Whitman in the British Isles

"Those blessed gales from the British Isles probably (certainly) saved me. . . . That emotional, audacious, open-handed, friendly-mouthed, just-opportune English action, I say, plucked me like a brand from the burning, gave me life again. . . . I do not forget it, and I shall never forget it." Whitman's effusively favorable view of his standing in Britain, has not been fully endorsed by scholars, who point to the distinctly stormy reception accorded Leaves of Grass by an outraged cultural establishment, from the hostile early Critic review onward (see selection 2). But as the excited response of the elderly Charles Ollier, onetime friend of Shelley, shows (see selection 1), the book—and its author—did appeal immensely to those writers and intellectuals who belonged to the radical subculture of Victorian Britain. To such progressives, his blatant Americanness was important, since it confirmed his status as prophet of the social and political and social future, but they also saw him as the heir to a distinguished British and European tradition of libertarianism, represented in literature by figures such as Burns, Blake, and Shelley. So by 1894 Henry Salt (See selection 21) could construct around Whitman an anthology deliberately meant as a challengingly radical alternative to that influential Victorian fashioner of an Arnoldian "great tradition," The Golden Treasury. Although Palgrave's famous anthology purported to be purely literary and strictly apolitical, Salt set out to expose its covert cultural conservatism by following the example of critics like Edward Dowden, who had discovered, through reading Whitman, how instinct with political assumptions was the form, as well as the content, of works of literature (see selection 9). Dowden was one of the first critics to use Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a commentary on Leaves of Grass.

In 1885 another radical, the militant democrat and protosocialist Ernest Rhys, set out to save Whitman not only from his enemies but also from his cultivated middle-class friends, in order to make his revolutionary gospel of thoroughgoing egalitarianism known to the masses newly made literate by the education acts of the 1870s. Rhys's letter (selection 13) reminds us that Whitman's initial appeal had been to a small, maverick, middle-class elite of academics, bohemian artists, and men of letters who discovered in his classlessness and sexual frankness, his robust "healthiness" and bold optimism, a relief from the inhibitions and prohibitions of their own sickly culture (see J. A. Symonds's comments in selection 20). The activities of this coterie of devotees, which bore several of the hallmarks of a religious cult, are too well known to need further documentation, but it may be worth emphasizing that many of the critical "monologues" printed here are in fact only one side of a complex dialogue. Swinburne, for instance, was already attempting to distance himself from the more uncritically adulatory of Whitman's supporters, an increasingly violent process of self-extrication that culminated in his notorious attack on "Whitmania" in 1887. Even the urbane and measured style of conspicuously accomplished writers like George Saintsbury and Edmund Gosse (see selections 8 and 22) can be regarded as a standing rebuke to the gushing rhapsodies of the faithful. But John Addington Symonds makes a challenging point when he claims that established, conventional critical discourse is incapable of dealing adequately with the revolutionary character of this poetry (see selection 20). His call for a new and answerable style of critical discussion is relevant both to Anne Gilchrist's powerfully informal, torrentially impetuous manner of writing (selection 6) and the later vatic stance of John Cowper Powys (selection 30) or the fluid explorations of D. H. Lawrence (see selection 27 and Studies in Classic American Literature). Bearing Symonds's remark in mind, it is worth noting that the best early British (see selection 1) and American (Emerson's 1855 response to Whitman) reactions to Leaves of Grass came in the unstudied and unbuttoned form of a private letter.

It wasn't only members of the intelligentsia who were intensely attracted to Whitman's writings. From 1885 onward a devoted group of skilled workers and lower-middle-class professionals in industrial Bolton met regularly on Monday evenings to study his work. Many of them saw in him a great prophet of the new socialist "religion," and they succeeded in spreading his "gospel" of universal brotherhood to the Labour Church and to the Independent Labour Party, whose revered leader, Keir Hardie, came to regard Whitman as a fellow spirit. Edward Carpenter formed a close association with the circle; two of its members went on pilgrimages to Camden for an audience with Whitman himself; and in turn his beloved, distinguished disciple R. M. Bucke paid the group a visit in 1891. As a last token, at once touching and funny, of Whitman's special affection for the ordinary "fellows" of the "Bolton College," the poet allowed them to stuff the body of his dead pet canary—the caged bird that had comforted him during his last, gloomy years—and carry it back to England with them. In their turn, his Bolton followers remained staunchly true to his memory (see selection 25). "Whitman Day" remained a labor holiday in that part of Lancashire right down to the 1950s.

Whitman's early followers may have congregated in small groups and formed exclusive coteries, but they were nevertheless also usually part of what became a broad movement for social, political, and cultural reform in Victorian Britain. By the turn of the century this movement included radical Liberals, utopian socialists, supporters of Lib-Lab politics, and members of the Independent Labor Party, and activists in these disparate groups were usually exposed to Whitman's influence through the distorting medium of Edward Carpenter's prose and poetry (particularly Towards Democracy, which has aptly been described as "Whitman and water"). The reaction to Leaves of Grass during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can, in fact, be usefully charted against the background of the initially doubtful and then irresistible rise of broad-based Victorian progressivism and radicalism, culminating, however, in the emergence of a new politics of class conflict. When Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855, the American republican "experiment" was viewed with hostile skepticism by conservatives and with considerable misgivings even by liberals (see selection 4). But by the time of the publication in 1860 of Rossetti's influential sanitized selection of Whitman's poetry (see selection 5), Britain had already embarked on a program of social and political reconstruction that was broadly parallel to the American example. Special enthusiasm for Whitman was therefore grounded in a general optimism about "democracy," although an occasional renegade supporter, such as Roden Noel, could still express reservations about the indiscriminately "levelling" spirit of the poetry (selection 14). The prevailing climate of opinion partly accounts for the great increase of interest in American literature during the last third of the century, with Emerson and Hawthorne in particular being regarded as major writers. American authors accounted for 10 percent of all titles bought in Britain during the 1880s. The first complete and uncensored British edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1881, and twenty editions of Whitman's poetry had been published by 1900.

But if there was no longer condescending talk about the naive provincialism and comical brashness of the States, little attempt was made to examine in detail the complex historical background from which Leaves of Grass had actually emerged. (J. A. MacCulloch's comments [selection 23] are an exception.) Instead, Whitman was welcomed as the embodiment of all that was progressive—in his enlightened attitude toward science, religion, sex (see selection 16), and women (see selection 6). As the century drew to its close, however, the confidence of some liberal humanists began to wane, and even previously ardent supporters like Dowden and Robert Louis Stevenson began to revise their views of Whitman's philosophy. Even Henry Bryan Binns's 1905 Life of Walt Whitman, which registered the poet's loose affiliation with socialism, reflected the decline in Whitman's reputation as a social prophet; Binns set out to write an "objective" biography, not a polemical one. Forster's wistful little article (selection 26), addressed to "working men" during a time of bitter labor disputes, is clearly the product of this twilight period of liberalism and can be regarded as a relic of the 1890s, when Whitman's poetry had appealed to a whole generation of young Cambridge intellectuals, including Lowes Dickinson, Roger Fry, G. M. Trevelyan, and G. E. Moore. The decline in Whitman's status as a social prophet may well have helped Basil de Selincourt to concentrate almost exclusively on Whitman's standing as a poet (selection 28). His brilliant, innovative study of the unconventional and much-derided artistry of Leaves of Grass appeared just as the First World War was finally pulverizing the world of liberalism. A year later Pound's Cathay was published, helping to usher in an aggressive literary modernism whose British followers and opponents alike were mostly to treat Whitman as a mere irrelevance.

Those late-nineteenth-century texts that testify to Whitman's power as a great liberator, and even as a savior, are particularly fascinating cultural documents precisely because they now see so historically remote; once more, the most striking of them comes in the form of a series of letters sent by Anne Gilchrist to Rossetti (see selection 6). Her startlingly unguarded response may in many respects repel rather than inspire modern feminists, but taken in its totality it provides quite a fearsome insight into the plight of Victorian women. In particular, Gilchrist defends Whitman's treatment of sexuality with a fiercely passionate intelligence completely unmatched elsewhere in all the Victorian verbiage about his "obscenity." By comparison, Pauline Roose's discussion of Whitman as a "child-poet" may at first seem coyly sentimental and cutely maternal (selection 18). But it has its own subversive aspects, since it adroitly avoids passing conventional moral judgment on the sexual morality of the poetry by radically changing the terms of the discussion and incidentally points the way forward to later psychoanalytic readings of Whitman's "infantilism" and polymorphous-perverse tendencies.

Two other daring explorers of the sexual content of the poetry returned with findings very different from those of Gilchrist and Roose. Havelock Ellis and Symonds both strongly suspected that Whitman's secret erotic preference was for the homophile relationships celebrated so ambiguously in the Calamus sequence (see selections 16 and 20). Like his friend Edward Carpenter, Ellis exulted in this discovery, but Symonds's own attitude toward homosexuality permeates his writing. Yet although these Britons were among the first to crack Whitman's sexual code, he seems never to have assumed the kind of importance in gay men's circles in Britain that he has in the culture of American gays.

Both for its quantity and for its quality, then, the best of British reactions to Leaves of Grass deserved Whitman's gratitude. "Those blessed gales from the British Islands" he called the support he had received, before lapsing into a description of it as "a just-opportune English action." He was right the first time, since it was not only England but each of the countries in the British Isles that played its part in establishing Whitman's reputation. Wales did least, because its culture, strongly nonconformist, continued to exist mainly in the Welsh language, but it nevertheless contributed through the Anglo-Welshman Ernest Rhys and later through the adopted Welshman John Cowper Powys. P. Mansell Jones's comparison of Whitman to the great Belgian poet Verhaeren (selection 29) was an interesting cultural by-product of Lloyd George's recruitment appeal to his countrymen to remember that other small beleaguered European country, gallant little Belgium. Yet during the First World War, T. E. Nicholas (Niclas y Glais) used a crude form of free verse modeled on Whitman's example to produce a savage attack in Welsh on the carnage which capitalism was sponsoring. As for Scotland, the interest it showed in Whitman was quite remarkable and can perhaps best be attributed both to the pronounced liberal and libertarian strain in the culture since the period of Scottish enlightenment and to a degree of sympathetic fellow-feeling by the Scots for another non-English but English-speaking nation. No fewer than three books on Whitman were published in Scotland during his lifetime, including John Robertson's incisively intelligent polemical pamphlet (selection 11). Leading Scottish writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to the redoubtable Hugh MacDiarmid have acknowledged the significant debt they've owed to Whitman's example, and since the Second World War David Daiches has been an accomplished and prolific interpreter of his poetry (selection 35).

It was in Ireland, though, that Whitman had the greatest impact of all, as W. B. Yeats's letter best illustrates (selection 19). Dowden was, of course, an Anglo-Irishman and the center of a Whitman circle well known to the poet himself. Whitman's deepest influence on Irish literature was, however, transmitted by different means, through figures who played a key part at different stages in the Irish Renaissance. These included Standish O'Grady, AE (George Russell), Sean O'Casey, and Frank O'Connor. Even Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, registered Whitman's presence as a force in modern Irish culture, and the letters written by Yeats in his youth show how he looked to Whitman to provide a model and an inspiration for the development of an independent, indigenous Irish literature in English. Padraic Colum anticipated Lawrence in his sensitive discussion of Whitman's work as, both in form and content, a poetry of "Becoming" (see selection 31). Nor was Whitman's influence confined to the writers. The freedom fighter James Connolly took Whitman's "Defiant Deed" as the text of his address to his followers during the Easter Rising in 1916, and his friend, the famous labor leader James Larkin, claimed his love of humanity derived from the writings of Thoreau, Emerson, and "the greatest man of all next to Whitman—Mark Twain." The warmth of Irish attachment to Whitman continues to be evident in the panache of the recent studies by Denis Donoghue (selection 38), while the comments of the contemporary Ulster poet Tom Paulin (selection 43) represent a fascinating attempt, reminiscent of Henry Salt's a century ago, to link Whitman to a native British republican tradition.

What, though, of Whitman's creative influence on the writers of the British Isles? While poets as diverse as Hopkins (selection 10), Wilde, Isaac Rosenberg, and Dylan Thomas have been fascinated by his work, it seems that W. H. Auden (see selection 36) and Charles Tomlinson are pretty close to the mark when they single out Lawrence as the sole example of a major writer whose imagination was certainly informed, and had perhaps been transformed, by Whitman's poetry. Lawrence's resultant attitude toward the American was so prickly and so chronically ambivalent that between 1913 and 1923 he made at least three separate and significantly different attempts to write him out of his system. The last two essays are already very well known, while the first must await publication by Cambridge University Press, but Lawrence's marvelously suggestive letter to Henry Savage deserves more attention, since everything he says later is there in embryo (selection 27). Tomlinson's recent demonstration of the extent of Whitman's influence on Ivor Gurney is revealing (selection 42), but in spite of his sensitive tribute to Whitman in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and other poems (selection 40), Tomlinson offers in his own work a perfect example of the preference most modern British poets have shown, whenever they have turned to American literature, for Pound and his fellow-modernists over Whitman. At the same time, those writers determinedly in the British grain have—with the occasional memorable exception such as Geoffrey Grigson (selection 39)—regarded Whitman as the epitome of all that is foreign (and wrong) in American writing. The case with modern British composers has been intriguingly different, as the novelist Anthony Burgess points out (selection 370).

