.... .... the old spice of pastoral affectation. . . . . There is indeed a criticism which may be made upon some of these poems, namely that they are not quite poetry. Some of them are perhaps rather too rhetorical, or contain too much moralizing, to be sufficiently disconnected from prose. . . . . Nor can we quite refrain from another conclusion. Nobody understands better than Mr. Lowell the difference between a pump and a spring; between writing because you can't help it, and writing because you are resolved to write. . . . ; but one may be permitted to doubt whether Mr. Lowell always remembered it, or rather always acted up to his knowledge, in the second series of Biglow Papers. The humour is there, but it is perceptibly more forced, and Birdofredom Sawin seems to have lost something of his old rollicking spirits. . . . . We doubt whether he [Lowell] could heartily enjoy any district beyond the range of the bobolink. His descriptive poetry, excellent as it is, possibly loses something in popularity from this kind of provincialism, for the most vivid touches are those which imply a certain amount of local knowledge. . . . . He prefers the future to the past, and the common, though not the vulgar, to the romantic. Such, for example, is the burden of the 'Vision of Sir Launfal,' a poem, which, with great beauties, is perhaps rather too obtrusively didactic. But in the 'Commemoration Ode' he has found an appropriate occasion and form for pouring out his strongest feelings in masculine verse. One or two stanzas even here may be a little too didactic; and the style is rather broad and manly than marked by the exquisite felicities which betray the hand of a perfect master. But throughout the ode the stream of song flows at once strong and deep. The poet is speaking from his heart, and with a solemnity, a pathos, and elevation of feeling worthy of a great event."-The Cornhill Magazine, January, 1875. BAYARD TAYLOR The text is from the 1865 edition. (436) THE FIGht of Paso del MAR. First published in The Literary World, March 11, 1848. "In the Californian Ballads I have attempted to give a poetical expression to the rude but heroic physical life of the vast desert and mountain region stretching from the Cordilleras of New Mexico to the Pacific. This country, in the sublime desolation of its sandy plains and stony mountains, streaked here and there with valleys of almost tropical verdure, and the peculiar character of its semi-civilized people, seemed to afford a field in which the vigorous spirit of the old ballad might be transplanted, to revive and flourish with a new and sturdy growth."-Preface to Rhymes, Ballads, and Other Poems, 1849. Paso del Mar = "the pass of the sea." 9. pescador=fisherman. (439) TO THE NILE. (440) 17. Osirian festivals: Osiris, the chief god of the Egyptians, was honored by magnificent annual festivals having reference to the subsidence of the Nile. 18. Memnon's music: according to fable, when the rays of the rising sun touched the colossal statue of Memnon at Thebes, it gave forth a musical sound. ¶ 19. Cambyses: king of Persia, who defeated the king of Egypt in 525 B.C., and devastated the country. ¶ 25. pylons: towers, flanking a gateway. (440) THE QUAKER WIDOW. (441) 28. Hicksite: the Hicksite, Quakers (an American sect founded by Elias Hicks, in 1827) held doctrines similar to the Unitarians. ¶ 37-40. The lines describe the customs of a Quaker wedding in the meeting-house. "In the presence of the Lord": the opening words of the form by which the Quaker bridegroom and bride take each other in marriage. WALT WHITMAN .... "After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, &c., .... I found myself remaining possess'd, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. . . . . This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and æsthetic Personality, in the midst of and tallying the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current America-and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book. Perhaps this is in brief, or suggests, all I have sought to do. Given the Nineteenth Century, with the United States, and what they furnish as area and points of view, 'Leaves of Grass' is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-will'd record. In the midst of all it gives one man's-the author's-identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, color'd hardly at all with any decided coloring from other faiths or other identities. Plenty of songs had been sung-beautiful, matchless songs-adjusted to other lands than these, another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and to-day. Modern science and democracy seem'd to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements-which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. For grounds for 'Leaves of Grass' as a poem, I abandon'd the conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake-no legend or myth or romance, nor euphemism nor rhyme,—but the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening Nineteenth Century, and especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the Unites States to-day. . . . . "The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads-seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those voices from our ear and area-holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of to-day: though perhaps the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man's or woman's individuality, Old World or New, are from them; and though if I were ask'd to name the most precious bequest to current American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west, some serious words and debits remain, some acrid considerations demand a hearing. Of the great poems receiv'd from abroad and from the ages, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? .... "It is certain, I say, that, although I had made a start before, only from the occurrence of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes of lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of course I don't mean in my own heart only; I saw it just as plainly in others, in millions), that only from the strong flare and provocation of that war's sights and scenes the final reasons-forbeing of an autochtonic and passionate song definitely came forth. .... "The word I myself put primarily for the description of them [his poems], as they stand at last, is the word Suggestiveness. I round and finish