As for the priests and their work, they are done. The American poets shall fill their place, and the whole world shall answer to their message. Their words shall be in the English tongue—the language of “all who aspire”—but they shall be the very words of the people of America; they shall be native to the soil, and redolent of the air of the Republic. Such poets shall be America’s own, and in them she will welcome her most illustrious visitors. They are her equals; for the soul of a man is as supreme as the soul of a nation. And America shall absorb them as affectionately as they have absorbed her.
Such is the gist of Whitman’s manifesto. Nature the Soul and Freedom; Simplicity and Originality of Expression—these, its dominant notes, recall at once Rousseau, Wordsworth and Shelley, with many another; while certain passages remind the reader that The Germ was but recently published across the sea, the manifesto of another movement associated with the names of the Rossetti family and with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But whatever the reminiscences it awakens, Whitman’s preface is his own. The thoughts were not all originally his. But they had shaped themselves newly in his brain and under his pen, and every line bears the stamp of originality.
Without staying to discuss the preface let us proceed to a rapid survey of the remaining pages. They are written, it would seem, for measured declamation, in a sort of free chant, which is neither prose nor verse, but whose lines coincide in length with natural pauses in the thought. Whitman himself spoke very deliberately, in a half drawl; he had a melodious baritone voice of considerable range and power, and one can well imagine how he would recite, when alone or with some intimate friend, the first lines, beginning:—
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.[170]
The lines are quite simple and direct; they are intended to place the reader at once in relation with the actual idler who recites them in the summer fields. He is an out-of-doors fellow, who lives whole-heartedly in the present, rejoicing in the world and observing it. He and his soul—he distinguishes decisively between the temporal and the eternal elements in himself whose equal balance, neither abdicating its place nor contesting that of the other, makes the harmony of his life—he and his soul commune together, and discover that the world means Love, and that the very grass is full of suggestions of immortality.