaen published Walt Whitman: Choix de poèmes, which contained a sensible introduction, but the translation was spoiled by several blunders. In 1954 my own L'Evolution de Walt Whitman après la première édition des "Feuilles d'herbe" offered to the French publich a well-balanced biography of the poet and thorough critical study of his works based on materials gathered in America during a three-year stay. It was later translated and published in two volumes by Harvard University Press (1960–1962). I also translated a selection from Leaves of Grass which went through several editions in the form of a bilingual anthology. It was declared the best translation of Leaves of Grass to date by Alain Bosquet, a distinguished poet, novelist, and critic. Bosquet himself wrote a brilliant introductory book about the poet, Whitman (1959), which contained several of his own translations.

In the course of a 1989 televised interview, Henri Thomas, a novelist and essayist born during World War I, lamented: "Whitman is now forgotten. Ah! how beautiful forgotten things are in retrospect!" This was much exaggerated, but it is true that Whitman's poetry has lost part of its appeal and power. Whitman is no longer regarded as a prophet of democracy and a revolutionary—through no fault of his own but simply because the word "democracy" has become devalued and now often leaves people cold. All its poetry has evaporated. It is too often synonymous in Western Europe with corruption, moral laxity, the oppression of minorities, and distrust of elites. It is no longer based on virtue, as Montesquieu believed, but on jealousy. It is now considered a necessary evil rather than an inspiring ideal and the supreme good. Whitman's faith in science and progress is similarly out of date at a time when people feel threatened by the atom bomb, holes in the ozone, and acid rain.

But Whitman's prestige, nonetheless, remains as great as ever among lovers of poetry and students of American literature, to whom he still gives the same shock of discovery and the same thrill as he did to Emerson in 1855. Two recent facts tend to prove it. First, in 1987 Claudette Fillard defended at the Sorbonne a doctoral dissertation which was both very interesting (qualitatively) and quite impressive (quantitatively) on "Walt Whitman, poète des éléments." In eight hundred finely written pages, she methodically and exhaustively followed the role played by the four elements (fire, water, air, and earth) in Leaves of Grass. She based her study on the analysis of Gaston Bachelard and Gilberd Durand and thus produced a very original dissertation, which unfortunately has not yet been published. The second event was the publication in 1989 of a new translation of Leaves of Grass (a selection; only Bazalgette translated the whole of it). The translator, Jacques Barras, is a poet as well as a professor of English literature, and his translation is sonorous and colorful and of course technically impeccable. (It has been hailed with enthusiasm by reviewers, though is is less faithful to the text than my own.)

Despite the pollution of the atmosphere and the current distaste for democracy, Leaves of Grass is thus as green as ever in contemporary France. French poets and connoisseurs of poetry prefer the fluidity of Whitman's free verse to the mineral rigidity of Poe's poems. After all, the essential quiddity of Leaves of Grass is its liquidity.

Belgium

Ever since obtaining political independence in 1831, Belgium has led an independent literary life. Even when they write in French, Belgian authors have a somewhat different voice from their French neighbors. It must not be forgotten that their country is the confluence of two worlds and is torn between Latin and Germanic cultures. A large part of the population speaks Flemish rather than French, and cultivated Belgians are at least trilingual. They speak the two national languages, plus English and/or German. They are open to French culture if their native language is French and to German culture if their native language is Flemish.

Naturally, under such conditions, Whitman's influence was felt in Belgium as well as in France and Germany. It was felt both directly through (partial) translations of Leaves of Grass and indirectly through French poets, like Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn, who had themselves been liberated from prosodic traditions by Whitman's example. It can be found in particular in the works of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) of the Flemish name. Maeterlinck was mostly a poet in prose, but he had published in 1889 a collection of poems entitled Serres chaudes. Though most of the pieces were written in conventional form, some of them were in free verse cut up so as to look like traditional verse, such as "Regards" and "Visages." There was a kind of preestablished harmony between Whitman and him. He was fundamentally a mystic, too, and had in 1891 translated from the Flemish "L'Ornement des noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable"; like Whitman, he was interested in all the old religions of India, Egypt, and Persia. In Le grand secret, he wrote these lines, to which Whitman would have fully subscribed: "The great secret, the only secret is that everything is secret . . . everything is God . . . everything is in Him and must end there in happiness, and the only Godhead we can hope to know is our deepest self." Like Whitman, too, he believed in democracy, in liberty and equality, and he said so in prose in Le Double Jardin (1921): "Yes, it is the duty of all those whose thoughts precede the unconscious masses to destroy all that interferes with the liberty of men, as if all men deserved to be free." He also believed that all things have souls, including the "brown ants in the little wells" mentioned in "Song of Myself" (LG, 33), and he devoted three books to ants, termites, and bees, describing (almost singing) in prose their wonderful intelligence.

But the Belgian poet who was closest to Whitman was Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) (who also had a Flemish name). His first collections of poems—Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les Flambeaux noirs—were, as the titles suggest, dark, pessimistic, and full of spleen, but he was saved from his decadent despair by a happy marriage, by his conversion to socialism, and perhaps, too, by his discovery of Leaves of Grass. From 1892 on, the tone of his poetry changed completely. His symbolism, contrary to that of the French symbolists, became social, dynamic, and energetic instead of languorous and melancholy. In Les Villes tentaculaires (1895), Les Forces tumultueuses (1902), and Les Rythmes souverains (1910), he sang in free verse and in strong rhythms the tumultuous life of large cities and the power of modern industry, with even more vigor and optimism than Whitman and with such realism that one French critic complained of the rattle made by so much scrap iron in his verse.

Verhaeren denied that he had been influenced by Whitman, since Leaves of Grass had not yet been translated into French by Léon Bazalgette, but he was not wholly unacquainted with his poetry, for he was in close touch with French writers who admired Whitman and who in some cases had even translated some of his poems: Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrell (both of American origin), Marcel Schwob, and André Gide.

Whitman's example also encouraged a Belgian poet of the next generation to break with tradition. Robert Goffin (1898–1984) at first wrote conventional poetry, but in the 1930s, under the influence of Cendrars and Claudel—and through them of Whitman—he began composing lines with as many as thirty syllables (instead of the traditional twelve of the alexandrine) and with a few rhymes thrown in here and there, however, as in "Table rase," written in 1934. He celebrated in this poem the immensity of the "Kosmos," the billions of stars, the mystery of life and love. Like Whitman, he used a demotic language and did not distinguish between "poetical" and "unpoetical" words. He even occasionally resorted to slang—nénés, partouzes—and to medical terms like hémorroides. He had complete faith in humanity and, despite the atomic bomb, believed in infinite progress. Existentialism left him cold, and he sang with wonder and fervor the history of our planet in "Sablier pour une cosmogonie" ("Sand-glass for a Cosmogony"). After he visited the United States in 1939, he sang America with the same enthusiasm in "Amérique" (1944)—a poem with reads at times like a Whitmanian catalog. Following the example of Maeterlinck and for the same reasons, he devoted a trilogy to too often unjustly despised creatures: Le Roman des anguilles (1936), Le Roman des rats (1937), and Le Roman des araignées (1938).

Flemish speakers also welcomed Whitman with great enthusiasm as soon as they discoverd his poetry. In 1908 Auguste Vermeylen (1872–1945), a militant defender of the Flemish language and editor of a magazine called Van nu en straks (From Now On), translated and published some of Whitman's poems and later, in 1914, delivered a public lecture about him. At that time Paul Van Ostnijen (1896–1928), one of the greatest Flemish poets, who believed both in the irresistible power of the life-force and in collective life, absorbed Whitman's poetry as well as that of the French unanimists (themselves influenced by Whitman). The result was Music Hall (1916), which vehemently evoked in free verse the life of a large city. Afterward, under the influence of German expressionism, his poetry became more and more experimental and dadaist.

In recent decades, Whitman's impact on Belgian poets has been negligible. Interest in his poetry tends to be purely academic, and his influence is now more diffuse and difficult to pinpoint.

What were those lectures? What did Whitman want to speak about? Some biographers are amazed at Whitman's capacity for work, because one had found, after his death, registers in which he had classified and pasted a good many magazine articles, pages torn from books, etc., on all kinds of subjects. On the other hand, in view of this cheap scholarship some people have a little too quickly jumped to the conclusion that Whitman was self-taught. We are all self-taught. No matter how ideas and knowledge are gained, what really matters is how that knowledge has been understood, criticized, assimilated. As a matter of fact we have a fairly long fragment from the project of a lecture by Whitman on romantic philosophy—based on elementary text-books. It would probably be necessary to make a close study of all the other fragments and go through Whitman's registers to appraise the amount of knowledge he had gained and weigh with precision the part which this knowledge played in the development of his genius. But here is a hypothesis based on the indications given by the "papers" contained in the Camden Edition:

Between 1848 and 1850, under the threefold influence of German idealistic philosophy, the spectacle which the U.S. offered him and the reading of Emerson's essays, Whitman felt called upon to assume a lofty civic and religious mission, namely to give an ideal, a philosophy, a religion to the American people then in the making. The Christian dogmas seemed to him outworn. He felt, or fancied he felt, possessed of great truths, all brand new. And he wrote: "the priest is on the way out, the divine literatus comes."

First, let us consider the influence of German philosophy. Out of all that came from Europe—and all that came from the spirit which originated in Europe—fairly early, apparently, Whitman chose Hegelianism for his spiritual fare. Only a specialist could say what Whitman's work owes to German philosophy and in particular to Hegelianism. But it undoubtedly owes much to them. He was descended from a long line of militant Christians and had even received a sort of Christian education. Above all, he needed a universal doctrine (If I fight against the churches, it is because I love the Church) and finding nothing satisfactory in the theology of the different sects whose moral corruption shocked him (The whole ideal of the church is low, repugnant, horrible), he spontaneously adhered to the great idealistic systems which issued from Germany. In his theoretical selfishness, one might find a reflection of Fichte's "Ich"; one may see in his aesthetic ideas a more or less deep mark of Schelling's doctrines. But Hegel took his fancy above all the others. The synthesis of opposites, the philosophical concept considered as logical, universal and concrete, the very "triadism" for which Hegel was so much criticized but thanks to which it has been possible to say that the dogma of the Trinity had been rationally reconstructed (cf. A. Véra, Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, where this point is discussed); the God-Idea ceaselessly materializing in nature; evil as a necessary negation; nature and history as an odyssey of the spirit; the universe understood and unreservedly accepted; indefinite liberty and progress; such is the simplified and elementary form of Hegelianism with which Whitman became intoxicated just as he became intoxicated with the French and Italian operas that he frequently attended in New York. "Only Hegel," he wrote, "is fit for America, is large enough and free enough." He also calls him the beloved doctor of his mind and soul. . . . To idealistic doctrines, Whitman paid the same deep, earnest, eager and uncritical attention as his ancestors had done to Christian doctrines. With him everything originates in the intellectual life of the mind, not in the so-called sentimental life. Everything has its source in the ethical activity and moral earnestness of this son and great-grandson of Protestant dissenters. The objection that one may raise—that he has never read the works of Hegel and knew him only through text-books—throws the better into relief this mystic character of Whitman's Hegelianism: how many of the first martyrs had read the Gospel? (And how many Hegelians are there not unaware that they are Hegelians? And how many triads one meets unexpectedly here and there!)

Let us note at this point that none of the great European poets of the nineteenth century has had such a broad philosophical basis or such a faith as a starting point for his aesthetic activity. (Christian writers were either sentimentalists or polemists, or both.) It may be said that Whitman's poetry has been, in the field of art, the continuation of the German philosophical revolution and that his work is a sort of Gospel of the Hegelian revelation. . . . But let us note too that Hegelianism—as Benedetto Croce has shown it—is so vast and contains so many apparent, if not real, contradictions that immediately after the master's death the disciples split into two groups: Hegelians of the right (such as, to some extent, Carlyle, one of Whitman's masters) and Hegelians of the left whose first act was to publish the Communist Manifesto. Does Whitman as a Hegelian belong to the right or to the left of the movement? A specialist alone could solve the problem. But it does seem the contradictions of the Hegelian doctrine are to be found again in Whitman's works and thoughts. It is more correct to say that Hegel acts as a stimulant to Whitman's thought and consequently to his works. (It could be interesting to know when and how the poet has been acquainted with the Hegelian doctrine and with romantic philosophy in general.) Before this man whose mind was so firmly settled on a broad basis of beliefs, and to demonstrate, as it were, that indefinite liberation and progress in which he believed, there was then taking place one of the most extraordinary events in history: the making of the American nation. It was the time when the growth of the U.S. was most rapid. The immense reservoir was filling. In a few years, the Western border being constantly pushed back, had reached the Pacific, and the Southern border extended to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The population of the towns had tripled and quadrupled in a short time. Ever more numerous immigrants were coming in and completely new living conditions awaited them in this brand-new country. To this, one should add the unrest which preceded the great crisis of the Union: two civilizations at strife in the bosom of the same nation.

It has been said of Henry James, and perhaps of many other American writers, that they have seen Europe as Americans and America as Europeans. Is it not strange that it should also be possible to apply this criticism to the great national poet of the United States? But skim through the volume of "Preparatory Thoughts and Readings": his idea of Europe is naive, and makes one smile. In a note, he wonders whether the European working class is not, even nowadays, such as Shakespeare depicted it. In another he says: "The definite history of the world cannot go farther than Egypt and in the most important particulars the average spirit of man, except in These States, has not gone forward of the spirit of Ancient Egypt." And again: "The English masses . . . in comparison with the masses of the United States are at least two hundred years behind us." Of course he had heard of the Holy Alliance; he knew that Poland had been parcelled out, Italy enslaved and that reactionary monarchism triumphed even in England where it was welcomed by the poets (Southey and Wordsworth—he reproached them for having betrayed the cause of freedom); above all . . . he had never gone to Europe. He believed that this lack of political liberty entailed a corresponding degradation of character, a sort of servility, an unfitness for modern life. A queer illusion, which the partial or apparent failure of the European revolutions (1830–1848) still reinforced. He despaired of Europe and like some of our revolutionaries, he regarded the United States as a virgin land where the human plant, cramped by the restraint of "feudal Europe," would at last grow freely and bear fruit. But then what about slavery in the Southern States? What about the moral barbarity whose effects he was soon to feel when his so-called sexual poems would be threatened by Puritan persecution?

But this state of mind explains why, in Whitman's works, the words "America," "These States," "Democracy," dissolve into the one word "Future." He acknowledges it in Democratic Vistas. He acknowledges it when he says that Longfellow is the poet who at the present time is the most suitable for the United States. It is precisely the people to whom he wants to give an ideal, that will be "America," "Democracy," etc. We have the raw material, man, the transplanted European. Let us help him to liberate himself and grow. Let us create great peronalities; it is the function of the poet: "It is not that he gives his country great poems, it is that he gives his coutry the spirit which makes the greatest poems and the greatest material for poems. . . ."

And, what carries us still farther into the future, he has in mind the whole of America. In a list of the States he claims to be addresssing, we read: Nicaragua, and long before Ruben Darío had written Los Cisnes in which the poet asks anxiously:

"Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?" Whitman, addressing the three Americas, cried:

"Americanos! conquerors! . . ."

(His frequent use of French and Spanish words may be another sign of this intention: he wants to speak in lingua trina: French, English, Spanish: the three languages of North America.)

To put the matter into a nutshell, America is for him the place where a Society in the making is to work out a new millenium. His error has been to believe that America alone would have the intellectual, moral, etc., primacy over the rest of the world. And thus he may have failed to realize that when singing for his people, he was singing for all the white race, for all mankind.

Such was, roughly speaking, the part which the spectacle of the making of the modern United States played in the growth of the poet. We shall see later the part played by this same spectacle in the growth of the poem.

At the point we have now reached, namely the time when Whitman was writing "barrels" of lectures in his Brooklyn attic, we see a Whitman dedicated to the logical life and engrossed in his ethical preoccupations.

At no other time perhaps was he farther from his vocation as a poet. It is even alarming. Roughly speaking the whole tradition of the New England Christian preachers from the Mathers to Elias Hicks culminates in him. Is the poet in him going to be sacrificed to the preacher? It is a pity that we should not possess two or three complete lectures. At least we have the notes which relate to the lectures he had planned. They are very naive and rather vague. They could have been written ten years earlier by the young schoolmaster-journalist of Long Island. In one of them he advises himself to make gestures; in another he speaks of a voluntary unpaid orator who would interrupt the politicians at the Capital and accost the President in the open street to remonstrate with him, etc. Elsewhere one gathers that his lectures would merely have been summaries of his magazine clippings and reading. Lastly, the impression left by all the notes and information relating to the lectures is that Whitman had no precise doctrine composed of simple elements to teach his people. He was not lacking in the gifts that make good orators (see his lecture on Lincoln's death and the little speech he delivered on Emerson's grave). But what he wanted to express could not be held with the limits and form of a speech. Several critics have noticed that certain fragments of the lectures resemble poems and announce Leaves of Grass. This is the greatest discovery of Whitman criticism. Yes, almost all Whitman's prose pieces tend to become poems.

Like plates in anatomy textbooks on which you see the development of the embryo at the different stages of its gestation, the notes, fragments, prose pieces of Whitman show the growth of the poem. See for instance "The White House by moonlight" in Specimen Days and compare especially the Preface to the 1855 edition with the poem "By Blue Ontario's Shore."

