From
Bartlett, Irving H. The American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ed. Kenneth M. Stampp. New York : Crowell, 1967. Questia . 28 Jan. 2007 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=62939160>.
Walt Whitman's life almost spanned the century. He was born just seven years after the war of 1812 and died in 1892, one year before Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his famous essay announcing the close of the frontier and its influence on American history.
Whitman's expansiveness, his intense individualism, and ardent democracy can be explained in part by family background. He was born on a Long Island farm in a household where self-reliance and democratic radicalism were already entrenched. His father was a man of vigorous, independent intellect who liked to work with his hands, vote for Democrats of the Jefferson-Jackson stripe, and follow the kind of avant garde
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reform causes espoused by Frances Wright. Young Walt could trace Dutch, English, Quaker, Yankee, and Calvinist strains in his ancestry. Perhaps the most important was Quakerism. Although he never formally became a Quaker, he was impressed by the doctrine of the Inner Light, and this helped to support his own self-assurance in later life.
Of all the formative influences on Whitman before the publication of Leaves of Grass, none was more important than his career as a political journalist. Whitman never had much of a formal education. He got his first job in a newspaper office at the age of twelve, and for the next thirty-four years, in an itinerant career which perfectly illustrates the social mobility of nineteenth century Americans, divided his time between journalism, schoolteaching, and carpentry. He was successful enough as a journalist to serve as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to 1848. The Eagle was a prominent Democratic paper, and at this time Whitman was almost as much a professional politician as a journalist. The experience of editing a major paper in one of the largest American cities during a period when it was growing spectacularly left its mark on him. Few men have ever been more suited for the job and the place than Whitman. He loved the swarming city, always in motion with its crowded omnibuses and ferries (he knew the drivers and the pilots by name). He rejoiced equally in the thronging immigrants and in the famous public figures he encountered in the streets. Webster, Clay, Jackson, Van Buren, Seward, Lincoln--he saw them all at one time or another in New York. The city, with its frenzied activity and the great bay alongside, symbolized the vitality and expansiveness of America. And when his own nature called for a change of rhythm, there were always the peaceful meadows and solitary beaches of Long Island.
Beside Whitman the empathetic reporter we must put Whitman the partisan Democrat, who in the Eagle supported humanitarian causes, condemned conservatives as "pestilential to our party," and upheld the dignity of American culture. "Give us American plays," he wrote on one occasion, "fitted to American opinions and institutions. . . . The drama of this country
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can be the mouthpiece of freedom. . . . It can wield potent sway to destroy any attempt at despotism."
We know that even as he wrote these words Whitman was groping in his notebook for a new kind of language which might carry a new kind of message. When his opposition to slavery brought him into conflict with the Democratic Party in 1849 and interrupted his journalistic career, Whitman was able to spend more time on his notebooks. In 1855, having set the type with his own hands, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
Leaves of Grass was Whitman's supreme achievement. He revised it many times throughout his life, and it cannot be said to have been finished until he died. Ms preface to the first edition, however, is probably the clearest statement he made anywhere of what he was trying to do. Many readers found the preface as obscure as the poem, but to others it must have seemed as if the author was the very embodiment of Emerson's American scholar. "The United States themselves," Whitman announced, "are essentially the greatest poem." The American poet, therefore, would have to be "commensurate" with the people and their land. Log cabins, trappers, ferrymen, mountains, lakes, rivers, mechanics, fisherman, slaves, abolitionists-all of this and infinitely more would make up what Whitman called "the great psalm of the republic." For such poetry the expression of the American poet would have to be "transcendent and new."
In his preface Whitman enumerates specific virtues that the American poet must acknowledge and express. The first is faith which he calls "the antiseptic of the soul . . . it pervades the common people and preserves them. . . . They never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist."
A second virtue is self-trust, reconciling individual dignity with service to others. "This is what you shall do: Love the earth
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and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or to any man or number of men."
A third virtue is belief in liberty. "Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people. . . . Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed and knows no discouragement."
A fourth virtue is naturalness. The American poet will find nothing American that is not also natural. "These American States strong and healthy and accomplished shall receive no pleasure from violations of natural models and must not permit them. . . . To put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts honest shapes or which creates unearthly beings or places or contingencies is a nuisance and a revolt."
