Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported fruit tastes as well to the man a thousand miles away as to the native.
The literature of a country however should be
individualistic, not imitative. Whitman is an American poet in the sense of recording his own individuality, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whitman rather than a Lowell who could have written the following passages, which appear in the famous Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever man and woman exist—but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the grand idea—to them it is confided, and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it.
I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the first Bigelow Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and of the lecture on Democracy, was not, in spite of his dislike of Whitman, in accord with the above quoted passage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned to write a passage like that from the nation which gave us such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's Areopagitica, Locke's Letters on Toleration, Jeremy Taylor's Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, Mill's Liberty and Morley's Compromise. But Whitman was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political documents embodied in his poetry views of political and individual liberty, as the fruit of democracy. Even Whitman stopped short of championing economic liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do champion it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a national poet, for European poets have also sung of liberty.
FOOTNOTES:
[172-A] The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City.