# Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 10

X
WALT WHITMAN
I
I cannot write of Walt Whitman, I confess, with an easy objectivity. The soul and the verse of the sage of Manhattan are too intimately related in my mind to one of the most important discoveries of my early youth: the discovery of poetry.
Among my father’s books I found the two little five-cent volumes of the Biblioteca Universale in which Gamberale had published part of his translation of Whitman; and I read them and reread them with that enthusiasm which does not survive the teens. Though I was no bourgeois gentilhomme I had then no clear idea of the difference between verse and prose; and I did not stop to inquire why these songs were ​composed of verses so long as to fill two or three lines of print. I read them—I breathed in the poetry of the sea, of the city, of the universe—without a thought of the pale scholars who count the syllables of a soul in emotion as they would count, if they could, the notes of the nightingale that sings for love.
And I must confess that I, a Tuscan, an Italian, a Latin, learned the meaning of poetry not through Virgil or through Dante—much less through the casuist Petrarch or the mosaicist Tasso, poets de luxe, and therefore men of letters rather than poets—but through the puerile enumerations and the long, passionate invocations of the good reaper of the Leaves of Grass. Even today, though so many years have passed, I cannot read without emotion the Whispers of Heavenly Death or There Was a Child Went Forth. Later on I read the Leaves of Grass in English, became acquainted, through thick American volumes, with the life and the countenance of Whitman, and studied in Jannacone’s little book the metrical questions raised by Whitman’s verse. But I have never forgotten those wondrous hours of my boyhood.
I am not saying all this for the sake of writing an uncalled-for bit of spiritual autobiography, but just to explain why I cannot speak of Whitman as if he were one of the ordinary foreign poets reserved for special importation by ​professors in female seminaries, and to make it clear that I can speak of him only as a loving brother may speak of a brother beloved, as a humble younger brother may speak of a great elder brother who is dead.
How glad I would be if I might convey to others something of my deep affection, if I might present to my readers a living, faithful image of the soul of the poet whom I love—a soul childlike and great, inebriate with joy and heavy with sadness.
I do not care to discuss the facts of his life. What matters it just when he was a printer, a reporter, a carpenter, a nurse, a government employee, a patriarch of democracy? I know that he was born in America in 1819, that he never left his country, and that he died in 1892. I know that in life he was just what he is in his songs: a complete, simple, loyal man, a lover of nature and of men, full of hope, a giver of joy. Howells, who saw him, writes: “His eyes and his voice revealed a frank, irresistible offer of friendship; he gave his hand in such a way that it was ours to hold forever.” And another, who saw his body the day after his death, writes: “His face is that of an affectionate and aged child.” Whenever I learn of such an honorable accordance between life and poetry I take delight in it; and I prefer those poets who have sung the grief of their own hearts to those whose ​versification of all possible sentiments proceeds from the depths of a comfortable armchair.
But I care less for the whole course of a man’s life than for his own distilling of its essence. Minute biographers have always seemed to me like those who, not content with the taste of a noble wine, should seek the stems of the grapes from which it came. Knowledge of the external life of a great man may satisfy the curiosity of the amateur d’âmes or the collector of anecdotes—and it may serve indeed to inspire great achievement—but it has nothing to do with the value or the real significance of his work.
External biography is even more than usually out of place in the case of Whitman, for he is a universal poet, a poet not of the part but of the whole, a poet not merely of America but of the world; and on the other hand he is a poet so personal, so individual, so intimate, that he could rightly say:
Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this, touches a man.
In his songs, therefore, you may find the man’s whole message—all that he wished to say, to teach, and to leave to those who loved him, to his comrades, to mankind. The hundred and other hundred Leaves of Grass are the truly immortal portion of his soul.
​Nor will I, in writing of Whitman, follow the plan of those who, having nothing of their own to say, proceed to a mechanical analysis of style. And yet, in the case of Whitman, there are choice questions of metrical jurisprudence to be proposed and solved. One might ask whether the poetry of Whitman is truly metrical, as Whitman himself declared, and others—Noel, Stedman, Gamberale—have repeated; or whether it has a dactylic cadence, as Macaulay believed, or a sort of consonantal rhythm, as Triggs maintains, or a latent rhythmic harmony with psychic rhyme and strophic period, as our own Jannacone has it. Or again, one might follow O’Connor and Nencioni in the endeavor to decide which movements in nature the song of Whitman most resembles—whether forest winds or ocean waves—or one might investigate the influence of Whitman’s theories as to the relation between prose and verse on the French movement of the verslibristes. And if one had plenty of time to waste, one might also consider Whitman’s favorite rhetorical figure, enumeration, and compare it with Homer’s periphrasis, Dante’s metonymy, Victor Hugo’s antithesis, and d’Annunzio’s metaphor. But all this fine research is not for us, for what we seek in the world and in men is spiritual activity, and what we seek in the spirit is ideas.
Walt Whitman wrote a few songs which are ​marvelous for their pure poetry, for their music, for their imagery, and for their choice of words, but fortunately he did not write to amuse people or to please the publishers.
Walt Whitman has something to say to men, and is eager that men should listen. That they may hear the better, he “sings full-voiced his valiant and melodious songs.” Our duty, the duty of those who love him, is to distil from these full-voiced songs the poet’s thought—that which he entrusted lovingly to himself, to his comrades, to his followers, to all of us.
II
Why did Walt Whitman turn to the writing of verse? Because he was a man of letters by instinct? To win fame? Because there was nothing else that he could do? By no means. Walt Whitman, before becoming a poet, had been a worker, the son of a carpenter, able to saw logs and make tables. He was far from being one of those mosaicists in adjectives whose horizon is an inkstand and whose only goal is the favor of critics and of ladies:
Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me? Did you seek the civilian’s peaceful and languishing rhymes? … What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes, For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.
Thus he writes To a Certain Civilian. So then the purpose of his volume is not to amuse people, nor to soothe sensitive ears, nor to delight students of metrics. His ideal is not the classic Æolian harp, but rather the hoarse locomotive, with its “madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all.” He has no fear of professors of poetry; he is content to contemplate the awe of a Colorado canyon:
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art? To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse? The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace —column and polish’d arch forgot?
“What do I care?”—Whitman seems to say—“all this is but literature”:
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
He sings not for the sake of singing, but that he may rouse men, educate them, inspire them:
I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!
I am the teacher of athletes, He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own.
No dainty dolce affettuoso I, Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe.
He is, then, less a poet in the modern sense than a prophet, a vates in the ancient sense. He is not the singer of certain specific things or of a few sentiments: he is the poet of the universal, of the all, of the ensemble.
There are poets who sing only the love of woman, others who sing only the love of nature, others yet who sing only the love of fatherland or of mankind or of themselves. Whitman sings all these loves together, and others as well:
I will not make poems with reference to parts, But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble, And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days.
All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.
And he has heard the command of the Muse:
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal.
At first sight, on the contrary, Whitman seems the most personal of poets, or at least the most sincere of egotists. Is he not the proud author of the Song of Myself? His very first line is this:
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person.
And again he says:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
His own personality recurs frequently in his songs, and not under the abstract and indeterminate title I, but with the face and the clothes of Walt Whitman:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.
Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes, This beard, the white wool unclipt upon my neck, My brown hands and the silent manner of me without charm.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from … This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
But it would be a mistake to regard this adoration of the self as a proof of Whitman’s individualism. He adores the self because he adores ​the all, sees the all reflected in the self, and feels the self intimately mingled with the all. Addressing an unknown friend, he says:
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side.
The enumeration goes on and on, in the endeavor to suggest effectively this sense of oneness with all things. He is conscious of himself as being the universal spirit, as being breath and air, as the God of a pantheistic world (if you will permit the paradox) might be conscious of himself:
Santa Spirita, breather, life, Beyond the light, lighter than light, Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell, Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume, Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan, Ethereal, pervading all, (for without me what were all? what were God?) Essence of forms, life of the real identities, permanent, positive, (namely the unseen,) Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general soul.
In this sense Walt Whitman may even be called a mystic. Yet he is very unlike other mystics, for he does not lose himself in God, but aspires, as it were, to be so universal as to include ​God Himself within his soul. At other times he desires “to be indeed a God”; says “that there is no God any more divine than Yourself”; or delights “to be this incredible God I am.” In one of the songs entitled Whispers of Heavenly Death he openly proclaims himself as the most powerful of Gods:
Consolator most mild, the promis’d one advancing, With gentle hand extended, the mightier God am I, Foretold by prophets and poets in their most rapt prophecies and poems … All sorrow, labor, suffering, I, tallying it, absorb in myself.
And he includes within himself not merely all things, but all times as well:
I know that the past was great and the future will be great, And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time … And that where I am or you are this present day, there is the centre of all days, all races, And there is the meaning to us of all that has ever come of races and days, or ever will come.
Furthermore, he comprises in himself not only all things and all times, but all men, men of all conditions and of all ages. In the Song of Myself, at the close of one of his endless enumerations of men, he asserts:
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years … These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
The personality of Walt Whitman is then but the dress, the rind of his cosmic love. Like all great souls he aspires to the complete and the infinite, but he does not seek to attain completeness by means of general and abstract terms. Just as his mysticism is an enormous amplification of his egotism, so his love for the universal manifests itself as a love of every single detail. He would reach the infinite by dint of the accumulation of finite things. Mad though the effort be, perilous though it be from the point of view of poetry, since it compels interminable enumerations, one must recognize that his constant insistence on particular things, and on the greatest possible number of particular things, suggests amplitude and universality more effectively than the abstract phrases with which philosophers and contemplatives are so well satisfied.
​So overflowing is his love for the universe that it could not find sufficient utterance if he were obliged to limit his expressions of love to things in general, to the all, to the infinite, to God. He must needs express to every single object his admiration and his affection, his pleasure and his wonder. As he looks upon the world, Walt Whitman is an optimist. An optimist, did I say? No, that is a cold and technical word, and will not serve for him. Say rather a passionate lover, a worshipper of the all—not so blind as to be unaware of the ugly and the evil, but so great as to extend his love to the ugly and the evil.
He is by instinct and by program the champion of all things:
And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.
To his magnificent soul all is magnificent:
Illustrious every one! Illustrious what we name space, sphere of unnumber’d spirits, Illustrious the mystery of motion in all beings, even the tiniest insect, Illustrious the attribute of speech, the senses, the body, Illustrious the passing light—illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the western sky, Illustrious whatever I see or hear or touch, to the last. Good in all.
All beautiful to me, all wondrous.
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
And again:
The whole universe indicates that it is good, The past and the present indicate that it is good. How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect.
In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.
For him
All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
His inspired child-soul sees nought save miracles:
To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars … And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
Thus Whitman’s soul is almost always joyous. At certain moments his physical and spiritual delight in the spectacle of the world transports him into a well-nigh Dionysiac frenzy. Read, for instance, the Song of Joys, wherein all joys from that of “bathing in the swimming bath” to the “prophetic joys of better” are enumerated and invoked.
​But the greatest of all joys for Whitman is the joy of being loved, in body and in spirit:
I know … That all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.
After studying all philosophers and all prophets he discovers that the basis of all metaphysics is love:
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, Of city for city and land for land.
He thinks of all the men scattered in far away lands whom he might love:
And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own lands, I know we should be brethren and lovers, I know I should be happy with them.