In retrospect, Lawrence's essay in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) can be seen to have been the culmination of almost seventy years of intense and frequently controversial discussion by British writers and critics of Leaves of Grass and its author. For almost half a century thereafter, however, Whitman was virtually ignored. Hugh l'Anson Faussett's comments (selection 32) illuminate the situation during the thirties and remind us that Whitman's philosophy of a kind of corporate or cooperative individualism was unconvincing and unsympathetic to those who believed in the need for collectivist solutions to modern social problems. Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Whitman's death in 1942, Faussett's book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, where the reviewer understandably warmed to those aspects of Whitman that had left Faussett cold—his advocacy of a personal freedom that was the antithesis of totalitarianism in both its Fascist and its Communist forms. A renewed interest in democracy not only as a political system but also as a human ideal is evident in the elderly J. Middleton Murry's postwar, and Cold War, study (selection 34).

In 1955 the Times Literary Supplement welcomed Gay Wilson Allen's The Solitary Singer: "a good biography of Whitman is particularly needed in this country, for most of us are only lightly acquainted with the social and political background of the America of his day." Since then the growth of American Studies in British universities has done much to improve the situation, and most of the discussion of Whitman over the past thirty years has taken place within that specialized professional context. The evident strengths of such a delimiting approach have, however, their corresponding weaknessess, which is why the cross-cultural comparisons effortlessly made by an elegantly perceptive nonacademic like V. S. Pritchett and a gifted general practioner like John Bayley are such vitally important correctives (selections 33 and 41). After all, Whitman's appeal in Britain had, from the very first, extended well beyond the academy and has frequently been deliciously unpredictable.

1. Charles Ollier

Letter to Leigh Hunt, February 19, 1856

[Whitman] says he is "one of the roughs," a "kosmos" etc; and in another part of his poem, he tells us his age & that he is six feet high.

"Well!" say you, "What care I? Who the deuce is Walt. Whitman?"

Let me be the first to tell you.

Walt. is an American—a sensualist—a "rough"—a "rowdy"—a "kosmos" (this is odd)—a poet—a humanist—an egoist—a transcendentalist, and a philosopher. Except the first book ever written (and who can tell what that was?) Walt. has given to the world the most original book ever composed. Other writers are derivations from their predecessors. Chaucer had his precursors; so had Spenser; so had Shakespeare; so Milton, and the rest. But Walt. is himself alone: himself in his mode of utterance, in his all-embracing philosophy, in his imagery, his description, his word-craft, and in every thing else. O the delight of getting into a new intellectual region!

Walt's book, just arrived from New York, is a quarto with very full pages, published without any publisher's name or any author's; but he faces the title with what our ancestors used to call the writer's true effigies, as much as to say "Here is the man who wrote this work. How do you like me? What do you think of me?" And there he stands in his shirt sleeves and bare neck and rough beard. He lets out his name in the course of the poem.

Walter Whitman is very fleshly as well as intellectual; and is too "particular" in the former respect. I wish it were not so. But one must be careful how one judges so large a mind. Perhaps he finds on that "side of things" as much to love and to wonder at as any other; and not only that, but in "things evil," the soul of goodness in which he "observingly distils out." He says he is "the poet of the body, and the poet of the soul: the poet of goodness, and the poet of wickedness." And wonderfully does he work out his purpose, which appears to be the universal reconcilement of things. He is obscure—he is occasionally slangy and vulgar with his Yankeeisms and plain-speaking; and his mysticism is too frequent. But his pages open a new world of thought. He is profound and far-seeing: profound because he digs to the roots of things; & far-seeing because he looks at space. He is not a driveller, like Wordsworth who is a flat variation of Cowper. He lies at the feet of no man; but stands like a great statue on a mountain-top seen from afar or like that lonely warder on the summit of one of the towers in Claude's Enchanted Castle, whom the artist has posted there forever, grasping his spear, and forever gazing over the wide, weltering waste of water. Walt. is sure to be laughed at and derided. But he evidently does not write for tavern-wits, though he may be one of them—a rake, a rough, a rowdy. In his universal love (for it is nothing short of that) of his fellow-men, he can find the friendliest words for drunkards, prostitutes & fools. He scans with a learned eye the mysteries of our nature, & cannot detect anything to hate. I can already understand half his book, and hope some day to comprehend the remainder. Very very few things in the English language are so fine—so strong—so juicy—so marrowy—so eloquent as some of Walt's passages. He will not tolerate pattern-writing (like that of Longfellow) or transmitted phrases; but is ever fresh and surprising. His poem is not in rhyme nor in blank verse; but in what one of his Yankee reviewers calls "excited prose." He divides his paragraphs like stanzas; he has long & short lines: and sometimes lines so long as to run three or four times across the page. I cannot yet find out his music though I believe him to be musical for he talks with rapture of music, classical & otherwise. Plenty of ridicule awaits him, and he is the very man to bear it, for he is himself a droll; and he is a weeper too, making his reader weep with him whenever he pleases. His main endeavor, nevertheless, is to elevate his reader with the grandeur of his philosophy and his conceptions and to make the world happier than it is. Walt. is a great poet—almost a prophet. His poem is about nothing, because it is about everything.

2. Anonymous Review

We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce. We had become stoically indifferent to her Woolly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums, and her Fanny Ferns; but the last monstrous importation from Brooklyn, New York, has scattered our indifference to the winds. Here is a thin quarto volume without an author's name on the title-page; but to atone for which we have a portrait engraved on steel of the notorious individual who is the poet presumptive. This portrait expresses all the features of the hard democrat, and none of the flexible delicacy of the civilized poet. The damaged hat, the rough beard, the naked throat, the shirt exposed to the waist, are each and all presented to show that the man to whom those articles belong scorns the delicate arts of civilisation. The man is the true impersonation of the book—rough, uncouth, vulgar. It was by the merest accident that we discovered the name of this erratic and newest wonder: at page 29 we find that he is—

The words, "an American" are a surplusage, "one of the roughs" too painfully apparent; but what is intended to be conveyed by a "Kosmos" we cannot tell, unless it means a man who thinks that the fine essence of poetry consists in writing a book which an American reviewer is compelled to declare is "not to be read aloud to a mixed audience." We should have passed over this book, Leaves of Grass, with indignant contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics attempted to "fix" this Walt Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature to America—who shall form a race of poets as Banquo's issue formed a line of kings. Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? We hope not; and yet there is a probability, and we will show why, that this Walt Whitman will not meet with the stern rebuke which he so richly deserves. America has felt, oftener perhaps than we have declared, that she has no national poet—that each one of her children of song has relied too much on European inspiration, and clung too fervently to the old conventionalities. It is therefore not unlikely that she may believe in the dawn of a thoroughly original literature, now there has arisen a man who scorns the hellenic deities, who has no belief in, perhaps because he has no knowledge of, Homer and Shakespeare; who relies on his own rugged nature, and trusts to his own rugged language, being himself what he shows in his poems.

Once transfix him as the genesis of a new era, and the manner of the man may be forgiven or forgotten. But what claims has this Walt Whitman to be thus considered, or to be considered a poet at all? We grant freely enough that he has a strong relish for nature and freedom, just as an animal has; nay, further, that his crude mind is capable of appreciating some of nature's beauties; but it by no means follows that, because nature is excellent, therefore art is contemptible. Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics. His poems—we must call them so for convenience—twelve in number, are innocent of rhythm, and resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians. Indeed, Walt Whitman has had near and ample opportunities of studying the vociferation of a few amiable savages. Or rather perhaps, this Walt Whitman reminds us of Caliban flinging down his logs, and setting himself to write a poem. In fact Caliban, and not Walt Whitman, might have written this:

Is this man with the "barbaric yawp" to push Longfellow into the shade, and he meanwhile to stand and "make mouths" at the sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not ridiculous. That object or that act which most develops the ridiculous element carries in its bosom the seeds of decay, and is wholly powerless to trample out of God's universe one spark of the beautiful. We do not, then, fear this Walt Whitman, who gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. The depth of his indecencies will be the grave of his fame, or ought to be if all proper feeling is not extinct. The very nature of this man's compositions excludes us from provoking by extracts the truth of our remarks; but we, who are not prudish, emphatically declare that the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip. Walt Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man: we, who may have been misdirected by civilisation, call it the expression of a beast . . .

3. Edmund Ollier (?) 
  "Transatlantic Latter-Day Poetry"

"Latter-day poetry" in America is of a very different character from the same manifestation in the old country. Here, it is occupied for the most part with dreams of the middle ages, of the old knightly and religious times: in America, it is employed chiefly with the present, except when it travels out into the undiscovered future. Here, our latter-day poets are apt to whine over the times, as if Heaven were perpetually betraying the earth with a show of progress that is in fact retrogression, like the backward advance of crabs: there, the minstrels of the stars and stripes blow a loud note of exultation before the grand new epoch, and think the Greeks and Romans, the early Oriental races, and the altar men of the middle centuries, of small account before the outward tramping of these present generations. Of this latter sect is a certain phenomenon who has recently started up in Brooklyn, New York—one Walt Whitman, author of "Leaves of Grass," who has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet, and by Englishmen as a kind of fool. For ourselves, we are not disposed to accept him as the one, having less faith in latter-day prophets than in latter-day poets; but assuredly we cannot regard him as the other. Walt is one of the most amazing, one of the most startling, one of the most perplexing, creations of the modern American mind; but he is no fool, though abundantly eccentric, nor is his book mere food for laughter, though undoubtedly containing much that may most easily and fairly be turned into ridicule.

The singularity of the author's mind—his utter disregard of ordinary forms and modes—appears in the very title-page and frontispiece of his work. Not only is there no author's name (which in itself would not be singular), but there is no publisher's name—that of the English bookseller being a London addition. Fronting the title page is the portrait of a bearded gentleman in his shirt-sleeves and a Spanish hat, with an all-pervading atmosphere of Yankee-doodle about him; but again there is no patronymic, and we can only infer that this roystering blade is the author of the book. Then follows a long prose treatise by way of Preface (and here once more the anonymous system is carried out, the treatise having no heading whatever); and after that we have the poem, in the course of which, a short autobiographical discourse reveals to us the name of the author. . . .

The poem is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical "lengths," like the measured prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, or some of the Oriental writings. The external form, therefore, is startling, and by no means seductive, to English ears, accustomed to the sumptuous music of ordinary metres; and the central principle of the poem is equally staggering. It seems to resolve itself into an all-attracting egotism—an eternal presence of the individual soul of Walt Whitman in all things, yet in such wise that this one soul shall be presented as a type of all human souls whatsoever. He goes forth into the world, this rough, devil-may-care Yankee; passionately identifies himself with all forms of being, sentient or inanimate; sympathizes deeply with humanity; riots with a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force and fervor of his own sensations; will not have the most vicious or abandoned shut out from final comfort and reconciliation; is delighted with Broadway, New York, and equally in love with the desolate backwoods, and the long stretch of the uninhabited prairie, where the wild beasts wallow in the reeds, and the wilder birds start upwards from their nests among the grass; perceives a divine mystery wherever his feet conduct or his thoughts transport him; and beholds all beings tending toward the central and sovereign Me. Such, as we conceive, is the key to this strange, grotesque, and bewildering book; yet we are far from saying that the key will unlock all the quirks and oddities of the volume. Much remains of which we confess we can make nothing; much that seems to us purely fantastical and preposterous; much that appears to our muddy vision gratuitously prosaic, needlessly plain-speaking, disgusting without purpose, and singular without result. There are so many evidences of a noble soul in Whitman's pages that we regret these aberrations, which only have the effect of discrediting what is genuine by the show of something false; and especially do we deplore the unnecessary openness with which Walt reveals to us matters which ought rather to remain in a sacred silence. It is good not to be ashamed of Nature; it is good to have an all-inclusive charity; but it is also good, sometimes, to leave the veil across the Temple.

4. Matthew Arnold  
  Letter to W. D. O'Connor, September 16, 1866

As to the general question of Mr. Walt Whitman's poetical achievement, you will think that it savours of our decrepit old Europe when I add that while you think it is his highest merit that he is so unlike anyone else, to me this seems to be his demerit; no one can afford in literature to trade merely on his own bottom and take no account of what the other ages and nations have acquired: a great original literature in America will never get in this way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to come, in a considerable measure, into the European movement. That she may do this and yet be an independent intellectual power, not merely as you say an intellectual colony of Europe, I cannot doubt; and it is on her doing this, and not on displaying an eccentric and violent originality that wise Americans should in my opinion set their desires.

5. William Michael Rossetti  
  Introduction, Poems by Walt Whitman

[Leaves of Grass], then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is par excellence the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity—that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the littérateur; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and pervading quality of the book is the exhuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter much under different conditions.

Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as in some sense not existing, or if existing, then as being of as much importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which Whitman stands to all sorts and aspects of them.

But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute and entire originality. He may be termed formless by those who, not without much reason to show for themselves, are wedded to the established forms and ratified sentiments of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to enlarge the canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than draw it close and exclude him. His work is practically certain to stand as archetypal for many future poetic efforts—so great is his power as an originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Légende des Siècles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind: to anything in the way of prescription, no relation at all. But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Americanism; with the movement of his predominant nation he is moved. His comprehension, energy and tenderness, are all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as for poetic genius, those who, without being ready to concede that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness and his Titanic power of temperament, working in the sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his genius as well. . . .

Besides originality and daring, which have already been insisted upon, width and intensity are leading characteristics of his writings—width both of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity of self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and expresses. He scans and presents an enormous panorama, unrolled before him as from a mountain-top; and yet whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his eye glances upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him with it for the time, be the object what it may. There is a singular interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and profounder reality beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations and auguries. He is the poet indeed of literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of readings between the lines. If he is the "cutest of Yankees," he is also as truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet. All his faculties and performance glow into a white heat of brotherliness; and there is a poignancy both of tenderness and of beauty about his finer works which discriminates them quite as much as their modernness, audacity, or any other exceptional point. . . .

There is a singular and impressive intuition or relevation of Swedenborg's; that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large sense, the general drift of Whitman's writings, even down to the passages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man, as the unit—the datum—from which all that we know, discern, and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and sensual, has to be computed. He knows of nothing nobler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical extension or recast.

Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remarkable poet—the founder of American poetry rightly to be so called, and the most sonorous poetic voice of the tangibilities of actual and prospective democracy—is in his proper life and person. . . .

A few words must be added as to the indecencies scattered through Whitman's writings. Indecencies or improprieties—or, still better, deforming crudities—they may rightly be termed; to call them immoralities would be going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have cognizance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things, and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and right, should not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech. That such a view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight, and at any rate to candid consideration and construction, appears to me not to admit of a doubt; neither is it dubious that the contrary view, the only view which a mealy-mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable, amounts to the condemnation of nearly ever great or eminent literary work of past time, whatever the century it belongs to, the country it comes from, the department of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it possesses.

6. Anne Gilchrist  
  An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman

I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I feel sometimes as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems. In the series headed "Calamus," for instance, in some of the "Songs of Parting," the "Voice out of the Sea," the poem beginning "Tears, tears," etc., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under it—stands quite still—and I am obliged to lay the book down for a while. Or again, the piece called "Walt Whitman," and one or two others of that type, I am as one hurried through stormy seas, over high mountains, dazed with sunlight, stunned with a crowd and tumult of faces and voices, till I am breathless, bewildered, half-dead. Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened. Living impulses flow out of these that make me exult in life, yet look longingly towards "the superb vistas of Death." Those who admire this poem, and do not care for that, and talk of formlessness, absence of metre, and so forth, are quite as far from any genuine recognition of Walt Whitman as his bitter detractors. Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, but that all are vital; they grew—they were not made. We criticise a palace or a cathedral; but what is the good of criticising a forest?. . .

Nor do I sympathize with those who grumble at the unexpected words that turn up now and then. A quarrel with words is always, more or less, a quarrel with meanings; and here we are to be as genial and as wide as nature, and quarrel with nothing. If the thing a word stands for exists by divine appointment (and what does not so exist?) the word need never be ashamed of itself; the shorter and more direct, the better. It is a gain to make friends with it, and see it in good company. Here, at all events, "poetic diction" would not serve—not pretty, soft, colourless words, laid by in lavender for the special uses of poetry, that have had none of the wear and tear of daily life; but such as have stood most, as tell of human heartbeats; as fit closest to the sense, and have taken deep hues of association from the varied experiences of life—those are the words wanted here. We only ask to seize and be seized swiftly, overmasteringly, by the great meanings. We see with the eyes of the soul, listen with the ears of the soul; the poor old words that have served so many generations for purposes, good, bad, and indifferent, and become warped and blurred in the process, grow young again, regenerate, translucent. It is not mere delight they give us—that the "sweet singers," with their subtly wrought gifts, their mellifluous speech, can give too in their degree; it is such life and health as enable us to pluck delights for ourselves out of every hour of the day, and taste the sunshine that ripened the corn in the crust we eat—I often seem myself to do that. . . .

You argued rightly that my confidence would not be betrayed by any of the poems in this book. None of them troubled me even for a moment; because I saw at a glance that it was not, as men had supposed, the heights brought down to the depths, but the depths lifted up level with the sunlit heights, that they might become clear and sunlit too. Always, for a woman, a veil woven out of her own soul—never touched upon even, with a rough hand, by this poet. But, for a man, a daring, fearless pride in himself, not a mock-modesty woven out of delusions—a very proper imitation of a woman's. Do they not see that this fearful pride, this complete acceptance of themselves, is needful for her pride, her justification? What! is it all so ignoble, so base, that it will not bear the honest light of speech from lips so gifted with "the divine power to use words?" Then what hateful, bitter humiliation for her, to have to give herself up to the reality! Do you think there is ever a bride who does not taste more or less this bitterness in her cup? But who put it there? It must surely be man's fault, not God's, that she has to say to herself, "Soul, look another way—you have no part in this. Motherhood is beautiful, fatherhood is beautiful; but the dawn of fatherhood and motherhood is not beautiful." Do they really think that God is ashamed of what He has made and appointed? And, if not, surely it is somewhat superfluous that they should undertake to be so for Him.

Of a woman above all. It is true that instinct of silence I spoke of is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature too. But it is not beautiful when it means an ignominious shame brooding darkly. Shame is like a very flexible veil, that follows faithfully the shape of what it covers—beautiful when it hides a beautiful thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. It has not covered what was beautiful here; it has covered a mean distrust of a man's self and of his Creator. It was needed that this silence, this evil spell, should for once be broken, and the daylight let in, that the dark cloud lying under might be scattered to the winds. It was needed that one who could here indicate for us "the path between reality and the soul" should speak. That is what these beautiful, despised poems, the "Children of Adam," do, read by the light that glows out of the rest of the volume: light of a clear, strong faith in God, of an unfathomably deep and tender love for humanity—light shed out of a soul that is "possessed of itself."

7. Algernon Charles Swinburne  
  Under the Microscope

There are in him two distinct men of most inharmonious kinds; a poet and a formalist. . . . It is from no love of foolish paradox that I have chosen the word "formalist" to express my sense of the radical fault in the noble genius of Whitman. For truly no scholar and servant of the past, reared on academic tradition under the wing of old-world culture, was ever more closely bound in with his own theories, more rigidly regulated by his own formularies, than this poet of new life and limitless democracy. Not Pope, not Boileau, was more fatally a formalist than Whitman; only Whitman is a poet of a greater nature than they. It is simply that these undigested formulas which choke by fits the free passage of his genius are to us less familiar than theirs; less real or less evident they are not. . . . What he says is well said when he speaks as of himself and because he cannot choose but speak; whether he speak of a small bird's loss or a great man's death, of a nation rising for battle or a child going forth in the morning. What he says is not well said when he speaks not as though he must but as though he ought; as though it behooved one who would be the poet of American democracy to do this thing or to be that thing if the duties of that office were to be properly fulfilled, the tenets of that religion worthily delivered. Never before was high poetry so puddled and adulterated with mere doctrine in its crudest form. Never was there less assimilation of the lower dogmatic with the higher prophetic elements. . . . [It] is one thing to sing the song of all trades, and quite another thing to tumble down together the names of all possible crafts and implements in one unsorted heap; to sing the song of all countries is not simply to fling out on the page at random in one howling mass the titles of all divisions of the earth, and so leave them. At this rate, to sing the song of the language it should suffice to bellow out backwards and forwards the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. And this folly is deliberately done by a great writer, and ingeniously defended by able writers, alike in good faith, and alike in blind bondage to mere dogmatic theory, to the mere formation of foregone opinion. They cannot see that formalism need not by any means be identical with tradition; they cannot see that because theories of the present are not inherited they do not on that account become more proper than were theories of the past to suffice of themselves for poetic or prophetic speech.

8. George Saintsbury  
  "Leaves of Grass"

It is not difficult to point out the central thesis of Walt Whitman's poetical gospel. It is briefly this: the necessity of the establishment of a universal republic, or rather brotherhood of men. And to this is closely joined another, or rather a series of others, indicating the type of man of which this universal republic is to consist, or perhaps which it is to produce. The poet's language in treating the former of these two positions is not entirely uniform; sometimes he speaks as of a federation of nations, sometimes as if mankind at large were to gravitate towards the United States, and to find in them the desired Utopia. But the constitution of the United States, at least that constitution as it ought to be, is always and uniformly represented as a sufficient and the only sufficient political means of attaining this Utopia, nay, as having to some extent already presented Utopia as a fact. Moreover, passing to the second point, the ideal man is imaged as the ideal Yankee, understanding that word of course as it is understood in America, not in Europe. He is to be a rather magnificent animal, almost entirely uncultured (this is not an unfair representation, although there are to be found certain vague panegyrics on art, and especially on music), possessing a perfect physique, well nourished and clothed, affectionate towards his kind, and above all things resolved to admit no superior. As is the ideal man, so is the ideal woman to be. Now it may be admitted frankly and at once, that this is neither the creed nor the man likely to prove attractive to many persons east of the Atlantic. If it be said that the creed is a vague creed, and the man a detestable man, there will be very little answer attempted. Many wonderful things will doubtless happen "when" as the poet says, "through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons"; but it must be allowed that there is small prospect of any such procession. One is inclined for very many sound reasons, and after discarding all prejudices, to opine that whatever salvation may await the world may possibly come from quarters other than from America. Fortunately, however, admiration for a creed is easily separable from admiration for the utterance and expression of that creed, and Walt Whitman as a poet is not difficult to disengage from Walt Whitman as an evangelist and politician. The keyword of all his ideas and of all his writings is universality. His Utopia is one which shall be open to everybody; his ideal of man and woman one which shall be attainable by everybody; his favourite scenes, ideas, subjects, those which everbody, to at least some extent, can enjoy and appreciate. He cares not that by this limitation he may exclude thoughts and feelings, at any rate phases of thought and feeling, infinitely choicer and higher than any which he admits. To express this striving after universality he has recourse to methods both unusual and (to most readers) unwelcome. The extraordinary jumbles and strings of names, places, employments, which deface his pages, and which have encouraged the profane to liken them to auctioneers' catalogues or indexes of encyclopaedias, have no other object than to express this universal sympathy, reaching to the highest and penetrating to the lowest forms of life. The exclusion of culture, philosophy, manners, is owing also to this desire to admit nothing but what is open to every human being of ordinary faculty and opportunities. Moreover, it is to this that we may fairly trace the predominance in Whitman's writings of the sexual passion, a prominence which has given rise, and probably will yet give rise, to much unphilosophical hubbub. This passion, as the poet has no doubt observed, is almost entirely the only one which is peculiar to man as man, the presence of which denotes virility if not humanity, the absence of which is a sign of abnormal temperament. Hence he elevates it to almost the principal place, and treats of it in a manner somewhat shocking to those who are accustomed to speak of such subjects (we owe the word to Southey) enfarinhadamente. As a matter of fact, however, the treatment, though outspoken, is eminently "clean," to use the poet's own word; there is not a vestige of prurient thought, not a syllable of prurient language. Yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that sexual passion occupies the chief place in Whitman's estimation. There is according to him something above it, something which in any ecstasies he fails not to realize, something which seems more intimately connected in his mind with the welfare of mankind, and the promotion of his ideal republic. This is what he calls "robust American love." He is never tired of repeating "I am the poet of comrades"—Socrates himself seems renascent in this apostle of friendship.

9. Edward Dowden  
  "The Poetry of Democracy"

The principle of political and social equality once clearly conceived and taken to heart as true, works outward through one's body of thought and feeling in various directions. As in the polity of the nation every citizen is entitled by virtue of the fact of his humanity to make himself heard, to manifest his will, and in his place to be respected, so in the polity of the individual man, made up of the faculties of soul and body, every natural instinct, every passion, every appetite, every organ, every power, may claim its share in the government of the man. If a human being is to be honoured as such, then every part of a human being is to be honoured. In asserting one's rights as a man, one asserts the rights of everything which goes to make up manhood. . . .

Having acknowledged that Whitman at times forgets that the "instinct of silence," as it has well been said, "is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature," and that in his manner of asserting his portion of truth there is a crudity which perhaps needlessly offends, everything has been acknowledged, and it ought not to be forgotten that no one asserts more strenuously than does Whitman the beauty, not indeed of asceticism, but of holiness or healthiness, and the shameful ugliness of unclean thought, desire and deed. If he does not assert holiness as a duty, it is because he asserts it so strongly as a joy and a desire, and because he loves to see all duties transfigured into the glowing forms of joys and of desires. The healthy repose and continence, and the healthy eagerness and gratification of appetite, are equally sources of satisfaction to him. If in some of his lyrical passages there seems entire self-abandonment to passion, it is because he believes there are, to borrow his own phrase, "native moments," in which the desires receive permission from the supreme authority, conscience, to satisfy themselves completely. . . .

In the way of crude mysticism Whitman takes pleasure in asserting the equality of all natural objects, and forces, and processes, each being as mysterious and wonderful, each as admirable and beautiful as every other; and as the multitude of men and women, so on occasions, does the multitude of animals, and trees, and flowers press into his poems with the same absence of selection, the same assertion of equal rights, the same unsearchableness, and sanctity, and beauty, apparent or concealed in all. By another working of the same democratic influence (each man finding in the world what he cares to find) Whitman discovers everywhere in nature the same qualities, or types of the same qualities, which he admires most in men. For his imagination the powers of the earth do not incarnate themselves in the forms of god and demi-god, faun and satyr, oread, dryad, and nymph of river and sea—meet associates, allies or antagonists of the heroes of an age, when the chiefs and shepherds of the people were themselves almost demi-gods. But the great Mother—the Earth—is one in character with her children of the democracy, who, at last, as the poet holds, have learnt to live and work in her great style. She is tolerant, includes diversity, refuses nothing, shuts no one out; she is powerful, full of vitality, generous, proud, perfect in natural rectitude, does not discuss her duty to God, never apologizes, does not argue, is incomprehensible, silent, coarse, productive, charitable, rich in the organs and instincts of sex, and at the same time continent and chaste. The grass Whitman loves as much as did Chaucer himself; but his love has a certain spiritual significance which Chaucer's had not. It is not the "soft, sweet, smale grass," embroidered with flowers, a fitting carpet for the feet of glad knights and sportive ladies, for which he cares. In the grass he beholds the democracy of the fields, earthborn, with close and copious companionship of blades, each blade like every other, and equal to every other, spreading in all directions with lusty life, blown upon by the open air, "coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious."

10. Gerard Manley Hopkins  
  Letter to Robert Bridges, October 18, 1882

I have read of Whitman's (1) "Pete" ["Come up from the Fields, Father"] in the library at Bedford Square (and perhaps something else; if so I forget), which you point out; (2) two pieces in the Athenaeum or Academy: this is all I remember. I cannot have read more than a half dozen pieces at most.

This, though very little, is quite enough to give a strong impression of his marked and original manner and way of thought and in particular of his rhythm. It might be even enough, I shall not deny, to originate or, much more, influence another's style: they say the French trace their whole modern school of landscape to a single piece of Constable's exhibited at the Salon early this century.

The question then is only about the fact. But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.

Nevertheless I believe that you are quite mistaken about this piece and that on second thoughts you will find the fancied resemblance diminish and the imitation disappear.

And first for the rhythm. Of course I saw that there was to the eye something in my long lines like this, that the one would remind people of the other. And both are in irregular rhythms. There the likeness ends. The pieces of his I read were mostly in an irregular rhythmic prose: that is what they are thought to be meant for and what they seemed to me to be. Here is a fragment of a line I remember: "or a handkerchief designedly dropped." This is in dactylic rhythm—or let us say anapaestic; for it is a great convience in English to assume that the stress is always at the end of the foot; the consequence of which assumption is that in ordinary verse there are only two English feet possible, the iamb and the anapaest, and even in my regular sprung rhythm only one additional, the fourth paeon: for convenience' sake assuming this, then the above fragment is anapaestic

—and there is a break down, a designed break of rhythm, after "handkerchief," done no doubt that the line may not become downright verse as it would be if he had said "or a handkerchief purposedly dropped." Now you can of course say that he meant pure verse and the foot is a paeon

or that he means, without fuss, what I should achieve by looping the syllable de and calling that foot an outriding foot—for the result might be attained either way. Here then I must make the answer which will apply here and to all cases and to the examples which may be found up and down the poets of the use of sprung rhythm—if they could have done it they would; sprung rhythm, once you hear it, is so eminently natural a thing and so effective a thing that if they had known of it they would have used it. Many people, as we say, have been "burning," but they all missed it; they took it up and mislaid it again. So far as I know—I am inquiring and presently I shall be able to speak more decidely—it existed in full force in Anglo-Saxon verse and in great beauty; in a degraded and doggerel shape in Piers Ploughman (I am reading that famous poem and am coming to the conclusion that it is not worth reading); Greene was the last who employed it at all consciously and he never continuously; then it disappeared—for one cadence in it here and there is not sprung rhythm and one swallow does not make a spring. (I put aside Milton's case, for it is altogether singular). In a matter like this a thing does not exist, is not done unless it is wittingly and willingly done; to recognize the form you are employing and to mean it is everything. To apply this: there is (I suppose, but you will know) no sign that Whitman means to use paeons or outriding feet where these breaks in rhythm occur; it seems to me a mere extravagance to think he means people to understand of themselves what they are slow to understand even when marked or pointed out. If he does not mean it then he does not do it; or in short what he means to write—and writes—is rhythmic prose and that only. And after all, you will probably grant this.

Good. Now prose rhythm in English is always one of two things (allowing my convention about scanning upwards or from slack to stress and not from stress to slack)—either iambic or anapaestic. You may make a third measure (let us call it) by intermixing them. One of these three simple measures then, all iambic or all anapaestic or mingled iambic and anapaestic, is what he in every case means to write. He dreams of no other and he means a rugged or, as he calls it in that very piece "Spirit that formed this scene" (which is very instructive and should be read on this very subject) a "savage" art and rhythm.

Extremes meet, and (I must for truth's sake say what sounds pride) this savagery of his art, this rhythm in its last ruggedness and decomposition into common prose, comes near the last elaboration of mine. For that piece of mine is very highly wrought. The long lines are not rhythm run to seed: everything is weighed and timed in them. Wait till they have taken hold of your ear and you will find it so. No, but what it is like is the rhythm of Greek tragic choruses or of Pindar; which is pure sprung rhythm. And that has the same changes of cadence from point to point as this piece. If you want to try it, read one till you have settled the true places of the stress, mark these, then read it aloud, and you will see. Without this these choruses are prose bewitched; with it they are sprung rhythm, like that piece of mine.

Besides, why did you not say Binsey Poplars was like Whitman? The present piece is in the same kind and vein, but developed, an advance. The lines and the stanzas (of which there are two in each poem and having much the same relation to one another) are both longer, but the two pieces are greatly alike: just look. If so how is this a being untrue to myself? I am sure it is no such thing.

The above remarks are not meant to run down Whitman. His "savage" style has advantages, and he has chosen it; he says so. But you cannot eat your cake and keep it: he eats his offhand, I keep mine. It makes a very great difference. Neither do I deny all resemblance. In particular I noticed in Spirit that Formed this Scene a preference for the alexandrine. I have the same preference: I came to it by degrees, I did not take it from him.

About the diction the matter does not allow me so clearly to point out my independence as about rhythm. I cannot think that the present piece owes anything to him. I hope not, here especially, for it is not even spoken in my own person but in that of St. Winefred's maidens. It ought to sound like the thoughts of a good but lively girl and not at all like—not at all like Walt Whitman. But perhaps your mind may have changed by this.

11. John Robertson  
  Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat

The essential thing is that the singer of democracy shall be full charged with his theme; and that an idea which feeds on optimism and confidence shall be carried with a confidence that no adversity will dash. And how Whitman's confidence rays out from his first page! Other poets have sung democracy in moments of expansion, or when goaded by the sight of war and depression: he alone ecstatically points a prosperous demos to new heights of ideal life. . . .

But Whitman is too enormously in earnest, too intensely faithful to laugh. Carlyle, let it be noted, is the one really earnest moralist who has indulged much in humour, and Carlyle's humour grew out of his profound unfaith in humanity. Whitman's faith is as strong as Carlyle's scepticism; and though he may meet one of Carlyle's favourite moral tests by a capacity to laugh broadly at the broadly and simply laughable, he is never heartily humorous in his writing. The humorous propensities of his countrymen get little recognition from him; when he is in a minatory mood—he frequently is in his later prose—he sees in the American habit of jesting on all things one of the unhealthy aspects of things democratic. . . . It may be doubted, however, whether Whitman's lack of humour is not a weakness in him as a propagandist, relatively to the average intellect of his time. Which of us can remain resolutely grave over the intimation that, among other things, the "picturesque looseness of carriage" of the American common people, and "the president's taking off his hat to them, not they to him," are "unrhymed poetry"? The thing is said in all good faith, and a momentary sympathy is possible, though it is not clear why the president should take his hat off to his fellow-citizens save to win their votes; but the smile will break through.

Mr. Meredith makes a character observe that cynicism is intellectual dandyism. Perhaps the dictum is truer than its acute author really believed. Take it that cynicism is humour overdone, and we arrive at a conception of humour as the soul's clothing for its nakedness, acutely experienced after modern indulgence in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It may be that the adoption of this is demonstrably an irrational act; but to demonstrate that a joke is an absurdity is but to make the joker a present of another. Logical progress, however, is possible on the understanding that he is a weak creature, and that a stronger may get on in vigorous nakedness. Such a son of Adam is Whitman. He positively does not need humour to protect him from his atmosphere, and he has no self-critical qualms about his appearance; being, indeed, by his enemies' account, far too naked to be ashamed.

12. Sonnet-epigraph to John Robertson's  
 Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat

Last stanza of the second poem which serves as epigraph to Robertson's Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat:

13. Ernest Rhys  
  Letter to Walt Whitman, July 7, 1885

At first it seemed rather out of place to have your work in a series of this kind called, rather stupidly, The Canterbury Poets, and got up in a cheap and prettified fashion, with red lines etc. But afterwards it struck me that there might be gain in the end through it. . . . The very including of Leaves of Grass in a series like this gives them a chance of reaching people who would otherwise never see them. What I—and many young men like me, ardent believers in your poetic initiative—chiefly feel about this is, however, that an edition at a price which will put it in the hands of the poorest member of the great social democracy is a thing of imperative requirement. You know what a fervid stir and impulse forward of Humanity there is today in certain quarters! and I am sure you will be tremendously glad to help us here, in the very camp of the enemy, the stronghold of caste and aristocracy and all selfishness between rich and poor!

Some people want to class you as the property of a certain literary clique—a rara avis, to be carefully kept out of sight of the uneducated mob as not able to understand and appreciate the peculiar qualities of your work. This does harm in many ways, and it would be a very good thing to make a fair trial of the despised mob. . . . What we want then is an edition for the poor, and this proposed one at only a shilling would be within reach of every man willing and caring to read.

14. Roden Noel  
 "A Study of Walt Whitman"

But is equality a truth in the manner in which he asserts it? I believe not; and if not, it must be so far mischievious to assert it. That common manhood is a greater, more cardinal fact than any distinctions among men which raise one above another I most firmly believe. Still these distinctions do exist, and so palpable a fact cannot be ignored without very serious injury. If great men could not have been without average men, and owe most to the grand aggregate soul of the ideal unit, humanity—which is a pregnant truth—yet, on the other hand, this grand aggregate soul could never have been what it is, could never have been enriched with the treasures it now enjoys, without those most personal of all personalities—prophets, heroes, men of genius. . . . If these men need to be reminded, as they do, of the rock whence they are hewn, there is yet a danger of average men mistaking such a message as that of modern democracy through so powerful a spokesman as Whitman, and insisting upon paring down the ideal superiority of their great ones too much to the level of their own inorganic uniformity, rather than acknowledging and venerating what is verily superior in these; taking them for leaders in regions where they are appointed by Nature to lead, and generally aiming to raise themselves as far as possible to the standard of a higher excellence thus set before them.

In order to satisfy this law of inequality among men, I do not believe that the mere proclamation of friendly love as between comrades (any more than of sexual love and equal union between man and woman) is at all sufficient. Veneration, reverence, also must be proclaimed, as likewise necessary; and the great point we ought to aim at, in helping to solve the momentous question of the social future, seems in that respect to be this—that mankind be taught, and gradually accustomed, to place their reverence where reverence is indeed due, and not upon mere idols of popular superstition. . . . But what Whitman does see so clearly is that, even when men have themselves elected a ruler, or been concerned in the choice of a form of government, there is a sort of glamour of the imagination which immediately invests any actual depositary of power; and bows them in a kind of unreasonable stupor before it. He therefore reminds them—Government exists for you, not you for the government. Obey it intelligently; modify it when reason requires.

