FEINBERG/ WHITMAN LITERARY FILE Prose "My Book and I" (Jan. 1887) Lippincott's Magazine. (DCN 86) Box 34 Folder 12 Printed Pages. Published as "A Backward Glan ce O'er Travel'd" Roads" Novermber Boughs. Includes A. Ms. corrections quotations. 784 1887 Jan. My Book and I; part of an essay. Printed pages with many autograph corrections and annotations. (5p. i.e. p.122-126 25 x 20 1/2 cm. ) Pages from Lippincott's Magazine, Jan. 1887 are pasted onto larger blank sheets to allow room for corrections. Whitman wrote at head of each page in blue pencil "Nov. Boughs". This article was incorporated in November Boughs, 1888 as part of the Preface titled A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads. {86}. [? ] Nov Bough 2 122 MY BOOK AND I. friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause-doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising-this little phalanx!-for being so few) is that, unstopp'd and unwarp'd by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record,-the value thereof to be decided by time. In calculating that decision, William O'Connor and Dr. Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else that can be said, I consider" Leaves of Grass" and it theory experimental, - as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of anything or any results. In the second place, the volume is a sortie/-whether to prove triumphant and conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, nothing less than a hundred years from now can fully answer. I consider the point that I have positively gain'd a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other lacks and withholdings. Essentially that was from the first, and has remain'd throughout, the main object. Now it seems to be achiev'd, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise momentous drawbacks , as of little account. [*Candidly and dispassionately reviewing all my intentions. I feel that they were creditable and I accept the result, whatever it may be*] After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc./-to take part in the great melee, both for victory's prize itself and to do some good/-after years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possess'd, at the age of thirty-[three]one to thirty-[five] three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current America/-and to exploit that Personality identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book. Perhaps this is in brief, or suggests, all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century, with the United States, and what they furnish as area and points of view, "Leaves of Grass: is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-will'd record. In the midst of all, it gives one man's-the author's-identity, ardors, observations, faiths and thoughts, color'd hardly at all with any decided coloring from other faiths, or [other authors], other identities. [or times]. Plenty of songs had been sung/- beautiful matchless songs-adjusted to other lands than these- [other days] another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put W W's Nov. Bough, 3 MY BOOK AND I 123 in quite solely with reference to America [and myself] and to-day. Modern science and democracy seem'd to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps to late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements/- which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. For grounds for "Leaves of Grass," [as poetry], I [have] abandon'd the conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high, exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake, ---no legend, or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme. But the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening Nineteenth Century, and especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the United States to day. One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with establish'd poems, is [(as I have said once before)] their different relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and still more (by reflection, confession, assumption, [etc]) the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity. It is certainly time for America, above all, to begin this readjustment in the scope and [change of] basic point of view of verse for everything else has changed. As I write, I see in an article on Wordsworth, in one of the current English magazines, the lines, "A few weeks ago an eminent French critic said that, owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease to be read in fifty years." But I anticipate the very contrary. Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to exist- nay, is already form'd-to which the poetic genius must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification-which the poet or other artist alone can give-reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain. Few appreciate the moral revolutions, our age, which have been profounder far than the material or inventive or war-produced ones. The Nineteenth Century, now well towards its close (and ripening into fruit the seeds of the two preceding centuries*/-the uprisings of *The ferment and germination even of the United States to-day, dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English his[tory] 62 62 16 Prove 12x38 x2) [*W W's Nov. Boughs 4*] 124 MY BOOK AND I. national masses and shiftings of boundary-lines[,]--the historical and [*d d*] other prominent facts of the United States[.]--the [Secession War] war of attempted Secession--the [*d d*] stormy rush and haste of nebulous forces[,]--never can future years witness more excitement and din of action--never completer change of army front along the whole line, the whole civilized world. For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new [first class and poetic] messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable. [*chin*] [*d*] [*Findy*] My Book and I[,]--what a period we have presumed to span ! those thirty years from 1850 to '80--and America in them ! Proud, proud [*1/*] indeed may we be if we have cull[e]d enough of that period in its own spirit to worthily waft a few live breaths of it to the future ! Let me not dare, here or anywhere, for my own purposes, or any purposes, to attempt the [any] definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, in my opinion no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry ; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. Also it must be carefully remember[e]d that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own[,] nor do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always curiously from elsewhere[,]--follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best. There are, I know, certain contro[l]ling themes that [*d*] seem endlessly appropriated to the poets[,]--as war, in the past[,]—in [*d d*] the Bible, religious rapture and adoration[,]--always love, beauty, some [*d*] fine plot, or [some] pensive or other emotion. But, strange as it may sound at first, I will say there is something striking far deeper and towering far higher than those themes for the best elements of modern song. Just as all the old imaginative works rest, after their kind, on long trains of presuppositions, often entirely unmention[e]d by themselves, yet supplying the most important [parts or] bases of them, and without which they could have had no reason for being, so "Leaves of Grass," before a line was written, presupposed something different from any other, and, as it stands, is the result of such presupposition. I should say, indeed, it were useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background and quality in the mind. Think of the United States to-day--the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires solder[e]d in one--[fifty or] sixty or seventy millions of equals, with [*d d*] [*tory, the age of Francis Bacon and Shak[e]spe[a]re. Indeed, when we pursue it, what growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost--perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost--in the receded horizons of the past?*] [*Chion*] [*WW's Nov. Boughs 5*] [My Book And I. 125] their lives, their passions, their future - these incalculable, [and] modern, American, seething [*d*] multitudes around us, [and] of which we are inseparable parts ! Think, in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with [anything like] cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the democratic masses, [modern] never was. In estimating first-class song, a sufficient [n]ationality, or, on the other hand, what may be call[e]'d the negative and lack of it (as in Goethe's case, it sometimes seems to me[,]) is often, if not always, the first element. One needs only a little penetration to see, at more or less removes, the material facts of their country and radius, with the coloring of the moods of humanity at the time, and its gloomy or hopeful prospects, behind all poets and each poet, and forming their birthmarks. I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged or been fashioned or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, nor any other land than democratic America, and from the absolute triumph of the National Union arms. And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. But it seem[e]'d to me, as the objects in Nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitations of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their point of view,* the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy—to chant those themes through the utterance of one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, but the born child of the New World—to illustrate all through the genesis and ensemble of to-day; and that such illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of America's prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry out, in the approved style, some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies[,]—all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excell[e]'d,—but that while in such aesthetic presentation of objects, passions, plots, thoughts, [etc.] &c., * According to Immanuel Kant, the last essential reality, giving shape and significance to all the rest. [*WW. Nov. Roughs 6*] 126 MY BOOK AND I. our lands and days do not want, and probably will never have, anything better than they already possess from the bequests of the past, it still remains to be said that there is even towards all those a subjective and [democratic] contemporary point of view appropriate to ourselves alone, and to our new genius and environments, different from anything hitherto[;] and that such conception of current or gone-by life and art is for us the only means of their assimilation consistent with the Western world. Indeed, and anyhow, to put it specifically, has not the time arrived when, [for highest current and future aims,] if it must be plainly said, for [Republican] democratic America's sake, if for no other's, there must imperatively come a readjustment of the whole theory and nature of Poetry? The question is important, and I may turn the argument over and repeat it: Does not the best thought of our day and Republic conceive of a birth and spirit of song superior to anything past or present? To the effectual and moral consolidation of [America] our lands, (already, as materially establish[e]'d, the greatest factors in known history, and far, far greater through what [it] prelude[s] they are and necessitate[s], and [is] to be in future)—to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnish[e]'d by [modern] science, and henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included—to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of [one time] the modern [and any] time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them—is not either a radical advance and step forward, or a [radically] new verteber of the best song indispensable? The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads—seeks not in the least to deaden of displace those voices from our [present time and] ear and area— holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of to-day—though perhaps the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man's or woman's individuality, Old World or New, are from them—and though if I were ask[e]'d to name the most precious bequest to current American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west[,]—some serious words and debits remain; some acrid considerations demand a hearing. Of the great poems receiv[e]'d from abroad and from the ages, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? What a comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literacy fulfilment, with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not our own, nor adapted to our light, but have been furnish[e]'d by far-back ages out of their arriere and darkness, or, at most, twilight dimness! What is there in those works that so imperiously and [*677*] 1887 January My Book and I: prose. A. MS. on off-print. (8p. 23 1/2 x 15 1/2 cm.) Written in ink at the top of the first page of an article by Whitman (the article appears on pp. 121-127), the pages of which are uncut--intended for an off-print?--and purple pencil cancellation marks through the article on p. 128, 4 words: Lippincott's Magazine January 1887 (Two copies, both with the same autograph lines.) [*Lippincott's Magazine January 1887*] MY BOOK AND I. 121 MY BOOK AND I. PERHAPS the best of a song heard, or of any and all true love, or life's fairest episodes, or sailors', soldiers' trying scenes on land or sea, is the floating résumé of them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past, with all their practical excitations gone. How the soul loves to hover over such reminiscences! So here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age, — I and my book, —casting backward glances over our travelled road. After completing, as it were, the journey (a varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals—or some lengthened ship-voyage, wherein more than once the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seemed certainly going down, yet reaching port in a sufficient way through all discomfitures at last)—after completing my poems, and letting an interval elapse to settle them, I am curious to review all in the light of their own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain unfoldings of the thirty years they seek to embody. These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments. Result of seven or eight stages and struggles extending through nearly thirty years, I look upon "Leaves of Grass," now finished to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World, * if I may assume to say so. That I have no gained the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future ("Still lives the song, though Regnar dies"),—that from a worldly and business point of view "Leaves of Grass" has been worse than a failure,—that after thirty years of trial public criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger and contempt more than anything else ("I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere,"—letter from W. S. K., Boston, May 28, 1884),—and that solely for publishing it I have been the object of two or three pretty serious official buffetings,—is all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. As fulfilled, or partially fulfilled, the best comfort of the whole business (after a small band of the dearest *When Champollion, on his death-bed, handed to the printer the revised proof of his "Egyptian Grammar," he said gayly, "Be careful of this,—it is my carte de visite to posterity." 122 MY BOOK AND I. friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause,—doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising—this little phalanx !—for being so few) is that, unstopped and unwarped by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record,—the value thereof to be decided by time. In calculating that decision, William O'Connor and Dr. Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else that can be said, I consider "Leaves of Grass" and its theory experimental,—as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing or any results. In the second place, the volume is a sortie, —whether to prove triumphant and conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, nothing less than a hundred years from now can fully answer. I consider the point that I have positively gained a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other lacks and withholdings. Essentially that was from the first, and has remained throughout, the main object. Now it is achieved, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise momentous drawbacks, as of little account. After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc.,—to take part in the great mêlée, both for victory's prize itself and to do some good, after years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possessed, at the age of thirty-three to thirty-five, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire and conviction that had been more or less flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary form and uncompromisingly my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current America,—and to exploit that Personality in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto book. Perhaps this is in brief or suggests all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century with the United States and what they furnish as area and points of view, "Leaves of Grass" is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-willed record. In the midst of all it gives one man's—the author's—identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, colored hardly at all with any coloring from other faiths, other authors, other identities or times, Plenty of songs had been sung,—beautiful, matchless songs,—adjusted to other lands than these—other days, another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put My Book and I. 123 in, solely with reference to America and myself and to-day. Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to Poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements, —which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. For grounds for "Leaves of Grass," as poetry, I have abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high, exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake, —no legend, or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme. But the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening nineteenth century, and especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the United States to day. One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with established poems, is (as I have said once before) their different relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and still more (by reflection, confession, assumption, etc.) the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity. It is certainly time for America, above all, to begin this readjustment in the scope of verse, for everything else has changed. As I write, I see in an article on Wordsworth, in one of the current English magazines, the lines, "A few weeks ago an eminent French critic said that, owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease to be read in fifty years." But I anticipate the very contrary. Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to exist—nay, is already formed—to which the poetic genius must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself finally in vain. Few appreciate the moral revolutions, our age, which have been profounder far than the material or inventive or war-produced ones. The nineteenth century, now well towards its close (and ripening into fruit the seeds of the two preceding centuries*),—the uprisings of * The ferment and germination even of the United States to-day, dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English his- 124 MY BOOK AND I. national masses and shiftings of boundary-lines,-- the historical and other prominent facts of the United States, -- the Secession War, -- the stormy rush and haste of nebulous forces, -- never can future years witness more excitement and din of action --never completer change of army front along the whole line, the whole civilized world. For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable. My Book and I,-- what a period we have resumed to span ! those thirty years from 1850 to '80--and America in them! Proud, proud indeed may we be if we have culled enough of that period in its own spirit to worthily waft a few live breaths of it to the future! Let me not dare, here or anywhere , to attempt any definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. Also it must be carefully remembered that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own, nor do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always from elsewhere,--follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best. These are, I know, certain controlling themes that seem endlessly appropriated to the poets,-- as war, in the past, -- in the Bible, religious rapture and adoration, -- always love, beauty, some plot, or some pensive or other emotion. But, strange as it may sound at first, I will say there is something far deeper and towering far higher than those themes for the elements of modern song. Just as all the old imaginative works rest, after their kind, on long trains of presuppositions, often entirely unmentioned by themselves, yet supplying the most important parts or bases of them, and without which they could have ad no reason for being, so "Leaves of Grass," before a line was written, presupposed something different form any other, and as it stands is the result of such presupposition. I should say, indeed , it were useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background and quality in the mind. Think of the United States to-day-- the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires soldered in one--fifty or, sixty millions of equals, with the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare. Indeed, when we pursue it, what growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost--perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost-- in the receded horizons of the past? MY BOOK AND I. 125 their lives, their passions, their future—these incalculable and seething multitudes around us, and of which we are inseparable parts ! Think, in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinous, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with anything like cosmic features were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the modern never was. In estimating first-class song, a sufficient nationality, or, on the other hand, what may be called the negative and lack of it (as in Goethe's case, it sometimes seems to me), is often, if not always , the first element. One needs only a little penetration to see, at more or less removes, the material facts of their country and radius, with the coloring of the moods of humanity at the time, and its gloomy or hopeful prospects, behind all poets and each poet, and forming their birthmarks. I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than America, and from the absolute triumph of the National Union arms. And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. But it seemed to me, as the objects in nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitation of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their point of view, * the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy—to chant those themes through the utterance of one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, but the born child of the New World—to illustrate all through the genesis and ensemble of to-day—and that such illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of America's prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry out, in the approved style, some choice plot or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies,—all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled,—but that while in such aesthetic presentation of objects, passions, plots, thoughts, etc., *According to Immanuel Kant, the essential reality, giving shape and significance to all the rest. 126 MY BOOK AND I. our lands and day s do not want, and probably will never have, anything better than they already possess from the bequests of the past, it still remains to be said that there is even towards all those a subjective and democratic point of view appropriate to our selves alone, and to our new genius and environment, different from anything hitherto, and that such conception of current life and art is for us the only means of their assimilation consistent with the Western world. Indeed, and anyhow, to put it specifically, has not the time arrived when, for highest current and future aims, there must imperatively come a readjustment of the whole theory and nature of Poetry? The question is important, and I may turn the argument over and repeat it: Does not the best thought of our day conceive of a birth and spirit of song superior to anything past or present? To the effectual and moral consolidation of America (already, as materially established, the greatest factor in known history, and far, far greater through what it preludes the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by modern science, and the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included-- to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of our time and any time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them-- is not a radically new verteber of the best song indispensable? The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads--seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those voices from our present time and area-- holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influenced, records, comparisons. But thought the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of to-day--though the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man's or woman's individuality, Old World or New, are from them--and though if i were asked to name the most precious bequest to American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west, -- some serious words and debits remain; some acrid consideration demand a hearing. Of the great poems received from abroad form the ages, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there on that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? what a comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literary fulfilment, with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not our own, but have been furnished by far-back ages out of their arriere and darkness, or, at most, twilight! What is there in those works that so imperiously and MY BOOK AND I. 127 scornfully dominates all our advancement, boasted civilization, and culture? Even Shakespeare, who so suffuses current literature and art (which indeed have in most degrees grown out of him), he too belongs essentially to the buried past. Only he holds the proud distinction for certain important phases of that past, of being the loftiest of the singers life has yet given voice to. All, however, relate to and rest upon conditions, standards, politics, sociologies, ranges of belief, that have been quite eliminated from the Eastern hemisphere, and never existed at all in the Western. As authoritative types of song they belong in America just about as much as the persons and institutes they depict. True, it may be said, the emotional, moral, and aesthetic natures of humanity have not changed—that in these old poems apply to our times and all times, irrespective of date; and that they are of incalculable value as pictures of the past. I willingly make those admissions, and to their fullest extent; then advance the points herewith as of serious, even paramount importance. I have indeed put on record elsewhere my reverence and eulogy for those never-to-be-excelled poetic bequests, and their indescribable preciousness as heirlooms for America. Another and separate point must now be candidly stated. If I had not stood before those poems with uncovered head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written "Leaves of Grass." My verdict and conclusions as illustrated in its pages are arrived at through the temper and inculcation of the old works as much as through as anything else,—perhaps more than through anything else. As America fully and fairly construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New. Walt Whitman. [128 STATESMAN AND NOVELIST. STATESMAN AND NOVELIST: A TALK BETWEEN SENATOR INGALLS AND MR. HOWELLS. On the evening of March 12, 1886, I spent a few hours at the Washington home of Senator and Mrs. Ingalls, whither I had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Howells, and there heard about the following conversation. The sketch is, of course, stripped of the picturesque language of the speakers; but the spirit and sentiment are retained. In person Mr. Howells is about five feet four inches in height, quite stout, with short neck, large head carried a little in front,—probably a result of continual leaning forward to write,—pleasant blue eye, iron-gray hair and moustache, colorless Napoleonic face. Senator Ingalls, tall, straight, slender, with large head, piercing black eye, gray hair and moustache, looks the scholar and distinguished man even in a crowd of distinguished people. Two persons could scarcely be more antipodal: Ingalls argumentative, pungent, picturesque; Howells gentle, graphic, and absorbent. After the preliminaries, Mr. Howells said, "Mr. Ingalls, what do you think of Cleveland?" "In many respects I have not made up my mind. I will give you my data, and you can come to your own conclusions. It was something to see a man who had been in Washington but once before, enter the Senate-chamber with perfect self-possession in company with Mr. Arthur, that polished, self-poised gentleman. The leading men of the nation were present; the galleries were full of distinguished people. More anxious to see him even than the others were the leaders of his own party from the South, to whom he was personally unknown. Amid such surroundings he coolly took his seat beside Mr. Arthur, with every eye, every opera-glass, centred on him. He looked neither embarrassed nor nervous in the lease. He never moved during that half-hour of preliminary exercises,—not his hand, not his foot; he did not wink oftener than usual: he might have been bronze, for any effect the inspection seemed to produce. He then moved out to the front, where he took the oath of office and delivered the first inaugural I ever heard pronounced without manuscript. He stood there and delivered that harangue of dogmatic platitudes without any attempt at oratory." "Did he not have notes?" asked Mr. Howells. "He held a card between the second and third fingers of the left] Lippincotti Magazine January 1887 MY BOOK AND I. 121 MY BOOK AND I. Perhaps the best of a song heard, or of any and all true love, or life's fairest episodes, or sailors', soldiers trying scenes on land or sea, is the floating resume of them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past, with all their practical excitations gone. How the soul loves to hover over such reminiscences! So here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age, --- I and my book, --- casting backward glances over our travelled road. After completing, as it were, the journey (a varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals--- or some lengthened ship-voyage, wherein more than once the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seemed certainly going down, yet reaching port in a sufficient way through all discomfitures at last)--- after completing my poems, and letting in interval elapse to settle them, I am curious to review all in the light of their own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain unfolding of the thirty years they seek to embody. These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations with the warp of the experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments. Result of seven or eight stages and struggles extending through nearly thirty years, I look upon "Leaves of Grass," now finished to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World,* if I may assume to say so. That I have not gained the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future ("Still lives the song, through Regnar dies"),--- that from a worldly and business point of view "Leaves of Grass" has been worse than a failure,--- that after thirty years of trial public criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger and content more than anything else ("I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere,"---letter from W.S.K., Boston, May 28, 1884),---and that solely for publishing it I have been the object of two or three pretty serious official buffetings,--- is all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. As fulfilled, or partially fulfilled, the best comfort of the whole business (after a small band of the dearest *When Champollion, on his death-bed, handed to the printer the revised proof of his "Egyptian Grammar," he said gayly. "Be careful of this,--- it is my carte de visite to posterity." 122 MY BOOK AND I. friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause, -- doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising-- this little phalanx!-- for being so few) is that, unstopped and unwarped by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record, --the value thereof to be decided by time. In calculating that decision, William O'Connor and Dr. Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else that can be said, I consider "Leaves of Grass" and its theory experimental, -- as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing or any results. In the second place, the volume is a sortie,-- whether to probe triumphant and conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, nothing less than a hundred years from now can fully answer. I consider the point that I have positively gained a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other lacks and withholdings. Essentially that was from the first, and has remained throughout, the main object. Now it is achieved, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise momentous drawbacks, as of little account. After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc.,-- to take part in the great melee, both for victory's prize itself and todo some good, -- after years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possessed, at the age of thirty-three to thirty-five, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire and conviction that had been more or less flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary form and uncompromisingly my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto book. Perhaps this is in brief or suggests all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century with the United States and what they furnish as area and points of view, "Leaves of Grass" is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-willed record. In the midst of all it gives one man's--the author's-- identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, colored hardly at all with any coloring from other faiths, other authors, other identities or times. Plenty of songs had been sung, --beautiful, matchless songs-- adjusted to other lands than these-- other days, another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put MY BOOK AND I. 123 in, solely with reference to America and myself and to-day. Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to Poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements, —which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. For grounds for "Leaves of Grass," as poetry, I have abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear in it; none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake, —no legend, or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme. But the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening nineteenth century, and especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the United States to day. One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with established poems, is (as I have said once before) their different relative attitude towards God, towards, the objective universe, and towards his fellow-humanity. It is certainly time for America, above all, to begin this readjustment in the scope of verse, for everything else has changed. As I write, I see in an article on Wordsworth, in one of the current English magazines, the lines, "A few weeks ago an eminent French critic said that, owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease to be read in fifty years." But I anticipate the very contrary. Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to exist—nay, is already formed—to which the poetic genius must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself finally in vain. Few appreciate the moral revolutions, our age, which have been profounder far than the material or inventive or war-produced ones. The nineteenth century, now well towards its close (and ripening into fruit the seeds of the preceding centuries*),—the uprisings of *The ferment and germination even of the United States to-day, dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English his- 124 MY BOOK AND I. national masses and shifting of boundary-lines, -- the historical and other prominent facts of the United States, --the Secession War,-- the stormy rush and haste of nebulous forces,--never can future years witness more excitement and din of action--never completer change of army front along the whole line, the whole civilized world. For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable. My Book and I,-- what a period we have presumed to span ! those thirty years from 1850 to'80--and America in them! Proud, proud indeed may we be if we have culled enough of that period in its own spirit to worthily waft a few live breaths of it to the future! Let me not dare, here or anywhere, to attempt any definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. Also it must be carefully remembered that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own, nor do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always from elsewhere,-- follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best. There are, I know, certain controlling themes that seem endlessly appropriated to the poets,--as war, in the past, --in the Bible, religious rapture and adoration, --always love, beauty, some plot, or some pensive or other emotion. But, strange as it may sound at first, I will say there is something far deeper and towering far higher than those themes for the elements of modern song. Just as all the old imaginative works res, after their kind, on long trains of presuppositions, often entirely unmentioned by themselves, yet supplying the most important parts of bases of them, and without which they could have had no reason for being, so "Leaves of Grass," before a line was written, presupposed something different from any other, and as it stands is the result of such presupposition. I should say, indeed, it were useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background and quality in the mind. Think of the United States to-day--the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires soldered in one--fifty or sixty millions of equals, with the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare. Indeed, when we pursue it, what growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost-- perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost-- in the receded horizons of the past? MY BOOK AND I. 125 their lives, their passions, their future-- these incalculable and seething multitudes around us, and of which we are inseparable parts! Think, in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with anything like cosmic features were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the modern never was. In estimating first-class song, a sufficient nationality, or, on the other hand, what may be called the negative and lack of it (as in Goethe's case, it sometimes seems to me), is often, if not always, the first element. One needs only a little penetration to see, at more or less removes, the material facts of their country and radius, with the coloring og the moods of humanity at the time, and its gloomy or hopeful prospects, behind all poets and each poet, and forming their birthmarks. I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than America, and form the absolute triumph of the National Union arms. And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. But it seemed to me, as the objects in nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitations of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their point of view,* the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy-- to chant those themes through the utterance of one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, but the born child of the New World-- to illustrate all though the genesis and ensemble of to-day-- and that such illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of America's prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry out, in the approved style, some choice plot or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies, --all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled,--but that while in such aesthetic presentation of objects, passions, plots, thoughts, etc., * According to Immanuel Kant, the essential reality, giving shape and significance to all the rest. 126 MY BOOK AND I. our lands and days do not want, and probably will never have, anything better than they already possess from the bequests of the past, it still remains to be said that there is even towards all those a subjective and democratic point of view appropriate to ourselves alone, and to our new genius and environments, different from anything hitherto, and that such conception of current life and art is for us the only means of