But Whitman’s song would not be truly universal if he saw only the beauty and the goodness of the world. I have already said, I believe, that his optimism is by no means that of Dr. Pangloss. He is not unaware of evil; he transcends it. Sometimes, indeed, he cannot rise above it in full ​serenity. A sudden thought assails him, and his words are full of sadness, wet with tears, resonant with the echoes of funeral bells and drums:
I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d, I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.
But for him too come days of sadness:
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame … All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon, See, hear, and am silent.
And when he contemplates the faces of those who sleep, he sees not only those of the happy, but
The wretched features of ennuyés, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates.
O then the unloosen’d ocean, Of tears! tears! tears!
He feels the horror
Of the terrible doubt of appearances, Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only.
And he asks, sadly:
Hast never come to thee an hour, A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth? These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours, To utter nothingness?
The thought of death, especially in his last years, leads him to bitter reflections:
To think how eager we are in building our houses, To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent … Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never cease—they are the burial lines, He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall surely be buried.
Pensive and faltering, The words the Dead I write, For living are the Dead, (Haply the only living, only real, And I the apparition, I the spectre).
For the death of Lincoln he expands magnificently St. Francis’ praise of Sister Death:
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. Approach strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
And he goes on to promise festivals and serenades as to one beloved.
III
But Whitman would not be the universal man if the thought of death held him continually. To be complete he must be at the same time as full of laughter as a child, as melancholy as an old man, as humble as St. Francis, and as valiant as Nietzsche. No one, I hope, will be surprised at the appearance of this name here. Since I ​know Whitman better than I know what has been written about him, I cannot say whether the relationship between Whitman and Nietzsche has been pointed out. In any case, students of Nietzsche should take care to include Whitman in the long roll of the precursors of their philosopher. From the Leaves of Grass one could easily make a little Nietzschean chrestomathy in which even the favorite expressions of the prophet of Zarathustra would appear.
In the very first strophe of the Song of Myself Whitman says:
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. 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.
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!
And he imagines thus the life of himself and his friends:
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving, No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing, Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing, Fulfilling our foray.
In the Song of Joys he exclaims:
O something pernicious and dread! Something far away from a puny and pious life! … To see men fall and die and not complain! To taste the savage taste of blood—to be so devilish! To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.
O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror.
Piety and conformity to them that like, Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like.
He would sing “the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth.” He feels all the unrealized greatness of the earth, and to the earth addresses a song which has the solemnity of a Vedic hymn:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space, Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty, Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness, Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above, Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees, With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention.
For man of you, your characteristic race, Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature, Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof, Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently inure, Here heed himself.
And to the mystic trumpeter he cries:
Marches of victory—man disenthral’d—the conqueror at last, Hymns to the universal God from universal man—all joy! A reborn race appears—a perfect world, all joy!
These moments of Dionysiac frenzy, in which Whitman is seized by the rapture of joy, are not rare in his songs. “I am one who ever laughs,” he says. Not only does he laugh; he goes mad with joy. One of his ecstasies ends thus:
O something unprov’d! something in a trance! To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds! To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous! To court destruction with taunts, with invitations! To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me! To rise thither with my inebriate soul! To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy.
O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on! To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports, A ship itself … A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.
Elsewhere the hymn rises still more rapturously, and ends in a way that reminds one of the beginning of Pascal’s Prière de Jésus:
Women and men in wisdom innocence and health—all joy! Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy! War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank earth purged—nothing but joy left! The ocean fill’d with joy—the atmosphere all joy! Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life! Enough to merely be! enough to breathe! Joy! joy! all over joy!
In this case the Dionysiac and Nietzschean exultation mingles with the universal optimism of Whitman, and in a certain sense purifies it. But the American prophet suggests the German poet in another respect also: in his pride. Whitman loves to call himself “more vain than modest,” and reveals himself “proud of his ​pride”—he comes even to the Lucifer-like conception of believing that he includes God.
