Complete Prose Works

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Not but what the brawn of "Leaves of Grass" is, I hope, thoroughly
spiritualized everywhere, for final estimate, but, from the very
subjects, the direct effect is a sense of the life, as it should be,
of flesh and blood, and physical urge, and animalism. While there
are other themes, and plenty of abstract thoughts and poems in the
volume--while I have put in it passing and rapid but actual glimpses
of the great struggle between the nation and the slave-power,
(1861-'65,) as the fierce and bloody panorama of that contest unroll'd
itself: while the whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years'
war, which, as I was in the midst of it, becomes, in "Drum-Taps,"
pivotal to the rest entire--and here and there, before and afterward,
not a few episodes and speculations--_that_--namely, to make a
type-portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy personality,
objective as well as subjective, joyful and potent, and modern and
free, distinctively for the use of the United States, male and
female, through the long future--has been, I say, my general object.
(Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied songs, and all my
writings, both volumes, only ring changes in some sort, on the
ejaculation, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a human
being, himself or herself.)

Though from no definite plan at the time, I see now that I have
unconsciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions,
to express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United
States, the prevailing tendency and events of the Nineteenth century,
and largely the spirit of the whole current world, my time; for I feel
that I have partaken of that spirit, as I have been deeply interested
in all those events, the closing of long-stretch'd eras and ages, and,
illustrated in the history of the United States, the opening of
larger ones. (The death of President Lincoln, for instance, fitly,
historically closes, in the civilization of feudalism, many old
influences--drops on them, suddenly, a vast, gloomy, as it were,
separating curtain.)

Since I have been ill, (1873-'74-'75,) mostly without serious pain,
and with plenty of time and frequent inclination to judge my poems,
(never composed with eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any
pecuniary profit,) I have felt temporary depression more than once,
for fear that in "Leaves of Grass" the _moral_ parts were not
sufficiently pronounced. But in my clearest and calmest moods I have
realized that as those "Leaves," all and several, surely prepare the
way for, and necessitate morals, and are adjusted to them, just the
same as Nature does and is, they are what, consistently with my plan,
they must and probably should be. (In a certain sense, while the
Moral is the purport and last intelligence of all Nature, there is
absolutely nothing of the moral in the works, or laws, or shows of
Nature. Those only lead inevitably to it--begin and necessitate it.)

Then I meant "Leaves of Grass," as publish'd, to be the Poem of
average Identity, (of _yours_, whoever you are, now reading these
lines.) A man is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or
explorer, nor even in science, or in his intellectual or artistic
capacity, or exemplar in some vast benevolence. To the highest
democratic view, man is most acceptable in living well the practical
life and lot which happens to him as ordinary farmer, sea-farer,
mechanic, clerk, laborer, or driver--upon and from which position as a
central basis or pedestal, while performing its labors, and his duties
as citizen, son, husband, father and employ'd person, he preserves his
physique, ascends, developing, radiating himself in other regions--and
especially where and when, (greatest of all, and nobler than the
proudest mere genius or magnate in any field,) he fully realizes
the conscience, the spiritual, the divine faculty, cultivated well,
exemplified in all his deeds and words, through life, uncompromising
to the end--a flight loftier than any of Homer's or Shakspere's--broader
than all poems and bibles--namely, Nature's own, and in the midst of it,
Yourself, your own Identity, body and soul. (All serves, helps--but in
the centre of all, absorbing all, giving, for your purpose, the only
meaning and vitality to all, master or mistress of all, under the law,
stands Yourself.) To sing the Song of that law of average Identity, and
of Yourself, consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a
main intention of those "Leaves."

Something more may be added--for, while I am about it, I would make a
full confession. I also sent out "Leaves of Grass" to arouse and set
flowing in men's and women's hearts, young and old, endless streams of
living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself,
now and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more
or less down underneath in most human souls)--this never-satisfied
appetite for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy--this
universal democratic comradeship-this old, eternal, yet ever-new
interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America--I have
given in that book, undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression.
Besides, important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions
for humanity, the special meaning of the "Calamus" cluster of "Leaves
of Grass," (and more or less running through the book, and cropping
out in "Drum-Taps,") mainly resides in its political significance. In
my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship,
the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the
young fellows, north and south, east and west--it is by this, I say,
and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the
United States of the future, (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be
most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a living
union.

Then, for enclosing clue of all, it is imperatively and ever to be
borne in mind that "Leaves of Grass" entire is not to be construed as
an intellectual or scholastic effort or poem mainly, but more as a
radical utterance out of the Emotions and the Physique--an utterance
adjusted to, perhaps born of, Democracy and the Modern--in its very
nature regardless of the old conventions, and, under the great laws,
following only its own impulses.

POETRY TO-DAY IN AMERICA

SHAKSPERE--THE FUTURE

Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born
poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As
the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple
or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the
branches and foliage, here waits _sine qua non_ at last. The stamp of
entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic
among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what
it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No
imitations will do.

And though no _esthetik_ worthy the present condition or future
certainties of the New World seems to have been outlined in men's
minds, or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am
clear that until the United States have just such definite and native
expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political,
geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however
astonishing and predominant, will constitute but a more and more
expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no
soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward
plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward
perception of the land this blank is plain; a barren void exists.
For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the
constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts
for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and
the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative
literature. If the latter were not establish'd for the States, to form
their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little
avail.

With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp,
its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native,
its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and
manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all
manners, all times. The hour has come for democracy in America to
inaugurate itself in the two directions specified--autochthonic poems
and personalities--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone,
to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and
familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons,
in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and
revolutionizing them. I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and
radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals.
The thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily
fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, electrifying all and
several, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual,
of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to
the congeries of bones, joints, heart, fluids, nervous system and
vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human
being--aye, an immortal soul--such relation, and no less, holds true
poetry to the single personality, or to the nation.

Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past
precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or
two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves.
The feudalism, of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakspere--and
by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson--with
all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic
permeating veins, poems, manners; even its errors fascinating. It
almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our
own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character
yet--strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible
courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where
Shakspere and the others I have named perform a service incalculably
precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else,
centers at last in perfect _personnel_, (as democracy is to find the
same as the rest;) and here feudalism is unrival'd--here the rich and
highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us--a mass of foreign nutriment,
which we are to work over, and popularize and enlarge, and present
again in our own growths.

Still there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears.
Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but
starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or
three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the
very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be
latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives. We
will for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a
Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun
of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system,
mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection.

As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest
outstretch, though ranking high, Shakspere (spanning the arch wide
enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks,
(as Eschylus.) But in portraying mediaeval European lords and barons,
the arrogant port, so dear to the inmost human heart, (pride! pride!
dearest, perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of
all--closer than love,) he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so
witches the world.

From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakspere,
exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth
to destroy. Jefferson's verdict on the Waverley novels was that they
turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours
over the lords, ladies, and aristocratic institutes of Europe,
with all their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the
suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without
stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any
part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to
the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on
to Tennyson, his works.

Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal
melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like
the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but
even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the
verse of inside elegance and high-life; and yet preserving amid all
its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors and outdoor folk. The old
Norman lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from
which twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that
revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and
deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its
highest range--a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty
breed--pervading the pages like an invisible scent; the idleness, the
traditions, the mannerisms, the stately _ennui_; the yearning of love,
like a spinal marrow, inside of all; the costumes brocade and satin;
the old houses and furniture--solid oak, no mere veneering--the moldy
secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the
English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the
window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a
word; never free and _naive_ poetry, but involved, labored, quite
sophisticated--even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a
shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad
and lass,) the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and
conventional gentleman; showing the laureate too, the _attache_ of the
throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes
than the dedication "to the Queen" at the beginning, and the other
fine dedication, "these to his memory" (Prince Albert's,) preceding
"Idylls of the King."

Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the
women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States
by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put
together.

We hear it said, both of Tennyson and another current leading
literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle--as of Victor Hugo in
France--that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward
America; indeed, quite the reverse. _N'importe_. That they (and more
good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch
thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present,
launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the
high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social
status so far--the measureless viciousness of the great radical
Republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud,
ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the
nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties,
audacities; those fearful and varied and long-continued storm and
stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind)
wherewith Nature, history, and time block out nationalities more
powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the
future;--that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is
it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight
empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales
of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the
globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we
can by no means afford to be oblivious of them.

The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, personalities.
However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl
and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and
forms, the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former.
Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here and today, a balance
of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price.

Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic
should be supplied and nourish'd by wholesale from foreign and
antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question
briefly:

Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have
expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still,
and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly
temper'd by some additional points, (perhaps the results of advancing
age, or the reflection of invalidism.) I see that this world of the
West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all,
as time does--the ever new yet old, old human race--"the same
subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for
chapter-heads. If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the
inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale
to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for?

The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse,
tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need
just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy
world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican
poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloos'd
individualities, and the rank, self-assertion of humanity here, may
well fall these grace-persuading, _recherche_ influences. We first
require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely
comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free.
Although to such results in the future I look mainly for a great
poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be
accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost
spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check
their own compell'd tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by
mark'd leanings to the past--by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas,
novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the
great vulgar gulf-tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries
growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind,
is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry.

It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable
party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make
_reconnaissance_ a little further still. Not the least part of our
lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign
experts,[35] and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry,"
says the London "Times,"[36] is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is
afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has
been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow,
with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more
apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American
humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry
he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's
verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought,
his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland."

Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says:
"American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an
exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of
reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want.
Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of
fancy gathered and gummed down in the _hortus siccus_ of an anthology.
American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected
volumes of their works. Like their audience they have been unable to
resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They
may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard
from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks
of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. ....In fact, they
have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and
are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as
readily as if they were English born. Americans themselves confess to
a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence
so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English
literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried
it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like
reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate
they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a
diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like
that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however
racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their
culture, read Byron and Tennyson."

The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly
withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied, (perhaps he is
jealous,) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have
been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but
American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as
whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain
no doubt willful opinions.

Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or
anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the
last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is
(like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow
limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the
demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery,
and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional
and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal,
and the democratic.

The poetry of the future, (a phrase open to sharp criticism, and not
satisfactory to me, but significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of
the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far,
far more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than
to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or
indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the
central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a
vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and
introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting
song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise,
to outside life and landscape, (returning mainly to the antique
feeling,) real sun and gale, and woods and shores--to the elements
themselves--not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a
good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above
style or polish--a feature not absent at any time, but now first
brought to the fore--gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its
born sister, music, already responds to the same influences. "The
music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all
tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a
vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades,
or Bellini's suave melodies."

Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the
masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old
works, and always unspeakably precious as studies, (for Americans more
than any other people,) is it too much to say that by the shifted
combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of
first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period term'd
classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by
recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the
most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible,
the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the
Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else
is wanted. For us the greatest poet is he who in his works most
stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him
the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done
the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning
is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to
study, much to complete in your turn."

The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination
of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in
excess that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls
the _beauty disease_. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says
Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds
imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of
truth and justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art
faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer."