Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today Part 1

Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today.

by Henry Eduard Legler.

I

On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional literary world was startled into indecorous behavior by the unannounced appearance of a thin quarto sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Gra.s.s, and there were but twelve poems in the volume. No author's name appeared upon the t.i.tle page, the separate poems bore no captions, there was no imprint of publisher. A steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the neck, and a copyright notice identifying Walter Whitman with the publication, furnished the only clues. Uncouth in size, atrociously printed, and shockingly frank in the language employed, the volume evoked such a tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no parallel in the history of letters. From contemporary criticisms might be compiled an Anthology of Anathema comparable to Wagner's Schimpf-Lexicon, or the Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for Henrik Ibsen. Some of the striking adjectives and phrases employed in print would include the following, as applied either to the verses or their author:

The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.

A belief in the preciousness of filth.

Entirely b.e.s.t.i.a.l.

Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.

Noxious weeds.

Impious and obscene.

Disgusting burlesque.

Broken out of Bedlam.

Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.

Defilement.

Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.

Ithyphallic audacity.

Gross indecency.

Sunken sensualist.

Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.

Roots like a pig.

Rowdy Knight Errant.

A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.

Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest l.u.s.t!

Priapus--worshipping obscenity.

Rant and rubbish.

Linguistic silliness.

Inhumanly insolent.

Apotheosis of Sweat.

Mouthings of a mountebank.

Venomously malignant.

Pretentious twaddle.

Degraded helot of literature.

His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors.

Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought.

Muck of abomination.

A few quotations from the press of this period will serve to indicate the general tenor of comment:

"The book might pa.s.s for merely hectoring and ludicrous, if it were not something a great deal more offensive," observed the Christian Examiner (Boston, 1856). "It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, and appet.i.tes in terms that admit of no double sense. The author is 'one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, sensual, divine inside and out. The scent of these armpits an aroma finer than prayer.' He leaves 'washes and razors for foofoos,' thinks the talk about virtue and vice only 'blurt,' he being above and indifferent to both of them. These quotations are made with cautious delicacy. We pick our way as cleanly as we can between other pa.s.sages which are more detestable."

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (1855) characterizes Walt Whitman thus: "No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He will bring poems to fill the days and nights--fit for men and women with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. The body, he teaches, is beautiful. s.e.x is also beautiful. Are you to be put down, he seems to ask, to that shallow level of literature and conversation that stops a man's recognizing the delicious pleasure of his s.e.x, or a woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. s.e.x will not be put aside; it is the great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort. To men and women, he says, you can have healthy and powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine.

Follow me, and there shall be taller and richer crops of humanity on the earth."

From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the Crayon (New York, 1856), this extract may be taken: "With a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity of perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of Gra.s.s has no ident.i.ty, no concentration, no purpose--it is barbarous, undisciplined, like the poetry of a half-civilized people, and as a whole useless, save to those miners of thought who prefer the metal in its unworked state."

The New York Daily Times (1856) asks: "What Centaur have we here, half man, half beast, neighing defiance to all the world? What conglomerate of thought is this before us, with insolence, philosophy, tenderness, blasphemy, beauty, and gross indecency tumbling in drunken confusion through the pages? Who is this arrogant young man who proclaims himself the Poet of the time, and who roots like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts?"

"Other poets," notes a writer in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1856), "other poets celebrate great events, personages, romances, wars, loves, pa.s.sions, the victories and power of their country, or some real or imagined incident--and polish their work, and come to conclusions, and satisfy the reader. This poet celebrates natural propensities in himself; and that is the way he celebrates all. He comes to no conclusions, and does not satisfy the reader. He certainly leaves him what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of the Paradise tree of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be erased again."

"He stalks among the dapper gentlemen of this generation like a drunken Hercules amid the dainty dancers," suggested the Christian Spiritualist (1856). "The book abounds in pa.s.sages that cannot be quoted in drawing rooms, and expressions that fall upon ears polite with a terrible dissonance."

Nor was savage criticism in the years 1855 and 1856 limited to this side of the Atlantic. The London Critic, in a caustic review, found this the mildest comment that Whitman's verse warranted: "Walt Whitman gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. * * * 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 civilization, call it the expression of a beast."

Noisy as was this babel of discordant voices, one friendly greeting rang clear. Leaves of Gra.s.s had but just come from the press, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his home in Concord, under date of July 21, 1855, wrote to the author in genuine fellowship:

"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 which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging."

Tracing the popular estimates of Walt Whitman through the next five years, expressions of unmeasured disapproval similar to those quoted may be found in periodicals and in the daily press, with here and there grudging admission that despite unseemly tendencies, there is evident originality and even genius in the pages of this unusual book.

In a comparatively temperate review, August 4, 1860, the Cosmopolite, of Boston, while deploring that nature is treated here without fig-leaves, declares the style wonderfully idiomatic and graphic, adding: "In his frenzy, in the fire of his inspiration, are fused and poured out together elements. .h.i.therto considered antagonistic in poetry--pa.s.sion, arrogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility, rowdyism, spirituality, laughter, tears, together with the most ardent and tender love, the most comprehensive human sympathy which ever radiated its divine glow through the pages of poems."