But Walt Whitman is no man of a single aspect. He is a Janus of many faces, gathering in himself, like humanity, all possible characters and all possible sentiments. The Leaves of Grass, indeed, are not without instances of humility:
What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over.
What do I know of life? what of myself? I know not even my own work past or present, Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me.
Extending his own humility to all mankind, he asks:
Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?
There is in Whitman something of a Prometheus and something of a Job; and if in some respects he may be called a precursor of Nietzsche, he may with equal propriety be classed on other grounds as a precursor of Dostoevsky and of Tolstoi. He never knew, probably, the “religion of human suffering,” but his great soul always felt a profound sympathy for the ​humblest members of society, the poor, the slaves, even the delinquent and the fallen. Amid the evils that silence him he numbers
The slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like.
To his banquet he invites all men:
I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited; There shall be no difference between them and the rest.
As friend he seeks a humble man:
He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be one condemn’d by others for deeds done.
In Tolstoi this attitude is a pose; but not in Whitman, for Whitman feels that he, like his humble friends, is stained with sin:
Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell’s tides continually run, Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me, I walk with delinquents with passionate love, I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?
He is not ashamed to turn even to a woman of the streets with that poetic generosity which purifies all things:
Unashamed, Whitman will celebrate the body, for
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.
And with equal frankness he will describe and celebrate love:
No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.
Not love as the hypocrites of literature understand it—not platonism paralleled by secret lust—but love as healthy human beings understand it, love born of body and soul alike, composed of physical action, touch, and pressure, ennobled by fatherhood and motherhood, and by the divine thought of the generations that are to spring from one embrace. He has then no cause for shame that he loves the body as well as the soul:
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.
Since Whitman feels that he is as vast as nature, he rejects nothing of what he finds in nature, but seeks merely to transform it. At heart he would like to be as natural as trees and beasts. Nor was he ever again so happy as on
The day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn.
But he always aspires, through the body, to the life of the soul:
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul, Because having look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.
And when he would rise above the world and escape from things, he sends to the soul this lyric summons:
Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away! O if one could but fly like a bird! O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship! To glide with thee O soul, o’er all, in all, as a ship o’er the waters.
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.
And he asks:
If the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
In this way his idealism becomes concrete, his sensualism becomes spiritualized, and the whole of life appears as a portentous unity in which nothing is to be rejected. And as he accepts life, so he accepts all the occupations of life. Even as he sings of the blossoms of the lilac, of the broad, cool sea that caresses him, of the sonorous rumblings of the drum, so he does not disdain to sing of the rough locomotive or to set forth the miracles of industry in his Song of the Exposition or to write the Song for Occupations, wherein no laborer is forgotten. Does he not indeed proclaim, simply and directly: “I sing the ordinary”?
The one thing he will not accept is slavery. ​He never forgets that he is the poet of free America and of democracy; he encourages thwarted revolutionists with his hymns of hope. He even disregards his pulsing naturalistic inspiration that he may set forth a sort of democratic mythology. But beneath the rhetorical and possibly ridiculous elements in this Promethean and Garibaldian phase of his poetry, there is a noble basis of natural generosity, of love for liberty, and of broad sympathy for those who cannot live as they desire to live.
He too, like all towering spirits, lived and moved in the pursuit of liberty:
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say. Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
And he encourages rebellion in others also. So he writes, To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire:
Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also.
And he is
Lifted now and always against whoever scorning assumes to rule me.
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws.
Again, he says:
I am for those that have never been master’d, For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d, For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master.
IV
In Walt Whitman the age-long opposition between flesh and spirit disappears. There are those who live solely for the flesh: they are pagans, in the bad sense of the word. There are those who subject the soul to the uses of the flesh: they are the refined pagans, the skeptics, the elegant Mephistophelians. There are those who live for the spirit alone, and mortify the body: they are the ascetics, reproved by Christ as well as by the ordinary man. And there are those who respect the body and train it for the service of the soul. Such is Walt Whitman.
Can it be truly said that he sings of the body ​for the sake of the body, that he sings of love for the sake of love? No. He sings of the body and the soul: the soul through the body; the body as the provisional vestment of the soul. And when he sings of love, even of ardent passion, though his thought may turn, like that of any Latin, to the intensity of a moment’s joy, he thinks of the man as husband and father, and of the woman as wife and mother. And in the background of the future he sees the numberless generations of their progeny.
There are those—and Catholicism has known many of them—who refrain from bodily sin, but are tempted and tormented and yield to sin within the life of thought. They are pure in the flesh and impure in the spirit. They defile the life of the spirit. There are others, like Whitman, who live fully and healthily the life of the body without pretense and without asceticism, and thus succeed in giving a spiritual quality even to bodily life. Such men are far nobler than the others. I would set the life of the spirit before all else; but for this very reason I would not have that life too full of scruples, of fears, of subterfuges, with regard to the life of the body. The life of the body is secondary; it must be purified by a purpose which is not corporeal. But it cannot be annihilated, and in consequence it must not be cursed and it must not be hidden. Walt Whitman was the first man who had the daring ​to seem for moral purposes to be immoral, to seem pornographic for pure ends. The more honor to him that he had no fear of staining himself even when he accepted that which small minds call indecent!
Whitman has been accused not only of immorality and of materialism, but of irreligion. He is certainly not an adherent of any specific religion. In all matters his point of view is universal. Humanity, taken as a whole, has no one single faith. Whitman, representing all humanity in himself, accepts all human faiths, does not admit that any one is truer than the others:
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist, Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew.
I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena … I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake. I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough … I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion … For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable to flame, the essential life of the earth, Any more than such are to religion.
But what is the essence of Whitman’s religion? In one of his songs he confesses the gods of his belief: the ideal man, death, the soul, time, space. Yet his polytheism is only apparent: his mind is unitarian. All things are one: this unity may be called soul, it may be called Walt Whitman, but it may better be called God. God is all and is everywhere:
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
When he thinks of immortality, he, the proud in spirit, prays:
Give me O God to sing that thought, Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith, In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us, Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space, Health, peace, salvation universal.
Like the mystics, he aspires to union with God:
Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee, I and my soul to range in range of thee.
And the hymn to divinity bursts forth thus from the love of his soul:
O Thou transcendent, Nameless, the fibre and the breath, Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them, Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, Thou moral, spiritual fountain—affection’s source, thou reservoir … Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space, How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out of myself, I could not launch, to those, superior universes?
Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
And as he had felt himself like unto God, so he feels like unto Christ. The same accusations had been brought against them both:
I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions, But really I am neither for nor against institutions.
He seeks only to found the city of love; and his resolute purpose gives him the right to believe himself more truly Christian than those who bear that name merely as a sign of cold devotion. He speaks thus To Him that was Crucified:
My spirit to yours dear brother, Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you, I do not sound your name, but I understand you … That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession … Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men. …
Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras, Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.
His pity for those who have sinned, his love for all men, even the humblest and most despised of men, his Franciscan praise of death—all these are truly Christian sentiments. And though Walt Whitman was never enrolled among the members of any church, we may count him without hesitation among the disciples and the followers of Christ.
Even less can one question the depth of his religious understanding. He believed not only in bodies, but in
Identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of.
He believed firmly in the future life. He maintained that the body cannot die, and that no one can ever suffer annihilation:
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue? Have you dreaded these earth-beetles? Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you? Is today nothing? is the beginningless past nothing? If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
Filled with hope, he has no fear of the future, and seeks to go beyond the things of common life, beyond cowardly immobility:
Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor! Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes? Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough? Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O my brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail!
Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther.
V
And now, like all good orators and all good essayists, I ought to gather the threads of my discourse and frame a summary. But this I ​shall not do. My love for Whitman is too deep. His poetry is not such that it can be reduced to a coherent system and subjected to dialectic criticism. Whitman’s soul is as vast as the world, as all-enfolding as God. It includes everything—joy and grief, body and spirit, liberty and discipline, pride and humility, God and the blade of grass. One must accept it as one accepts the universe, without regard for the cleavages that men have made in the world.
But Whitman’s soul is not merely a gigantic lake of love. It is composed of qualities, sentiments, passions that may inspire men, excite them to action, to life, render them saner, stronger, purer, better. Men who do not feel, as they read Whitman, that the flame of life grows broader and shines more brilliantly, as if it were carried into a better air, who are not conscious of an intense regret that it was not for them to know and embrace the author of certain of these songs, who are shocked by the coarseness, the violence, the shamelessness, the energy of the poems, and would have the man calmer and more refined, more prudent and less rough—such men understand Whitman not at all, will never understand him, and are not worthy to understand him.
Whitman is a good plebeian who sings unashamed all the things of the world. And the most significant counsel that he gives us—after ​the counsel that we love one another—is that we wash away the literary rheum that fills our eyes and keeps from us the sight of things as they are. We Italians—and not we alone—are too literary, too polite. We are gentlemen even in the presence of nature, which asks no compliments. We are gentlemen even within the world of poetry, which asks no elegance. In our dried veins—sleek, feminine, civilian dilettantes that we are—we need a little of the blood of peasants, of mountaineers, of the rabble. It is not enough to “open our windows,” as Orsini said. We must go forth, leave the city, feel things and love things immediately, whether they be fair or foul. And we must express our love without respect of persons, without sweetish words, without metrical hair-splitting, without too much thought of the holy traditions, the honorable conventions, and the stupid rules of good society. If we would find again the poetry we have lost we must go back a little toward barbarism—even toward savagery.
If Walt Whitman does not teach us this at least, translations and interpretations will avail nothing.
* ↑ Written à propos of L. Gamberale’s version of the Leaves of Grass: Foglie di erba, Palermo, 1908. In the present translation the Italian quotations from Whitman are replaced by the corresponding passages of the English text as printed in the edition of Leaves of Grass published by Doubleday, Page and Company in 1920. The page references in the footnotes are to this edition.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 289.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 89.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 254.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 268.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 108.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 109.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 103.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 29.
* ↑ Vol. I, pp. 25–26.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 161.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 276.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 1.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 33.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 62.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 152.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 63.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 132.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 224–25.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 221.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 161.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 279.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 223.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 294.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 52.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 135–38.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 258.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 278.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 110.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 35.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 219–20.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 276.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 280.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 25.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 164.
* ↑ Vol. I, pp. 70–71.
* ↑ Vol, II, pp. 140–41.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 142.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 38.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 147.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 154.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 56.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 177.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 34.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 201.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 18.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 145.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 38.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 214–15.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 234.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 101–2.
* ↑ It is to be remembered that the first edition of the Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 33.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 60.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 254.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 156.
* ↑ Vol. I, pp. 216–17.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 220.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 109.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 273.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 191.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 189–90.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 254.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 252.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 130.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 222.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 252–53. In the comparison with Nietzsche, their common love for the South should be noted. See Whitman’s O Magnet-South.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 166.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 200.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 137.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 34.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 55.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 134.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 160.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 161.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 123.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 251.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 117.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 111. Compare pp. 117–18 and 124–26.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 121.
* ↑ Vol. I, pp. 12, 213.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 148.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 26.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 153.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 105.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 114. Compare also pp. 122–24.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 253.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 237 ff.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 180.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 143.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 224.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 154.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 229.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 123.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 95.
* ↑ Vol. I, pp. 21–22.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 30–31.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 106.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 278.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 194.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 195.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 71.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 154.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 159.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 23.
* ↑ Vol. I, p. 26.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 213.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 220.
* ↑ Vol. II, pp. 196–97.
* ↑ Vol. II, p. 260.