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Walt Whitman |
Walt Whitman (1855).
Preface to Leaves of Grass.
Vol. 39, pp. 388-398 of
The Harvard Classics
Walt Whitman is the
most original and startling of modern poets. An irony of his life is
that while he wrote for the contemporary masses, only a limited
number of followers appreciated his genius, now universally
recognized.
(Walt Whitman born
May 31, 1819.)
1 AMERICA does
not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid
other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions … accepts
the lesson with calmness … is not so impatient as has been supposed
that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature
while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new
life of the new forms … perceives that the corpse is slowly borne
from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house … perceives that it
waits a little while in the door … that it was fittest for its days
… that its action has descended to the stalwart and well shaped
heir who approaches … and that he shall be fittest for his days.
The Americans of all nations at any
time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The
United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the
history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear
tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is
something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast
doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a
teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings
necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in
vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes…
. Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and
nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the performance disdaining the
trivial unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and
groupings and the push of its perspective spreads with crampless and
flowing breadth and showers its proflic and splendid extravagance.
One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and
need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the
orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children
upon women.
Other states indicate themselves in
their deputies … but the genius of the United States is not best or
most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or
authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its
newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people.
Their manners, speech, dress, friendship—the freshness and candor
of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage …
their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything
indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the
citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the
fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome
of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their
susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never
knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency
of their speech—their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly
tenderness and native elegance of soul … their good temper and open
handedness—the terrible significance of their elections—the
President’s taking off his hat to them, not they to him—these too
are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment
worthy of it.
The largeness of nature or the nation
were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of
the spirit of the citizen. Not nature nor swarming states nor streets
and steamships nor prosperous business nor farms nor capital nor
learning may suffice for the ideal of man … nor suffice the poet.
No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation can always cut a
deep mark and can have the best authority the cheapest … namely
from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses of
individuals or states and of present action and grandeur and of the
subjects of poets.—As if it were necessary to trot back generation
after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and
sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical!
As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening
of the western continent by discovery and what has transpired since
in North and South America were less than the small theatre of the
antique or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages! The pride of
the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities and all
returns of commerce and agriculture and all the magnitude of
geography or shows of exterior victory to enjoy the breed of full
sized men or one full sized man unconquerable and simple.
The American poets are to enclose old
and new for America is the race of races. of them a bard is to be
commensurate with a people. to him the other continents arrive as
contributions … he gives them reception for their sake and his own
sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit … he incarnates
its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with
annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio
and St. Lawrence with the Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do
not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure
into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and
Maryland and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine and over Manhattan
Bay and over Champlain and Erie and over Ontario and Huron and
Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian
and Cuban seas, and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not
tallied by the blue breadth of the waters below more than the breadth
of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast
stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily
stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from
east to west and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid
growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and
live oak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree
and cottonwood and tuliptree and caotus and wildvine and tamarind and
persimmon … and tangles as tangled as any canebrake or swamp …
and forests coated with transparent ice, and icicles hanging from
boughs and crackling in the wind … and sides and peaks of mountains
… and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie …
with flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wild
pigeon and high-hold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and
red-shouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white ibis and Indian-hen and
cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and
blackbird and mockingbird and buzzard and condor and nightheron and
eagle. to him the hereditary countenance descends both mother’s and
father’s. to him enter the essences of the real things and past and
present events—of the enormous diversity of temperature and
agriculture and mines—the tribes of red aborigines—the
weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky
coasts—the first settlements north or south—the rapid stature and
muscle—the haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and
formation of the constitution … the Union always surrounded by
blatherers and always calm and impregnable—the perpetual coming of
immigrants—the wharf-hem’d cities and superior marine—the
unsurveyed interior—the loghouses and clearings and wild animals
and hunters and trappers … the free commerce—the fisheries and
whaling and gold-digging—the endless gestation of new states—the
convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from
all climates and the uttermost parts … the noble character of the
young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen …
the general ardor and friendliness and enterprise—the perfect
equality of the female with the male … the large amativeness—the
fluid movement of the population—the factories and mercantile life
and laborsaving machinery—the Yankee swap—the New York firemen
and the target excursion—the Southern plantation life—the
character of the northeast and of the northwest and southwest—slavery
and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern
opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the
speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease. For such the
expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is
to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality
goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other
nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and
that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here
the theme is creative and has vista. Here comes one among the well
beloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the
solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid
forms.