their assimilation consistent with the Western world. Indeed and anyhow, to put it specifically, has not the time arrived when, for highest current and future aims, there must imperatively come a readjustment of the whole theory and nature of Poetry? The question is important, and I may turn the argument over and repeat it: Does not the best thought of our day conceive of a birth and spirit of song superior to anything past or present? To the effectual and moral consolidation of America (already, as materially established, the greatest factor in known history, and far, far greater through what it preludes and necessitates, and is to be in future)—to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by modern science, and the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included—to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of our time and any time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them—is not a radically new verteber of the best song indispensable? The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads—seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those voices from our present time and area— holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of to-day—though the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man's or woman's individuality, Old World or New, are from them—and though if I were asked to name the most precious bequest to American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west,—some serious words and debits remain; some acrid considerations demand a hearing. Of the great poems received from abroad and from the ages, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? What a comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literary fulfillment, with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not our own, but have been furnished by far-back ages out of their arriere and darkness, or, at most, twilight! What is there in those works that so imperiously and MY BOOK AND I. 127 scornfully dominates all our advancement, boasted civilization, and culture? Even Shakespeare, who so suffuses current literature and art (which indeed have in most degrees grown out of him), he too belong essentially to the buried past. Only he holds the proud distinction for certain important phases of that past, of belief, of being the loftiest of the singers life has yet given voice to. All, however, relate to and rest upon conditions, standards, politics, sociologies, range of belief, that have been quite eliminated from the Eastern hemisphere, and never existed at all in the Western. As authoritative types of song they belong in America just about as much as the persons and institutes they depict. True, it may it be said, the emotional, moral, and aesthetic natures of humanity have not changed-that in these the old poem apply to our times and all times, irrespective of date; and that they are of incalculable value as pictures of the past. I willingly make those admissions, and to their fullest extent; then advance the points herewith as of serious, even paramount importance. I have indeed put on record elsewhere my reverence and eulogy for those never-to-be-excelled poetic bequests, and their indescribable preciousness as heirlooms for America. Another and separate point must now be candidly stated. If I had not stood before those poems with uncovered head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written "Leaves of Grass." My verdict an conclusions as illustrated in its pages are arrived at through the temper and inculcation of the old works as much as through anything else,- perhaps more than through anything else. As America fully and fairly construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poem of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, castle, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New. Walt Whitman 128 STATESMAN AND NOVELIST. STATESMAN AND THE NOVELIST: A TALK BETWEEN SENATOR INGALLS AND MR. HOWELLS. On the evening of March 12, 1886, I spent a few hours at the Washington home of Senator and Mrs. Ingalls, whiter I had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Howells, and there heard about the following conversation. The sketch is, of course, stripped of the picturesque language of the speakers; but the spirit and sentiments are retained. In person Mr. Howells is about five feet four inches in height, quite stout, with short neck, large head carried a little in front,- probably a result of continual learning forward to write,- pleasant blue eye, iron-gray hair and moustache, colorless Napoleonic face. Senator Ingalls, tall, straight, slender, with large head, piercing black eye, gray hair and moustache, looks the schoar and distinguished man even in a crowd of distinguished people. Two persons could scarcely be more antipodal: Ingalls argumentative, pungent, picturesque; Mr. Howells sadi, "Mr. Ingalls, what do you think of Cleveland?" "In many respects I have not made up my mind. I will give you my data, and you can come to your own conclusion. It was something to see a man who had been in Washington but once before, enter the Senate-chamber with perfect self-possession in company with Mr. Arthur, that polished, self-poised gentleman. The leading men of the nation were present; the galleries were full of distinguished people. More anxious to see him even than the others were the leaders of his own party from the South, to whom he was personally unknown. Amid such surrounding he coolly took his seat beside Mr. Arthur, with every eye, every opera-glass, centered on him. He looked neither embarrassed nor nervous in the least. He never moved during that half-hour of preliminary exercises,- not his hand, not his foot; he did not wink oftener than usual: he might have been bronze, for any effect the inspeton seemed to produce. He then moved out to the front, where he took the oath of office and delivered the first inaugural I ever heard pronounced without manuscript. He stood there and delivered that harangue of dogmatic platitudes without and attempt at orantoy." "Did he not have notes?" asked Mr. Howells. "He held a card between the second and third fingers of the left Lippincott's Magazine January 1887 My book and I. 121 MY BOOK AND I. Perhaps the best of a song heard, or of any and all true love, or life's fairest episodes, or sailors', soldiers' trying scenes on land or sea, is the floating resume of them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past, with all their practical excitations gone. How the soul loves to hover over such reminiscences! So here I sit gossiping in the early candle-light of a old age, -I and my book,- casting backward glances over the travelled road. After completing, as it were, the journey ( a varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals- or some lengthened ship-voyage, wherein more than once the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seemed certainly going down, yet reaching port in a sufficient way through all discomfitures at last)- after completing any poems, and letting an interval elapse to settle them, I am curious to review all in the light of their own at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain unfoldings of the thirty years they seek to embody. These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purpose and speculations with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments. Result of seven or eight stages and struggles extending through nearly thirty years, I look upon "Leaves of Grass," now finished to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World,* if I may assume to say so. That I have not gained the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future (" Still lives the song, though Regnar dies"), - that from a worldly and business point of view "Leaves of Grass" has been worse than a failure,- that after thirty years of trial public criticism on the book and myself as author of it shows marked anger and contempt more than anything else (" I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere,"- letter from W.S.K., Boston, May 28, 1884),- and that solely for publishing it I have been the object of two or three pretty serious official buffetings,- is all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and convention. As fulfilled, or partially fulfilled, the best comfort of the whole business after a small band of the dearest * When Champollion, on his death-bed, handed to the printer the revised proof of his "Egyptian Grammar," he said gayly, "Be careful of this,- it is my carte de visite to posterity. 