It is undeniably therefore this tendency towards poetry, this unrecognized and repressed aesthetic activity which eventually ruined the great preaching project conceived by Whitman. He realized at last that he possessed a far more sensitive, delicate and receptive faculty than his intelligence and logical faculty. Rising from the innermost recesses of his moral life, through the superposed layers of his intellectual life, the great lyrical source had at last come to the surface and reached the light of consciousness. He did not stubbornly resist this incursion of an unreasonable and undisciplined element—his indolence, his yielding, "absorbing" nature once more stood him in good stead. Besides, his doctrine was vast enough to accept an outburst of lyricism. Whitman immediately understood that the best way to preach his ideal was to give himself unreservedly. Now literary creation and poetry alone could be the channel of this gift, or rather they were the gift itself. Thus he did not misunderstand his genius to the point of considering it merely as a means; he considered it both as a means and as an end; the moral preoccupation remained but poetry was saved.

This event was probably hastened by his reading Emerson's Essays. One should read in R. W. Emerson's Essays, the one entitled "The Poet." It is almost the portrait of the poet as Whitman was to conceive him; it is very nearly Whitman's own portrait. "I was simmering," Whitman said, "Emerson brought me to a boil." We can take his word for it. But the main thing is that the poet having come of age at last should have entered into his inheritance. (As a result, his lecture on the "poet" was left unfinished.)

The 1855 edition, printed in Brooklyn by the author's own hands, appeared—with its volcanic "Preface," rather bad as a preamble and manifesto because, in fact, it was a poem in the making. It was followed by the first poems, with their immense titles, the mastodons and iguanodons of Whitman's creation.

So far we have seen how the poet was formed, took shape and developed in Whitman; and we have tried to show the influences which were responsible for this development. Let us now see the elements and influences which were to determine the development of his poetry.

First of all, we find the intellectual activity. Basil de Sélincourt has a felicitous phrase for this: Whitman, he says in as many words, was or tried to be the first conscious poet. We think every great artist is a conscious one and that in every great work of art the part played by the critical faculty is considerable. But it is certain that Whitman appears especially conscious. And this comes from the fact that, more than any other poet of his time, he has lived on two planes: the ethical and the aesthetic. And he is capable at any given moment of passing from one to the other. His whole mind seems to work at the same time, and one thus gets at once the most inspired and the most voluntary poems. Thus the outline of the work, the title of the work (the idea of growth dominating the poem) were found immediately and never changed. Everything concurs in the same result: statement of a doctrine, revelation of a personality, civic teaching. And the unity of the poem is undeniable. Thus it is, then, that 10 years after Edgar Allan Poe had proclaimed in his lecture on "The Poetic Principle" that it was impossible to write long poems, epic and didactic poems, etc., there appeared precisely in America the longest of the great didactic poems ever written.

But this very consciousness, this will is also that which harms the poem more than anything else. When the constructions of the ethical or logical activity do not find an aesthetic expression, whenever thought fails to transmute itself into poetry, we get merely that "doctrine in its crudest form" as Swinburne said. These are the times when Whitman forgets that his method can only be that of the philosopher. Hence the catalogues, almost all of them unsuccessful, which will never take another meaning than the one they have, whatever H. Bryan Binns may think, and will never be, whatever Miguel de Unamuno may say, the supreme culmination of lyricism, but rather the result of an impotence to express. Hence also horrible lapses into allegory. It is then indeed that Whitman is "above art" or beneath, or beside it: for the poet cannot free himself from art, which is his very freedom. He simply loses his way in philosophy, which is not his field. It might have been preferable for him to persist in writing the other "athletic book"; the lectures would have been derivatives for his doctrine . . . and we should not have been obliged to read them.

Let us note this, but let us not underrate the importance of Whitman's doctrine in his poem. It is the great motive force in his works. It threw him out of the so-called normal path, and tore him away from a career—without any interest or profit for us—as a journalist and popular or well-advertised writer. It put him on his path, the path to immortality. And it remained the great stimulant to the artist: a synthesis of opposites, the glorification of democracy (which is less the exaltation of the common man than that of the essential man). America, These States, such are the fetish-words which rouse his inspiration and awake the muse of the New World. In a word, such is Whitman's religion. This is the deep source of his naivety (in the double meaning of the word): the virtue which made him rediscover on his own account the reason, the function, the dignity and the scope of art; and also the simplicity which gave him the courage to undertake, in spite of everything he lacked (and he lacked a lot!) the exploitation of the vast province which he had discovered.

The other great factor—an exciter, too—was the spectacle offered by the United States then in the making. (Living in New York was enough; it was like feeling the pulse of the land.) B. de Sélincourt almost reproaches Whitman for being the poet of an "unfinished nation." But it was precisely Whitman's luck to be the poet of a nation in the making; at least, this is what an Hegelian for whom history is nothing but the history of the indefinite development of liberty, must have thought. The United States in the nineteenth century laid the very image of this development under Whitman's eyes and thus encouraged him to write the poem of the pioneers, projected towards the future, the songs of the forward march, the momentary retreat and the renewed advance. Lastly, his nation at work and at war gave him without the help of any philosophy, the feeling of modern life and made him discover the poetry of the work and wealth of man.

History of Leaves of Grass

The appearance of Leaves of Grass was no more noticed than the appearance of any collection of society verse in the European tradition published in the same year of 1855. But at the end of the summer, Whitman received the famous letter by which Emerson recognized him and inducted him. Until now it is the finest thing that ever took place in America. Through Emerson the good news was announced to Europe and the whole world: "Americans abroad, may now come home: unto us a man is born."

