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THE FIRST AMERICAN POET .

In the year 1860, we published a literary paper called "The Fireside," in which we devoted a page to

Moreover he is a genuine American man, the most original and truest Democrat of his time.

Westminster Review 74 n.s. 18 (October 1860), 590. Moncure Conway, Dial (August 1860), 517-19.

The First American Poet

Westminster Review 74 n.s. 18 (October 1860), 590.; Moncure Conway, Dial (August 1860), 517-19.; "Marco

Bozzaris," poem about the fighter for Greek independence by the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck; "

upon the angry bull, the majority of cultivated minds begin to see that Walt Whitman is the most American

of poets and one of the brightest lights of American literature.

Without attempting to argue the point it may be said that were all records of America destroyed and Walt

Dire were the grimaces of the mourners in high places, and dire are their grimaces still.

There were plenty of criticisms to make, even after one had finished crying Oh!

than the one which is the caption of this paper, nor one that has attracted more attention in the American

clear up the passages in nature which God has left obscure; the writer does not explain that the poems were

power—pulse of the continent," offer the finest embodiment of the grandeur of applied mechanics which American

thought, and writing; and from this effort, whatever the mistakes or limitations of its method, American

and enlarged edition of W ALT W HITMAN 's "Leaves of Grass," they did the best thing possible for American

literature, and performed an act of justice towards the most thoroughly original of American bards.

immature and casual reader we would gladly obliterate, yet as a sign of the time when a distinctively American

splendid protest against the fine spun and sickly effeminacy of the A MANDA M ATILDA poetry of the American

stoppage and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, Were

He has not omitted, as some editors might have done, In a City Dead House and The Flight of the Eagles

Yet, as these latter are nearly all very brief, many of them not exceeding a dozen lines each, there

If it were spread out as often is done, the poetry alone would fill a thin volume, while another could

It is a matter of no little significance that here has appeared in American literature a man who has

absurd delusion that the inhabitants of London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, and the lands which these cities

In 1876 Robert Buchanan, the Scotch poet, published an appeal "eulogizing and defending the American

A Danish critic has said in a Copenhagen magazine: "It may be candidly admitted that the American poet

But, although he calls them the "most precious bequest to current American civilization from all the

. $1.00); the dainty American reissue of George Meredith's subtile sonnet sequence, 'Modern Love" (with

These works of two American and one English poet represent a great deal that is most salient in modern

The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism.

the spirit of civilized communism and socialism is not far enough removed from the minds of our American

But his greatest grievance is that there is no American literature, as such.

But Artemus Ward is as redolent of the American soil as Walt Whitman, and while he is not, in any sense

But granted that we have no distinctive American literature, with the exception of Walt Whitman himself

while he was still in his teens are so melodramatic and unreal, that they would be unworthy of notice were

Into this volume he has gathered fragments of writing, some of which were produced as long ago as 1860

, and all of which are illustrative of his thoughts and his experiences in the woods and the city, in

It is good because it shows that the American mind does not become callous, with all its closeness of

from the modern Athens he now appears undimmed and, it is to be hoped, victorious in the neighbor city

Nature had given him a strong constitution, and his features were those of a dreamy sensualist.

to American persons, progresses, cities?—Chicago, Kanada, Arkansas?

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos, Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking

vulgar inditings of an uneducated man, free from any Old World philosophy, or Old World religion, were

His poems may be said to be essentially filled with an American spirit, to breathe the American air,

and to assert the fullest American freedom.

American books was known to be as profound as that of Sydney Smith —had discovered an American poet.

cities, and fit to have for his background and accessories their streaming populations and ample and

He famously remaked, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American

He famously remaked, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American

play, or looks at an American picture or statue?"

. ∗ ∗ ∗ The successive growth-stages of my infancy, childhood, youth and manhood were all pass'd on Long

He has visited Boston and the principal cities in Canada and in the West.

The hospital notes are printed in the slovenly shape in which they were written in his diary.

in his assertion of it he has imitated the owner of a forest who assured a lumberman that his trees were

Freeman to use in his essay on the peculiarities of American speech.

Boston, Thayer & Eldridge. 1860 Washington, Philp & Solomons.

and the opening words of his critique on the latter were graduated to a point no finer than to say, "

If the Aristarch of "Scotch Reviewers" were still in the flesh, and felt called, in the spirit of the

It were no great wonder, after the success of Walt Whitman, if many persons who have never talked any

Review of Leaves of Grass (1860–61)

It if were possible to see the genius of a great people throwing itself now into this form, now into

one can hope to understand from his book, or in any way except to go off tramping with him through cities

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) (1782) were probably regarded as "coarse" because of Rousseau's candor

.; Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) Confessions (1782) were probably regarded as "coarse" because

America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies; I will make inseparable cities

time; privileged to evoke, in a country hitherto still asking for its poet, a fresh, athletic, and American

the English language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of the earth; and in his own American

A N American Rough, whose name is W ALT W HITMAN , and who calls himself a "Kosmos," has been publishing

The fields of American literature want weeding dreadfully.

WALT WHITMAN, THE AMERICAN POET OF DEMOCRACY.

that a new poet had arisen in America, and that much difference of opinion existed as to his merits, were

had in his pocket while we were talking.

These were all inarticulate poets, and he interpreted them.

Walt Whitman, The American Poet of Democracy

Year 85 of the States—(1860–61) This is a new edition of the work of Walt Whitman, which some years ago

rampant, but not insufferable, fully believing himself to be a representative man and poet of the American

We should advise nobody to read it unless he were curious in literary monstrosities, and had a stomach

The radical abolitionist sympathies of Thayer & Eldrige, the publishers of the 1860–61 edition of Leaves

Review of Leaves of Grass (1860–61)

The radical abolitionist sympathies of Thayer & Eldrige, the publishers of the 1860–61 edition of Leaves

.* Some eight or ten years ago there was delivered to the world a volume of what were called poems by

In Walt Whitman we are called upon to recognise "the founder of American poetry rightly to be so called

By way of showing us what a superior animal is this American poet, Mr.

. . . of the questions of those recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities filled with

The performed American and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me; The unperformed, more gigantic

For the first time in American history a native poet sings to us of America.

hates, and all the fiery passions of the people; may write themselves unbelievers in the destiny of American

holds the right reader with a magnetism as strong as the Poles. he is the most oriental and the most American

of Americans.

True as the needle to the North is he true to his country, to the brave mother language, and to the American

For if those pre-successes were all—if they ended at that—if nothing more were yielded than so far appears—a

gross materialistic prosperity only—America, tried by subtlest tests, were a failure—has not advanced

Both the cash and the emotional cheer were deep medicines; many paid double or treble price.

printer, carpenter, author, and journalist, domiciled in nearly all the United States and principal cities

of that time, tending the Northern and Southern wounded alike—work'd down South and in Washington city

breadth, the democratic kindliness, and homespun sense that marks the very soul and gait of our American

He ought to winter in some pleasant Southern city where he could sit by open windows.

valued them for the "barbaric yawp," which seems to them the note of a new, vigorous, democratic, American

STRANGELY impudent agitation has just been started with regard to what is called "Walt Whitman's Actual American

Whitman, it may be explained, is an American writer who some years back attracted attention by a volume

of so-called poems which were chiefly remarkable for their absurd extravagance and shameless obscenity

"The real truth," says an American journal, which has taken up the subject apparently in the interest

All the established American poets studiously ignore Whitman."

"Walt Whitman's Actual American Position" was an unsigned article published in the West Jersey Press

Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Iowa City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Raleigh, Savannah, Charleston

, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, Brownsville, San Francisco, Havana, and a thousand equal cities, present

Further publication of Walt Whitman's collected poems having been interdicted in Boston, the plates were

Rees Welsh & Co., of Philadelphia, whose advance orders exceeded their first edition, a copy of which

But we had nearly forgotten "Brahma," and were only reminded of it by the appearance in the last number

Reader, the Atlantic Monthly, the best of American magazines, publishes two pages and a half of this

inevitably united, and made one identity, Nativities, climates, the grass of the great Pastoral Plains, Cities

neat form, Walt Whitman's ridiculous rigmarole, by an extreme stretch of critical courtesy called " American

If it were only decent prose we might stand it; but it does not rise to the dignity of a dessertation

While the words "Walt Whitman's American Institute Poem" appear on both the volume's cover and one of

Whitman wrote the poem following a request by the Committee on Invitations of the American Institute

While the words "Walt Whitman's American Institute Poem" appear on both the volume's cover and one of

Whitman wrote the poem following a request by the Committee on Invitations of the American Institute

Review of Leaves of Grass (1860–61)

Among the many accusations and calumnies which were heaped upon this despised people, there was none

The answer is plain,by the hands of wicked men, and because his works were righteous, and theirs were

Know ye not that so many of us as were baptised into Jesus Christ, were baptised into his death ?

But they were not necessary, and perhaps not suited to any other people than they to whom they were written

Were you ever tempted by any devil but one in your own souls? No: you never were.

other European power, seated upon what must one day have been the easternmost projection of the American

Both shrouded as it were from the world, and dedicated to the service of Apollo almost from their very

Her first attempts at verse were given to the Athenaeum without any signature, or indeed even initial

word, and call Browningesque; for we question if, till Miss Barrett wrote, so singular a position were

Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lovell were those who were his first intellectual associates; after a time, Wordsworth

, Lamb, and Cottle were added.

All these were men of a peculiar stamp, some of the highest powers.

fitted for emigration to a new world than they were.

Both Lloyd and Lovell were singular beings.

Clipping on final page appeared in Scientific American, 25 September 1847; here it is pasted on a February

1851 essay on Robert Southey from the American Whig Review.

The Quirites were a Sabine race. These two towns were hostile to each other.

The senators were chosen for life.

were taken from, before they were conquered.

to the Etruscan city.

Schlegel 272 were hewn.

The Slavonians and Eastern Europe. 283 and adds the interesting fact, that they were in a good state

Specimens of wood found there were in an excellent state of preservation.

Even they, however, were doomed at last to foreign invasion.

, seeds that were but revived by the German Luther?

Even in her worst days, were her serfs more degraded beings than those of Russia now?

The false and the phantasmal have ever been considered the necessary complements, as it were, of our

They heard gods in winds and in fire—and altars to these were among the earliest raised.

The forests were sacred to the universal Pan—his fauns, sylvans and satyrs; every oak had its hamadryad

The Swiss peasants were successful, and are held in honorable remembrance forever.

We have a thousand proofs that they were rude, bad, ignorant times.

Grass points out that this is a revised reprint of an article by the same title published by the American

imprinting many a kiss; Joying, as I would joy, to see such charms, As though he knew how blest a lot were

I cried, 'would that I shared the bliss Of that embrace, and that such joy were mine!'

Meanwhile, the vigorous minds of Germany were occupied with other matters.

Soul-like were those hours of yore; Let us walk in soul once more.

It is the strangest contrast of cities that can be seen in Europe.

That night the eyes of my inner man were opened, and enabled to look into heaven, the world of spirits

At His presence all the spirits were gathered together from all sides; and when they were come they were

left to form a celestial society, but the evil were cast into the hells.'

tossing the figure of a quoit; others were pitching the shadow of a bar; others were breaking the apparition

"They live in two cities, to which they are led after death.

"Shakspeare versus Sand," anonymously authored, appeared in The American Whig Review 5.5 (May 1847):

There is intellectual, moral, and physical force-possibility in the world enough to amaze us if it were

THE INDIANS IN AMERICAN ART.

I T seems to us that the Indian has not received justice in American art.

In the beginning of that war, the Indians were induced, by fair promises, to assemble peaceably in the

They were seated on one side of the house, and the English on the other, who, after lecturing them upon

The Indians in American Art

manufactures, and all the principal themes of interest to men civilized life, and to men and women, were

common empire of H in the great Asiatic cities of Nineveh and Babylon and their empi empires, and the

—Vast libraries existed; Cheap copies of these books circulated among the commonality or were eligible

to the m, and there were institutions in which learning and religion grew together.

They were commissioned to develop the resources of the human mind in the cultivation of philosophy, and

He answered with as much sincerity as geniality, that it would indeed be strange if there were no music

at the heart of his poems, for more of these were actually inspired by music than he himself could remember