I
A jungle of writings has sprung up about Whitman; as many as four biographies of him have appeared in a single year, yet aside from two or three careful studies, like those of Perry and Carpenter, no really scholarly or unbiased work has been issued. Before the last word can be spoken of the poet there must be an adequate text with variorum readings and chronological arrangement. The present definitive edition is a chaos, almost useless for purposes of study. New and old are mixed indiscriminatingly. The "Chants Democratic," for instance, of the earlier editions have been dismembered and scattered from end to end of the book. All of the older poems were in constant state of revision from edition to edition, until now patches from every period of the poet's life may be found on many of them. Large sections of the earlier editions were omitted, enough indeed at one time and another to make up a volume. The fact is important, since the material rejected by a poet at different stages in his evolution often tells much concerning his art.
There is, moreover, a strange dearth of biographical material at critical points in Whitman's life, notably during that formative period preceding the first issue of Leaves of Grass. In his later years he talked of his own experiences and aims and ideals with the utmost freedom; through Traubel, his Boswell, he put himself on record with minuteness; his poetic work is all autobiographical; and almost all of his editions are prefaced by long explanations and defenses, yet of the really significant periods of his life we know little. A crude man of the people, a Broadway rough, as he described himself, who has been writing very ordinary poems and stories and editorials—how ordinary we can easily judge, for very many of them have been preserved—suddenly brings out a book of poems as unlike any earlier work of his or any previous work of his nation or language as an issue of the Amaranth or the Gem would be unlike the book of Amos. What brought about this remarkable climax? Was it the result of an evolution within the poet's soul, an evolution extending over a period of years? Did it come as a sudden inspiration or as a deliberate consummation after a study of models? We do not know. There are no contemporary letters, no transition poems, no testimony of any friend to whom the poet laid bare his soul. At one period we have verses like these:
We are all docile dough-faces,
They knead us with the fist,
They, the dashing Southern lords,
We labor as they list;
For them we speak—or hold our tongues,
For them we turn and twist.
Then suddenly without warning we have this:
Free, fresh, savage,
Fluent, luxuriant, self-content, fond of persons and places,
Fond of fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Fond of the sea—lusty-begotten and various,
Boy of the Mannahatta, the city of ships, my city,
* * * * *
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a new world.
That is the problem of Walt Whitman, a problem the most baffling and the most fascinating in the later range of American literature.