Part 13 (1/2)
I have divided iven to each a separate heading, yet I ale theme,--viz, Whitht be no ht at once be put in possession of his point of view, the poet declared at the outset of his career that at every hazard he should let nature speak
”Creeds and schools in abeyance Retiring back awhile, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I perinal energy”
The hazard of letting nature speak will, of course, be great,--the hazard of gross misapprehension on the part of the public, and of hesitancy and inadequacy on the part of the poet The latter danger, I think, was safely passed; Whitman never flinched or wavered for a moment, and that his criticism is adequate seeross misapprehension of the public, even the wiser public--has been astounding He has been read in a narrow, literal, bourgeois spirit The personal pronoun, which he uses so freely, has been taken to stand for the private individual Walt Whitotism and licentiousness His character has been traduced, and his purpose in the ”Leaves” entirely lance that his attitude towards nature, towards God, towards the body and the soul, reverses ical conceptions
All is good, all is as it should be; to abase the body is to abase the soul Man is divine inside and out, and is no more divine about the head than about the loins It is from this point of view that he has launched his work He believed the ti human nature; let conventions and refinements stand back, let nature, let the soul, let the elemental forces speak; let the body, the passions, sex, be exalted; the stone rejected by the builders shall be the chief stone in the corner Evil shall be shown to be a part of the good, and death shall be welcomed as joyously as life
Whitood, and perhaps more To many readers this confession of itself would be his condemnation
To others it would be an evidence of his candor and breadth of view I suppose all great vital forces, whether eood If they do not, they only tickle the surface of things Has not the Bible worked evil also? Soood The dews and the rains and the sunshi+ne work evil
Froood without evil; evil is an unripe kind of good There is no light without darkness, no life without death, no groithout pain and struggle Beware the eood by exclusion rather than by victory ”Leaves of Grass” ork evil on evil uide, but an inspiration; not a reth Art does not preach directly, but indirectly; it is ets
Whit lorifying the body, the natural passions and appetites, nativity; in identifying himself with cri to hiuilty of, runs the risk, of course, of being read in a spirit less generous and redemptive than his own
The charity of the poet may stimulate the license of the libertine; the optimism of the seer may confirm the evil-doer; the equality of the democrat may foster the insolence of the rowdy This is our lookout and not the poet's We take the same chances with him that we do with nature; we are to tris; we are to soheat and not tares for his rains to water
Whitlorification of the body has led some critics to say that he is the poet of the body only But it is just as true to say he is the poet of the soul only He always seeks the spiritual through the material He treats the body and the soul as one, and he treats all things as having reference to the soul
”I will not make a poem, nor the least part, of a poe look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the soul”
The curious physiological strain which runs through the poeht of this idea He exalts the body because in doing so he exalts the soul
”Sure as the earth swih the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results”
II
The reader of Whit; the poet is here not to deprecate or criticise, but to love and celebrate; he has no partialities; our notions of e eand confesses to all his sins and shortco to our ood is the last thing the poet would claim for it He has not, after the easy fashi+on of the ood here and the bad there; he has blended them as they are in nature and in life; our profit and discipline begin e have found out whither he finally tends, or e have ood he holds If we expect he is going to preach an austere system of morality to us, or any system of morality, we are doomed to disappointment Does Nature preach such a system? does Nature preach at all? neither will he He presents you the eleood and evil in himself in vital fusion and play; your part is to see how the totals are at last good
It is objected that Whit hiet is that he is an ani he is least likely to remember is that he is a spirit and a child of God But Whitman insists with the same determination that he is a spirit and an heir of immortality,--not as one who has cheated the devil of his due, but as one who shares the privileges and felicities of all, and who finds the divine in the human Indeed it is here that he sounds his most joyous and triumphant note No such faith in spiritual results, no such conviction of the truth of inition of the unseen world as the final reality is to be found in modern poetry
As I have said, Whitman aimed to put his whole nature in a poeical, the spiritual, the aesthetic and intellectual,--without giving any undue prominence to either If he has not done so, if he has made the animal and sexual too pronounced, more so than nature will justify in the best proportioned man, then and then only is his artistic scheme vitiated and his work truly i a et is that he is an aniet, is that the animal is just as sacred and important as any other part; indeed that it is the basis of all, and that a sane and healthful and powerful spirituality and intellectuality can only flow out of a sane and healthful animality
”I believe in you, my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other”
III
Furthermore, Whitman's main problem is to project into literature the new democratic man as he conceives him,--the man of the future, intensely American, but in the broadest sense hue enough for all uses and conditions, ignoring the feudal and aristocratic types which have for thethem with a type ion, candor, and of equal egoism and power