Of all nations the United States with
veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have
the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be
their common referee so much as their poets shall. of all mankind the
great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are
grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its
place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every
object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is
the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of
his age and land … he supplies what wants supplying and checks what
wants checking. If peace is the routine out of him speaks the spirit
of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities,
encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce—lighting the
study of man, the soul, immortality—federal, state or municipal
government, marriage, health, freetrade, intertravel by land and sea
… nothing too close, nothing too far off … the stars not too far
off. In war he is the most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him
recruits horse and foot … he fetches parks of artillery the best
that engineer ever knew. If the time becomes slothful and heavy he
knows how to arouse it … he can make every word he speaks draw
blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or
legislation he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he
masters it. High up out of reach he stands turning a concentrated
light … he turns the pivot with his finger … he baffles the
swiftest runners as he stands and easily overtakes and envelopes
them. The time straying towards infidelity and confections and
persiflage he withholds by his steady faith … he spreads out his
dishes … he offers the sweet firmfibred meat that grows men and
women. His brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer … he is
judgment. He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling
around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest he has the most
faith. His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the
talk on the soul and eternity and God off of his equal plane he is
silent. He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and
denouement … he sees eternity in men and women … he does not see
men or women as dreams or dots. Faith is 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… . The power to destroy or remould
is freely used by him, but never the power of attack. What is past is
past. If he does not expose superior models and prove himself by
every step he takes he is not what is wanted. The presence of the
greatest poet conquers … not parleying or struggling or any
prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way see after him! There is
not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or
exclusiveness or the ignominy of a nativity or color or delusion of
hell or the necessity of hell … and no man thenceforward shall be
degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.
The greatest poet hardly knows
pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before
thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.
He is a seer … he is individual … he is complete in himself …
the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is
not one of the chorus … he does not stop for any regulation … he
is the president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he
does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The
other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any
proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world.
A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and all the
instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning. What is
marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or
vague? after you have once just opened the space of a peachpit and
given audience to far and near and to the sunset and had all things
enter with electric swiftness softly and duly without confusion or
jostling or jam.
The land and sea, the animals, fishes,
and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains,
and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to
indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb
real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality
and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough …
probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen,
early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the
love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers
of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old
varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence
of the poetic in outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets
to perceive … some may but they never can. The poetic quality is
not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things
nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of
these and much else and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that
it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of
uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground
out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free
growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely
as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the
shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the
perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest
poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but
dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful
brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is
enough … the fact will prevail through the universe … but the
gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles
himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you
shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and 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 unknown or to any man or number of
men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young
and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air
every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been
told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults
your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the
richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its
lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion
and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in
unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed
and manured … others may not know it but he shall. He shall go
directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of
everything he touches … and shall master all attachment.
The known universe has one complete
lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion
and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible
contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly
his delicious pay. What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his
burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the
reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All
expected from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the
sight of the daybreak or a scene of the winter woods or the presence
of children playing or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman.
His love above all love has leisure and expanse … he leaves room
ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover … he is
sure … he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and
thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him … suffering and
darkness cannot—death and fear cannot. to him complaint and
jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth … he
saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of
the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection
and beauty.
The fruition of beauty is no chance of
hit or miss … it is inevitable as life … it is as exact and plumb
as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from
the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds
another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. to
these respond perfections not only in the committees that were
supposed to stand for the rest but in the rest themselves just the
same. These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods …
that its finish is to each for itself and onward from itself … that
it is profuse and impartial … that there is not a minute of the
light or dark nor an acre of the earth and sea without it—nor any
direction of the sky nor any trade or employment nor any turn of
events. This is the reason that about the proper expression of beauty
there is precision and balance … one part does not need to be
thrust above another. The best singer is not the one who has the most
lithe and powerful organ … the pleasure of poems is not in them
that take the hand-somest measure and similes and sound.
Without effort and without exposing in
the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any
or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some
less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. to do
this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time.
What is the purpose must surely be there and the clue of it must be
there … and the faintest indication is the indication of the best
and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and future
are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence
of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of
their coffins and stands them again on their feet … he says to the
past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the
lesson … he places himself where the future becomes present. The
greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes
and passions … he finally ascends and finishes all … he exhibits
the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is
beyond … he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most
wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown … by that flash of
the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or
terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not
moralize or make applications of morals … he knows the soul. The
soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging
any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its
pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far
while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of
art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt
both and they are vital in his style and thoughts.
The art of art, the glory of
expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity.
Nothing is better than simplicity … nothing can make up for excess
or for the lack of definiteness. to carry on the heave of impulse and
pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations
are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in
literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the
movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of
trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph
of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it you have looked
on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You
shall not contemplate the flight of the gray gull over the bay or the
mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leaning of
sunflowers on their stalk or the appearance of the sun journeying
through heaven or the appearance of the moon afterward with any more
satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The greatest poet has
less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things
without increase or diminution and is the free channel of himself. He
swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my
writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way
between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in
the way not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely
what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe I
will have purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless
of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my
composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my
side and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless
gentility of great poets will be proved by their unconstraint. A
heroic person walks at his ease through and out of that custom or
precedent or authority that suits him not. of the traits of the
brotherhood of writers savans musicians inventors and artists,
nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms.
In the need of poems, philosophy, politics, mechanism, science,
behavior, the craft of art, an appropriate native grand-opera,
shipcraft, or any craft, he is greatest for ever and for ever who
contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest
expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes
one. The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to
us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better
than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.
Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can
be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any
more than one eyesight countervails another … and that men can be
good or grand only of the consciousness of their supremacy within
them. What do you think is the grandeur of storms and dismemberments
and the deadliest battles and wrecks and the wildest fury of the
elements and the power of the sea and the motion of nature and the
throes of human desires and dignity and hate and love? It is that
something in the soul which says, Rage on, Whirl on, I tread master
here and everywhere, Master of the spasms of the sky and of the
shatter of the sea, Master of nature and passion and death, and of
all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be marked for
generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . They
shall be kosmos … without monopoly or secrecy … glad to pass
anything to any one … hungry for equals night and day. They shall
not be careful of riches and privilege … they shall be riches and
privilege … they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The
most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by
equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard
shall delineate no class of persons nor one or two out of the strata
of interests nor love most nor truth most nor the soul most nor the
body most … and not be for the eastern states more than the western
or the northern states more than the southern.
Exact science and its practical
movements are no checks on the greatest poet but always his
encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance are there …
there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best … there he
returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveller …
the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist,
spiritualist, mathematician, historian, and lexicographer, are not
poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction
underlies the structure of every perfect poem. No matter what rises
or is uttered they sent the seed of the conception of it … of them
and by them stand the visible proofs of souls … always of their
fatherstuff must be begotten the sinewy races of bards. If there
shall be love and content between the father and the son and if the
greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father
there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable
science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of
science.
Note
1. Walt Whitman (1819–1892), the most original of American
poets, was born in West Hills, Long Island, educated in the Brooklyn
Public Schools, and apprenticed to a printer. As a youth he taught in
a country school, and later went into journalism in New York,
Brooklyn, and New Orleans. The first edition of “Leaves of Grass”
appeared in 1855, with the remarkable preface here printed. During
the war he acted as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals, and,
when it closed, he became a clerk in the government service at
Washington. He continued to write almost till his death.
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