122 MY BOOK AND I. friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause, --doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising -- this little phalanx! -- for being so few) is that, unstopped and unwarped by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record, -- the value thereof to be decided by time. In calculating that decision, William O'Connor and Dr. Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else that can be said, I consider "Leaves of Grass" and its theory experimental, --as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing or any results. In the second place, the volume is a sortie, --whether to prove triumphant and conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, nothing else than a hundred years from now can fully answer. I consider the point that I have positively gained a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other lacks wand withholdings. Essentially that was from the first, and has remained throughout, the main objects. Now it is achieved, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise momentous drawbacks, as of little account. After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc., --to take part in the great melee, both for victory's prize itself and to do some good, --after years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possessed, at the age of thirty-three to thirty-five, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire and conviction that had been more or less fitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary form and uncompromising my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days and of current America, --and to exploit that Personality in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto book. Perhaps this is in brief or suggests all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century with the United States and what they furnish as area and points of view, "Leaves of Grass" is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-willed record. In the midst of all it gives one man's --the author's --identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, colored hardly at all with any coloring from other faiths, other authors, other identities or times. Plenty of songs had been sung, --beautiful, matchless songs --adjusted to other lands than these --other days, another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put [MY BOOK AND I.] 123 in, solely with reference to America and myself and to-day. Modern science and democracy seemed to be throwing out their challenge to Poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late), I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements,--which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means. For grounds for "Leaves of Grass," as poetry, I have abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high, exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake, --no legend, or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme. But the broadest average of humanity and its identities in the now ripening nineteenth century, and especially in each of their countless examples and practical occupations in the United States to day. One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with established poems, is (as I have said once before) their different relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and one chanting or talking still more (by reflection, confession, assumption, etc.) the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking, towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity. It is certainly time for America, above all, to begin this readjustment in the scope of verse, for everything else has changed. As I write, I see in an article on Wordsworth, in one of the current English magazines, the lines, "A few weeks ago an eminent French critic said that, owing to the special tendency to science and to its all-devouring force, poetry would cease to be read in fifty years." But I anticipate the very contrary. Only a firmer vastly broader, new area begins to exist-nay, is already formed- to which the poetic genius must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the flows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification-which the poet or other artist alone can give- reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself finally in vain. Few appreciate the moral revolutions', our age, which have been profounder far than the material or inventive or war-produced ones. The nineteenth century, now well towards its close (and ripening into fruit the seeds of the two preceding centuries*),-- the uprisings of *The ferment and germination even of the United States to-day, dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English his- 124 MY BOOK AND I. national masses and shifting of boundary-lines, -- the historical and other prominent facts of the United States, -- the Secession War, -- the stormy rush and haste of nebulous forces, -- never can future years witness more excitement and din of action -- never complete change of army front along the whole line, the whole civilized world. For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable. My Book and I, -- what a period we have presumed to span! those thirty years from 1850 to '80 -- and America in them! Proud, proud indeed may we be if we have culled enough of that period in its own spirit to worthily waft a few live breaths of it to the future! Let me not dare, here or anywhere, to attempt any definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable, and we all give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it. Also it must be carefully remembered that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own, nor do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always from elsewhere, -- follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best. There are, I know, certain controlling themes that seem endlessly appropriated to the poets, -- as war, in the past, -- in the Bible, religious rapture and adoration, -- aways love, beauty, some plot, or some pensive or other emotion. But strange as it may sound at first, I will say there is something far deeper and towering far higher than those themes for the elements of modern song. Just as all the old imaginative works rest, after their kind, on long trains of presuppositions, often entirely unmentioned by themselves, yet supplying the most important parts or bases of them, and without which they could have had no reason for being, so "Leaves of Grass," before a line was written, presupposed something different from any other, and as it stands is the result of such presupposition. I should say, indeed, it were useless to attempt reading the book without first carefully tallying that preparatory background and quality in the mind. Think of the United States to-day -- the facts of these thirty-eight or forty empires soldered in one -- fifty or sixty missions of equals, with _____________________________________________________________________________________ tory, the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespear. Indeed, when we pursue it, what growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost -- perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost -- in the receded horizons of the past? MY BOOK AND I. 125 their lives, their passions, their future -- these incalculable and seething multitudes around us, and of which we are inseparable parts! Think, in comparison, of the petty environage and limited area of the poets of past or present Europe, no matter how great their genius. Think of the absence and ignorance, in all cases hitherto, of the multitudinousness, vitality, and the unprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. It almost seems as if a poetry with anything like cosmic features were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the modern never was. In estimating first-class song, a sufficient nationality, or, on the other hand, what may be called the negative and lack of it (as in Geothe's case, it sometimes seems to me), is often, if not always, the first element. One needs only a little penetration to see, at more or less removes, the material facts of their country and radius, with the coloring of the moods of humanity at the time, and its gloomy or hopeful prospects, behind all poets and each poet, and forming their birthmarks. I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than America, and from the absolute triumph of the National Union arms. And whether my friends claim it for me or not, I know well enough, too, that in respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. But it seemed to me, as the objects in nature, the themes of aestheticism, and all special exploitations of the mind and soul, involve not only their own inherent quality, but the quality, just as inherent and important, of their point of view,* the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy -- to chant those themes through the utterance of one, not only the grateful and reverent legatee of the past, but the born child of the New World -- to illustrate all through the genesis and ensemble of to-day -- and that such illustration and ensemble are the chief demands of America's prospective imaginative literature. Not to carry out, in the approval style, some choice plot or fancy, or fine thoughts, or incidents, or courtesies, -- all of which has been done overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled, -- but that while in such aesthetic presentation of objects, passions, plots, thoughts, etc., _____________________________________________________________________________________ *According to Immanuel Kant, the essential reality, giving shape and significance to all the rest. 126 MY BOOK AND I. our lands and days do not want, and probably will never have, anything better than they already possess from the bequest of the past, it still remains to be said that there is even towards all those a subjective and democratic point of view appropriate to ourselves alone, and to our new genius and environments, different from anything hitherto, and that such conception of current life and art is for us the only means of their assimilation consistent with the Western world. Indeed, and anyhow, to put it specifically, has not the time arrived when, for highest current and future aims, there must imperatively come a readjustment of the whole theory and nature of Poetry? The question is important, and I may turn the argument over and repeat it: Does not the best thought of our day conceive of a birth and spirit of song superior to anything past or present? To the effectual and moral consolidation of America (already, as materially established, the greatest factor in known history, and far, far greater through what it preludes and necessitates, and is to be in future) -- to conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnished by modern science, and the only irrefragable basis for anything, verse included -- to root both influences in the emotional and imaginative action of our time and any time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them -- is not a radically new verteber of the best song indispensable? The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique, with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads -- seeks not in the least to deaden or displace those voices from our present time and area -- holds them indeed as indispensable studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawn-dazzle of the sun of literature is in those poems for us of to-day -- though the best parts of current character in nations, social groups, or any man's or woman's individuality, Old World or New, are from them -- and though if I were asked to name the most precious bequest to American civilization from all the hitherto ages, I am not sure but I would name those old and less old songs ferried hither from east and west, -- some serious words and debits remain; some acrid considerations demand a hearing. Of the great poems received from abroad and from the ages, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? What a comment it forms, anyhow, on this era of literary fulfilment, with the splendid day-rise of science and resuscitation of history, that our chief religious and poetical works are not our own, but have been furnished by far-back ages out of their arriere and darkness, or, at most, twilight! What is there in those works that so imperiously and MY BOOK AND I. 127 scornfully dominates all our advancement, boasted civilization, and culture? Even Shakespeare, who so suffuses current literature and art (which indeed have in most degrees grown out of him), he too belongs essentially to the buried past. Only he holds the proud distinction for certain important phases of that past, of being the loftiest of the singers life has yet given voice to. All, however, relate to and rest upon conditions, standards, politics, sociologists, ranges of belief, that have been quite eliminated from the Eastern hemisphere, and never existed at all in the Western. As authoritative types of song they belong in America just about as much as the persons and institutes they depict. True, it may be said, the emotional, moral, and aesthetic natures of humanity have not changed----that in these the old poems apply to our times and all times, irrespective of date ; and that they are of incalculable value as pictures of the past. I willingly make those admissions, and to their fullest extent ; then advance the points herewith as of serious, even paramount importance. I have indeed put on record elsewhere my reverence and eulogy for those never-to-be-excelled poetic bequests, and their indescribable preciousness as heirlooms for America. Another and separate point must now be candidly stated. If I had not stood before those poems with uncovered head, fully aware of their colossal grandeur and beauty of form and spirit, I could not have written "Leaves of Grass." My verdict and conclusions as illustrated in its pages are arrived at through the temper and inculcation of the old works as much as through anything else, ---perhaps more than through anything else. As America fully and fairly construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great ; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New. Walt Whitman. 128 STATESMAN AND NOVELIST. STATESMAN AND NOVELIST: A TALK BETWEEN SENATOR INGALLS AND MR. HOWELLS. ON the evening of March 12, 1886, I spent a few hours at the Washington home of Senator and Mrs. Ingalls, whither I had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Howells, and there heard about the following conversation. The sketch is, of course, stripped of the picturesque language of the speakers; but the spirit and sentiment are retained. In person Mr. Howells is about five feet four inches in height, quite stout, with short neck, large head carried a little in front, -- probably a result of continual leaning forward to write, -- pleasant blue eye, iron gray hair and moustache, colorless Napoleonie face. Senator Ingalls, tall, straight, slender, with large head, piercing black eye, gray hair and moustache, looks the scholar and distinguished man even in a crowd of distinguished people. Two persons could scarcely be more antipodal: Ingalls argumentative, pungent, picturesque; Howells gentle, graphic, and absorbent. After the preliminaries, Mr. Howells said, "Mr. Ingalls, what do you think of Cleveland?" "In many respects I have not made up my mind. I will give you my data, and you can come to your own conclusions. It was something to see a man who had been in Washington but once before, enter the Senate-chamber with perfect self-possession in company with Mr. Arthur, that polished, self-poised gentleman. The leading men of the nation were present; the galleries were full of distinguished people. More anxious to see him even more than the others were the leaders of his own party from the South, to whom he was personally unknown. Amid such surroundings he coolly took his seat beside Mr. Arthur, with every eye, every opera-glass, centred on him. He looked neither embarrassed nor nervous in the least. He never moved during that half-hour of preliminary exercises, -- not his hand, not his foot; he did not wink oftener than usual: might have been bronze, for any effect the inspection seemed to produce. He then moved out to the front, here he took the oath of office and delivered the first inaugural I ever heard pronounced without manuscript. He stood there and delivered that harangue of dogmatic platitudes without any attempt at oratory." "Did he not have notes?" asked Mr. Howells. "He held a card between the second and third fingers of the left Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.