15. Anonymous Review  
  "American Poets"

Such pieces as the burial hymn to Lincoln "When Lilacs Last etc.," or "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," stamp Whitman as a lyric genius of the highest order. In creative force and imaginative vigour Whitman stands, in our opinion, first among American poets. But he has not justified his claim to initiate a new departure in the form or the substance of poetry. His finest passages are written when, in the sweep of his lyric passion, he forgets his system and his purpose. His poems come before the world in a shape which is as attractive to some as it is repulsive to others. In either case the audacity of the strange attire rivets attention. Yet the form is not new. At their best his lines have the sweep of the Hebrew prophets; they roll in upon the ear, rhythmic as the waves beating on the shore. But just as often they resemble the baldest prose of Tupper. Whitman denounces rhyme as the medium of inferior writers and trivial subjects. His slatternly prose irresistibly suggests the conclusion, that his revolt against the tinkling serenader's style was confirmed, if it was not stimulated, by mechanical incapacity or at least by a want of artistic patience. In the first heat of his revolutionary enthusiasm, he claimed to throw art to the winds, and to demonstrate its futility when applied to the higher forms of poetry. In his maturer judgement he poses as the Wagner of poetry. It is possible, and even probable, that poetry, like music, may undergo great rhythmical changes; but whatever change takes place will be in the direction, not of the neglect, but of the development of Art. It is no defence of Whitman's theory, that he wished to render poetry inartistic; it is a complete and adequate defence, that he attempts to reproduce in verse the cosmic symphony, the strong musical pulse that beats throughout the world, the great undersong of the universal surge of Nature. Had this conception been in his mind from the first, had he been an innovator and not a mere iconoclast, he might have worked out his system less crudely. His vocabulary is strong and rich. He bows to no aristocracy of words. He hopes to see the Versailles of verse invaded by the language of the "Halles." He uses whatever expression most forcibly conveys his meaning, without regard to conventionalities. Thus his language is piercingly direct, and he repeatedly strikes out original epithets or phrases which create a picture in themselves.

In the protest which Whitman makes against conventionalities of form and language he did good service, but he only echoes the voice of Emerson.

16. Havelock Ellis  
  The New Spirit

Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite flower of ascesis—a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical—in those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected—the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen. . . .

Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that "Leaves of Grass" sought the light Tourgenieff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious—a spirit marked also, as Hinton has pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and coordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite. . . . That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance wihout understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of Hegel—with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations—with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind "Children of Adam."

This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio's, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the world—saying, not: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," but, with Clifford: "Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together"—is certainly Whitman's most significant and impressive mood. Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his never-changing attitude towards death.

17. R. W. Raper  
  "The Innings"

18. Pauline W. Roose  
  "A Child-Poet: Walt Whitman"

This attitude of admiration and ever-fresh suprise, as of a stranger in the world, is accompanied by most of the characteristics of early childhood. Without a grain of egotism, he has a child's intense interest in himself and absorbing sense of his own importance. Thus, to a series of poems he ushers himself in in words recalling the formula one so often sees inscribed on the title-page of some child's diary, and which, with its innocent unsuspiciousness of fate, brings a pang to the heart:

Independently of all witchcraft and fairy lore, he can create for himself the very miracles and transformations of which the little ones are always dreaming. The old woodland kings, in his belief, hold great thoughts, which they drop down upon him as he passes beneath them. There was a small boy who once prayed that God would make the trees walk. This very conceit was almost realised by the vivid fancy of Walt Whitman, who, in a "sort of dream-trance," as he calls it, beheld his favourite trees "step out and promenade up, down, and around very curiously,—with a whisper from one, leaning down as he passed me: 'We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.'" That they coud do it if they chose seems indeed to be his deliberate opinion.

Children are notably devoid of humour, and in Whitman that quality is conspicuous by its absence. Who, however, better than children—or than Whitman—can appeal to the humour of others? There is something touching in the unconsciousness with which he lays himself open to the sneers of whoever may be willing to avail himself of the opportunity. His sense of fun, of which he has his full share, never interferes with the most preposterous statements on his own part, even while he allows no oddity of life nor any ludicrous effect of nature to escape him. Of what has been called the cockneyism of the nineteenth century not a trace is to be found in him, nor of the modern smartness and indifference. He cannot content himself with superficial views any more than childhood can be put off with the flippant answers which grown-up persons of a certain calibre amuse themselves by returning to its earnest questionings. . . .

His coarseness is as the coarseness of the earth, which, with "disdainful innocence," takes all for clean. Or rather, to maintain our point of view, he is a "vulgar child" indeed, but after the fashion of the youngster to whose harmless improprieties Sterne, in justification of his own deliberate offences, drew its mother's attention—not after that of the sentimentalist himself. The "chaste indecency of childhood" is not so hard to forgive.

19. W. B. Yeats  
  Letters to the Editor of United Ireland

[December 17, 1892] Is there, then, no hope for the de-Anglicising of our people? Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation's life, not by trying to do what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible, but by translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best of the ancient literature? Can we not write and persuade others to write histories and romances of the great Gaelic men of the past, from the sons of Nessa to Owen Roe, until there has been a golden bridge between the old and the new?

America, with no past to speak of, a mere parvenu among the nations, is creating a national literature which in its most characteristic products differs almost as much from English literature as does the literature of France. Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte, and Cable, to name no more, are very American, and yet America was once an English colony. It should be more easy for us, who have in us that wild Celtic blood, the most un-English of all things under heaven, to make such a literature. If we fail it shall not be because we lack the materials, but because we lack the power to use them.

[December 1, 1894] I know perfectly well what Emerson wrote about the "wit and wisdom" of the The Leaves of Grass, but cannot see how his praise alters the fact that while Mr. W. M. Rossetti was bringing out an English selection from Whitman's poems, and Mr. Ruskin and George Eliot celebrating their power and beauty, the American public was hounding their author from a Government post because of their supposed immorality, or that when in his old age all Europe had learned to honour his name the leading magazines of his country were still not ashamed to refuse his contributions. Whitman appealed, like every other great and earnest mind, not to the ignorant many, either English or American, but to that audience, "fit though few," which is greater than any nation, for it is made up of chosen persons from all, and through the mouths of George Eliot, Ruskin and Emerson it did him honour and crowned him among the immortals.

20. John Addington Symonds  
  Walt Whitman, a Study

To bear the yoke of universal law is the plain destiny of human beings. If we could learn to bear the yoke with gladness, to thrill with vibrant fibres to the pulses of the infinite machine we constitute—(for were it possible that the least of us should be eliminated, annihilated, the whole machine would stop and crumble into chaos)—if, I say, we could feel pride and joy in our participation of the cosmic life, then we might stand where Whitman stood with "feet tenoned and mortised in granite." I do not think it is a religion only for the rich, the powerful, the wise, the healthy. For my own part, I may confess that it shone upon me when my life was broken, when I was weak, sickly, poor, and of no account; and that I have ever lived thenceforward in the light and warmth of it. In bounden duty toward Whitman, I make this personal statement; for had it not been for the contact of his fervent spirit with my own, the pyre ready to be lighted, the combustible materials of modern thought awaiting the touch of the fire-bringer, might never have leapt up into the flame of life-long faith and consolation. During my darkest hours, it comforted me in the illimitable symphony of cosmic life. When I sinned, repined, sorrowed, suffered, it touched me with a gentle hand of sympathy and understanding, sustained me with the strong arm of assurance that in the end I could not go amiss (for I was a part, an integrating part of the great whole); and when strength revived in me, it stirred a healthy pride and courage to effectuate myself, to bear the brunt of spiritual foes, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For this reason, in duty to my master Whitman, and in the hope that my experience may encourage others to seek the same source of inspiration, I have exceeded the bounds of an analytical essay by pouring forth my personal confession. . . .

I am not sure whether a loose, disjointed method, the mere jotting down of notes, would not be the best way of illustrating so intangible an author. And then I think of many metaphors to express a meaning irreducible to propositions.

He is Behemoth, wallowing in primitive jungles, bathing at fountain-heads of mighty rivers, crushing the bamboos and the crane-brakes under him, bellowing and exulting in the torrid air. He is a gigantic elk or buffalo, trampling the grasses of the wilderness, tracking his mate with irresistible energy. He is an immense tree, a kind of Yggdrasil, stretching its roots deep down in the bowels of the world, and unfolding its magic boughs through all the spaces of the heavens. His poems are even as the rings in a magestic oak or pine. He is the circumambient air, in which float shadowy shapes, rise mirage-towers, and palm-groves; we try to clasp their visionary forms; they vanish into ether. He is the globe itself; all seas, lands, forests, climates, storms, snows, sunshines, rains of universal earth. He is all nations, cities, languages, religions, arts, creeds, thoughts, emotions. He is the beginning and the grit of these things, not their endings, lees, and dregs.

The section of Whitman's works which deals with adhesiveness, or the love of comrades, is full as important, and in some ways more difficult to deal with, than his "Children of Adam." . . . Here the element of spirituality in passion, of romantic feeling, and of deep enduring sentiment, which was almost conspicuous by its absence from the section on sexual love, emerges into vivid prominence, and lends peculiar warmth of poetry to the artistic treatment. . . .

It is clear then that, in his treatment of comradeship, or the impassioned love of man for man, Whitman has struck a keynote, to the emotional intensity of which the modern world is unaccustomed. It therefore becomes of much importance to discover the poet-prophet's Stimmung—his radical instinct with regard to the moral quality of the feeling he encourages. Studying his works by their own light, and by the light of their author's character, interpreting each part by reference to the whole and in the spirit of the whole, an impartial critic will, I think, be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the "adhesiveness" of comrades is meant to have no interblending with the "amativeness" of sexual love. . . . It is obvious that those unenviable mortals who are the inheritors of sexual anomalies, will recognise their own emotion in Whitman's "superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown," which "waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men," the "something fierce in me, eligible to burst forth," "ethereal comradeship," "the last comradeship," "the last athletic reality." Had I not the strongest proof in Whitman's private correspondence with myself that he repudiated any such deductions from his "Calamus," I admit that I should have regarded them as justified; and I am not certain whether his own feelings upon this delicate topic may not have altered since the time when "Calamus" was first composed. . . .

[We may inquire] whether anything like a new chivalry is to be expected from the doctrines of "Calamus," which shall in the future utilise for noble purposes some of those unhappy instincts which at present run to waste in vice and shame. It may be asked what these passions have in common with the topic of Whitman's prophecy? They have this in common with it. Whitman recognises among the sacred emotions and social virtues, destined to regenerate political life and to cement nations, an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant love of man for man: a love which yearns in absence, droops under the sense of neglect, revives at the return of the beloved: a love that finds honest delight in hand-touch, meeting lips, hours of privacy, close personal contact. He proclaims this love to be not only a daily fact in the present, but also a saving and ennobling aspiration. While he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "damnable" all "morbid inferences" which may be drawn by malevolence or vicious cunning from his doctrine, he is prepared to extend the gospel of comradeship to the whole human race. He expects democracy, the new social and political medium, the new religious ideal of mankind, to develop and extend "that fervid comradeship," and by its means to counterbalance and to spiritualise what is vulgar and materialistic in the modern world.

21. Henry Salt  
  Songs of Freedom

A new impulse was given to democratic songs by the political and social excitement that commenced with the Reform Bill of 1832, and culminated in the outbreak of 1848—a movement which was represented in England by the Anti-Corn Law and Chartist agitations, and in Ireland by a revival of national spirit which led to an abortive rebellion, while in America it was abolition of negro-slavery that formed the ideal of the emancipators. . . .

Where, then, is the great singer of modern democracy? Who can voice its myriad demands for freedom and justice as Shelley voiced the high and sanguine aspirations of the early years of the century? In England no such poet has yet made his appearance; but in Walt Whitman we can find another epoch-making writer, a worthy successor to Shelley—unlike him, it is true, in a thousand ways, yet manifesting in a sterner and rougher form the same unquenchable spirit of freedom, the same unalterable spirit of love. We know, of course, all the critical objections that are urged against Whitman's "barbaric yawp" and alleged lack of style; but then we remember that Shelley's poetry—a "drivelling prose run mad" as the Quarterly described it—was scarcely less distasteful to the artistic susceptibilities of seventy years back! And if, as it seems probable, there be needed not only a fresh impulse of thought, to create a new wave of poetry, but also a new vehicle of poetic expression (a need which would certainly arise, if anywhere, in the case of that poetry which has revolutionary import), we can realise the supreme significance of Walt Whitman as a singer of democracy. He has given us a new ideal of universal comradeship; and he has given us a new method of embodying that ideal. His name inevitably stands at the head of the present era of revolutionary song.

22. Edmund Gosse  
  "Walt Whitman"

To me, at least, after all the oceans of talk, after all the extravagant eulogy, all the mad vituperation, he remains perfectly cryptic and opaque. I find no reason given by these authorities why he should have made his appearance, or what his appearance signifies. I am told that he is abysmal, putrid, glorious, universal and contemptible. I like these excellent adjectives, but I cannot see how to apply them to Whitman. Yet, like a boy at a shooting gallery, I cannot go home till I, too, have had my six shots at this running-deer.

On the main divisions of literature it seems that a critic should have not merely a firm opinion, but sound argument to back that opinion. It is a pilgarlicky mind that is satisfied with saying, "I like you, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell." Analysis is the art of telling the reason why. But still more feeble and slovenly is the criticism that has to say, "I liked Dr. Fell yesterday and I don't like him today, but I can give no reason." The shrine of Walt Whitman, however, is strewn around with remarks of this kind. Poor Mr. Swinburne has been cruelly laughed at for calling him a "strong-winged soul, with prophetic lips hot with the blood-beats of song," and yet a drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter. But he is not alone in this inconsistency. Almost every competent writer who has attempted to give an estimate of Whitman has tumbled about in the same extraordinary way. Something mephitic breathes from this strange personality, something that maddens the judgement until the wisest lose their self-control.

Therefore, I propound a theory. It is this, that there is no real Walt Whitman, that is to say, that he cannot be taken as any other figure in literature is taken, as an entity of positive value and defined characteristics. . . . Whitman is mere bathybius; he is literature in the condition of protoplasm—an intellectual organism so simple that it takes the instant impression of whatever mood approaches it. Hence the critic who touches Whitman is immediately confronted with his own image stamped upon that viscid and tenacious surface. He finds, not what Whitman has to give, but what he himself has brought. And when, in quite another mood, he comes again to Whitman, he finds that other self of his own stamped upon the provoking protoplasm. . . . Almost every sensitive and natural person has gone through a period of fierce Whitmanomania; but it is a disease which rarely afflicts the same patient more than once. It is, in fact, a sort of highly-irritated kind of egotism come to a head, and people are almost always better after it. . . .

Every reader who comes to Whitman starts upon an expedition to the virgin forest. He must take his conveniences with him. He will make of the excursion what his own spirit dictates. There are solitudes, fresh air, rough landscape, and a well of water, but if he wishes to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with him. When people are still young and like roughing it, they appreciate a picnic into Whitman-land, but it is not meant for those who choose to see their intellectual comforts round them.

23. J. A. Macculloch  
  "Walt Whitman: The Poet of Brotherhood"

But before coming to that stumbling-block to the bourgeois and to the verse-reading public alike, Whitman's style, a further word may be spoken of the tendencies in American thought when he began to write. The wave of revolution, of illumination, of romanticism which had swept over Europe, passed in succession to America. Puritanism, an uncompromising and bigoted orthodoxy, untilitarianism, Philistinism, had petrified the nation into a rock on which idealism could find scanty foothold. When the new movement arrived it disintegrated these unyielding elements, and was welcomed by a group of men and women who saw in it the dawn of a new age of poetry, of social reform, of religious fervor. A Transcendental Club was formed and found choice spirits in George Ripley, Charles Dana, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Hawthorne and Emerson. With loud voice they proclaimed to the world, Ecce, nunc acceptabile tempus. But the movement became discredited by the wild enthusiasm of many bizzare, crack-brained, and absurd persons; and, though it never lost its possession of a noble ideal, it had to adapt itself to the circumstances of the modern world. Yet it formed a current which has continued to warm and to colour American thought since then. It has resulted in a certain freshness and crispness in literature, such as may readily by seen in the writings of Emerson, of Thoreau, of Lowell, of Longfellow. Nor did Whitman escape it. He is the finest product of the Transcendental movement, the prophet who will sound it forth to future ages. We see in his work the stirring of a new life in America, which we in the Old World cannot eventually escape.

24. G. K. Chesterton  
  "Conventions and the Hero"

Walt Whitman is, I suppose, beyond question the ablest man America has yet produced. He also happens to be, incidentally, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. Ibsen is all very well, Zola is all very well and Maeterlinck is all very well; but we have begun already to get to the end of them. And we have not yet begun to get to the beginning of Whitman. The egoism of which men accuse him is that sense of human divinity which no one has felt since Christ. The baldness of which men accuse him is simply that splendidly casual utterance which no sage has used since Christ. But all the same, this gradual and glowing conservatism which grows upon us as we live leads us to feel that in just those points in which he violated the chief conventions of poetry, in just those points he was wrong. He was mistaken in abandoning metre in poetry; not because in forsaking it he was forsaking anything ornamental or anything civilized, as he himself thought. In forsaking metre he was forsakig something quite wild and barbarous, something as instinctive as anger and as necessary as meat. He forgot that all real things move in a rhythm, that the heart beats in harmony, that the seas rise and ebb in harmony. He forgot that any child who shouts falls into some sort of repetion and assonance, that the wildest dancing is at the bottom monotonous. The whole of Nature moves in a recurrent music; it is only with a considerable effort of civilization that we can contrive to be other than musical. The whole world talks poetry; it is only we who, with elaborate ingenuity, manage to talk prose.

The same that is true of Whitman's violation of metre is true, though in a minor degree, of his violation of what is commonly called modesty. Decorum itself is of little social value; sometimes it is a sign of social decay. Decorum is the morality of immoral societies. The people who care most about modesty are often those who care least about chastity; no better examples could be given than Oriental Courts or the west-end drawing rooms. But all the same Whitman was wrong. He was wrong because he had at the back of mis mind the notion that modesty or decency was in itself an artificial thing. This is quite a mistake. The roots of modesty, like the roots of mercy or of any other traditional virtue, are to be found in all fierce and primitive things.

25. W. T. Hawkins  
  Poem Read at Celebration of Whitman's Birthday, May 31, 1906

26. E. M. Forster  
  "The Beauty of Life"

Whitman knew what life was. He was not praising its beauty from an armchair. He had been through all that makes it hideous to most men—poverty, the battlefield, the hospitals—and yet could believe that life, whether as a whole or in detail, was perfect, that beauty is manifest wherever life is manifested. He could glorify the absurd and the repulsive; he could catalogue the parts of a machine from sheer joy that a machine has so many parts; he could sing not only of farming and fishing, but also of "leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting, distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking, electro-plating, electro-typing, stereo-typing"; one of the lines in one of his poems runs thus! He went the "whole hog" in fact, and he ought to be writing this article.

But most of us have to be content with a less vigorous attitude. We may follow the whole-hogger at moments, and no doubt it is our fault and not his when we don't follow him; but we cannot follow him always. . . . One might define the average educated man as optimist by instinct, pessimist by conviction. . . .

Here then is what one may call the irreducible mininum, the inalienable dowry of humanity: Beauty in scraps. It may seem a little thing after the comprehensive ecstasies of Whitman, but it is certain; it is for all men in all times, and we couldn't avoid it even if we wanted to. . . .

One final tip; read Walt Whitman. He is the true optimist—not the professional optimist who shuts his eyes and shirks, and who palliatives do more harm than good, but one who has seen and suffered much and yet rejoices. He is not a philosopher or a theologian; he cannot answer the ultimate question and tell us what life is. But he is absolutely certain that it is grand, that it is happiness, and that "wherever life and force are manifested, beauty is manifested."

27. D. H. Lawrence  
 Letter to Henry Savage, December 22, 1913

What a rum chap you are. Now you're discovering Whitman and humanity. But don't you see, he says all men are my brothers, and straightway goes into the wilderness to love them. Don't let yourself in for a terrific chagrin. But I'm glad you've discovered Humanity: it is fearfully nice to feel it round one. If you read my poetry—especially the earlier rough stuff which was published in the English Review, and isn't in the book of poems, you would see how much it has meant to me. Only, the bitterness of it is,that while one is brother to all men, and wrote Macbeth with Shakespeare, and the Bible with James the First's doctors, one still remains Henry Savage or D. H. Lawrence, with one's own little life to live, and one's own handful of thoughts to write. And it is so hard to combine the two, and not to lose oneself in the generalisation, and not to lose the big joy of the whole in being narrowly oneself. Which is a preach. But perhaps you, like Whitman or Christ, can take the Church to bride, and give yourself, bodily and spiritually, to the abstract. The fault about Whitman is, strictly, that he is too self-conscious to be what he says he is: he's not Walt Whitman, I, the joyous American, he is Walt Whitman, the Cosmos, trying to fit a cosmos inside his own skin: a man rongé with unsatisfiedness not at all pouring his seed into American brides to make Stalwart American Sons, but pouring his seed into the space, into the idea of humanity. Poor man, it is pathetic when he makes even an idea of his flesh and blood. He was a martyr like Christ, in a slightly different sort.—I don't mind people being martyrs in themselves, but to make an idea of the flesh and blood is wrong. The flesh and blood must go its own road. There is something wrong with Whitman, when he addresses American women as his Stalwart brides in whom he is to pour the seed for the Stalwart Sons. One doesn't think like that. Imagine yourself addressing English women like that, in the mass. One doesn't feel like that—except in the moments of wide, gnawing desire when everything has gone wrong—Whitman is like a human document, or a wondeful treatise on human self-revelation. It is neither art nor religion nor truth: Just a self-revelation of a man who could not live, and so had to write himself. But writing should come from a strong root of life: like a battle song after a battle.—And Whitman did this, more or less. But his battle was not a real battle: he never gave his individual self into the fight: he was too much aware of it. He never fought with another person—he was like a wrestler who only wrestles with his own shadow—he never came to grips. He chucked his body into the fight and stood apart saying, "Look how I am living." He is really false as hell.—But he is fine too. Only, I am sure, the generalisations are no good to the individual: the individual comes first, then the generalisation is a kind of game, not a reality: just a surplus, an excess, not a whole.

About spiritual pride, I think you are right. I can't understand you when you think so much of books and genius. They are great too—but they are the cake and wine of life—there is the bread and butter first, the ordinary human contact, the exchange with individuals of a bit of our individual selves, like beggars might exchange bits of crust on the road side. But Whitman did not take a person: he took a generalised thing, a Woman, an Athlete, a Youth. And this is wrong, wrong, wrong. He should take Gretchen, or one Henry Wilton. It is no use blanking the person out to have a sort of representative.

28. Basil de Selincourt  
 "The Problem of the Form"

[In] the example that follows, the tone of conversation has passed into that of soliloquy; the mood is too intimate, too remote, to admit of the idea of any but an impersonal utterance; we picture the soul of the poet addressing as it were some shadow of itself:

The form here is of such exquisite sensitiveness that it is with an effort we remember the offences its author could commit. The lines "O who is that ghost" and "What shapeless lump is that" serve just to maintain the air of realistic familiarity that Whitman loves. He takes advantage of the ballast they provide to soar up into heights of suggestion and impressionism where he is equally at home. The storm, the human creature out in it, exchange forces, appearance, personality almost, from line to line. The tears are the rain, but who is it that is weeping? The night, the tempest, the seashore are part of the solitude and the despair they cover, part of the outpouring of passion and sorrow which they liberate, echo, and absorb. And how does language take the impress of hints so vague and so conflicting and of an integration so profound? All through the piece alliteration, though never obtruding itself, and indeed never appearing till it is sought out, adds significance to the choice of words by coaxing the reader to dwell upon them and so helping him to pass naturally over gaps whether of grammar or idea which might otherwise check him; he may observe next how every line, sensitive to the cadence of the first, divides itself sympathetically into a succession of lesser impulses, of which there are usually, but not always, three; and finally, as the sign of a still more vital sensitiveness, he will note the repetition of the keynote of the piece, the word "tears." The word is not only repeated, but variously placed in successive lines, so that by the maintenance of the emphasis upon it its structural significance may be fully brought out. Then, at what is structurally the centre of the piece, there is a cessation; four lines of release and tumult follow which are silent of it; and so we are prepared for the beauty and inevitability of the final cadence in which it returns.

In Tears! Tears! Tears! we have a piece of poetic architecture which is at once completely original and completely satisfying. . . . The sincerer our devotion to poetry, the more readily we recognise that even in works called great, the form is apt to be a convenient mantle which, though it serves indeed to reveal the living gestures of the poet, serves also to give an average effect of dignity to transitional moments, when he is recovering from one gesture and preparing for the next. Form, as Whitman made use of it, avoids this pitfall. Not pre-existing as a mould to be filled, it cannot attract the feeling that is to fill it. It waits upon the feeling, and the feeling when it comes is the more likely to be genuine and sincere.

29. P. Mansell Jones  
  "Whitman and Verhaeren"

In considering together Whitman and Verhaeren, it is at once evident that they are, so to speak, poetic anomalies: they are alike in being unlike most other poets. And their importance lies in the fact that they are great not by the standards and virtues of the past, but because they have rebelled greatly and conquered. Yet that which distiguishes them from the vast majority of poets unites them more closely to one another. Both have chosen as themes, not any of the so-called "poetic subjects," but the world as it is today, the world of commerce and industry, of democracy and science. But apart from this modern, universal aspect of their work, each finds in the development of his country a source of inspiration which offers many points of similarity.

As young as America, Belgium is still adolescent and feels the joy of newly-acquired strength. As in America, the mixture of peoples and fertility of the soil have engendered a superb and powerful race. Walt Whitman was the cry of America, at last conscious of her power. Vehaeren proclaims the triumph of the Belgian—the European race. Each is the first adequate singer of his country. For this audacious task, both poets were by nature equally well equipped. Each embodies his country's two main sources of character: French and Flemish in the cases of the Belgian poet, English and Dutch for that of the American. Moreover, their composite characters were moulded by similar environments: both combine, in a striking manner, a whole-hearted worship of nature with a love of "populous pavements." They have given the people—their needs and aspirations—a primary place in their works. Vehaeren truly loves the life of the humble. Though he belongs by birth to the middle-classes, his sympathy for the lowest in the social scale enables him to transform the commonplace details of their life into poems of extraordinary beauty and tenderness. He is one of them, says Zweig, and they feel their nearness to him. . . .

Surveying his work towards the end of his life, the author of Leaves of Grass said, "The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand at last is the word Suggestiveness." And a last glance at Whitman's work, so rough and unpolished, yet so rich in the stuff and substance of poetry, seems to drive home the conclusion that Whitman is the fountain-head whence, all unconsciously, Vehaeren proceeds. Yet there is no intention to suggest that the former is of less significance than the latter. For if the "comradeship" of Calamus finds its reflection in the "admiration" of La Multiple Splendeur, and if, as a song of the modern, Leaves of Grass is excelled by Les Villes tentaculaires, if, finally, Verhaeren is a greater artist that Whitman, it must not be forgotten that many themes—like those of democracy and death—have been treated more fully by the American than by the Belgian poet.

30. John Cowper Powys  
 Walt Whitman, in Visions and Revisions

I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry. We all know what a splended heroic Anarchist he was. We all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence. We know his mania for the words "en masse," for the words "ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We all know his defiant celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking effort he made—and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius!—to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background—like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer—against which, as against the great blank spaces of Life itselt, "the writing upon the wall" may make itself visible.

What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed. . . .

The "free" poetry of Walt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws, the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need, as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of "commands" of this kind. Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping absinthe. Is it a secret, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long, plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs; those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts.

Take that little poem—quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit of democratic vulgarity—which begins:

Is it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a challenge? Take the poem which begins:

Do you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar sublety of that reference to the rank, rain-drenched anonymous weeds, which every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would have driven the magic of it quite away.

Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and wreckage, of vast desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy American landscape, but which those who love England know where to find, even among our trim gardens. No one like Walt Whitman can convey to us the magical ugliness of certain aspects of Nature—the bleak, stunted God-forsaken things; the murky pools where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods; the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-windrow of broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that cover paupers's graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted marsh-lands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their flying wings, and of which madmen dream—these are the things, the ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heart-breaking defiance—but from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer.

31. Padraic Colum  
  "The Poetry of Walt Whitman"

Somewhere in the beginning of our histories of Philosophy is the name of the thinker who first announced that the World was a Becoming. That intuition was left to the philosophers until Walt Whitman arrived. And with Whitman the Becoming seems not only to be realized, but to be participated in. All is urge in his poetry. His rhythms flow and break like waves. His stanzas have not the measure that belongs to the poets of a world that is established—poets like Dante and Spenser, for instance—but the balances that are set in nature—one living member balancing another living member, as in a branching tree.

His verse not merely departs from traditional forms. It creates a new and special norm. It is special in as much as it exists only for Whitman's purpose, but it is a norm—that is to say, any departures from it can be perceived. . . . Hardly any poet has revised his original texts more than Whitman has. And it can be perceived that all his revision has the effect of making his lines conform to his verse-norm. "Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you face to face," is the opening he once had for Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. If one substitutes this line for the line that opens the poem now, one can see that the norm is disturbed:

Whitman is a master of language as well as master of his special verse-form. His is one of the greatest vocabularies of any poet who has written in English. What an array of words is in his volume! squatter's words; hobo's words; drummer's words; foreign phrases; words out of scientific and philosophic texts, with all the words of literary and journalistic English. And he uses all these words with such precision and vigor that he stamps them anew. . . . Every line in his verse is so vividly felt and so powerfully realized that it stands as solid as a bar of iron. . . .

Then there is in Whitman the clear and tender-toned poet. The themes of the poet are affection, reconciliation, death. When he sings of death he has a strangely beautiful accent. It is as if all the things that had kept him company—those tremendous shows and processions that his will and his vision bound him to—were folded away from him. He is Ruth to the Universe's Naomi. "Whither thou goest I will go," he says, and his trust makes beautiful his most haunting poems—Passage to India, the lovely Death Carol beginning "Come, Lovely and Soothing Death," Whispers of Heavenly Death; Darest Thou Now O Soul; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and The Last Invocation with its hushed lyricism. Did Whitman feel an unwonted power upon him when he sang of death? It would seem as if he did. It is something outside himself that prompts the lines of the Death Carol, a bird singing. And in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking the bird that sings of separation is named demon. Whitman surely was aware when he gave that strange name to the bird that the demon in tradition is the spiritual power beyond our own soul that prompts to extraordinary manifestations.

32. Hugh L'Anson Faussett  
  Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy

It was . . . increasingly difficult to avoid seeing the scramble for wealth as the dominating motive of the time, not merely in the feverish gold-rush to California in 1849–50, but in the city government itself. Yet it was neither in his nature nor his experience to question the individualism of which a ruthless pursuit of self-interest was an extreme expression. He was born into a tenaciously individual class, nourished on the self-reliant gospels of Franklin and Jefferson, and suspicious of any encroachments by a central government upon independent rights. The phase of material development during which he lived as well as his own pronounced egoism prevented him from being in any radical sense a socialist.

Even today in America the conception of a society reorganised so that the cooperative impulse supersedes the competitive grows very slowly. And Whitman was too naively of his time to be a hundred years in front of it. His sympathies were all for brotherhood, but for a brotherhood of individuals who had surrendered none of their private rights. The acquisitive individual was an unfortunate by-product of such freedom, but less dangerous to the health of a society than an intrusive Government.

It was and is an understandable view. But it was based on a serious underestimate of the vicious strength of the acquisitive impulse, through which democracy in America has been persistently defeated by plutocracy, and on a very limited conception of Government. Whitman resisted any extension of Governmental authority because he viewed it always as something imposed upon individuals. He never seems to have conceived of it as a possibly organic expression of their social consciousness and as such liberating them from a conflict of selfish impulses. At bottom his political views were limited by his own gospel of egoism. Seeing, as he did, so imperfectly what a real self-hood entailed, he was equally blind to the sacrifice of selfish independence necessary to the individual who would lose and find himself in an integrated society. And so, in theory at least, he was always to remain a merely humanitarian democrat despite all the inhumanities which a laissez-faire system was increasingly to display.

33. V. S. Pritchett  
  "Two Writers and Modern War"

The American Civil War was the first modern war. . . . [In the work of writers before this] there is no suggestion that war is a human tragedy. This suggestion is not made until the civilian fights. He cannot shrug his shoulders and say, "C'est la guerre." He is stunned by his own fears, stupefied by his own atrocities, amazed at his happiness, incredulous at the point of death. When all people are at war, no code, no manner, can contain the experience. The nearest writers to Whitman are Tolstoy and Erckmann-Chatrian—it is interesting to note that they were all writing about war at the same time—but Tolstoy's ironical pacifism and Erckmann-Chatrian's mildness and peaceableness are a branch of the main stream of popular feeling. They are not, like Whitman, the stream itself. The Histoire d'un Conscrit de 1813 was written in 1864. It has been called l'Iliade de la peur and it portrays the pathos of the conscript's situation. The tragedy of the conscript is a passive one: that a quiet, peaceable man like himself should be killed. But in Whitman—as in Wilfred Owen—the tragedy is not passive; it lies not only in what is done to a man but in what he himself does and in what happens to him inside. . . . [Tolstoy and Erckmann-Chatrian] are propagandists with an uncommonly delicate ear. They write to warn opinion in the fond domestic parlour behind the little shop.

Compared with them, Whitman does not know his mind. He is all over the place. He is the public. It is typical of Speciman Days that its first picture of the war is of the news spreading in the streets at night. The emotion of the street catches him. He is not intoxicated with patriotism but he does not deny the message of the pennants and the flags in the street. He is the man in the parlour who goes out into the street and loses his head. He feels the herd instinct. Two great wars have made us guarded, and when we read Speciman Days and especially the poems called Drum-Taps, we resist that old-fashioned war. The sun has faded the defiant and theatrical photograph, and paled the headlines to a weak-tea brown. The uniforms are shabby. We suspect Whitman's idea that out of this a nation is born; it sounds like the cracked bugle and slack drum of propaganda. And yesterday's propaganda puts no one in a flurry. Yet, in all this, the loquacious Whitman is right. It is the bewildering thing in all his work, that this dressed-up egotist with all the air of a ham actor, is always half-right when he is most dubious. He is the newspaper man who reflects the ambiguous quality of public feeling. His virtue is that he begins on the pavement and that, like the streets, he has no shame and no style. Excitement and incantation take the place of it. . . .

After this the reality begins. And the reality, as the first modern war drags on, is the casuality list. In the classical narratives men are merely shot. Sometimes they are blown up. The aftermath was not minutely described. "Bloodshed," "carnage," generalise it. Whitman, too, uses those words but with all his voice. . . . That discovery marks the beginning of the modern attitude to war. We write as followers, not leaders. And though Whitman likes the heroic act, the message in the leader's eye, enjoys seeing the President ride past with his escort of cavalry and feels the public emotion of the "great convulsive drums," he writes more surely when he goes back to the rank and file, when he recovers his sense of anonymity. (Odd that this huge and often so flaccid egotist should be able to puff himself large enough until he is identified with all the people and lost in them; it is his paradox.) It is his paradox, too, that doggerel and the real thing traipse along together like the blind leading the blind, unable to see, unable to stop. . . .

Drum-Taps describes the general scene, what the unknown and anonymous man did and saw and how filthily he died. Patriotism has not decayed; but the human being has emerged. He emerged first of all, it is interesting to observe, in a civil war, a war of ideas; and in the country which, to so many people, had seemed the Promised Land, where no formal tradition of war existed. Whitman himself observed, in his confused groping way, that a new way of warfare was necessary to America. A new way of writing about war certainly emerged; perhaps that is what he was trying to say.

34. J. Middleton Murry  
  "Walt Whitman: Prophet of Democracy"

The universal of which "these States" were the particular in Whitman's poetry is Democracy; and all over the world democrats, in Whitman's peculiar and profound sense of the word—that is, those who believe that a self-governing society of free and responsible individuals offers the only way of progress towards the Good—have had no difficulty in regarding Whitman's America as the city of their own soul. It is for them a symbol of the ideal, of the same order as Blake's Albion and Jerusalem; and Whitman is rhapsodizing over the rivers and prairies of America, is behaving as Shakespeare's poet, "who gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"—except that the ideal Democracy is much more than "an airy nothing." It is at least a compelling vision of the society towards which humanity must stumble on, if it is not to cease to be human. . . .

[Writing] as late as 1904 Henry Bryan Binns, his English biographer, speaking of Whitman's dismissal in 1865 from his clerkship in the Indian Bureau in Washington, as the result of the reading of Leaves of Grass by his Methodist chief, says: "Average American opinion was then undisguisedly hostile, as, of course, it still remains." If that was really the situation in America in 1904, it was distinctly different from that in England, where by that time his book had been accepted as a classic by the Liberal intellectuals, and as a sort of bible by the native British Socialist movement, which, though it had a fair sprinkling of intellectuals, had a solid working-class core. Perhaps the explanation of this descrepancy is that quite early in the nineteenth century the British working class had become more or less completely urbanized, and Whitman's poetry had, for the part of it which was sufficiently alert to become Socialist, a powerful nostalgic attraction as a poetry of the open country and the open air. And it is very probably that the curious, but very marked association of the early Socialist movement in England with camping and hiking, on foot or cycle in the countryside is almost entirely due to the influence of Whitman. . . .

[The] matrix is more important than the gems; the total Whitman far more dynamic, far more charged with potential for humanity, than his rounded utterances. The Whitman who gropes his way from the basis of his deep and new-discovered pesonality, his identified soul, into the vast variety of his incomplete affirmations; who offers himself with all his hesitations, his contradictions, and his deep unformulable faith, to his comrades of the future is a truly prophetic man. He is, in part, the attractive image of the citizen of the new completely human society of which the crude integument is what we call Democracy; he is, in a yet more important part, the tongue-tied soul in his travail of the idea of which he is the instinctive vehicle. And this part of him, which is quite inseparable from the other, is perhaps even more durable than the image of the rounded man which he communicates. For it is inherent in the conception of Democracy, as the constant, endless breaking of the fallows of humankind for the sowing of the seed of personality, that it should never reach finality.

35. David Daeches  
  "Walt Whitman's Philosophy"

How could Whitman take a normative attitude to the civilization of his day if at the same time he accepted everything in existence merely because it was in existence? I think the answer to this question lies in Whitman's view of the nature of a real person. Inanimate Nature and animals were all to be accepted; they were what they were, part of the process of things. But men—who were alone capable of betraying their identities by leading second-hand lives in which their real selves were not involved—could be judged in accordance with the degree to which they fulfilled the true laws of their own personalities. It is significant that after Swinburne turned against Whitman, to write a stinging attack on the man and his poetry, Whitman remarked of the furious English poet: "Ain't he the damndest simulacrum?" Swinburne, in talking this frenzied nonsense, was acting as a simulacrum, a pale image of his real self, not in his true capacity as a person. And this is the way in which Whitman tended to speak of those he disliked and, indeed, of all evil in the universe. He did not hold simply that "whatever is, is right," but rather that whatever exists in its true, undistorted nature is good. The "parcel of helpless dandies" that he attacked were denounced as "all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand," and that was the real burden of his complaint.

