HUTTON WEBSTER - "EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY"

Charles Goff Thomson - "Terry"

Anna Graetz - "Pearl and Periwinkle"

Thomas Henry Huxley - "This is Essay #1 from Science and Hebrew Tradition"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Complete Prose Works

W >> Walt Whitman >> Complete Prose Works




For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above
all his errors and wickedness--few suspect how deep, how deep it
really strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently
supposed so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal
franchise, an elective government--to inaugurate the respectability
of labor, and become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding,
orderly and well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of
America; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception,
but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher
progress. Daughter of a physical revolution--mother of the true
revolutions, which are of the interior life, and of the arts. For so
long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of no
avail.

The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American
independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds
except those of one's own being, control'd by the universal ones.
To lands, to man, to woman, what is there at last to each, but the
inherent soul, nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest-poised, soaring its
own flight, following out itself?

At present, these States, in their theology and social standards, (of
greater importance than their political institutions,) are entirely
held possession of by foreign lands. We see the sons and daughters
of the New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the
native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the
partial, and the dead. We see London, Paris, Italy--not original,
superb, as where they belong--but second-hand here, where they do not
belong. We see the shreds of Hebrews, Romans, Greeks; but where, on
her own soil, do we see, in any faithful, highest, proud expression,
America herself? I sometimes question whether she has a corner in her
own house.

Not but that in one sense, and a very grand one, good theology, good
art, or good literature, has certain features shared in common. The
combination fraternizes, ties the races--is, in many particulars,
under laws applicable indifferently to all, irrespective of climate
or date, and, from whatever source, appeals to emotions, pride, love,
spirituality, common to human kind. Nevertheless, they touch a man
closest, (perhaps only actually touch him,) even in these, in
their expression through autochthonic lights and shades, flavors,
fondnesses, aversions, specific incidents, illustrations, out of his
own nationality, geography, surroundings, antecedents, &c. The spirit
and the form are one, and depend far more on association, identity and
place, than is supposed. Subtly interwoven with the materiality
and personality of a land, a race--Teuton, Turk, Californian, or
what-not--there is always something--I can hardly tell what it
is--history but describes the results of it--it is the same as the
untellable look of some human faces. Nature, too, in her stolid forms,
is full of it--but to most it is there a secret. This something is
rooted in the invisible roots, the profoundest meanings of that place,
race, or nationality; and to absorb and again effuse it, uttering
words and products as from its midst, and carrying it into highest
regions, is the work, or a main part of the work, of any country's
true author, poet, historian, lecturer, and perhaps even priest and
philosoph. Here, and here only, are the foundations for our really
valuable and permanent verse, drama, &c.

But at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the
chief ends of existence to be to feverishly make money during one-half
of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign travel, flippantly
kill time, the other half,) and consider'd with reference to purposes
of patriotism, health, a noble personality, religion, and the
democratic adjustments, all these swarms of poems, literary magazines,
dramatic plays, resultant so far from American intellect, and
the formation of our best ideas, are useless and a mockery. They
strengthen and nourish no one, express nothing characteristic, give
decision and purpose to no one, and suffice only the lowest level of
vacant minds.

Of what is called the drama, or dramatic presentation in the United
States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to
be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions of
ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of
curtains and hangings in a ball-room--nor more, nor less. Of the
other, I will not insult the reader's intelligence, (once really
entering into the atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it
necessary to show, in detail, why the copious dribble, either of our
little or well-known rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the
needs and august occasions of this land. America demands a poetry that
is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself.
It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself
with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the
future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself
from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to
them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own
democratic spirit only. Like her, it must place in the van, and hold
up at all hazards, the banner of the divine pride of man in himself,
(the radical foundation of the new religion.) Long enough have the
People been listening to poems in which common humanity, deferential,
bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors. But America listens to
no such poems. Erect, inflated, and fully self-esteeming be the chant;
and then America will listen with pleased ears.

Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to light at last, be
probably usher'd forth from any of the quarters currently counted on.
To-day, doubtless, the infant genius of American poetic expression,
(eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes,
and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox
publishers--causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not
to chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial
gossamer delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and
uninjur'd by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of
the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges--lies sleeping, aside,
unrecking itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or
Tennessee repartee, or stumpspeech--or in Kentucky or Georgia, or
the Carolinas--or in some slang or local song or allusion of the
Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore mechanic--or up in the
Maine woods--or off in the hut of the California miner, or crossing
the Rocky mountains, or along the Pacific railroad--or on the breasts
of the young farmers of the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of
the lakes. Rude and coarse nursing-beds, these; but only from such
beginnings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted,
and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits
truly and fully our own.

I say it were a standing disgrace to these States--I say it were a
disgrace to any nation, distinguish'd above others by the variety and
vastness of its territories, its materials, its inventive activity,
and the splendid practicality of its people, not to rise and soar
above others also in its original styles in literature and art, and
its own supply of intellectual and esthetic masterpieces, archetypal,
and consistent with itself. I know not a land except ours that has
not, to some extent, however small, made its title clear. The Scotch
have their born ballads, subtly expressing their past and present, and
expressing character. The Irish have theirs. England, Italy, France,
Spain, theirs. What has America? With exhaustless mines of the richest
ore of epic, lyric, tale, tune, picture, etc., in the Four Years' War;
with, indeed, I sometimes think, the richest masses of material ever
afforded a nation, more variegated, and on a larger scale--the first
sign of proportionate, native, imaginative Soul, and first-class works
to match, is, (I cannot too often repeat,) so far wanting.

Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to
fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba. When the present
century closes, our population will be sixty or seventy millions. The
Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be
daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an
age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality
of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any
doubt who the leader ought to be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing
less than the mightiest original non-subordinated SOUL has ever
really, gloriously led, or ever can lead. (This Soul--its other name,
in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.)

In fond fancy leaping those hundred years ahead, let us survey
America's works, poems, philosophies, fulfilling prophecies, and
giving form and decision to best ideals. Much that is now undream'd
of, we might then perhaps see establish'd, luxuriantly cropping forth,
richness, vigor of letters and of artistic expression, in whose
products character will be a main requirement, and not merely
erudition or elegance.

Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment
of man to man--which, hard to define, underlies the lessons and ideals
of the profound saviours of every land and age, and which seems to
promise, when thoroughly develop'd, cultivated and recognized in
manners and literature, the most substantial hope and safety of the
future of these States, will then be fully express'd.[29]

A strong fibred joyousness and faith, and the sense of health _al
fresco_, may well enter into the preparation of future noble American
authorship. Part of the test of a great literatus shall be the absence
in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the
devil, the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural
depravity, and the like. The great literatus will be known, among the
rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards,
his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him
of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strain'd and temporary
fashion.

Nor must I fail, again and yet again, to clinch, reiterate more
plainly still, (O that indeed such survey as we fancy, may show in
time this part completed also!) the lofty aim, surely the proudest and
the purest, in whose service the future literatus, of whatever field,
may gladly labor. As we have intimated, offsetting the material
civilization of our race, our nationality, its wealth, territories,
factories, population, products, trade, and military and naval
strength, and breathing breath of life into all these, and more, must
be its moral civilization--the formulation, expression, and aidancy
whereof, is the very highest height of literature. The climax of this
loftiest range of civilization, rising above all the gorgeous shows
and results of wealth, intellect, power, and art, as such--above even
theology and religious fervor--is to be its development, from the
eternal bases, and the fit expression, of absolute Conscience, moral
soundness, Justice. Even in religious fervor there is a touch of
animal heat. But moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw,
not Godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants forever. Great is
emotional love, even in the order of the rational universe. But, if we
must make gradations, I am clear there is something greater. Power,
love, veneration, products, genius, esthetics, tried by subtlest
comparisons, analyses, and in serenest moods, somewhere fail, somehow
become vain. Then noiseless, withflowing steps, the lord, the sun, the
last ideal comes. By the names right, justice, truth, we suggest, but
do not describe it. To the world of men it remains a dream, an idea as
they call it. But no dream is it to the wise--but the proudest, almost
only solid, lasting thing of all. Its analogy in the material universe
is what holds together this world, and every object upon it, and
carries its dynamics on forever sure and safe. Its lack, and the
persistent shirking of it, as in life, sociology, literature, politics,
business, and even sermonizing, these times, or any times, still leaves
the abysm, the mortal flaw and smutch, mocking civilization to-day,
with all its unquestion'd triumphs, and all the civilization so far
known.[30]

Present literature, while magnificently fulfilling certain popular
demands, with plenteous knowledge and verbal smartness, is profoundly
sophisticated, insane, and its very joy is morbid. It needs tally and
express Nature, and the spirit of Nature, and to know and obey the
standards. I say the question of Nature, largely consider'd, involves
the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious--and
involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right
conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and
development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it
enough merely _to live_--and would, in their relations to the sky,
air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in
the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness--with Being
suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the
pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect,
erudition, or the sense of art, can give.

In the prophetic literature of these States, (the reader of my
speculations will miss their principal stress unless he allows well
for the point that a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics,
certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and
worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy,) Nature,
true Nature, and the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all,
become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading
atmosphere to poems, and the test of all high literary and esthetic
compositions. I do not mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, poseys
and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing
billions of tons. Furthermore, as by what we now partially call Nature
is intended, at most, only what is entertainable by the physical
conscience, the sense of matter, and of good animal health--on these it
must be distinctly accumulated, incorporated, that man, comprehending
these, has, in towering superaddition, the moral and spiritual
consciences, indicating his destination beyond the ostensible, the
mortal.

To the heights of such estimate of Nature indeed ascending, we proceed
to make observations for our Vistas, breathing rarest air. What is
I believe called Idealism seems to me to suggest, (guarding against
extravagance, and ever modified even by its opposite,) the course of
inquiry and desert of favor for our New World metaphysics, their
foundation of and in literature, giving hue to all.[31]

The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality
must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate
heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their
parents. Fearless of scoffing, and of the ostent, let us take our
stand, our ground, and never desert it, to confront the growing excess
and arrogance of realism. To the cry, now victorious--the cry of
sense, science, flesh, incomes, farms, merchandise, logic, intellect,
demonstrations, solid perpetuities, buildings of brick and iron, or
even the facts of the shows of trees, earth, rocks, &c., fear not, my
brethren, my sisters, to sound out with equally determin'd voice,
that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision'd
soul--illusions! apparitions! figments all! True, we must not condemn
the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its
meanings; but how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we
can already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and,
palpable as it seems under present relations, it all and several
might, nay certainly would, fall apart and vanish.

I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the
demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current
age, our States. But we to the age or land in which these things,
movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel
to flame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science,
materialism--even this democracy of which we make so much--unerringly
feed the highest mind, the soul. Infinitude the flight: fathomless the
mystery. Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe,
competes with, outcopes space and time, meditating even one great
idea. Thus, and thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend
above, and justify, objective Nature, which, probably nothing in
itself, is incredibly and divinely serviceable, indispensable, real,
here. And as the purport of objective Nature is doubtless folded,
hidden, somewhere here--as somewhere here is what this globe and its
manifold forms, and the light of day, and night's darkness, and life
itself, with all its experiences, are for--it is here the great
literature, especially verse, must get its inspiration and throbbing
blood. Then may we attain to a poetry worthy the immortal soul of man,
and widen, while absorbing materials, and, in their own sense, the
shows of Nature, will, above all, have, both directly and indirectly,
a freeing, fluidizing, expanding, religious character, exulting with
science, fructifying the moral elements, and stimulating aspirations,
and meditations on the unknown.

The process, so far, is indirect and peculiar, and though it may be
suggested, cannot be defined. Observing, rapport, and with intuition,
the shows and forms presented by Nature, the sensuous luxuriance, the
beautiful in living men and women, the actual play of passions, in
history and life--and, above all, from those developments either in
Nature or human personality in which power, (dearest of all to the
sense of the artist,) transacts itself-out of these, and seizing what
is in them, the poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine
magic of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious
removes, indirections, in literature and art. (No useless attempt to
repeat the material creation, by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by
mortal mental means.) This is the image-making faculty, coping with
material creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it. This
alone, when all the other parts of a specimen of literature or art are
ready and waiting, can breathe into it the breath of life, and endow
it with identity.

"The true question to ask," says the librarian of Congress in a paper
read before the Social Science Convention at New York, October, 1869,
"The true question to ask respecting a book, is, _has it help'd any
human soul?_" This is the hint, statement, not only of the great
literatus, his book, but of every great artist. It may be that all
works of art are to be first tried by their art qualities,
their image-forming talent, and their dramatic, pictorial,
plot-constructing, euphonious and other talents. Then, whenever
claiming to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly
tried by their foundation in, and radiation, in the highest sense, and
always indirectly, of the ethic principles, and eligibility to free,
arouse, dilate.

As, within the purposes of the Kosmos, and vivifying all meteorology,
and all the congeries of the mineral, vegetable and animal worlds--all
the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the
race in politics, religions, wars, &c., there is a moral purpose, a
visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all--its results
and proof needing to be patiently waited for--needing intuition,
faith, idiosyncrasy, to its realization, which many, and especially
the intellectual, do not have--so in the product, or congeries of the
product, of the greatest literatus. This is the last, profoundest
measure and test of a first-class literary or esthetic achievement,
and when understood and put in force must fain, I say, lead to works,
books, nobler than any hitherto known. Lo! Nature, (the only complete,
actual poem,) existing calmly in the divine scheme, containing all,
content, careless of the criticisms of a day, or these endless and
wordy chatterers. And lo! to the consciousness of the soul, the
permanent identity, the thought, the something, before which the
magnitude even of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes
partial, measurable--something that fully satisfies, (which those
do not.) That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the
accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant,
indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a
ship the sea. And again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit,
throbbing forever--the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole
of life in things--wherefrom I feel and know that death is not the
ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning--and that
nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.

In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make
great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be
the poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond
itself. I have eulogized Homer, the sacred bards of Jewry, Eschylus,
Juvenal, Shakspere, &c., and acknowledged their inestimable value.
But, (with perhaps the exception, in some, not all respects, of
the second-mention'd,) I say there must, for future and democratic
purposes, appear poets, (dare I to say so?) of higher class even than
any of those--poets not only possess'd of the religious fire and
abandon of Isaiah, luxuriant in the epic talent of Homer, or for proud
characters as in Shakspere, but consistent with the Hegelian formulas,
and consistent with modern science. America needs, and the world
needs, a class of bards who will, now and ever, so link and tally the
rational physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space,
and with this vast and multiform show, Nature, surrounding him, ever
tantalizing him, equally a part, and yet not a part of him, as to
essentially harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest. Faith, very old, now
scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same
power that caused her departure--restored with new sway, deeper,
wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, this coward
fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not
always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has the
past, and does the present. What the Roman Lucretius sought most
nobly, yet all too blindly, negatively to do for his age and its
successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus,
especially poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever
science indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his
own genius, will compose the great poem of death. Then will man indeed
confront Nature, and confront time and space, both with science, and
_con amore_, and take his right place, prepared for life, master of
fortune and misfortune. And then that which was long wanted will be
supplied, and the ship that had it not before in all her voyages, will
have an anchor.

There are still other standards, suggestions, for products of high
literatuses. That which really balances and conserves the social and
political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and
dread of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in
humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c. Indeed, this perennial
regulation, control, and oversight, by self-suppliance, is _sine qua
non_ to democracy; and a highest widest aim of democratic literature
may well be to bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen this
sense, in individuals and society. A strong mastership of the
general inferior self by the superior self, is to be aided, secured,
indirectly, but surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for
individual or aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and
along with which goes a great masterful spirit.

And still, providing for contingencies, I fain confront the fact,
the need of powerful native philosophs and orators and bards, these
States, as rallying points to come, in times of danger, and to fend
off ruin and defection. For history is long, long, long. Shift and
turn the combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the
future of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold
in behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and
over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful,
threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly
up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all--brings
worse and worse invaders--needs newer, larger, stronger, keener
compensations and compellers.

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