It seems that at this point, assured of ultimate success, Whitman had nothing to do but devote himself to the construction of his poem, a rather absorbing task. A European poet like Wordsworth for instance, once assured that his success does not depend on a coterie, but is guaranteed to him by a certain correspondence between his poetry and the taste of an élite, keeps quiet. He will even be accused of lagging behind to the best of his ability once he is famous. But Whitman identified himself with his poem, and his poem is his doctrine, the salvation of his people and of Democracy. If he had had a fortune, he would have spent it in advertisements to make people read his poem. At least he printed a second edition of it on the back of which he engraved a sentence from Emerson's letter: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." A big blunder; and he was to make others. For he was not intelligent in the vulgar sense of the word. For the first time he took the offensive. But he did not know how to set about it. What he carried in him, that poetry which has given us such pleasure, deafened him, made him incapable of any social success; he merely succeeded in passing for the most impudent of climbers. His importunity met with silence. And when at last he found followers, he incited them so much to praise him that self-respecting critics, though favorable to Whitman, refused to join the "ignoble fray" (J. A. Symonds). Abroad, he passed for a simpleton, hungry for fame; a European critic wrote: "the mere mention of his name in a newspaper made him cry for joy."

While carrying on this ill-fated war, without losing his calm, he pursued his work. And lo! scandal and slander were added to incomprehension and hatred. The intervention of Europe was necessary to make America respect this great son of civilization. In the meantime it merely rejected his work into thicker obscurity. . . . But neither public opinion nor Emerson's arguments, nor the very interest of his book, drew a single concession from Whitman. He was too much the man of God, he was too attentive to the "still small voice" to compromise with the world. In a poem written in his old age, he compared himself to Christopher Columbus, the most illustrious of great men known for their stubborness.

From then on [after the Civil War] his life and work are better known to us. So far we have hardly caught sight of him. And even after he was surrounded by friends capable of telling us about him, in Washington, a part of his life—the part which he devoted to his young friend Peter Doyle—remains obscure. However, he appears to us as a humble public servant whose external life was almost as regular as that of Kant. Of course his whole life was directed towards his poem. It was because of his father that he remained a bachelor. (An instinct has impelled me to form no ties. . . .) One must say so: he was a man of letters; such was his trade, his main concern and that since 1850, if not since the beginning. And what is more, it is only because he was a man of letters that we are interested in him.

Another trait appears. We must renounce seeing Whitman as a hearty comrade, an unceremonious "pal," a good fellow, etc. Someone has been aware of his reserve and has even used the word aloofness which implies distance and almost a haughty reserve. . . . Let us beware: maybe this poet who claimed to live intensely has lived above all with and in his book; maybe the "great comrade" has been a great solitaire. . . . (The poem ending with: ". . . filled with the bitterest envy," might be a confession.)

This reserve may have accounted for something of the ascendency which Whitman soon exercised over his friends in Washington and later in Camden after his second stroke (summer of 1873). This second stroke turned him into an old man.

There he is, in Camden. But his friends, his admirers take good care of him. It is a noble sight.

All these good people should be mentioned by name. Let us merely mention the most faithful and best known of them: John Burroughs, W. D. O'Connor, E. C. Stedman, Anne Gilchrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke and his first young admirer Miss Mary Whitall Smith (now Mrs. Benson).

Illness, destitution, old age; he said so himself, such are the conditions under which he completed the poem so triumphantly begun in 1850. But the picture was not so dark as he chose to see it. He had always been satisfied with little and he lacked nothing. It was even at this time of his life that he made his longest journeys and had the most leisure. Above all, he was famous and he knew it. He was famous . . . in Europe and as a consequence he was beginning to be recognized in America. It was the time when he overworked the cameras. He was taking his revenge: the reporters who had split their sides with laughter over an old copy of the 1855 edition that strayed into a newspaper office, now came from New York to Philadelphia to take down in shorthand the statements of the "good gray poet." Yet he was not satisfied. He still urged that people should read his poem and he could not bear criticism. He had never ceased to see in Leaves of Grass the remedy, the book which was to give America "the spirit which makes great poems." A mixture of scandal, curiosity, gossip—in short, nothing but noise—his personal fame was not worth anything in his eyes unless it might help the poem. But how disappointing! He had thought he would be read, understood, absorbed by that American people, that American working class which he had sung, and lo, it was the literati of Europe who were reading him and if any readers were to be found in America, they were millionaire Quakers from Philadelphia, and Mr. Andrew Carnegie!

But he kept his illusions. Bliss Perry has written that, in the last years of his life, Whitman was no longer in touch with the spirit of his age. But on the contrary Whitman had every reason to believe that it was his age that had drifted away from him. (It was the eclipse of idealism; it was scientism, the time which has been called philosophical barbarism.)

"I do not think," wrote John Burroughs to W. D. O'Connor, "that either you or I are the custodians of Whitman's fame or that it lies in our power to make or unmake it." We may be confident that this truly expresses what all Whitman's friends thought, the small group, the small court at Camden. That is probably why they had no scruples in collecting so many—indeed too many—of Whitman's words.

He was evidently declining, physically and intellectually. Certain habits force themselves upon him, almost monomanias. He is more and more preoccupied with the immediate success of his work (as though he had not known success for a long time). There he is in his old age:

"Old age land-lock'd within its winter bay," and there he is alone—his "many tearing passions," the life of streets and ports which he had "absorbed" with vacant eyes and hand on hip—alone with the book, which falls heavily upon him. Everything has reference to it. They tell him about Wagner's music and he thinks of the music of Leaves of Grass. He judges the writers of his time according to their opinion of Leaves of Grass. It was then—and only then—that he was the "great literary egotist" whom Bliss Perry compared to Montaigne (one wonders why). Shall we go so far as to say that he finally admired in himself the author of Leaves of Grass? What does it matter to us?

The Results

Criticism has once and for all done away with its custom of distributing white or black balls. Its function is to follow the development of literary history, which is the history of Expression, and to examine its failures and successes. Great works are those which mark the main stages of this history. It is thus perfectly useless to discuss their merit. But they have their own particular history: failures and successes in pure expression, a mortal part and a living part.

May, 1914

In Whitman's own words, "the expression of the American poet is to be . . . indirect and not direct or descriptive and epic. . . . Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated . . . not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista." It will suffice to put side by side with these words a few verse and prose passages which will throw light on each other: . . . spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is this in it and from it? Thou, soul, unloosen'd—the restlessness after I know not what; Come let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away! O if I could fly like a bird! O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship! To glide with thee O soul, o'er all, in all as a ship over the waters; Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the morning drops 
  of dew, The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves, Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blosssoms called innocence; Sample and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere, To grace the bush I love—to sing with the birds, A warble for joy at lilac-time, returning in reminiscence.

All this concerns lilacs which Whitman from childhood associated with his most intimate memories: There was a child went forth every day . . . The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and 
  the song of the phoebe-bird . . .

Nature, the outside world have become phart of his soul, ("To glide with thee O soul, o'er all, in all . . .") to such an extent that flowers, trees, brooks, animals have become his very soul, reflections of its inner light, forms of its progressive life. Nature has become "le milieu coloré" (the colored medium) of which Baudelaire speaks where artistic composition takes place, that is to say in Whitman's case: the Soul. This is what Whitman repeatedly expresses. Let us quote a text recently published by Emory Holloway in The American Mercury for December 1924: The kernel of every object that can be seen, felt or thought of, has its relations to the soul, and is significant of something there. He who can tear off all husks and skins and pierce straight through every stratagem of concealment—

Let us again quote Baudelaire: Tout l'univers visible n'est qu'un magasin d'images et de signes auxquels l'imagination donnera une place et une valeur relatives; c'est une espèce de pâture que l'imagination doit digérer et transformer . . .

Of course, it was something new in France when Baudelaire was thus laying the foundations of Symbolism. But, on close inspection, one realizes that this theory was common practice in English poetry. For Spenser, Keats, Shelley and even for Donne, the outside world had been nothing but a "shop of images and signs."

Whitman frequently reverts to the theory that true poetry is "indirect."

"Something ecstatic and undemonstrable" which underlies life, this alone can be the subject of a poem. The subject (if it is necessary that there be a subject) is merely a pretext; the matter, the suggestion or, as Whitman says, the "indirection" of it is eternal. He is convinced that this attitude is new. He throws back into the shadows of the past all the European poets who have been "descriptive" and "epic," "the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new."

Whitman thus states the very principle of Symbolism and it could not be otherwise. For, let us remember that Whitman communicates to the reader what is most unreal in him and yet is most powerful. A dream, but a dream on which all life depended. A shade of color, but a shade which tinges all the days and nights of a man. In short, Whitman "celebrates his soul." Now, the very definition implies it, the unconscious is ineffable. In every age and in every place, mystics have professed themselves powerless to express their ecstasies in intelligible terms. They can give us only pale reflections of them. In the same manner, a poet of Whitman's temper will succeed in communicating with us only through "suggestions" and "preludes," to use terms familiar to Whitman. He suggested the ineffable and wrote preludes to the great themes of life and death; such was his attitude. Such was to be presently the attitude of the French symbolists.

The originality of Whitman lies in this, that through him we pass imperceptibly from realism to surrealism, that is to say from a state of clear consciousness in which images have distinct outlines to the unconscious, the soul, in which images are fused in that "atmosphere"—we should rather say that emotional state—in which the poet will transmit it, still warm with life. No one has known better than he how to fuse the objective outline and the inner image in such a way that everywhere reality unifies the soul while the soul animates the reality. It will suffice to indicate the fusion of the two elements in the course of our study.

Fundamental Images

One cannot insist too much on the importance of the first edition, which is really the key to all the images that will follow. It gives the notes, as it were. So it is necessary to isolate the thematic images of this work and sort them so as to bring out the gamut of the whole hymn.

I. Creation: It is the theme of the former life of the soul, so to speak. For Whitman fancies that the soul has a past, and this past is the theme of creation.

Whitman expresses it first of all by means of a manifest sign: the germ, the sprout which he has observed in fields and gardens.

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

Between the idea of immortality and the images supplied by the sprout which turns green again every year, the poet draws a logical connection which is expressed here by the verb "shows." So this is not yet symbolism proper. To reach it, the poet must suppress the grammatical link. For instance: Walt, you understand enough . . . why don't you let it out then? Come now, I will not be tantalized . . . you conceive too much of articulation. Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded? Waiting in gloom, protected by frost, The dirt receding before my prophetical screams, I underlying the causes to balance them at last.

This is pure Whitman. It will be noticed how he passes from the objective image: "Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded?" to the symbolic image which represents him identified with the germ, first in winter, then in spring, when the germ forces its way towards the light. A detailed analysis would show that each word includes a double meaning: that of the objective image, that of the symbol, for instance: "The dirt receding before my prophetical screams" is related both to the image of the seed emerging from the ground and to the notion of the errors which the poet dispels with his work. The identification is perfect. To such a degree that the image of the seed loses its reality and becomes in the next time the abstract idea of "Cause," which possesses enough universality to embrace the real and the spiritual. Hence the apparently metaphysical statement: "I underlying the causes," in which one can recognize a memory of the theories of substance, but in which the main thing is the imaginative content.

Another line shows the same process: "All truths wait in all things," a formula whose imaginative content cannot be understood unless we compare it to the preceding passages in which the word "wait" already occurs: "Waiting in gloom."

Just as the poet waits in solitude and silence for the fatal moment when he will sing, the germ of truth waits for the moment which will certainly come, for "They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it."

Whitman here adds an image, superimposed upon that of the waiting germ, the image of childbirth; it logically leads up to the line: "They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon."