little if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought-there to pursue your own flight. Another impetusword is Comradeship as for all lands, and in a more commanding and acknowledg'd sense than hitherto. Other word-signs would be Good Cheer, Content, and Hope. . . . . I say the profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the intellect, or supply something polish'd and interesting, nor even to depict great passions or persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all. Fortunately there is the original inexhaustible fund of buoyancy, normally resident in the race, forever eligible to be appeal'd to and relied on. . . . . "While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through Time. My book ought to emanate buoyancy and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those elements, and has been the comfort of my life since it was originally commenced. One main genesis-motive of the 'Leaves' was my conviction (just as strong to-day as ever) that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth-or even to call attention to it or the need of it-is the beginning, middle, and final purpose of the poems."-Walt Whitman, "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads," 1888. The text is from the 1891 edition. (443) SONG OF MYSELF. Section 1; Section 21; Section 32, ll. 1-8; Section 33, ll. 113-23, 135-46; Section 45, ll. 11-31; Section 46, 11. 20-22. ¶ 6-13. These lines were added in 1881. (444) 42-44. Cf. Carlyle's "Characteristics": "Self-contemplation, on the other hand, is infallibly the symptom of disease, be it or be it not the sign of cure. An unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in repenting and anxiety, whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward and make more way. If in any sphere of man's life, then in the Moral sphere, as the inmost and most .... vital of all, it is good that there be wholeness; that there be unconsciousness, which is the evidence of this." (446) FACES. Section 5. The subject of the lines is Whitman's mother. (453) STARTING FROM PAUMANOK. Section 4, ll. 5-9; Section 5, ll. 1-9. Cf. Whitman's "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads" (1888): "Later, at intervals, summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country or to Long Island's seashores: there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than in any library or indoor room-it makes such difference where you read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them. . . . . (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelm'd by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)" Cf. also Emerson's "The American Scholar": "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions, arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. . . . . Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." (462) WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM'D. "I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. . . . . The party makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going gray horse, is dress'd in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man. .... I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones..... They pass'd me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen'd to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow'd and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."-Whitman, Specimen Days, August 12, 1863. "I saw him on his return, at three o'clock, after the performance [the inauguration] was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look'd very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach'd to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness and native western form of manliness.)-Ibid., March 4, 1865. "He leaves for America's history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality. Not but that he had faults, and show'd them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form'd the hard-pan of his character. These he seal'd with his life. The tragic splendor of his death, purging, illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will remain and will grow brighter through time, while history lives and love of country lasts. By many has this Union been help'd; but if one name, one man, must be pick'd out, he, most of all, is the conservator of it, to the future."-Ibid., April 16, 1865. (473) TO THE MAN-OF-WAR BIRD. 18. Senegal: a French colony in western Africa. CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of 'Leaves of Grass.' I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment that so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career."-Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Whitman, July 21, 1855. "A fireman or omnibus driver who had intelligence enough to absorb the speculations of that school of thought which culminated at Boston some fifteen or eighteen years ago, and resources of expression to put them forth again in a form of his own, with sufficient self-conceit and contempt for public taste to affront all usual propriety of diction, might have written this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet somehow fascinating book. As we say, it is a mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism; and, what must be surprising to both these elements, they here seem to fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony. The vast and vague conceptions of the one lose nothing of their quality in passing through the coarse and odd intellectual medium of the other; while there is an original perception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness in our new poet which belong to no other adept of the transcendental school."-Putnam's Monthly Magazine, September, 1855. "This thin quarto deserves its name. That is to say, one reads and enjoys the freshness, simplicity, and reality of what he reads, just as the tired man, lying on the hillside in summer, enjoys the leaves of grass around him, enjoys the shadow, enjoys the flecks of sunshine, not for what they 'suggest to him,' but for what they are. . . . . So the book is a collection of observations, speculations, memories, and prophecies, clad in the simplest, truest, and often the most nervous English. . . . . What he has seen once he has seen for ever. And thus there are in this curious book little thumb-nail sketches of life in the prairie, life in California, life at school, life |