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Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a vast
seething mass of _materials_, ampler, better, (worse also,) than
previously known--eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning
stage, and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future,
the nation of the body and the soul,[32]--no limit here to land,
help, opportunities, mines, products, demands, supplies, etc.;--with
(I think) our political organization, National, State, and Municipal,
permanently establish'd, as far ahead as we can calculate--but, so
far, no social, literary, religious, or esthetic organizations,
consistent with our politics, or becoming to us--which organizations
can only come, in time, through great democratic ideas,
religion--through science, which now, like a new sunrise, ascending,
begins to illuminate all--and through our own begotten poets and
literatuses. (The moral of a late well-written book on civilization
seems to be that the only real foundation-walls and bases--and also
_sine qua non_ afterward--of true and full civilization, is the
eligibility and certainty of boundless products for feeding, clothing,
sheltering everybody--perennial fountains of physical and domestic
comfort, with intercommunication, and with civil and ecclesiastical
freedom--and that then the esthetic and mental business will take care
of itself. Well, the United States have establish'd this basis, and
upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity, rivaling
those of Nature; and have now to proceed to build an edifice upon
it. I say this edifice is only to be fitly built by new literatures,
especially the poetic. I say a modern image-making creation is
indispensable to fuse and express the modern political and scientific
creations--and then the trinity will be complete.)

When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, and
continued turning over that plan, and shifting it in my mind
through many years, (from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five,)
experimenting much, and writing and abandoning much, one deep purpose
underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever
since--and that has been the religious purpose. Amid many changes,
and a formulation taking far different shape from what I at first
supposed, this basic purpose has never been departed from in the
composition of my verses. Not of course to exhibit itself in the old
ways, as in writing hymns or psalms with an eye to the church-pew, or
to express conventional pietism, or the sickly yearnings of devotees,
but in new ways, and aiming at the widest sub-bases and inclusions
of humanity, and tallying the fresh air of sea and land. I will see,
(said I to myself,) whether there is not, for my purposes as poet, a
religion, and a sound religious germenancy in the average human race,
at least in their modern development in the United States, and in
the hardy common fiber and native yearnings and elements, deeper and
larger, and affording more profitable returns, than all mere sects
or churches--as boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature itself--a
germenancy that has too long been unencouraged, unsung, almost
unknown. With science, the old theology of the East, long in its
dotage, begins evidently to die and disappear. But (to my mind)
science--and may-be such will prove its principal service--as
evidently prepares the way for One indescribably grander--Time's young
but perfect offspring--the new theology--heir of the West--lusty and
loving, and wondrous beautiful. For America, and for today, just the
same as any day, the supreme and final science is the science of
God--what we call science being only its minister--as Democracy is, or
shall be also. And a poet of America (I said) must fill himself with
such thoughts, and chant his best out of them. And as those were the
convictions and aims, for good or bad, of "Leaves of Grass," they are
no less the intention of this volume. As there can be, in my opinion,
no sane and complete personality, nor any grand and electric
nationality, without the stock element of religion imbuing all the
other elements, (like heat in chemistry, invisible itself, but the
life of all visible life,) so there can be no poetry worthy the name
without that element behind all. The time has certainly come to begin
to discharge the idea of religion, in the United States, from mere
ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and churches and church-going, and
assign it to that general position, chiefest, most indispensable, most
exhilarating, to which the others are to be adjusted, inside of all
human character, and education, and affairs. The people, especially
the young men and women of America, must begin to learn that religion,
(like poetry,) is something far, far different from what they
supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of
the New World to be consign'd any longer to the churches, old or
new, Catholic or Protestant--Saint this, or Saint that. It must be
consign'd henceforth to democracy _en masse_, and to literature. It
must enter into the poems of the nation. It must make the nation.

The Four Years' War is over--and in the peaceful, strong, exciting,
fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is
hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of
sentries, the prisons, the hospitals--(ah! the hospitals!)--all have
passed away--all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty
generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the
war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences
of hatred, conflict, death. So let It be obliterated. I say the life
of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each
and all, south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even
if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a
chant--to rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they
are to play, and are even now playing--to the thought of their great
future, and the attitude conform'd to it--especially their great
esthetic, moral, scientific future, (of which their vulgar material
and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments
by an orchestra,) these, as hitherto, are still, for me, among my
hopes, ambitions.