Now I think that this helps to explain, too, Whitman's increasing insistence on his originality as he grew older. In repudiating an obvious debt to Emerson and—as Esther Shephard has pointed out—concealing a significant debt to two novels of George Sand, Whitman cannot be acquitted of disingenuousness; but we can see why it was important to him to keep stressing his originality. The real poet was essentially original, true to his own vision, transcribing nothing at second-hand. If Whitman had thought more carefully about the problem of originality, he would have seen that it is not necessarily incompatible with borrowing: nobody now denies the originality of Shakespeare's genius because he took his plots from other writers. But he was so obsessed with the importance of renouncing the second-hand, of exploiting only his own true self, that he felt it necessary to repudiate with increasing urgency any suspicion of borrowing.

36. W. H. Auden  
  "D. H. Lawrence"

The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language which he has to reveal, while the free verse poet thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his artistic conception. One might also say that, in their attitude towards art, the formal verse writer is a catholic, the free verse writer a protestant. And Lawrence was, in every respect, very protestant indeed. As he himself acknowledged, it was through Whitman that he found himself as a poet, found the right idiom of poetic speech for his demon.

On no other English poet, so far as I know, has Whitman had a beneficial influence; he could on Lawrence because, despite certain superficial resemblances, their sensibilities were utterly different. Whitman quite consciously set out to be the Epic Bard of America and created a poetic persona, not an actual human being, even when he appears to be talking about the most intimate experiences. When he sounds ridiculous, it is usually because the image of an individual obtrudes itself comically upon what is meant to be a statement about a collective experience. I am large. I contain multitudes is absurd if one thinks of Whitman himself or any individual; of a corporate person like General Motors it makes perfectly good sense. The more we learn about Whitman the man, the less like his persona he looks. On the other hand it is doubtful if a writer ever existed who had less of an artistic persona than Lawrence; from his letters and the reminiscences of his friends, it would seem that he wrote for publication in exactly the same way as he spoke in private. (I must confess that I find Lawrence's love poems embarrassing because of their lack of reticence; they make me feel a Peeping Tom.) Then, Whitman looks at life extensively rather than intensively. No detail is dwelt upon for long; it is snapshotted and added as one more item to the vast American catalogue. But Lawrence in his best poems is always concerned intensively with a single subject, a bat, a tortoise, a fig tree, which he broods on until he has exhausted its possibilities.

37. Anthony Burgess  
  "The Answerer"

British musicians have been better Whitman publicists than British men of letters. Whitman, a bad poet to quote (as Uncle Penderevo admits in Tono-Bungay), was learned by thousands of provincial choral singers—those who tackled Delius's Sea-Drift, Vaughn Williams's A Sea Symphony, Holst's Dirge for Two Veterans, eventually Bliss's Morning Heroes. Because Whitman, like the Bible, seemed to stand on the margin of art, composers saw that they could add some art to him. More than that, he was democratic, even sweaty, and the right librettist for a musical renaissance that turned against Mendelssohnian salons and went to the sempiternal soil. Whitman's free verse (not vers libre, a very salony thing) was a corrective to the four-square folkiness that bedevilled so many rural rhapsodies and even The Planets, but his rhythms were lyrical or declamatory, not—like Eliot and Pound (who eventually made a peace with Whitman, having "detested him long enough")—muffled, arhetorical, conversational.

Whitman's verse-technique is still of interest to the prosodist. His basic rhythm is an epic one—the Virgilian dactyl-spondee—and his line often hexametric. . . . He sometimes sounds like Clough's Amours de Voyage, though it would be hard to imagine a greater disparity of tone and attitude than that which subsists between these two Victorians. Nevertheless, both Clough and Whitman saw that the loose hexameter could admit the contemporary and sometimes the colloquial. . . . When Whitman becomes "free," it is as though he justifies truncation or extension of the basic hexameter by some unspoken theory of a line-statement or line-image. Flouting classical procedure in refusing to allow any spill-over from line to line, he invokes a tradition older than Virgil—that of Hebrew poetry. British composers, their noses well-trained, sniffed the Bible in Whitman.

38. Denis Donoghue  
  "Walt Whitman"

[We] have to ask what Whitman's freedom gave him, besides ease. In one sense he was, indeed, free; he put down burdens which other men sustained. But it may be argued that in another sense he was bound, because he was ignorant of what he disowned. There is no evidence that he conn'd old times sufficiently to know them as sturdy and different from his own: certainly, he did not propose a relation to the past based upon that knowledge. So it is necessary to say that he freed himself from human history without taking the precaution, in the first instance, of thoroughly understanding it. Whatever worth we ascribe to his freedom, it must allow for that limitation, that its facility was not profoundly earned. That is why his message, so far as it may be described as such, is despensable. He was, by his own assertion, a prophet and a sage, but his prophecy was somewhat meretricious, his wisdom untested. What matters, after all, is the poetry.

To get the beauty of Whitman's poetry hot, one must read it in long, rolling stretches. No poet is less revealed in the single phrase, the image, or even the line. The unit of the verse is indeed the phrase, a loose-limbed structure of several words held easily together and moving along because the cadence goes with the speaker's breath. This is what William Carlos Williams learned from Whitman, the natural cadence, the flow of breath as a structure good enough for most purposes and better for humanity than the counting of syllables. For both poets the ideal is what Whitman called "a redeeming language," a language to bridge the gap between subject and object, thereby certifying both and praising bridges. Again in both poets the function of language is to verify an intricate network of affinities and relationships, contacts, between person and person, person and place, person and thing. In Whitman, the number of completely realized poems is small: many poems contain wonderful passages, but are flawed, often by a breach of taste, a provincialism. Where the poem fails, it fails because Whitman thought too well of his excess to curb it; the words converge upon the poem, and he will not turn them aside. Some of his greatest writing is in "Song of Myself," but on the other hand that poem, too, is often provincial, awkward. The best of Whitman, certainly one of his greatest achievements, is a shorter poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." William Carlos Williams once praised a poem by Marianne Moore as an anthology of transit, presumably because the words secured a noiseless progression from one moment to another: they did not sit down to admire themselves. Whitman's favourite subject is movement, process, becoming: no wonder he loved bridges and ferries, which kept things moving while defining relationships, one thing with another.

39. Geoffrey Grigson  
  The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook

A poem should be words locked into a form and so made indestructible or hard to destroy, whether the words are fitted into already determined forms, or whether they find their own form as they go along, to each poem its own form. So there isn't really a contradiction between the tight compressed regularity of a poem by an Icelandic or Norwegian scald of the Middle Ages and a poem by Whitman or St.-John Perse, or between a poem by Hopkins and a poem by Whitman.

Hopkins was upset to have to recognize his kinship with Whitman. . . .

From North America I once had a ninny poet in the house. He could not be persuaded that poets occur in a population by rare genetic accident, little related to numbers, although their nurture and their maturation will much depend on culture and economics.

He wasn't going to accept from me that in the great population of his continent there might have been—there may have been—no very remarkable poet since John Crowe Ransom, and Whitman.

The most—at any rate the best—in fewest words. Which condemns, if that were necessary, Olson and the upright or vertical paper poets of America. But not Whitman. And then what is required, from each if possible, isn't too little of the most in the fewest words, but plenty of it, plenty of risks undertaken. . . .

How Whitman's rhetoric deflates to a wrinkled toy balloon when he unhooks too long from the objectivity of his great America—stars, lilac, rivers, wharfs, ferries, the cavalry in the ford, the net around the fish, and all of his "eternal uses of the earth," his "primal sanities" of Nature. How he conveys when his exclamation is particular!

Whitman thrilled to a high voltage of new America, a beginning, a continent flowering (into what subsequent flowers, if only he had known). Hopkins, his contemporary in small England, thrilled, while it was still possible, to a high voltage of the divine, opening its apparent flowers to him. It is hard to see how there can again be grandly equivalent coincidences of the poet and the situation. But doesn't Whitman say that the best poems are still to be written, and that in his opinion "no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard it and overturn it?"

Anyhow the company chairman and the Foreign Minister and the editor and the union boss and the detective inspector and the engineer mayn't believe it, but no poetry, in whatever future convention, would mean no humanity.

40. Charles Tomlinson  
  "Crossing Brookly Ferry"

41. John Bayley  
  "Songs of a Furtive Self: Whitman"

The fact is that Whitman was not really doing anything American at all in Song of Myself, whatever the appearances; he was creating a new language and style for self-expression—the physical sense of self—as Keats had done thirty years or so before. Keats's sensuality of language can often be slightly shamefaced, but it is not furtive; furtiveness implies a carefully worked out undercover programme, such as the genius of Whitman could organize.

The effects of Keats's language, though, are remarkably similar to Whitman's—"The Eve of St. Agnes" and Sleep and Poetry are in terms of their verbal world the nearest kind of poetry to Song of Myself. Even Keats's neologisms have an exact parallel in Whitman's exhuberances and demotic oddities. . . . Whitman's gallicisms are an essential part of his style, its total and original "campness," and like Keats's intuitions in language of the nature and feel of the body Whitman's sense of it seems also to need that posture of touching and unwitting absurdity and vulnerability which belongs to human nakedness. This his fervency of language, like Keats's provides. . . . Like Keats's Whitman's language has what might be termed erectile tendencies ("Those movements, those improvements of our bodies," as Byron blandly remarks) and its exuberance and oddities seem wholly natural for this reason. There is nothing pretentious or metaphysical about the neologisms of either poet; they seem to expand into a world not of ingenuity but of vivid physical simiplicity, a verbal equivalent of what Whitman calls "the curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body," and its "thin red jellies."

Discovering the body in poetry was not quite the same thing as discovering America. More fortunate than Keats in this as in other ways, Whitman did not feel that he had to pass himself for the higher life in order to discover America. Furtiveness came naturally to him, but it had the simple health of inner shamelessness: he was not in thrall to romantic ideas of the European tradition, the spirit and its lofty destiny, as Keats was. The age and the expectations that ordained for Keats the romantic hero's role, in opposition to his own poetic genius, left Whitman wholly free to loaf about on fish-shaped Paumanok clam-digging and declaiming Shakespeare to the waves.

42. Charles Tomlinson  
  "Ivor Gurney's 'Best Poems'"

[The first London performance] of the Sea Symphony brought together two of [Ivor] Gurney's heroes—Vaughn Williams and Walt Whitman. Vaughn Williams's spacious and dramatic settings of Whitman's poems deal with texts that were to be increasingly important for Gurney. Except for Lawrence, it is hard to think of any other English poet who has known what to do with Whitman. Gurney—dangerously, one might have thought—identified himself with Whitman and earned his right to do so not only in his excellent "New England poems" but in masterpieces like "Felling a Tree." He wrote this last, having emerged from the war, in 1922 when his days of freedom were already numbered.

During his asylum years, evidently round 1925, Gurney compiled a forgotten selection entitled "Best poems," the manuscript of which has only recently come to light in a Gloucestershire sale room. . . . It contains "Felling a Tree" and many other Whitmanian pieces. One of these, "Of the Sea," has never appeared in selections of Gurney and is a remarkable celebration of that poet who helped give him a standard beyond the constrictions of English Georgianism:

One of the surprising things about Gurney's attachment to Whitman was that it did not lead to mere superfluity. The piled-up, almost laborious effects of "Felling a Tree" serve the theme of the poem itself. "Of the Sea," though shorter, achieves a comparable massive simplicity of utterance in a style which characterizes another poem in Kavanagh's collection, "Portraits," which Donald Davie has justly referred to as "perhaps the finest reflection on American history by an Englishman." These Whitmanesque yet unmistakably Gurney poems take him beyond Gloucestershire and the Severn meadows and also beyond the trenches.

43. Tom Paulin  
 Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State

With hindsight we can see that the mansion-house of liberty passage in Areopagitica reads like an anticipation of Whitman's "Song of Myself":

The Whitman who hears "all sounds running together, combined, fused or following" is true to the social relatedness of different individual activities which Milton sings in the prose. Especially at the close—"others as fast reading, trying all things"—Milton sounds uncannily like Whitman democratically trying to pack every last rapid action in.

Both poets share an ecstatic primitivism ("Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!") that can also be a figure for the procreant urge of the market: "millions of spinning worms,/ That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk." However, Milton's commitment to the busy hum of mercantile republics is not entirely wholehearted, for he assigns this vision of productive "natural" labour to Comus, the tempter. . . . Milton's egotism, like Whitman's, has a generous, wonderfully innocent optimism that springs from their absolute confidence in the liberating possibilities of the free individual conscience.

By comparing Milton and Whitman, we start to see the republican poetics that structure the prose. Whitman asserts, "Not words of routine this song of mine," and Milton is constantly striving to break down inert routines in order to free the imagination from "linen decency," "a gross confirming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment." To adapt Hazlitt's terms, the "momentum" and "elasticity" of this republican visionary force which confidently insists that of all governments a Commonwealth aims "most to make the people flourishing, virtuous, noble and high-spirited." It seems appropriate that scholars working in the United States should invite readers congealed in the royalist kitch of present-day Britain to remember and admire this great servant of human liberty.