* * * * *
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.
II
There can be little doubt that the primal impulse in the creation of Leaves of Grass came from the intellectual and moral unrest of the thirties and the forties. Whitman caught late, perhaps latest of all the writers of the period, the Transcendental spirit that had so unsettled America and the rest of the world as well. "What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!" Emerson had cried in 1844. Who "will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the 'Transcendental Movement' of thirty years ago"? Lowell had asked in 1865. "Apparently set astir by Carlyle's essays on the 'Signs of the Times,' and on 'History,' the final and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by 'Sartor Resartus.' At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham à Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny.... The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to set at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the newer and fairer creation was to be hatched in due time."[87] Whitman was a product of this ferment. He took its exaggerations and its wild dreams as solemn fact. He read Emerson and adopted his philosophy literally and completely: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." "He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness." "Insist on yourself; never imitate." "Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him." "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string." "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do," and so on and on.
All criticism of Whitman must begin with the fact that he was uneducated even to ignorance. He felt rather than thought. Of the intellectual life in the broader sense—science, analysis, patient investigation—he knew nothing. When he read he read tumultuously, without horizon, using his emotions and his half conceptions as interpreters. A parallel may be drawn between him and that other typical product of the era, Mrs. Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science cult. Both were mystics, almost pathologically so; both were electric with the urge of physical health; both were acted upon by the transcendental spirit of the era; both were utterly without humor; and both in all seriousness set about to establish a new conception of religion.
I too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a Religion.
To Whitman the religious leader of an era was its poet. He would broaden the conception of the Poet until he made of him the leader and the savior of his age.
The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
He is the glory and extract, thus far, of things, and of the human race.
The singers do not beget—only The Poet begets,
The singers are welcomed, understood, appear often enough—but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems,
Not every century, or every five centuries, has contained such a day, for all its names.