WALT WHITMAN

1-

Poet and Seer

by

Julia Ellsworth Ford

"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around
the whole earth.

I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them."

INTERNATIONALIST.

"Salut au Monde!" "Passage to India." Passage to more
than India---passage to oriental lands and primal man to get away
from a conventionalized West and its conventional sense of the East,
to expand, to think in hemispheres, to reach the heart of the planet---
that heart being everywhere, in "the infinite greatness of the past."

Such was the cry of Whitman, his tireless yearning. "His
sense of the Orient was a flower of his universal mind."* The divine
in him brought him into the knowledge of his universal being. His
understanding of vital unity was the source of that capacity for love
which was his greatest originality and made him enfold all men and
women as himself. This he expresses in "Salut au Monde" and "Passage
to India."

Passage to India!

Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing.

O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,

Thy circumnavigation of the world begin;

Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,

To reason's early paradise,

Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,

Again with fair Creation.

I see, O year, in you, the vast terraceous globe, given, and
giving all,

Europe to Asia, Africa join'd, and they to the New World.

* Charles Eugene Youga

2-

Lo, soul, the retrospect, brought forward;
The old, most populous, wealthiest of Earth's lands,
The streams of the Indus and the Ganges, and their many

affluents;

(I, my shores of America walking today, behold, resuming all.)

The tale of Alexander, on his warlike marches, suddenly dying,

On one side China, and on the other side Persia and Arabia,

To the south the great seas, and the Bay of Bengal;

The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,

Old occult Brahma, interminably far back—the tender and,

junior Buddha,

Central and southern empires, and all their belongings, possessors.

THE INTERNATIONALIST

Salut au Monde" is a long poem, a soliloquy. It has been

called a monotonous poem—some lines, no doubt, may strike us so—but,
in fact, no generalization could give the effect that this crusader's
penetrating pen produces in the naming of these oriental lands,—the
people and their occupation. It is an amazing poem. In vision and
spirit he passes "in compassion and determination around the whole
earth."

O, to realize space!

The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds.

He begins: "O take my hand, Walt Whitman!" Then, under the
headings of "What do you hear, Walt Whitman?" and "What do you see, Walt
Whitman?" he names countries after countries in succession.

I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of
them, as my land is to me.

And of these lands he says:

I see Teheran—I see Muscat and Medina, and the intervening
sands—I see the caravans toiling onward;

I see Egypt and the Egyptians—I see the pyramids and obelisks;

I look on chisel'd histories, songs, philosophies, cut in slabs of
sand-stone, or on granite-blocks;

I see at memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies, embalm'd,
swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries;

I look on the fall'n Theban, the large-ball'd eyes, the sideward-
drooping neck, the hands folded across the breast.

3-

Salut au Monde!

What cities the light of warmth penetrates, I penetrate those
cities myself;

All islands to which birds wing their way, I wing my way myself.

And following up this thought, again he says:

> I see those who in any land have died for the good cause.
> The seed is spare; nevertheless the crop shall never run out.

Poets are often scornfully called loafers. Whitman was one
of them. Many of his critics blame him, deride him, denounce him for
his "perpetual indolence in loafing on the open road."

But then, of what did these loafings consist? With books
and papers and knapsack on his back, he would start for the open road
or the sea and there this so-called "idler and loafer" thought and
dreamed and had his visions. He says:

> "I loafe and invite my soul.
> I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of grass.
> Space and Time! Now I see it is true, what I guess'd at,
> What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,
> What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,
> And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of
> the morning."

Out of this loafing was born Leaves of Grass, and if you
must scorn his loafing you must scorn Leaves of Grass, for in these
loafings he was Man thinking.

His love of solitude did not make him a recluse,-- indeed
in his solitude his thoughts always were for mankind.

> Knowest thou the joys of pensive thoughts ...
> Joys of the solitary walks, the spirit bowed
> yet proud, the suffering and the struggle.

> The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the
> solemn musings day and night.

In the following he declares his place among men:

> I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

About cosmic consciousness, I find that Bucke's essay on it in *In Re*, pages 329-347, is not so full nor quite so clear, as the explanation in his complete book called *Cosmic Consciousness* where he gives numerous examples besides Whitman, and enters more into the psychological analysis of just what he conceives cosmic consciousness to stand for in evolution. I like your definition of it, although I might revise it slightly to read: *Cosmic consciousness is the perception of the spiritual relation of the individual to the entire universe. It transcends normal human consciousness in the same way as that transcends the subconscious. There is a very interesting discussion of this in Mary Austin's Every Man's Genius.*

4-

All alone...
Without any companion it grew there
Uttering joyous leaves of dark green ....
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without
a friend, a lover near.
I knew very well I could not.

## COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

No one has written more understandingly, more intelligently, more
sympathetically of Whitman than his great friend and physician, Dr. Richard M.
Bucke, as Whitman himself acknowledged. It is perhaps, in this keen analysis
of the springs of his inspiration that we find the poet's nearest approach to
characteristic sublimity.

There exists in Whitman "a mental function not possessed by ordinary
men," says Dr. Bucke, "and that function is a form of consciousness transcend-
ing the common consciousness that we all have, and superadded to it. • • • It is
from this faculty or sense that the charm and influence of the man and his words
flow. • • •

"The fact of cosmic consciousness has been long recognized both in the Eastern and Western worlds, and the great majority of civilized men and women in all countries today bow down before teachers who possessed • • • the cosmic sense. Among those who have been thus endowed were Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Paul and Mohammed, and it is entirely because they were so that these men have been enabled to found the religions, and become leaders of the civilized world for the last two thousand years."

To these names Akhnatón, Moh Tih and Gandhi might be added.

Whitman was conscious of this faculty in him and says: "The new
experience came in 1853. • • • I believe in its teachings, although, however,
it is so divine the other I am (the old self) must not be abased
to it, neither must it ever be over-ridden by the more basic organs and

5-

faculties * * * neither must the new be encroached upon or limited by
the old; he will see that they live as friendly co-workers together.*
Bucke adds that "whoever does not realize this last clause will never
fully understand 'Leaves.'"

Only of a man whose mind had deep affinities with the soul of
the East could Bucke speak as "the best example the world has so far had
of what Balzac calls a 'specialist'---the best because he is the man in
whom the new faculty has been, probably, most perfectly developed, and
especially because he is, par excellence, the man who in modern times
has written distinctly and at large from the point of view of the cosmic
sense, and in so doing has referred to the facts and phenomena of cosmic
consciousness more plainly and fully than any other writer either ancient
or modern."

In the above passage it is not implied, of course, that Whitman
was unique in his gift of cosmic consciousness, but all possession of
the new sense, as Bucke has argued, is not on the same plane. Whitman
seems to have attained an altogether extraordinary range and depth of
soul. Dr. Bucke asserts that "analogy would lead us to believe that
this step in promotion awaits the whole world."

Whitman joins in vision the old and the new, past and present
---lands, peoples, the labourers, the toilers of the earth, and all those
who suffered---their histories, wars, tragedies and tales, their religions.

Although he does not appear to absorb and accept as his own China's and
India's philosophies, his intuitions of human nature and deep sense of cosmic
solidarity caused him to turn to the East in a spirit of brotherhood ---

6-

neither to lead nor to be guided. Out of impatience with the West, was he turning his heart to oriental lands and peoples. His mind, spontaneously and irresistibly synthetic, knew that his world, however great, was too small for him. He wanted to understand more, to enfold more—he felt he _could_ be an oriental.

## QUAKER FAITH

He was freer than most poets and philosophers. Perhaps because of the simple faith of his Quaker parentage, he was not trammelled with theology or dogma and superstitious beliefs in his religion. Whitman's character and Quaker faith in the brotherhood of man helped him to carry out his teaching, as exemplified in his tender care of the sick and wounded and dying soldiers during the war, which sapped his vitality. "He ministered to fully a hundred thousand persons, cheering and making no distinction of North or South, and alleviating where he could the red overflow of discord and dismay.

His prostration arose from a poisonous wound in the right hand received while assisting at the amputation of the gangrene'd limb of a Virginia Union soldier." Whitman says: "I was seriously paralyzed from the Session war, poor, in debt, was expecting death. * * * Dr. Drinkard said it was the result of too extreme bodily and emotional strain continued in Washington and 'down in front' in 1863, '4 and '5. I doubt if a heartier, stronger, healthier physique, more balanced upon itself, or more unconscious, more sound, ever lived from 1835 to '72. My greatest call (Quaker) to go around and do what I could there in those war scenes, where I had fallen among the sick and wounded, was, that I seemed to be _so strong and well_. (I considered myself

7-

in vulnerable.) But this last attack shattered me completely." *

"I sit by the restless all the dark night; some are so young,

Some suffer so much; I recall the experience sweet
and sad.

Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have crossed
and rested,

Many a soldier's kies dwelles on these bearded lips:-"

## EMERSON

The mind of Walt Whitman had a deep affinity with Emerson's and
they enjoyed long hours of mutual intercourse. The mysticism in both
drew them instinctively together. Their temperaments, however, were markedly
different. Emerson had the light, but he kept apart. Whitman lived among
men. Emerson wrote from the author's study -- Whitman in the open air.

"I am he that walks with the tender and growing night."

Whitman was a great lover of books and in Emerson's library, which
included many volumes on oriental countries, their life and religions, Whitman
found the translations of Persian and Arabic poems. Emerson had written an
essay on the Persian poet Hafiz, whose "intellectual liberty and profound
thought" naturally appealed to them both.

There is a story of a traveller who, after reading "Leaves of
Grass" to an Arab, asked: "Do you know the nationality of the man?" And
the Arab answered: "Of course; an Arab!"

To grow we must absorb and reject and reject. So Whitman taught.
This is the lesson man must learn. The dead leaves on the branch must be

*In "Specimen Days" he has given a full account of his war experience.

8-

cut off - they served their purpose but they only mar the beauty and ever
growing immortal leaves of life. Every year the branches must be stronger,
more fully developed. This is the evolution of life. We must keep in
sight the symmetry of the whole.

"I am not insensible to Emerson's deepest lessons," Whitman wrote,
"but I must consider his books from the Democratic point of view," and that
was his standard of a great poet, as well as of a great nation.

"Emerson, in my opinion, was not most eminent as a poet or artist
or teacher, though valuable in all of these. He is best as critic diagnoster...
Not passion or imagination or warp or weakness or any pronounced cause or
speciality, dominates him." * * * "Cold * * * intellectuality dominates him.
(I know the fires, emotions, love egotism, glow deep, perennial, as in all
New Englanders - but the facade hides them well.") * * * His books fill and well
fill certain stretches of life, certain stages of development. * * * I read
his writings reverently and addressed him in print as 'Master.' * * * No
teacher ever taught that has so provided for his pupil's setting up independ-
ently - no truer evolutionist." This is true in Whitman's case for he real-
ized that "we level that lift and continue beyond." It has been said of him
that he "differed from the philosophers in that he felt intensely what they
believed intellectually, and from the religious mystics in that he accepted
passionately, voluptuously, the gross as well as the spiritual aspects of that
universal life."

Although Emerson did not always agree with his friend, he kept
throughout the fundamental attitude he had voiced in his now famous letter

9-

of July, 1855.**

ADMIRERS AND SCOFFERS

Walt Whitman, in 1855, published the first part of *Leaves of Grass*, including * Songs of Myself* and other poems. This he printed by his own hand. When his book first appeared there was a great outcry. It was protested against with indignation and horror. He shocked the whole literary world except the writers of the highest standing.

It was Whitman's strong personality, his powerful impulsion - to love, to serve, to lift, to help, to comprehend, to be *one with humanity* that the cynical psychoanalytical critics of late have failed to understand.

"Speak and I will tell you what you are," says Emerson. These higglers, these recent *ragpickers of human character* and others like William H. Barton and *Katherine Lyne* will always find flaws - who is without them! Poetical and personal faults he had, but shall not a man and his works be judged as a whole? They will pass, he will remain.

**Dear Sir:

"Concord, Mass., July 21st, 1855.

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of *Leaves of Grass*.
I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.
It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy
Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making
our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought.
I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as
they must be. I find the courage of treatment 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.

"I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office.

"I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and
visiting New York to pay you my respects.

"R. W. EMERSON."

10-

Who are these iconoclasts in contradistinction to the honored names of the men who proclaimed Whitman's message to the New World full of inspiration and prophecy, - men who not only recognised his genius but were in correspondence with him and became very devoted personal friends. There are those whose minds are so intent on factual details that they lose sight of the spirit and inspiration. In England, Dante Gabriel and William M. Rosetti, Ann Gilchrist, Tennyson, J. A. Symonds, Carlyle, Carpenter, Dr. J. H. Johnson, Swinburne, Havelock Ellis, Edward Dowden, Hubert Herkomer and many others. In France, Sarrazin and Bazalgette. In America, Emerson, Bucke, Burroughs, Traubel, Col. Ingersoll, Harned, O'Connor, Thoreau.

He was the poet of the mystery of life in all its phases. He understood those who committed evil deeds as well as good, - "Not until the sun excludes you do I exclude you." As Col. Ingersoll says, "This is one of the greatest lines in literature." Jesus might have said it. Ingersoll also said, "Whitman has told great truths - uttered sublime thoughts." Dowden says of Whitman: "Great principles and great passions, which play their part in the future, are to be found in his writing." We none of us question that yours is the clearest, and sweetest, and fullest American voice." Bucke: "Whitman had cosmic breadth. His 'Leaves' foliage the heavens. He was so complicated with all men and all phenomena that his very voice partook of the sway of elemental integrity and candor. Nature has not shame nor vainglory, nor had he. 'Leaves of Grass' has a tone peculiarly its own and strange in all the annals of literary career."

## PERSONIFICATION

The "I," as used by Whitman in *Leaves of Grass*, so often misunderstood, as alluding to personal experience, is based on the fact that he identified

11-

himself with every type and condition of men and women, evil as well as good.
He believed **all life** is the evolutionary process of God. "In the faces of
men and women I see God." All prudish shame of speaking of the act of
creation he cast aside. In his comprehensive sympathies, in his power of
entering into every condition of life, he included all human experience - joy,
happiness, sorrow, degradation, suffering.

Whitman felt that "whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks
to his own funeral dressed in his shroud." And during the war when rich and
respectable people were upholding the Fugitive Slave Law in England, as well
as in America, his tender sympathy was aroused. In the same spirit he wrote:

"I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the
marksmen,
I clutgh the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with
the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently over the head
with whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person."

When he says "I am for those who believe in loose delights; I
share the midnight orgies of young men," it has been attributed to him as his
own actions. Again, in personification, he wrote:

"I am of old, and young, of the foolish
as much as the wise.

Those who knew Whitman spoke of his majestic presence - his magic
personal and powerful charm. His cleanliness of person and utterances. He
was loved by all who knew him. Lincoln exclaimed when he saw him: "Well he
looks like a man!"

12-

## WOMAN

Poets have eulogized, admired, loved women, but no poet has honored her as has Whitman. Individual rights, Walt Whitman felt, must be given equally to women the same as to men in every particular - the same freedom, the same opportunity and, above all, the right to be the master of her own body and mind.

"I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men,"

Throughout his writings, when he mentioned man he nearly always included the name of woman.

## POETS

"The true poets are not followers of beauty but the August masters of beauty."

The great poets and teachers are not only those who are inspired. It is rather they who *inspire* others. It would not be amiss to let the greatest poet in America, so often misunderstood even by his admirers, explain both his purpose and method. Whitman says: "For us the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection. * * * The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, who not all of whose meanings is at first obvious and who leaves much to desire, to explain, to study, to complete in your turn." He adds:

"I have been more anxious to suggest the songs of vital endeavor and manly evolution * * * than to make perfect rhymes." And further proceeds:

"In my opinion, the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to

13-

win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement rules
of iambic, spondee, dactyle, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements
continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes (especially for
persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste,
something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow), the truest
and greatest Poetry (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and dis-
tinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be ex-
pressed in arbitrary and rhyming meter, any more than the greatest eloquence,
or the truest power and passion.* While admitting that the venerable and
heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time played great and
fitting parts, it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the day of such
conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as a medium of
highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present or future, it
palpably fails, and must fail to serve."

* It was an Englishwoman of remarkable character, Ann Gilchrist, who first came to Walt Whitman's defense. "I have received word from Mrs. Gilchrist," wrote Walt Whitman to Rosetti in 1872. "Nothing in my life, or my literary fortunes, has brought me more comfort and support every way, nothing has more spiritually soothed me than the warm appreciation of friendship of that true full-grown woman." She saw William M. Rosetti's edition, which he published in England, of *Leaves of Grass* and she wrote him: "For me, the reading of his poems is truly a new birth of the soul * * * I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with fetters of meter. But I know the music is there and I would not for something change ears with those who cannot hear."

13a-

In the following poems there is profound thought, deep sympathy, new
meanings to old symbols. Truths simply told. _Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood._

*By Blue Ontario's Shore.* I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing. To a Pupil in
*"Autumn Rivulets."* Starting from Paumanok. The only poems that touch a note
on the intimacy of personal love and friendship for women are _Not Heat Flames Up
and Consumes_ and _Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd_, the latter said to have been
written to Mrs. Beach, and _Going Somewhere_ which was written when Ann Gilchrist
died and sent to her son. _Song of the Open Road._-

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Here is the efflux of the soul,
The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower'd
gates, ever provoking questions,

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds
that would hold me.

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness.

No one can deny rhythmic beauty to Walt Whitman who has read
*Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking* and his immortal poem, *When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd*, on the death of Lincoln, "the sweetest, wisest soul of all
my days and lands." This poem is one of the most beautiful that has ever been
written to Lincoln,-- a song that came out of his love and admiration for "this
great man," as he wrote his mother "in lavish praise after seeing Lincoln in Wash-
ington reviewing a two days' parade of battle-beaten soldiers returning from the
war!"*

Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding
the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again
bursting with joy,

*From one of the sixteen letters in the Walt Whitman Camden Museum donated by Miss Jessie Whitman, his niece.*

13b-

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with
Spring.

Whitman's "victorious song, death's outlet song" for "the dead I loved
so well" is as triumphant in its sweeping movement as Wagner's music on the death
of Siegfried.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, an exquisite love song of a bird
to his mate:

When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was
growing,

Up this seashore in some briers,

Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,

And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,

And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,

And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with
bright eyes,

And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,

Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Shine! shine! shine!

Four down your warmth, great sun!

While we bask, we two together.

Singing all time, minding no time,

While we two keep together.

Till of a sudden,

May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate,

And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,

And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,

Over the hoarse surging of the sea,

Or flitting from brier to brier by day,

I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,

The solitary guest from Alabama.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud!

Loud I call to you, my love!

14-

Hither my love!

Here I am! here!

With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you,

This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decay'd elsewhere,

That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

In the air, in the woods, over fields,

Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

But my mate no more, no more with me!

We two together no more.

For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have
heard you,

Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,

And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
and more sorrowful than yours,

A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never
to die.

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,

O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating
you,

Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,

Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night

By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,

The messenger there arouse'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,

The unknown want, the destiny of me.

15-

DEMOCRACY

As I have said, Whitman made Democracy his standard of all great
poems and nations. As well as the Bible, Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare's and
Tennyson's works appealed to him more than any books, but great as he felt their
value to literature (described at length in his *Prose Works*), he thought the
three authors named "exhaled the principle of caste." * * * "Never one
democratic page could be traced in their work. * * * They were subservient
to their kings and queens and left down-trodden people negligently in the
background."

"I was looking a long while for intentions,
For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for
these chants - and now I have found it,
It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I
neither accept nor reject,)
It is no more in the legends than in all else,
It is in the present - it is this earth of today,
It is in Democracy - (the purport and aim of all the past,)
It is the life of one man or one woman today * * *
All for the modern - all for the average man of today."

Such being the very springs of Whitman's inspiration and action,
they bestow to this defense of democratic ideals characteristics all his own.
Thoreau, in speaking of him, said: "Whitman is democracy." To recall names
such as those of Emerson, Ruskin, Arnold, liberals as they were, is all we
need if we want a keen sense of the distinctiveness of Whitman's democracy.

Commenting on Arnold's achievement, the author of "Leaves of Grass"
unwittingly revealed the inherent quality of his own social philosophy when he
said: "Arnold is weak on the democratic side. He has some intellectual
perception of democracy but he doesn't have the feel of the thing." For the
poet of our land who endowed with ranges of heroism and leftiness the *Leaves
of Grass*, the democratic averages of America, Democracy was not a thing to grow

16-

into, but the very law of man, bound to come out in time.

"Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy.
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only,
The Past is also stored in thee,
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the
Western continent alone,
Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship, is steadied
by thy spars,
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink
or swim with thee,
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars,
thou bearest the other continents,
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant;
Steer them with good strong hand and wary eye O helmsman, thou
carriest great companions,
Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
And royal feudal Europe sails with thee."

LABOR

Naturally, Whitman was intensely interested in the labor question.
He not only foresaw the uprisings and struggles of subject races, but the
expanding movements of labor and the serious outcomes they were to result in.

"Beneath the whole political world, what most presses and perplexes
today, sending vastest results affecting the future, is not the abstract
question of democracy, but of social and economic organization, the treatment
of working-people by employers, and all that goes along with it - not only the
wages-payment part, but a certain spirit and principle, to vivify anew these
relations: all the questions of progress, strength, tariffs, finances, etc.,
really evolving themselves more or less directly out of the Poverty Question
('the Science of Wealth,' and a dozen other names are given it, but I prefer
the severe one just used)."

SCIENCE

And what was the attitude of Whitman toward the facts of science
and its growth, already phenomenal in his day? We can leave it to him to

17-

express what so many have felt from his time to ours:

"Without being a scientist, I have thoroughly adopted the conclusions of the great savants and experimentalists of our time and of the last hundred years, and they have interiorly tinged the chyle of all my verse, for purposes beyond. Following the modern spirit, the real poems of the present, ever solidifying and expanding into the future, must vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which scientism has invested man and the universe (all that is called creation), and must henceforth launch humanity into new orbits consonant with that vastness, splendor and reality (unknown to the old poems), like new systems of orbs, balanced upon themselves, revolving in limitless space, more subtle than the stars, Poetry, so largely hitherto and even at present wedded to children's tales, and to more amorousness, upholstery and superficial rhyme, will have to accept, and while not denying the past, nor the themes of the past, will be revivified by this tremendous innovation, the cosmic spirit, which must henceforth, in my opinion, be the background and underlying impetus, more or less visible, of all first-class songs."

"Only (for me, at any rate, in all my prose and poetry) joyfully accepting modern science, and loyally following it without the slightest hesitation, there remains ever recognized still a higher flight, a higher fact, the eternal soul of man (of all else, too), the spiritual, the religious - which it is to be the greatest office of scientism, in my opinion, and of future poetry also, to free from fables, crudities and superstitions, and launch forth in renewed faith and scope a hundred fold. To me, the worlds of religiousness, of the conception of the divine, and of the ideal, though mainly latent, are just as absolute in humanity and the universe as the world of chemistry, or anything in the objective worlds.

"The prophet and the bards,
Shall yet maintain themselves - in higher circles yet,
Shall mediate to the modern, to democracy - interpret yet to them,
God and eidolons.

"To me, the crown of savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way for a more splendid theology, and for ampler and diviner songs."

"Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful with the new principles behind them.

"Exact science" and, we might add, the evolution of religious concepts, "and its practical movements are no check on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support."

## PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS INSIGHT

Even greater than his democracy is his philosophical and religious insight. He was always absorbed with penetrating the mysterious secrets of

18-

man's life, his thoughts, his actions and his relation to the universe. He believed in the soul and the all-pervading power of love and the divinity of man (the infinite in man). His supreme subject is the soul of man. Significant lines of the poet's thought are: "What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior? * * * Only the soul is of itself — all else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does and thinks is of consequence." His respect for man is infinite, because he believes that man is the evolutionary process of God. His Quaker faith made him recognize a divinity in all things.*

Walt Whitman has been called a pantheist, but, to quote Prof. C.E. Vouga, "Nobody could admit that who had actually thought over the significance of pantheism. Pantheism is an inarticulate belief in the supernaturalness of nature, inarticulate especially in that it refuses or fails to establish purposiveness or any relation man may have with nature thus considered. Pantheism, as the word is commonly used, is a denial of personality. Whitman, who spontaneously and steadfastly and in unique language made a case for Personality, cannot be classed among pantheists."

"Religion, although casually arrested and, after a fashion, preserved in the churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified soul, which, when greatest, knows not bibles in the old way, but in new ways - the identified soul, which can really confront religion when it extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before." Is he

"Seek the truth only within thyself," was one of the essential precepts that Elias Hicks preached and under whom Whitman first drew his inspiration. 1375 years before Christ the great Akhnaton, pharaoh and prophet of Egypt, made the "inward law and light the rule and standard of all faith and work and exhorted his people to consider God's creatures even to the meanest." He might have been called the first quaker, so like were his principles to those of Walt Whitman. He strove to break down conventional thought and ceaselessly urged his people to worth "in truth," simply, without excess of ceremony," "Akhnaton, living in truth," was how he signed himself.

19-

not hundreds of years ahead of his time? He sums up his philosophy in the
following lines:

"*** to share with me two greatnesses, and a third
one rising inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the great-
ness of Religion."

"Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky
are for religion's sake.

## INDIVIDUALITY

Again he asserts: "The ripeness of religion is doubtless to
be looked for in this field of individuality, and is a result that no
organization or church can ever achieve."

His faith in personality and not in the law of averages urged
him to offer formulation to the growing masses of the country and, in thus
helping to mould and give significance to a nation's consciousness, a
statesman and prophet were lurking back of the Poet and stand revealed in
the following lines;

## PROPHET

Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,

To formulate the Modern - out of the peerless grandeur of the
modern,

Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches,
art,

(Recast, may-be discard them, end them - may-be their work is
done, who knows?)

By vision, hand, conception, on the background of the mighty
past, the dead,

To liam with absolute faith the mightyliving present.

And yet thou living, present brain, heir of the dead, the Old
World brain,

Thou that lay folded like an unborn babe within its folds so
long,

20-

Thou carefully prepared by it so long - haply thou but unfoldest
it, only maturest it,

It to eventuate in thee - the essence of the by-gone time con-
tain'd in thee;

Thou but the apples, long, long, long a-growing,

The fruit of all the Old ripening to-day in thee.

In our seething times, when most of us neither lead nor follow,
but grope helplessly in the dark, what a breath-spell we are given when we
come upon this masterly heralding of the future and how we can once more persuade
ourselves that both the *Poet* and the *Prophet* are among the most useful and
practical citizens.

Prophet he was, as well as poet. He was several hundred years ahead
of his generation.

The poet's message, he felt, must be one understanding of all life -
of international comprehension, "the bard who walks in advance."

For the great idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,

For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,

The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign
despots.

Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,

They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,

(Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been
always ready to fall for Liberty).

For the great Idea,

That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.

Songs of stern defiance ever ready,

 Songs of the rapid arming and the march,

The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,

Warlike flag of the great Idea.

PERSONALITY

Whitman's personal exhortation to the youth of America accentuates
the power of personal force. He says:

"Is reform needed? Is it through you?

The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you
need to accomplish it."

* * *

31-

"Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness,

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality."

## AMERICA

It may be true that only America could have produced this great primitive, intense-loving, passionate, all-absorbent nature. Certainly he is not the poet of the old English school (Poe being the greatest American exponent of the English traditional form). This new land, America, needed a new language and found its poet and prophet in Whitman, our greatest American poet, as Lincoln was our greatest statesman. And these two men, true humanitarians, had this in the foundation of their character - they were both of Quaker parentage.

Ann Gilchrist, his "noblest woman friend," as Whitman called her, wrote: "If the poet's heart were not a 'measureless ocean of love' that seeks the lips and would quench the thirst of all, he were not the one we have waited for so long. Happy America that he should be her son!"

When cosmic consciousness takes possession of a man he understands all mankind and no longer is limited by nationalism, racialism or sectarianism. His whole being is universalized beyond every species of narrowness. He becomes a fraternal internationalist and, like Walt Whitman, declares:

> I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God, I will accept nothing that all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms!

> I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

## Foot Note.

Whitman's reputation centres around *Leaves of Grass*, but his Prose Works is a great outpouring of his ideas, dreams, hope of democracy for America and the world, and it is not possible to fully understand Whitman without reading his prose. In *Walt Whitman*, edited by his literary executors Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke and Thomas B. Harned, is a most valuable edition, containing letters giving intimate relations in his life, his friends and his idea of democracy, poetry and religion.

WALT WHITMAN

*Prophet and Poet*

By

JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD.

In vision and spirit he passes "in compassion
and determination around the whole earth"

"Salut au Monde!" "Passage to India."
Passage to more than India--- passage to
oriental lands and primal man to get away
from a conventionalized West and its convent-
ional sense of the East, to expand, to think
in hemispheres, to reach the heart of the
planet--- that heart being everywhere, in "the
infinite greatness of the past".

Such was the cry of Whitman, his tire-
less yearning. "His sense of the Orient was a
flower of his universal mind." The divine in
him brought him into the knowledge of his univ-
ersal being. His understanding of vital unity
was the source of that capacity for love
which was his greatest originality and made
him enfold all men and women as himself. This

-2-

he expresses in "Salut au Monde" and "Passage
to India".

### Passage to India!

Lo,soul,seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
The races,neighbors,to marry and be given in marri-
age,
The oceans to be cross'd,the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

* * *

### A worship new I sing.

* * *

O,soul,repressless,I wish thee and thou with me
Thy circumnavigation of the world begin;
Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,
To reason's early paradise,
Back,back to wisdom's birth,to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair Creation.

* * *

Lo,soul,the retrospect,brought forward;
The old,most populous,wealthiest of Earth's lands,
The streams of the Indus and the Ganges,and their
many affluents;
(I,my shores of America walking to-day, behold,
resuming all,)
The tale of Alexander, on his warlike marches,
suddenly dying,
On one side China, and on the other side Persia
and Arabia,
To the south the great seas,and the Bay of Bengal;
The flowing literatures,tremendous epics,religions,
castes,
Old occult Brahma,interminably Far back-- the
tender and junior Buddha,
Central and southern empires, and all their
belongings, possessors.

"Salut au Monde" is a long poem, a
soliloquy. It has been called a monotonous
poem-- some lines, no doubt, may strike us so-
but in fact, no generalization could give the

-3-

effect that this crusader's penetrating pen
produces in the naming of these oriental lands,
the people and their occupation. It is an
amazing poem. In vision and spirit he passes
"in compassion and determination around the
whole earth"

O, to realize space!
The plenteousness of all---
that there are no bounds.

He begins: "O, take my hand, Walt Whitman!"

Then, under the headings of "What do you hear,
Walt Whitman?" and "What do you see, Walt Whit-
man?" he names countries after countries in
succession.

And of these lands he says:

I see Teheran--I see Muscat and Medina, and
the intervening sands-- I see the caravans
toiling onward;

I see Egypt and the Egyptians-- I see the
pyramids and obelisks;

I look on chisel'd histories, songs, philosophies,
cut in slabs of sand-stone, or on granite blocks

I see at Memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies,
embalm'd,
swathed in linen cloth, lying there many
centuries;

I look on the fallen Theban, the large-ball'd
eyes, the side-drooping neck, the hands
folded across the breast.

-4-

## Salut au Monde!

And following up his thought, again he says:

Poets are often scornfully called loafers.
Whitman was one of them. Many of his critics
blame him, deride him, denounce him for his "per-
petual indulgence in loafing on the open road".

But then, of what did these loafings
consist? With books and papers and knapsack on
his back, he would start for the open road or
the sea, and there this so-called "idler and
loafer" thought and dreamed and had his visions.

He says:

> I loafe and invite my soul.
> I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of grass.
> Space and Time! Now I see it is true what I guess'd at.

> What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,
> What I guess'd when I lay alone in my bed,
> And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning."

-5-

His love of solitude did not make him
a recluse, - indeed in his solitude his thoughts
always were for mankind.

Knowest thou the joys of pensive thoughts......
Joys of the solitary walks, the spirit bowed
yet proud, the suffering and the struggle.
The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of
the solemn musings day and night.

In the following he declares his place among
men.

I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing
All alone....
Without any companion it grew there
uttering joyous leaves of dark green...
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without
a friend, a lover near.
I knew very well I could not.

No one has written more understandingly,
more intelligently, more sympathetically of
Whitman than his great friend and physician,
Dr. Richard M. Bucke, as Whitman himself ac-
knowledged. It is perhaps, in this keen anal-
ysis of his inspiration that we find the poet's
nearest approach to characteristic sublimity.

There exists in Whitman"a mental funct-
ion not possessed by ordinary men" says Dr.
Bucke, "and that function is a form of

-6-

consciousness transcending the common con-
sciousness that we all have, and superadded
to it**** It is from this faculty or sense
that the charm and influence of the man and
his words flow.***

*
"The fact of cosmic consciousness has
been long recognized both in the Eastern and
Western worlds, and the great majority of men
and women in all countries to-day bow down
before teachers who possessed*** the cosmic
sense. Among those who have been thus endow-
ed were Gautama, the Buddha, Jesus the Christ,
Paul and Mohammed, and it is entirely because
they were so that these men have been enabled
to found the religions, and become leaders of
the civilized world for the last two thousand
years."

To these names Akhnaton and Gandhi
should be added.

Whitman was conscious of this faculty
in him and says: " The new experience came in
1853.*** I believe in its teachings, although,
however, it is so divine the other I am (the
not
old self) must be abased to it, neither must
*
Cosmic consciousness in its simplest meaning
is the understanding and inner vision of the
whole material universe.
Cosmos

-7-

the new be encroached upon or limited by the old;
he will see that they live as friendly co-work-
ers together." Bucke adds that "whoever does
not realize this last clause will never fully
understand "Leaves" "

Only of a man whose mind had deep affini-
ties with the soul of the East could Bucke speak
as "the best example the world has so far had
of what Balzac calls a 'specialist'-- the best
because he is the man in whom the new faculty
has been, probably, most perfectly developed,
and especially because he is, par excellence,
the man who in modern times has written distinct-
ly and at large from the point of view of the
cosmic sense, and in so doing has referred to
the facts and phenomena of cosmic consciousness
more plainly and fully than any other writer
either ancient or modern."

-8-

Whitman unites in vision, the old and the new, past and present-- lands, peoples, the labourers, the toilers of the earth, and all those who suffered-- their histories, war, tragedies and tales, their religions. Although he does not appear to absorb and accept as his own China's and India's philosophies, his institutions of human nature and deep sense of cosmic solidarity caused him to turn to the East in a spirit of brotherhood--neither to lead or to be guided. Out of impatience with the West, was he turning his heart to oriental lands and peoples. His mind, spontaneously and irresistibly synthetic, knew that his world, however great, was too small for him. He wanted to understand more, to enfold more-- he felt he could be an Oriental. He was freer than most poets and philosophers. Perhaps because of the simple faith of his Quaker parentage, he was not trammelled with theology or dogma and superstitious beliefs in his religion. Whitman's

-9-

character and Quaker faith in the brotherhood
of man helped him to carry out his teaching, as
exemplified in his tender care of the sick and
wounded and dying soldiers during the war which
sapped his vitality.

The mind of Whitman had a deep affinity with Emerson's and they enjoyed long hours of mutual intercourse. The mysticism in both drew them instinctively together. Their temperaments, however, were markedly different. Emerson had the light, but he kept apart. Whitman lived among men. Emerson wrote from the author's study-- Whitman in the open air.

"I am he that walks with the tender and growing might."

Whitman was a great lover of books
and in Emerson's library, which included many
volumes on Oriental countries, their life and
religions, Whitman found the translations of
Persian and Arabic poets. Emerson had written
an essay on the Persian poet Hafiz, whose
"intellectual liberty and profound thought"
naturally appealed to them both.

-10-

To grow we must absorb and *reject* and *reject*, So Whitman taught. This is the lesson man must learn. The dead leaves on the branch must be cut off-- they served their purpose but they only mar the beauty and the growing immortal leaves of life. Every year the branches must be stronger, more fully developed This is the evolution of life. We must keep in sight the symmetry of the whole.

"I am not insensible to Emerson's deepest lessons," Whitman wrote, "but I must consider his books from the *Democratic point of view*." And that was his standard of a great poet, as well as of a great nation.

"Emerson, in my opinion, was not most eminent as a poet or artist or teacher, though valuable in all of these. He is best as critic, diagnoser. Not passion, nor imagination, nor warp, nor weakness, nor any pronounced cause or speciality dominates him."

-11-

"Cold****intellectuality dominates him (I know the fires, emotions, love, egotism, glow deep, perennial, as in all New Englanders- but the facade hides them well.)*** His books fill and well certain stretches of life, certain stretches of life, certain stages of development.**** I read his writings reverently and addressed him in print as 'Master'*** No teacher ever taught that has so provided for his pupil's setting up independently- no truer evolutionist." This is true in Whitman's case for he realized that "We level that lift and continue beyond." It has been said of him that he "differed from the philosophers in that he felt intensely what they believed intellectually, and from the religious mystics in that he accepted passionately, voluptuously, the gross as well as the spiritual aspects of that universal life."

Walt Whitman, in 1855, published the first part of "Leaves of Grass" including "Song of Myself" and other poems. This he printed by his own hand. When his book appeared there was a great outcry. It was protested against with indignation and horror. He shocked the whole

-12-

literary world except the writers of the high-
est standing who proclaimed his a marvellous
message to the New World, full of inspiration
and prophecy.*

Although Emerson did not always
agree with his friend, he kept the fundamental
attitude he had voiced in his now famous letter
**of July 1855.

*

In England: W.M.Rossetti, Anne Gilchrist,
Tennyson, J.A.Symonds, Carlyle,Carpenter,
Dr.J.H.Johnson, Havelock Ellis.

In America: Emerson, Bucke, Burroughs,
Traubel, Col.Ingersoll,Harned,O'Connor,
Thoreau.

**

Concord, Mass

July 21st, 1855.

"Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the wonderful
gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the
most extraordinary piece of wit and wis-
dom that America has yet contributed. I
am very happy in reading it as great power
makes us happy. It meets the demand I am
always making of what seems the sterile
and stingy Nature, as if too much handi-
work or too much lymph in the temperament
were making our Western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave
thought. I have great joy in it. I find
incomparable things said incomparably
well, as they must be. I find the courage
of treatment which so delights us, and
which large perception only can inspire.

-13-

"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.

"I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office.

R.W. Emerson."

The "I" as used by Whitman in "Leaves of Grass", so often misunderstood as alluding to personal experience, is based on the fact that he identified himself with every type and condition of men and women, evil as well as good, believing "evil is diminished good". He believed _all life_ is the evolutionary process of God. "In the faces of men and women I see God." All prudish shame in speaking of the act of creation he cast aside. In his comprehensive sympathies, in his power of entering into every condition of life, he included all

* Professor E.C.Vouga

-14-

human experience-- joy, happiness, sorrow,
degradation, suffering.

Whitman felt that "whoever walks a
furlong without sympathy walks to his own fun-
eral dressed in his shroud." And during the
war when rich and respectable people were up-
holding the Fugitive Slave Law, his tender sym-
pathy was aroused. In the same spirit he wrote:

"I am the hounded slave, I wince at the
bite of dogs.
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and
again crack the marksmen
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore
dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses,
haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently
over the head with whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,
I myself become the wounded person."

When he says "I am for those who believe in loose delights; I share the midnight orgies of young men", it has been attributed to him as his own actions. Again figuratively he wrote:

"I am of old and young, of the foolish
as much as the wise."

He was the poet of the mystery of
life in all its phases. He understood those
who committed evil deeds as well as good.

-15-

"not until the sun excludes you do I exclude you."

As Col. Ingersoll says, "This is one of the greatest lines in literature. Jesus might have said it."

Poetical and personal faults he had, but shall not a man and his works be judged as a whole? Those who knew him spoke of his majestic presence- his magic personal and powerful charm. His cleanness of person and utterances. He was loved by all who knew him. Lincoln exclaimed when he saw him: "This looks like a man! "

Poets have eulogized, admired, few loved women, but xxxpoets have honored her as has Whitman. Individual rights, Walt Whitman felt, must be given equally to women the same as to men in every particular-- the same freedom, the same opportunity, and above all, the fight to be the master of her own body and mind.

"I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men."

Throughout his writings, when he mentions man he nearly always includes woman

-154-

Anne Gilchrist.

Once when I was in London I went to
see William Rossetti, and as we sat talking
in his charming library, he told me about
the vital impression Whitman's verse made on
him. Feeling my sincere admiration for Walt
Whitman, he said, "I have a letter of Whit-
man's here" He took up the envelope and said,
"I cannot give you the letter, but I think you
would value having the envelope which is address-
ed to me in Whitman's strong, firm hand."

I was indeed very happy to have this,
and also a beautiful letter of his sister's,
Christina Rossetti, which he gave me [at the
same time] ON THAT OCCASION.

For the first time then I heard
through him about Anne Gilchrist, the first
woman to recognize and proclaim Whitman as
a great soul. William Rossetti told how when
he took "Leaves of Grass" to her she was so
thrilled by the new vision of life it portrayed,
that she wrote to Whitman immediately.

"For me, the reading of the poems is truly a
new birth of the soul*** I see that no count-

-15½-

Anne Gilchrist

of syllables will reveal the mechanism of
the music, and that this rushing spontaneity
could not stay to bind itself with fetters
of meter. But I know the music is there
and I would not for something change ears
with those who cannot hear."

Walt Whitman, Rosetti continued,
wrote to him in 1872-- "Nothing in my life
or my literary fortunes, has brought me more
comfort and support in every way, nothing
has more spiritually soothed me than the
warm appreciation and friendship of that
full-grown woman."

Anne Gilchrist is the only woman
I know of whose name Whitman mentions, and
after her death he wrote a poem to her
which he sent to her son: "Going Somewhere".
other

The only poems of Whitman's that
touch a note of personal love and friendship
for women are: "Not Heat Flames up and Consumes"
and "Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd". The
latter poem Merle St.Croix Wright, a great
student of Whitman told me, was written to
Mrs Beach.

15 3/4.

Anne Gilchrist

Whitman thought of going to England to see Anne Gilchrist, who, as we all know waa most anxious to meet him. His health, however, failed, and in 1876 she came to America to see him bringing her daughters and son, and remained for three years. This was a very happy time for Whitman as he visited her constantly and was surrounded day by day by those who loved him dearly

Anne Gilchrist and her husband had written a book on Blake, and her understanding of that poet's mystic qualities gaver her greater insight into Whitman's mysticism.

16

Chinese

None of Whitman's biographers, so
far as I know, have laid stress on the striking
and significant parallels between his poetic,
subtle sensitiveness and that of the Chinese.
I was struck by it at once when reading the
following classical Chinese verses:

"As the years go by, give me but peace,
Freedom from ten thousand matters.
I ask myself and always answer:
Nothing is better than coming home.

"A wind from the pine trees blows my sash
And my lute is bright with the mountain moon.
You ask me about good and evil?
Hark! on the lake there's a fisherman
singing."

These verses have five qualities
that apply also to Whitman's poetry; - they
portray a vivid picture steeped in color,
sensitiveness to beauty, a gentle tenderness
that often brings tears in the heart; they
have vision, and their last lines are suggest-
ive of subtle philosophy.

For instance take Whitman's poem
"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": the
picture of the boy who 'wandered alone'....
'Up from the mystic play of shadows twining

164

Chinese -2-

and twisting as if they were alive-- watched
the mocking-bird singing-- calling to his mate.
'Singing all the time, minding no time, while we
two keep together.' Till of a sudden his mate
is lost. Then the love notes are so tender
as the bird calls, 'O night! I do not see my
love.'...... And then, as a man, 'from the
memories of the bird that chanted to me'....
'A man, yet by these tears a little boy again'..
Taking all hints to use them, swiftly leaping
beyond them'...... 'My own songs awaked from
that hour'.

Those qualities also apply to
his great poem on Lincoln "When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloomed"

The great poets and teachers are
not only those who are inspired. It is rather
they who inspire others. It would not be
amiss to let the greatest poet in America, so
often misunderstood even by his admirers,
explain both his purpose and method. Whitman
says: "For us the greatest poet is not he
who has done the best; it is he who suggests
the most; he not all of whose meanings is at

Chinese -3-

He adds: "I have been more anxious to suggest
the songs of vital endeavor and manly evolu-
tion *** than to make perfect rhymes."

And further proceeds:

"In my opinion, the time has arrived to essent-
ially break down the barriers of form between
prose and poetry. I say the latter is hence-
forth to win and maintain its character

-17-

"regardless of rhyme, and the measurement
rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl etc, and
that even if rhyme and those measurements
continue to furnish the medium for inferior
writers and themes (especially for persi-
flage and the comic, as there seems hence-
forward to the perfect taste something in-
evitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself,
and anyhow), the truest and greatest poetry
(while subtly and necessarily always
rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough)
can never again, in the English language, be
expressed in arbitrary and rhyming meter, any
more than the greatest eloquence, or the
truest power and passion." While admitting
that the venerable and heavenly forms of
rhyming versification have in their time
played great and fitting parts, it is, notwith-
standing, certain to me, that the day of such
conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at
any rate, and as a medium of highest aesthetic
practical or spiritual expression, present or
future, it palpably fails, and must fail to
serve.

* see next page

-18-

*It was an Englishwoman of remarkable character, Anne Gilchrist, who first came to Whitman's defense. "I have received word from Mrs. Gilchrist," wrote Walt Whitman to Rossetti in 1872. "Nothing in my life, or my literary fortunes, has brought me more comfort and support in every way, nothing has more spiritually soothed me than the warm appreciation and friendship of that true full-grown woman." She saw William Rossetti's edition, which he published in England, of "Leaves of Grass" and she wrote him: "For me, the reading of his poems is truly a new birth of the soul**** I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that the rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with fetters of meter. But I know the music is there and I would not for something change ears with those who cannot hear."

No one can deny rhythmic beauty to Walt Whitman who has read his immortal poem _When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd_ on the Death of Lincoln, "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands;" _Songs of Parting_; _The Voice out of the Sea_; _Walt Whitman_; the lovely poem _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_; _As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life_ and other songs in _Sea Drift_; _By Blue Ontario's Shore_; _Song of the Open Road_; _Starting from Potomac in Two Rivulets_. The only poems that touch a note on the intimacy of personal love and friendship for women are:

-19-

Not Heat Flames up and Consumes and
Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd, the
latter said to have been written to Mrs.
Beach, and Going Somewhere written when
Anne Gilchrist died, and sent to her son..

DEMOCRACY

As I have said, Whitman made
Democracy his standard of all great poems
and nations. As well as the Bible, Homer's
Iliad, Shakespeare's and Tennyson's works
appealed to him more than any other books,
but great as he felt their value to liter-
ature (described at length in his *Brose Works*),
he thought the three authors named "exhaled
democracy of caste"\*\*\*\*"Never one demo-
cratic page could be traced in their work.
They were subservient to their kings and
queens and left down-trodden people neglig-
ently in the background"

"I was looking for a long time for intentions,
For a clew to the history of the past for
myself, and for these chants- and now I
have found it.

It is not in those paged fables in the librar-
ies, (them I neither accept not reject)

It is no more in the legends than in all else,
It is in the present- it is this earth to-day,
It is in Democracy-(the purport and aim of all

the past)

It is the life of one man or one woman to-day
All for the modern-all for the average man of to-day

-20-

Such being the very springs of
Whitman's inspiration and action, they be-
stow on this defense of democratic ideals
characteristics all his own. Thoreau, in
speaking of him, said: "Whitman _is_ Democracy"
To recall names such as those of Emerson, Ruskin,
Arnold, liberals as they were, is all we need
if we want a keen sense of the distinctive-
ness of Whitman's democracy.

Commenting on Arnold's achieve-
ment, the author of "Leaves of Grass" unwitt-
ingly revealed the inherent quality of his
own social philosophy when he said: "Arnold
is weak on the democratic side. He has some
intellectual perception of democracy but he
doesn't have the feel of the thing." For
the poet of our land who endowed with ranges
of heroism and loftiness the "Leaves of Grass",
the democratic averages of America, Democracy
was not a thing to grow into, _but the very_
_law of man_ bound to come out in time.

-21-

"Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
Of value is the freight, 'tis not the
Present only,
The Past is also stored in thee.
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone,
not of the Western continent alone,
Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel,
O ship, is steadied by thy spars.
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee,
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs,
heroes, epics, wars, thou bearest the
other continents.
Their, theirs as much as thine, the
destination-port triumphant;
Steer them with good strong hand and wary
eye, O helmsman, thou carriest great
companions.
Venerable, priestly Asia sails this day
with thee,
And royal, feudal Europe sails with thee."

Naturally Whitman was intensely interested in the Labor question. He not only foresaw the uprisings and struggles of subject races, but the expanding movements of labor and the serious outcomes they were to result in.

"Beneath the whole political world, what most presses and perplexes to-day, sending vastest results affecting the future, is not the abstract question of democracy, but of social and economic organization, the treatment of working people by employers, and all that goes along with it-not only the wages-payment part, but a certain spirit and principle, to vivify anew these relations; all the questions of progress, strength, tariffs, finances etc. really evolving themselves more or less directly out of the Poverty Question. ('the Science of Wealth' and a dozen other names are given to it but I prefer the severe one just used)"

-23-

greatest office of scientism, in my opinion,
and of future poetry also, to free from
fables, crudities and superstitions, and
launch forth in renewed faith and scope a
hundred fold. To me, the world of religious-
ness, of the conception of the divine, and
of the ideal, though mainly latent, are just
as absolute in humanity and the universe as
the world of chemistry, or anything in the
objective worlds.

"The prophet and the bard,
Shall yet maintain themselves-in higher
circles yet,
Shall mediate to the modern, to democracy-
interpret yet to them- God and eidolons.

"To me the crown of savantism
is to be that it surely opens the way for a
more splendid theology, and for ampler and
diviner songs.

"Science, having extirpated the
old stock-fables and superstitions, is clearing
a field for verse, for all the arts and even
for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more
wonderful and with the new principles behind
them.

"Exact science" and we might add
the evolution of religious concepts, "and its
practical movements are no check on the great-
est poet, but always his encouragement and
support"

## PHILOSOPHY

Even greater than his democracy
is his philosophical and religious insight. He
was always absorbed with penetrating the mis-
terious secrets of man's life, his thoughts,
his actions, and his relation to the universe.
He believed in the soul, and the all-pervading
power of love and the divinity of man (the
infinite in man). His supreme subject is the
soul of man. Significant lines of the poet's
thought are: "What do you suppose will satis-
fy the soul except to walk free and own no
superior? **** Only the soul is of itself--

-24-

all else has reference to what ensues. All that a
a person does and thinks is of consequence. His
respect for man is infinite, because he believes
that man is the evolutionary process of God. His
Quaker faith made him recognize a divinity in all
things.*

* "Seek the truth only within thyself"
was one of the essential precepts that
Elias Hicks preached and under him
Whitman first drew his inspiration,
and fifteen hundred years before Christ
Akhnaton, the great Pharaoh and Prophet
of Egypt made the "inner law and light
the rule and standard of all faith and
work and exhorted his people to consider
God's creatures even to the meanest."
He might be called the first Quaker, so
like were his principles to those of
Walt Whitman. He forbade his people to
worship the sun as a deity, but as only
a marvellous symbol of the Divine Mind.
--He urged them to worship "in truth"
simply, without excess of ceremony.
He signed himself "Akhnaton, Living in
truth."

-25-

Walt Whitman has been called a Pantheist, but to quote Prof. C.E.Vouga, "Nobody could admit that who has actually thought over the significance of pantheism. Pantheism is an inarticulate belief in the supernaturalness of nature, inarticulate especially in that it refuses or fails to establish purposiveness or any relation man may have with nature thus considered. Pantheism, as the word is commonly used, is a denial of personality. Whitman, who spontaneously and steadfastly and in unique language made a case for Personality, cannot be classed among pantheists."

Whitman's idea of religion is "although casually arrested and, after a fashion, preserved in the churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified soul, which when greatest knows not Bibles in the old way, but in new ways- the identified soul, which can really confront religion when it extricates itself entirely from the churches, and not before."

-26-

Is he not hundreds of years ahead of his time? He sums up his philosophy in the following lines:

"To share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of religion.

Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake."

His faith in personality and not in the law of averages urged him to offer formulation to the growing masses of the country, and in thus helping to mould and give significance to a nation's consciousness, a statesman and prophet were lurking back of the Poet and stand revealed in the following lines:

"Brain of the New World, what a task is thine, To formulate the Modern-out of the peerless grandeur of the modern, Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art, (Recast, maybe discard them, end them-maybe their work is done, who knows?)

-27-

"By vision, hand, conception, on the background
of the mighty past, the dead,
To limn with absolute faith the mighty living
present.

And yet thou living, present brain, heir of the
dead, the Old World brain,
Thou that lay folded like an unborn babe
within its folds so long,
Thou carefully prepared by it so long- haply
thou but unfoldest it, only maturest it,
It to eventuate in thee- the essence of the
bygone time contain'd in thee;
Thou but the apples, long, long, long agrowing,
The fruit of all the old ripening to-day in thee."

In our seething times, when most of
us neither lead nor follow, but grope helplessly in
the dark, what a breath-spell we are given when
we come upon this masterly heralding of the
future and how we can once more persuade our-
selves that both the _Poet_ and the _Prophet_ are
among the most useful and practical citizens.

Whitman's personal exportation
to the youth of America accentuates the power
of personal force. He says:

-28

As a young woman I came upon these
these words of Walt Whitman:

"Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else,
and commence to annure yourdelf to pluck,
reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
elevatedness.

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself
of your _own_ personality."

They stirred me so that I started reading Whitman
from cover to cover. He gave me courage to
stand for my own truth, my personality, and all
that I hold dear in life. Those words of his
have been my inspiration and guide all my years!
And this was Whitman's own guide.

It may be true that only America
could have produced this great primitive, in-
tense loving, passionate, all-absorbent nature.
Certainly he is not the poet of the old English
school (Poe being the greatest exponent in
America of the English tradional form) This
new land, America, needed a new language and
found its poet and prophet in Whitman, our
greatest American poet, as Lincoln was our
greatest statesman. And these two men, true
humanitarians, had this in the foundation of
their character- they were both of Quaker
parentage

-29-

Anne Gilchrist, his "Noblest woman friend" as Whitman called her, wrote:

"If the Poet's heart were not'a measureless ocean of love' that seeks the lips and would quench the thirst of all, he were not the one we have waited for so long. Happy America that he should be her son! "

When cosmic consciousness takes possession of a man he understands all man-kind and no longer is limited by nationalism, racialism or sectarianism. His whole being is universalized beyond every species of narrowness. He becomes a <u>fraternal internationalist</u> and, like Walt Whitman, declares:

"I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy
By God, I will accept nothing that all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms!
I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

Foot Note

Whitman's reputation centres around "Leaves of Grass", but his Prose Works is a great outpouring of his ideas, dreams, hope of democracy for America and the world. "In Re. Walt Whitman" edited by his literary executors, Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke and Thomas B. Harned, is a most valuable edition containing letters giving intimate relations in his life, his friends and his ideas of democracy, poetry and religion.