Now, curiously enough from the point of view of the question that occupies us at present, these lines follow a short passage in which Whitman again symbolizes the notion of creation in the form of a germ. The passage in question is one of the erotic passages of Leaves of Grass. The sensual origin of the images cannot be doubted: I am given up by traitors; I talk wildly . . . I have lost my wits . . . I and nobody else am the greatest traitor . . . You villain touch, what are you doing . . . my breath is tight in its throat; Unclench your floodgates; you are too much for me. Blind living wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch. Did it make you ache so leaving me? Parting track'd by arriving . . . perpetual payment of perpetual loan, Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterwards. Sprouts take and accumulate . . . stand by the curb prolific and vital, Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

Whatever one may think of the chaotic accumulation of images, Whitman's instinctive mastery over words has to be recognized. A short analysis will help to understand the very clever use our poet makes of the symbolic image.

The theme is that of creation—of procreation, for Whitman does not distinguish them.

"Parting track'd by arriving" indicates by means of a familiar image the continuity of life in sexual intercourse. This idea is immediately (that is to say without any intermediary of any kind) expressed by a new image: "perpetual payment of perpetual loan," whose obscurity is cleared up only by the context (a further proof) that Whitman builds the whole and each image as merely an "indirection." The ideas of richness potentially contained in this image are taken up again in the next line: "Rich showering and recompense richer afterwards."

Whitman was not so averse to figures of speech as he claimed since we catch him here in indulging in a chiasmus, thanks thanks to which moreover he goes on to the notion of fecundation. For the richer recompense which follows the sexual act is, to the poet's mind, the propagation of life.

We should hesitate to extract this meaning from a word obscured by its place in a lyrical context, if the theme of propagation were not familiar to our poet; so familiar that one has sometimes the impression that Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass merely to celebrate childbirth. Here is the way Whitman's imagination describes this "richer recompense": Sprouts take and accumulate . . . stand by the curb prolific and vital, Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

We have already encountered and explained the notion of germination. This time, the image is extended; it is no longer a spear of grass or even a plant or tree which germinates and grows. It is a "landscape," a synthesis of lines and colors; it is the world of external things with its splendor and power: "Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden. . . ."

Rarely has Whitman's ecstasy reached such fullness and vividness. Rarely has sensual intoxication found such profound expression. For the poet's aim in this line is nothing less than a suggestion of the recreation of the world through the sexual act.

One sees how Whitman's symbolism develops. "Whoever has power in his writings to draw bold startling images and strange pictures, the power to embody in language original and beautiful and quaint ideas—is a true son of song." These words which Whitman wrote in 1846 can be applied to himself. He then expressed consciously what under the influence of his "surrealistic" attitude he was to practice unconsciously in his work after 1855. After the theme of creation comes that of existence.

II. Existence: It is evident whenever Whitman wants to express the mere existence of his ego, he has to do so in "indirect" terms. Whitman's ego was beyond the real, that is to say beyond words; consequently his expression can only be symbolic.

Yet, there are places where Whitman has tried to define himself directly. Let us transcribe them in the order in which they appear and see what they can teach us.

"I am the mate and companion of people," which must be put side by side with an identical definition which occurs further on: "I am a free companion . . . I bivouac by invading watchfires."

On page 20 (of the 1855 edition) there occurs a definition which corresponds more exactly to the artist: "In me the caresser of life wherever moving."

At times, the image is suggested rather than described in detail, as when Whitman depicts himself as an orchestra: I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and 
  slain persons. I sound triumphal drums for the dead—I fling through my embouchures the 
  loudest and gayest music to them . . .

Sometimes the definition of Whitman's ego requires more delicacy and pervasive sweetness. The most significant example is to be found on page 27, when the ego of the poet is changed into an ethereal being, a spirit or ghost, a presence which only the sweetness of evening can make us feel. "I am he that walks with the tender and growing night."

One might say in this example, Whitman's ego is dissolved in an emotion. In the example which follows it resolves itself into a vital principle: Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me . . . I stand indifferent, I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

A prophetic definition of the potentialities of the ego is to be found on page 45, where Whitman writes: "I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs."

How many future poems will be nothing but the unfolding of secondary images already contained in this definition!

It seems that we might attribute the same prophetic character to the following definition: "I am the teacher of athletes."

Like the former, it was grounded on the most reliable reality of the ego and, consequently, projects into the future possibilities which naturally came true.

Thus in 1856, that is to say, shortly after the appearance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman composed for the young men of America a speech full of that energetic determination which, according to him, was to prepare a race of athletes for the United States.

Many a passage of Leaves of Grass shows that his ego wanted to lead men along a new road towards truth and beauty: I am a dance . . . I am the ever-laughing . . . it is new moon and twilight, I see the hiding of douceurs . . . I see nimble ghosts whichever way I look, Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it is neither 
  ground nor sea . . . Only from me can they hide nothing; and would not if they could; I reckon I am their boss and they make me a pet besides. . . Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards with mirth-shouting music and 
  wild flapping pennants of joy.

It is only when reaching the last stroke of this picture where there throbs a wild "joie de vivre," that we understand the definition of the beginning: I am dance . . . I am the ever-laughing . . .

This symbol developed by a rich imagination probably indicates better than an analysis how Whitman became conscious of his deeper self. A dance, a laugh . . . that is to say what reveals to the senses the rhythm and enthusiasm of physical life. For it is through the ecstasy that comes from the mere fact of living freely that Whitman's ego best reveals itself. That is why his imagery becomes most original and significant whenever, instead of defining his ego, Whitman depicts it in action, so to speak.

III. Action: Action is in itself a symbol of the ego. With Whitman, of course, action should not be understood in the social sense of the word. If this kind of action is included in Leaves of Grass, we know that it is merely a residue of his public life. But this kind of activity does not represent the true action of the deeper self. Let us bear in mind the fact that the latter has definitely deserted the realm of clear consciousness. Whitman's ego no longer knows the meaning of good, evil, heaven and hell. It is indifferent. Its field of action is the unconscious. There it lives intensely an immense and throbbing life. It is this action alone that interests us here; it is the only one that allowed of symbolic treatment.

Yet, even in the realm of unconscious imagination, there are several planes. We can distinguish two when examining Leaves of Grass from the point of view of symbolism.

a) The passages where Whitman's ego tries to assert its supremacy. The imagery is borrowed from war and army life, for the poet wants to impart to the reader the idea and emotion of a struggle. . . .

The page in which, in reminiscent ecstasy, Whitman sings the voluptuous ascendency of the sea and the night over his soul, is quite significant of his defeat: I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom'd night . . . You sea, I resign myself to you also . . .

We have here the action of the ego, but, as it were, its negative action, which is quite characteristic of the nature of Whitman. The night, the sea, two infinite mediums in which his soul dilates in sterile exhaustion, sterile as regards practical life, but on the contrary productive of beauty. As a matter of fact, this page is the most transposed of all in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is one of the most characteristic of Whitman. Never has the imagery been more revealing than in this passage. One may say that Night and the Sea are the symbols in which Whitman has best expressed his soul. Wrapped up in them, his soul has conquered its supremacy.

b) When Whitman considers himself no longer as a defeated person, but as possessing all his combative power, the imagery will thrive on fresh air, the "splendid sun" and the open road. Night is all right for hiding our quiet ecstasies (which are nothing but preparations, as for a rush forward). Broad daylight is necessary for true action. . . .

All that symbolizes the notion of a free and spontaneous impulse in Whitman eyes, flows naturally from his pen.

He sings the horse: The gigantic beauty of a stallion . . . Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes . . . But it does not seem to him so fast as his soul: Swift wind: Space! My soul! . . . My ties and ballasts leave me . . . I travel, I sail.

c) We are thus led up to the symbols which were bound to tempt Whitman's imagination, those of the ship and the bird which have always in all languages provided poets with a convenient means of expressing the irresistible and infinite yearning of their souls: I anchor my ship for a little while only My messengers continually cruise away . . . lines which were immediately preceded by this one: "I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul."

These two symbols recur with most frequency in the poems which followed the first edition. . . .

Creation, Existence, Action . . . such are the modes of Whitman's hymn. Can there be broader ones? They contain potentially all the poetic variations of mankind.

Conclusion

We have reached the end of our exploration. The inner workings of the mind which lead a poet one day to express in rhythms and images the anxiety that haunts him, begins as soon as the imagination awakens. The one who wishes to catch them, must neglect nothing. As it is impossible for us really to follow the first steps of the mind and senses, we have to consult with great attention the early writings, when there are any, in which these first proceedings were disclosed. In the case of Whitman, there is no lack of these writings at the present day after the patient researches which have brought them to light.

While the young artist tries to express the first gropings of his dreams, he comes into contact with reality, persons and things. It is the time when a sort of struggle begins between the soul of the poet and society, a hidden struggle, which the latter, being a blind force, does not notice, and of which the former, still unaccustomed to thought, is only dimly aware.

We have tried to show that the historical juncture was such that it called for all Whitman's will, but that owing to a natural bent which his manner of life strengthened, something in him kept him away from it and isolated him in a nation in which dreamy solitude was a crime. Hence in Whitman the perpetual sense of a lack of balance between society and his soul, a lack of balance that begets evil.

We have shown that this sense of evil is rooted in the innermost heart of the poet of Leaves of Grass and it is probably to this sense that we owe the poetical works of 1855. Sensing the germ of evil deep in his soul, Whitman has naturally dreamed of a pure and healthy life.

If Whitman has told this to the public, he has kept to himself his inner anxiety. It is on a slip found in his personal papers (the date of which seems to be 1868–1870; Whitman was then 51) that Whitman makes this disclosure: "It is imperative that I obviate and remove myself (and my orbit) at all hazards (away from) this incessant enormous . . . perturbation."

What Whitman may have suffered in his flesh and in his soul on account of the "perturbation" which isolated him, we shall probably never know. But how much more human the man and the poet now become! How far we are from the prophet satisfied with himself and the world whom his blind friends insisted on seeing in Whitman. It is not in disparagement of him that we tear away the veils that a patient friendship had woven round his face. Here are his infinitely soft and sad eyes, but they are true eyes with the glint of life in them. Here is his skin, with the marks left by caresses, those of the sun and sea air, but also those of human hands and lips. Here is his whole person "that attracts and repels at the same time." His voice sings, stops on the verge of confidence. A sort of shame envelops it. And a great pride.

"We did not like his hat," said Bucke. Yet, it was the sign of his manly pride. His friends would have liked to violate Whitman's solitude. To some extent, their desire was legitimate. But there was a limit which they never overstepped. This Quaker hat always on his head in the Quaker fashion meant that Whitman would recognize no other will that his own. This will plunged its roots into the very flesh of his being. And there it drew a sap which, if it produced the poetical flowers that we admire, nevertheless separated Whitman from his fellow men forever. The penalty of genius probably.

But what an extraordinary undertaking! Here we have a work meant to draw all men together, and it has its source in a heart's loneliness. . . . the yearning and swelling heart, Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of what is real, the thought if 
  after all it should prove unreal, The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time . . .

Who would not hear in such words the murmurings of a heart? It is there rather than in the hymns that the truth lies.

The work he had dreamed of is not complete: the Leaves of Grass of 1855 are only a "prelude," as he said. The love he felt for man, the self-pity he transferred to the others; his enthusiasm for physical life, the workings of existence, all this he thought he had sufficiently expressed. He realized he had reached a poetic form which was his own. He said so in his Preface: "The expression of the American poet is . . . indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic . . . the theme is creative and has vista." We have shown that this is poetic symbolism and that herein lies both the strength and novelty of Whitman. Here also lay, for the poet, the solution of the problem of his own existence.

We trust that in the measure that "the ineffable grace of dying days" came to him, Whitman forgot his sufferings. Of his childhood and adolescence, there remained nothing but sweet reminiscences and beautiful images. Death would merge the disharmonies of his days, Death with "the beautiful touch," the Death he had so often called upon with all the unconscious forces of his being, for in death the "health" and "silence" for which he had craved all his life would at last be realized.