"Leaves of Grass," already publish'd, is, in its intentions, the song
of a great composite _democratic individual_, male or female. And
following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my
mind to run through the chants of this volume, (if ever completed,)
the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable,
unprecedented, vast, composite, electric _democratic nationality_.

Purposing, then, to still fill out, from time to time through years
to come, the following volume, (unless prevented,) I conclude this
preface to the first instalment of it, pencil'd in the open air, on
my fifty-third birth-day, by wafting to you, dear reader, whoever you
are, (from amid the fresh scent of the grass, the pleasant coolness
of the forenoon breeze, the lights and shades of tree-boughs silently
dappling and playing around me, and the notes of the cat-bird for
undertone and accompaniment,) my true good-will and love. W. W.
_Washington, D. C., May_ 31, 1872.

Note:

[32] The problems of the achievements of this crowning stage through
future first-class National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others--of
creating in literature an _imaginative_ New World, the correspondent
and counterpart of the current Scientific and Political New
Worlds,--and the perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for
our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America, and,
indeed, all Christian lands everywhere, from the thin moribund and
watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry--by
putting something really alive and substantial in its place--I have
undertaken to grapple with, and argue, in the preceding "Democratic
Vistas."

PREFACE, 1876 _To the two-volume Centennial Edition of_ Leaves of
Grass _and_ Two Rivulets.

At the eleventh hour, under grave illness, I gather up the pieces of
prose and poetry left over since publishing, a while since, my first
and main volume, "Leaves or Grass"--pieces, here, some new, some old--
nearly all of them (sombre as many are, making this almost death's
book) composed in by-gone atmospheres of perfect health--and preceded
by the freshest collection, the little "Two Rivulets," now send them
out, embodied in the present melange, partly as my contribution and
outpouring to celebrate, in some sort, the feature of the time, the
first centennial of our New World nationality--and then as chyle and
nutriment to that moral, indissoluble union, equally representing all,
and the mother of many coming centennials.

And e'en for flush and proof of our America--for reminder, just as
much, or more, in moods of towering pride and joy, I keep my special
chants of death and immortality[33] to stamp the coloring-finish of
all, present and past. For terminus and temperer to all, they were
originally written; and that shall be their office at the last.

For some reason--not explainable or definite to my own mind, yet
secretly pleasing and satisfactory to it--I have not hesitated to
embody in, and run through the volume, two altogether distinct veins,
or strata--politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought of
immortality. Thus, too, the prose and poetic, the dual forms of
the present book. The volume, therefore, after its minor episodes,
probably divides into these two, at first sight far diverse, veins of
topic and treatment. Three points, in especial, have become very dear
to me, and all through I seek to make them again and again, in
many forms and repetitions, as will be seen: 1. That the true
growth-characteristics of the democracy of the New World are
henceforth to radiate in superior literary, artistic and religious
expressions, far more than in its republican forms, universal
suffrage, and frequent elections, (though these are unspeakably
important.) 2. That the vital political mission of the United States
is, to practically solve and settle the problem of two sets of
rights--the fusion, thorough compatibility and junction of individual
State prerogatives, with the indispensable necessity of centrality and
Oneness--the national identity power--the sovereign Union, relentless,
permanently comprising all, and over all, and in that never yielding
an inch: then 3d. Do we not, amid a general malaria of fogs and
vapors, our day, unmistakably see two pillars of promise, with
grandest, indestructible indications--one, that the morbid facts of
American politics and society everywhere are but passing incidents and
flanges of our unbounded impetus of growth? weeds, annuals, of the
rank, rich soil--not central, enduring, perennial things? The other,
that all the hitherto experience of the States, their first century,
has been but preparation, adolescence--and that this Union is only now
and henceforth, (_i.e._, since the secession war,) to enter on its
full democratic career?

Of the whole, poems and prose, (not attending at all to chronological
order, and with original dates and passing allusions in the heat and
impression of the hour, left shuffled in, and undisturb'd,) the chants
of "Leaves of Grass," my former volume, yet serve as the indispensable
deep soil, or basis, out of which, and out of which only, could come
the roots and stems more definitely indicated by these later pages.
(While that volume radiates physiology alone, the present one, though
of the like origin in the main, more palpably doubtless shows the
pathology which was pretty sure to come in time from the other.)

In that former and main volume, composed in the flush of my health and
strength, from the age of 30 to 50 years, I dwelt on birth and life,
clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give
them positive place, identity--saturating them with that vehemence
of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind
of still-to-be-form'd America from the accumulated folds,
the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling
anti-democratic authorities of the Asiatic and European past--my
enclosing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation
and aid, the eternal bodily composite, cumulative, natural character
of one's self.[34]

Estimating the American Union as so far, and for some time to come, in
its yet formative condition, I bequeath poems and essays as nutriment
and influences to help truly assimilate and harden, and especially to
furnish something toward what the States most need of all, and which
seems to me yet quite unsupplied in literature, namely, to show them,
or begin to show them, themselves distinctively, and what they are
for. For though perhaps the main points of all ages and nations
are points of resemblance, and, even while granting evolution, are
substantially the same, there are some vital things in which this
Republic, as to its individualities, and as a compacted Nation, is to
specially stand forth, and culminate modern humanity. And these
are the very things it least morally and mentally knows--(though,
curiously enough, it is at the same time faithfully acting upon them.)

I count with such absolute certainty on the great future of the United
States--different from, though founded on, the past--that I have
always invoked that future, and surrounded myself with it, before or
while singing my songs. (As ever, all tends to followings--America,
too, is a prophecy. What, even of the best and most successful, would
be justified by itself alone? by the present, or the material ostent
alone? Of men or States, few realize how much they live in the future.
That, rising like pinnacles, gives its main significance to all You
and I are doing to-day. Without it, there were little meaning in lands
or poems--little purport in human lives. All ages, all Nations and
States, have been such prophecies. But where any former ones with
prophecy so broad, so clear, as our times, our lands--as those of the
West?)

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 mere 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 kosmic 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 renew'd 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. To me

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. No
year, nor even century, will settle this. There is a phase of the
real, lurking behind the real, which it is all for. There is also
in the intellect of man, in time, far in prospective recesses, a
judgment, a last appellate court, which will settle it.

In certain parts in these flights, or attempting to depict or suggest
them, I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity, in either of
my two volumes-because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim
escapes and outlets-must possess a certain fluid, aerial
character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no
imagination,--but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style,
when address'd to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture,
and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.
True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest
wild-wood, or the best effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks
and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor.

Finally, as I have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a
revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify the points
of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, altogether in my own way.
Thus my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the
analogy of them. Within my time the United States have emerged from
nebulous vagueness and suspense, to full orbic, (though varied,)
decision--have done the deeds and achiev'd the triumphs of half a
score of centuries--and are henceforth to enter upon their real
history the way being now, (_i.e._ since the result of the secession
war,) clear'd of death-threatening impedimenta, and the free areas
around and ahead of us assured and certain, which were not so
before--(the past century being but preparations, trial voyages and
experiments of the ship, before her starting out upon deep water.)

In estimating my volumes, the world's current times and deeds, and
their spirit, must be first profoundly estimated. Out of the hundred
years just ending, (1776-1876,) with their genesis of inevitable
wilful events, and new experiments and introductions, and many
unprecedented things of war and peace, (to be realized better, perhaps
only realized, at the remove of a century hence;) out of that stretch
of time, and especially out of the immediately preceding twenty-five
years, (1850-'75,) with all their rapid changes, innovations,
and audacious movements-and bearing their own inevitable wilful
birth-marks--the experiments of my poems too have found genesis.

W. W.

Notes:

[33] PASSAGE TO INDIA.--As in some ancient legend-play, to close the
plot and the hero's career, there is a farewell gathering on ship's
deck and on shore, a loosing of hawsers and ties, a spreading of sails
to the wind--a starting out on unknown seas, to fetch up no one knows
whither--to return no more--and the curtain falls, and there is the
end of it--so I have reserv'd that poem, with its cluster, to finish
and explain much that, without them, would not be explain'd, and to
take leave, and escape for good, from all that has preceded them.
(Then probably "Passage to India," and its cluster, are but freer vent
and fuller expression to what, from the first, and so on throughout,
more or less lurks in my writings, underneath every page, every line,
everywhere.)

I am not sure but the last inclosing sublimation of race or poem is,
what it thinks of death. After the rest has been comprehended and
said, even the grandest--after those contributions to mightiest
nationality, or to sweetest song, or to the best personalism, male or
female, have been glean'd from the rich and varied themes of tangible
life, and have been fully accepted and sung, and the pervading fact
of visible existence, with the duty it devolves, is rounded and
apparently completed, it still remains to be really completed by
suffusing through the whole and several, that other pervading
invisible fact, so large a part, (is it not the largest part?) of life
here, combining the rest, and furnishing, for person or State, the
only permanent and unitary meaning to all, even the meanest life,
consistently with the dignity of the universe, in Time. As from the
eligibility to this thought, and the cheerful conquest of this fact,
flash forth the first distinctive proofs of the soul, so to me,
(extending it only a little further,) the ultimate Democratic
purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones, are to concentrate here,
and as fixed stars, radiate hence. For, in my opinion, it is no less
than this idea of immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter
into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to democracy in
the New World.

It was originally my intention, after chanting in "Leaves of Grass"
the songs of the body and existence, to then compose a further,
equally needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and
conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul
govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the
theme of my first chants, to shift the slides, and exhibit the problem
and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality
entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law,
and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation,
but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the
greatest part of existence, and something that life is at least as
much for, as it is for itself. But the full construction of such a
work is beyond my powers, and must remain for some bard in the future.
The physical and the sensuous, in themselves or in their immediate
continuations, retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely
releas'd; and those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly
wish'd to weaken.

Meanwhile, not entirely to give the go-by to my original plan, and far
more to avoid a mark'd hiatus in it, than to entirely fulfil it, I
end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on death,
immortality, and a free entrance into the spiritual world. In those
thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the
mighty theme, from the point of view necessitated by my foregoing
poems, and by modern science. In them I also seek to set the key-stone
to my democracy's enduring arch. I recollate them now, for the press,
in order to partially occupy and offset days of strange sickness,
and the heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life; and I fondly
please myself with the notion of leaving that cluster to you, O
unknown reader of the future, as "something to remember me by," more
especially than all else. Written in former days of perfect health,
little did I think the pieces had the purport that now, under present
circumstances, opens to me.

[As I write these lines, May 31, 1875, it is again early summer,
--again my birth-day--now my fifty-sixth. Amid the outside beauty and
freshness, the sunlight and verdure of the delightful season, O how
different the moral atmosphere amid which I now revise this Volume,
from the jocund influence surrounding the growth and advent of "Leaves
of Grass." I occupy myself, arranging these pages for publication,
still envelopt in thoughts of the death two years since of my
dear Mother, the most perfect and magnetic character, the rarest
combination of practical, moral and spiritual, and the least selfish,
of all and any I have ever known--and by me O so much the most deeply
loved--and also under the physical affliction of a tedious attack of
paralysis, obstinately lingering and keeping its hold upon me, and
quite suspending all bodily activity and comfort.]

Under these influences, therefore, I still feel to keep "Passage to
India" for last words even to this centennial dithyramb. Not as, in
antiquity, at highest festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of death
was sent on exhibition to the revelers, for zest and shadow to the
occasion's joy and light--but as the marble statue of the normal
Greeks at Elis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and
perfect young man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted
torch--emblem of rest and aspiration after action--of crown and point
which all lives and poems should steadily have reference to, namely,
the justified and noble termination of our identity, this grade of it,
and outlet-preparation to another grade.

[34] Namely, a character, making most of common and normal elements,
to the superstructure of which not only the precious accumulations of
the learning and experiences of the Old World, and the settled
social and municipal necessities and current requirements, so long
a-building, shall still faithfully contribute, but which at its
foundations and carried up thence, and receiving its impetus from the
democratic spirit, and accepting its gauge in all departments from
the democratic formulas, shall again directly be vitalized by the
perennial influences of Nature at first hand, and the old heroic
stamina of Nature, the strong air of prairie and mountain, the dash of
the briny sea, the primary antiseptics--of the passions, in all their
fullest heat and potency, of courage, rankness, amativeness, and
of immense pride. Not to lose at all, therefore, the benefits of
artificial progress and civilization, but to re-occupy for Western
tenancy the oldest though ever-fresh fields, and reap from them the
savage and sane nourishment indispensable to a hardy nation, and the
absence of which, threatening to become worse and worse, is the most
serious lack and defect to-day of our New World literature.