The central poem out of which all the rest of Leaves of Grass grew is "Song of Myself." The characteristics of the poem that help us to locate Whitman's position with respect to the transcendentalists are immediately obvious. The first three lines echo Emerson.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The apparent egocentricity of these lines hardly overreached Emerson's own words. Emerson had said that this was the age of the first person singular, and he must have agreed when Whitman identified the first person singular not only with himself as poet but also with the whole American democracy. The lines
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest
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reflect Emerson's belief in the spiritual unity of all men. Emerson's sense of fraternity may have been a good deal chillier than Whitman's but it was no less sincere.
Many critics objected to Whitman's poetry because of its formlessness. Compared to Longfellow's finished rhymes, Whitman's lines seemed rough and clumsy.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent
My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Whitman believed that the "expression of the American poet" had to be "transcendent and new." Here again we notice a resemblance to Emerson, who believed that the form was less important than the idea of a poem, and that the poet was less a craftsman than a vessel through which inspiration passed. "For it is not metres," Emerson said, "but a metre-making argument that makes a poem--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. . . .
The passages in the poem that made Emerson flinch were a product of Whitman's sensuous imagination. He thought of himself as "the poet of the body" as well as "the poet of the soul" and acted upon the belief in lines like the following:
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer
This head more than churches, bibles and all the creeds.
Emerson, who loved nature but Constantly strove to transcend the experience of the senses, would never be able to understand Whitman's belief that in America the body should be as free as the soul. Indeed he hardly knew how to describe Whitman's emphasis on sexual imagery, and once wrote to a friend about "our wild Whitman, with real inspiration but choked by titanic abdomen."
Whitman confessed his debt to Emerson by saying, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a
boil." When he sent Emerson a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the latter replied most generously, "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career." The fact that Whitman was brash enough to print Emerson's letter in the second edition of the Leaves and, to Emerson's shocked embarrassment, put "I greet you at the Beginning of a Great Career--R. W. Emerson" on the cover, tells us a good deal about the difference in the two men's personalities, but does not detract from the significance of their encounter. Whitman and the Transcendentalists may have been different kinds of people, but their intellectual sympathies were profound.
The coming of the Civil War had a decisive impact on the last half of Whitman's career. How could he continue to sing "the great psalm of the republic" while the republic was flaming in ruins all about him? How could he chant of brotherhood, when brothers were locked in bloody combat across the nation?
Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled
And sullen hymns of defeat?
It is a tribute to Whitman's integrity and to the comprehensiveness and strength of his vision that he continued to write exalted poetry about America.
Whitman's biographer Henry Seidel Canby finds that the war had a double effect on him. In the first place he realized that the American mission had been diverted and that the war was necessary to preserve it. At the same time Whitman's own experience during the war enhanced his faith in democracy. This experience was gained in the hospitals around Washington where he worked as an aide. In "Song of Myself" he had written, "I was the man, I suffered, I was there." Now he was there. In his first visit he saw a pile of amputated feet, arms, and legs
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under a tree in front of a camp hospital. He stayed to give comfort to the wounded, write letters to parents, wives, and sweethearts, distribute tobacco and fruit. As he sat by the bedsides of the dying young men, fanning and wiping the sweat from their faces, he was struck by their courage, endurance, and lack of complaint. They were the stuff of democracy and they became a part of Whitman's poetry after the war, a poetry in which, as Canby points out, Whitman's "amorphous" idealism "crystallized," in which there was less rhetoric, less of Whitman himself, and a calm certainty about democracy. The compassionate and controlled verses in Drum Taps and the matchless lyrics of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" testify to the more serene Whitman of the latter years.
In 1876, when he was almost sixty, Whitman issued a centennial edition of Leaves of Grass. "I count with . . . absolute certainty in the great future of the United States," he wrote in the preface, " America, too, is a prophecy. . . . Within my time the United States have emerged from nebulous vagueness and suspense to full . . . decision--have done the deeds and achiev'd the triumphs of half a score of centuries--and are henceforth to enter upon their real history."