A contemporary of this date, the Boston Post, found nothing to commend. "Gra.s.s," said the writer, making the t.i.tle of the book his text, "gra.s.s is the gift of G.o.d for the healthy sustenance of his creatures, and its name ought not to be desecrated by being so improperly bestowed upon these foul and rank leaves of the poison-plants of egotism, irreverance, and of l.u.s.t, run rampant and holding high revel in its shame."

And the London Lancet, July 7, 1860, comments in this wise: "Of all the writers we have ever perused, Walt Whitman is the most silly, the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting. If we can think of any stronger epithets, we will print them in a second edition."

II

What were these poems which excited such vitriolic epithets? Taking both the editions of 1855 and of the year following, and indeed including all of the four hundred poems bearing Whitman's authorship in the three-quarters of a half-century during which his final volume was in the making, scarcely half a dozen poems can be found which could give offense to the most prudish persons. Nearly all of these have been grouped, with some others, under the general sub-t.i.tle Children of Adam. There are poems which excite the risibles of some readers, there are poems which read like the lists of a mail-order house, and others which appear in spots to have been copied bodily from a gazetteer. These, however, are more likely to provoke good-natured banter than violent denunciatory pa.s.sion. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose generous greeting and meed of praise in the birth-year of Leaves of Gra.s.s will be recalled, in sending a copy of it to Carlyle in 1860, and commending it to his interest, added: "And after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it."

Had Whitman omitted the few poems whose t.i.tles are given here, doubtless a few readers would have found his formless verses either curious or ludicrous, or merely stupid, and others would have pa.s.sed them by as unmeriting even casual attention. The poems which are chiefly responsible for a controversy which raged for half a century, are these:

I sing the body electric.

A woman waits for me.

To a common prost.i.tute.

The dalliance of the eagles.

Wholly dissociated from the picturesque personality from which the book emanated, Leaves of Gra.s.s bears a unique story margined on its pages. The sprawling types whose muddy imprint on the ill-proportioned pages made up the uncouth first edition of the book, were put together by the author's hands, and the sorry press work was his handiwork as well. The unusual preface and the twelve poems that followed he wrote in the open, while lounging on the wharves, while crossing on ferry-boats, while loitering in the fields, while sitting on the tops of omnibuses. His physical materials were the stubs of pencils, the backs of used envelopes, sc.r.a.ps of paper that easily came to hand. The same open-air workshops and like crude tools of writing he utilized for nearly forty years. During the thirty-seven years that intervened between the first printing of his Leaves and his death in 1892, he followed as his chief purpose in life the task he had set himself at the beginning of his serious authorship--the c.u.mulative expression of personality in the larger sense which is manifest in the successive and expanding editions of his Leaves of Gra.s.s. That book becomes therefore, a life history. Incompletely as he may have performed this self-imposed task, his own explanation of his purpose may well be accepted as made in good faith. That explanation appears in the preface to the 1876 edition, and amid the mult.i.tude of paper sc.r.a.ps that came into the possession of his executors, following his pa.s.sing away, may be found similar clues:

"It was originally my intention, after chanting in Leaves of Gra.s.s the songs of the body and of existence, to then compose a further, equally-needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the theme of my first chants, to shift the slides and exhibit the problem and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law, and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation, but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the greater part of existence, and something that life is at least as much for, as it is for itself."

Too long for repet.i.tion here, but important in the same connection for a full understanding of Walt Whitman's motives, is that Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, wherein he summed up his work in fourteen pages of prose, and with frank egotism appended this anecdote in a footnote on the first page thereof: "When Champollion, on his death bed, handed to the printer the revised proof of his Egyptian Grammar, he said gayly, 'Be careful of this--it is my _carte de visite_ to posterity.'"

Undaunted when ridicule poured over him, evenly tranquil when abuse a.s.sailed him, unemotional when praise was lavished upon him, unfalteringly and undeviatingly he pursued his way. The group headings which were added in successive editions of his book, indicate the milestones of his journey from the time when the Song of Myself noted the beginning, till Whispers of Heavenly Death presaged the ending.

Familiarity with the main incidents and experiences of his life give to the several annexes, as he was fond of calling the additions that he made to each succeeding issue of his Leaves, the clues of chapter headings: Children of Adam; Calamus; Birds of Pa.s.sage; Sea-Drift; By the Roadside; Drum-Taps; Autumn Rivulets; Whispers of Heavenly Death; Songs of Parting.

A check list of his princ.i.p.al editions of Leaves of Gra.s.s, with characteristics noted, would serve almost as a chronology of Whitman's life story.

1855--FIRST EDITION. Twelve poems were included in this edition. They are without distinctive t.i.tles, though in later issues they appeared with varying t.i.tles, those given in the definitive edition being the following: