Complete Prose Works

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I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860-'65, not as a struggle
of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening,
and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the
same identity--perhaps the only terms on which that identity could
really become fused, homogeneous and lasting. The origin and
conditions out of which it arose, are full of lessons, full of
warnings yet to the Republic--and always will be. The underlying and
principal of those origins are yet singularly ignored. The Northern
States were really just as responsible for that war, (in its
precedents, foundations, instigations,) as the South. Let me try to
give my view. From the age of 21 to 40, (1840-'60,) I was interested
in the political movements of the land, not so much as a participant,
but as an observer, and a regular voter at the elections. I think I
was conversant with the springs of action, and their workings, not
only in New York city and Brooklyn, but understood them in the whole
country, as I had made leisurely tours through all the middle States,
and partially through the western and southern, and down to New
Orleans, in which city I resided for some time. (I was there at the
close of the Mexican war--saw and talk'd with General Taylor, and the
other generals and officers, who were feted and detain'd several days
on their return victorious from that expedition.)

Of course many and very contradictory things, specialties,
developments, constitutional views, &c., went to make up the origin of
the war--but the most significant general fact can be best indicated
and stated as follows: For twenty-five years previous to the
outbreak, the controling "Democratic" nominating conventions of our
Republic--starting from their primaries in wards or districts, and
so expanding to counties, powerful cities, States, and to the great
Presidential nominating conventions--were getting to represent and be
composed of more and more putrid and dangerous materials. Let me give
a schedule, or list, of one of these representative conventions for
a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan.
(Remember they had come to be the fountains and tissues of the
American body politic, forming, as it were, the whole blood,
legislation, office-holding, &c.) One of these conventions, from 1840
to '60, exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in
our own age and in these States. The members who composed it were,
seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing
office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators,
murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors,
spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels,
disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of
slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents,
spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports,
expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers
of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile
disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money
and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the
lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came
they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses,
marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the
President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed
by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from
political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds
inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from
the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and
from the running sores of the great cities. Such, I say, form'd,
or absolutely controll'd the forming of, the entire personnel, the
atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National
politics--substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding
everything--legislation, nominations, elections, "public sentiment,"
&c.--while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and
traders, were helpless in their gripe. These conditions were mostly
prevalent in the north and west, and especially in New York and
Philadelphia cities; and the southern leaders, (bad enough, but of a
far higher order,) struck hands and affiliated with, and used them.
Is it strange that a thunder-storm follow'd such morbid and stifling
cloud-strata?

I say then, that what, as just outlined, heralded, and made the ground
ready for secession revolt, ought to be held up, through all the
future, as the most instructive lesson in American political
history--the most significant warning and beacon-light to coming
generations. I say that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and
shallowness of rulers (back'd by the machinery of great parties) are
just as eligible to these States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom,
or empire--there is not a bit of difference. History is to record
those three Presidentiads, and especially the administrations of
Fillmore and Buchanan, as so far our topmost warning and shame.
Never were publicly display'd more deform'd, mediocre, snivelling,
unreliable, false-hearted men. Never were these States so insulted,
and attempted to be betray'd. All the main purposes for which the
government was establish'd were openly denied. The perfect equality of
slavery with freedom was flauntingly preach'd in the north--nay, the
superiority of slavery. The slave trade was proposed to be renew'd.
Everywhere frowns and misunderstandings--everywhere exasperations and
humiliations. (The slavery contest is settled--and the war is long
over--yet do not those putrid conditions, too many of them, still
exist? still result in diseases, fevers, wounds--not of war and army
hospitals--but the wounds and diseases of peace?)

Out of those generic influences, mainly in New York, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, &c., arose the attempt at disunion. To philosophical
examination, the malignant fever of that war shows its embryonic
sources, and the original nourishment of its life and growth, in the
north. I say secession, below the surface, originated and was brought
to maturity in the free States. I allude to the score of years
preceding 1860. My deliberate opinion is now, that if at the opening
of the contest the abstract duality-question of _slavery and quiet_
could have been submitted to a direct popular vote, as against their
opposite, they would have triumphantly carried the day in a majority
of the northern States--in the large cities, leading off with New York
and Philadelphia, by tremendous majorities. The events of '61 amazed
everybody north and south, and burst all prophecies and calculations
like bubbles. But even then, and during the whole war, the stern fact
remains that (not only did the north put it down, but) _the secession
cause had numerically just as many sympathizers in the free as in the
rebel States_.

As to slavery, abstractly and practically, (its idea, and the
determination to establish and expand it, especially in the new
territories, the future America,) it is too common, I repeat, to
identify it exclusively with the south. In fact down to the opening of
the war, the whole country had about an equal hand in it. The north
had at least been just as guilty, if not more guilty; and the east and
west had. The former Presidents and Congresses had been guilty--the
governors and legislatures of every northern State had been guilty,
and the mayors of New York and other northern cities had all been
guilty--their hands were all stain'd. And as the conflict took decided
shape, it is hard to tell which class, the leading southern or
northern disunionists, was more stunn'd and disappointed at the
non-action of the free-State secession element, so largely existing
and counted on by those leaders, both sections.

So much for that point, and for the north. As to the inception and
direct instigation of the war, in the south itself, I shall not
attempt interiors or complications. Behind all, the idea that it was
from a resolute and arrogant determination on the part of the extreme
slaveholders, the Calhounites, to carry the States-rights' portion
of the constitutional compact to its farthest verge, and nationalize
slavery, or else disrupt the Union, and found a new empire, with
slavery for its corner-stone, was and is undoubtedly the true theory.
(If successful, this attempt might--I am not sure, but it might--have
destroy'd not only our American republic, in anything like first-class
proportions, in itself and its prestige, but for ages at least, the
cause of Liberty and Equality everywhere--and would have been the
greatest triumph of reaction, and the severest blow to political and
every other freedom, possible to conceive. Its worst result would
have inured to the southern States themselves.) That our national
democratic experiment, principle, and machinery, could triumphantly
sustain such a shock, and that the Constitution could weather it, like
a ship a storm, and come out of it as sound and whole as before, is
by far the most signal proof yet of the stability of that experiment,
Democracy, and of those principles, and that Constitution.

Of the war itself, we know in the ostent what has been done. The
numbers of the dead and wounded can be told or approximated, the debt
posted and put on record, the material events narrated, &c. Meantime,
elections go on, laws are pass'd, political parties struggle, issue
their platforms, &c., just the same as before. But immensest results,
not only in politics, but in literature, poems, and sociology, are
doubtless waiting yet unform'd in the future. How long they will wait
I cannot tell. The pageant of history's retrospect shows us, ages
since, all Europe marching on the crusades, those arm'd uprisings of
the people, stirr'd by a mere idea, to grandest attempt--and, when
once baffled in it, returning, at intervals, twice, thrice, and again.
An unsurpass'd series of revolutionary events, influences. Yet it took
over two hundred years for the seeds of the crusades to germinate,
before beginning even to sprout. Two hundred years they lay, sleeping,
not dead, but dormant in the ground. Then, out of them, unerringly,
arts, travel, navigation, politics, literature, freedom, the spirit of
adventure, inquiry, all arose, grew, and steadily sped on to what we
see at present. Far back there, that huge agitation-struggle of the
crusades stands, as undoubtedly the embryo, the start, of the high
preeminence of experiment, civilization and enterprise which the
European nations have since sustain'd, and of which these States are
the heirs.

Another illustration--(history is full of them, although the war
itself, the victory of the Union, and the relations of our equal
States, present features of which there are no precedents in
the past.) The conquest of England eight centuries ago, by the
Franco-Normans--the obliteration of the old, (in many respects so
needing obliteration)--the Domesday Book, and the repartition of
the land--the old impedimenta removed, even by blood and ruthless
violence, and a new, progressive genesis establish'd, new seeds
sown--time has proved plain enough that, bitter as they were, all
these were the most salutary series of revolutions that could possibly
have happen'd. Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out of
Albic, Roman and Saxon England--and without them could not have
come--not only the England of the 500 years down to the present,
and of the present--but these States. Nor, except for that terrible
dislocation and overturn, would these States, as they are, exist
to-day.

It is certain to me that the United States, by virtue of that war and
its results, and through that and them only, are now ready to enter,
and must certainly enter, upon their genuine career in history, as
no more torn and divided in their spinal requisites, but a great
homogeneous Nation--free States all--a moral and political unity in
variety, such as Nature shows in her grandest physical works, and as
much greater than any mere work of Nature, as the moral and political,
the work of man, his mind, his soul, are, in their loftiest sense,
greater than the merely physical. Out of that war not only has the
nationality of the States escaped from being strangled, but more than
any of the rest, and, in my opinion, more than the north itself, the
vital heart and breath of the south have escaped as from the pressure
of a general nightmare, and are henceforth to enter on a life,
development, and active freedom, whose realities are certain in the
future, notwithstanding all the southern vexations of the hour--a
development which could not possibly have been achiev'd on any less
terms, or by any other means than that grim lesson, or something
equivalent to it. And I predict that the south is yet to outstrip the
north.

PREFACES TO "LEAVES OF GRASS"

PREFACE, 1855 _To first issue of Leaves of Grass. _Brooklyn, N.Y._

America does not repel the past, or what the past has produced under
its forms, or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old
religions--accepts the lesson with calmness--is not impatient because
the slough still sticks to opinions and manners in literature, while
the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life
of the new forms--perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the
eating and sleeping rooms of the house--perceives that it waits a
little while in the door--that it was fittest for its days--that
its action has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who
approaches--and that he shall be fittest for his days.

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably
the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto,
the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler
largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man
that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here
is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and
details, magnificently moving in masses. Here is the hospitality
which for ever indicates heroes. Here the performance, disdaining the
trivial, unapproach'd in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and
groupings, and the push of its perspective, spreads with crampless and
flowing breadth, and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance.
One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter,
and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground, or the
orchards drop apples, or the bays contain fish, or men beget children
upon women.

Other states indicate themselves in their deputies--but the genius
of the United States is not best or most in its executives or
legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors, or colleges or
churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors--but
always most in the common people, south, north, west, east, in all its
States, through all its mighty amplitude. The largeness of the
nation, however, were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and
generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not swarming states, nor
streets and steamships, nor prosperous business, nor farms, nor
capital, nor learning, may suffice for the ideal of man--nor suffice
the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation
can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best authority the
cheapest--namely, from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable
uses of individuals or states, and of present action and grandeur,
and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to trot back
generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty
and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the
mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the
opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired
in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the
antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!) The pride
of the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and
all returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude of
geography or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the sight and
realization of full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and
simple. The American poets are to enclose old and new, for America
is the race of races. The expression of the American poet is to
be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or
descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more.
Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted, and their eras and
characters be illustrated, and that finish the verse. Not so the great
psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative, and has vista.
Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation,
the great poet never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he
masters it. High up out of reach he stands, turning a concentrated
light--he turns the pivot with his finger--he baffles the swiftest
runners as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelopes them. The
time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he
withholds by steady faith. Faith is the antiseptic of the soul--it
pervades the common people and preserves them--they never give up
believing and expecting and trusting. There is that indescribable
freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person, that humbles
and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees
for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and
perfect as the greatest artist.

The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet,
but seldom the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not
expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he
is not what is wanted. The presence of the great poet conquers--not
parleying, or struggling, or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed
that way, see after him! There is not left any vestige of despair,
or misanthropy, or cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a
nativity or color, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell--and
no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or
sin. The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he
breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates
with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer--he is
individual--he is complete in himself--the others are as good as he,
only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus--he does
not stop for any regulation--he is the president of regulation. What
the eyesight does to the rest, he does to the rest. Who knows the
curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate
themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own, and
foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it
mocks all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books
of the earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely?
what is impossible or baseless or vague--after you have once just
open'd the space of a peach-pit, and given audience to far and near,
and to the sunset, and had all things enter with electric swiftness,
softly and duly, without confusion or jostling or jam?

The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky of heaven
and the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes
--but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and
dignity which always attach to dumb real objects--they expect him
to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and
women perceive the beauty well enough--probably as well as he. The
passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of
gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the
manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for
light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing
perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic in out-door
people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive--some may,
but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshal'd in rhyme
or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy
complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else,
and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a
sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys
itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and
uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws, and
bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush,
and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges, and
melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency
and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations,
are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful
blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction
in a man or woman, it is enough--the fact will prevail through the
universe; but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not
prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the
stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate
tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward
the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any
man or number of men--go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and
with the young, and with the mothers of families--re-examine all
you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss
whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great
poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the
silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your
eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not
spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is
already plough'd and manured; others may not know it, but he shall. He
shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of
everything he touches--and shall master all attachment.

The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest
poet. He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance
happens, and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and
persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks
others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to
his proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest, he is
rapport with in the sight of the daybreak, or the scenes of the winter
woods, or the presence of children playing, or with his arm round
the neck of a man or woman. His love above all love has leisure and
expanse--he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or
suspicious lover--he is sure--he scorns intervals. His experience
and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar
him--suffering and darkness cannot--death and fear cannot. To him
complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the
earth--he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore, or the
shore of the sea, than he is the fruition of his love, and of all
perfection and beauty.

The fruition of beauty is no chance of miss or hit--it is as
inevitable as life--it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the
eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds
another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally
curious of the harmony of things with man. These understand the law
of perfection in masses and floods--that it is profuse and
impartial--that there is not a minute of the light or dark, nor an
acre of the earth and sea, without it--nor any direction of the sky,
nor any trade or employment, nor any turn of events. This is the
reason that about the proper expression of beauty there is precision
and balance. One part does not need to be thrust above another. The
best singer is not the one who has the most lithe and powerful organ.
The pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure
and sound.

Without effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done, the
greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions
and scenes and persons, some more and some less, to bear on your
individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to
compete with the laws that pursue and follow Time. What is the purpose
must surely be there, and the clue of it must be there--and the
faintest indication is the indication of the best, and then becomes
the clearest indication. Past and present and future are not disjoin'd
but join'd. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be,
from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and
stands them again on their feet. He says to the past, Rise and walk
before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson--he places
himself where the future becomes present. The greatest poet does
not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions--he
finally ascends, and finishes all--he exhibits the pinnacles that no
man can tell what they are for, or what is beyond--he glows a moment
on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden
smile or frown; by that flash of the moment of parting the one that
sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The
greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals--he
knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in
never acknowledging any lessons or deductions but its own. But it has
sympathy as measureless as its pride, and the one balances the other,
and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the
other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest
poet has lain close betwixt both, and they are vital in his style and
thoughts.