But while thus boldly declaring himself as the man that should come, he has of course no desire to stand alone, and attempts to outline the equipment necessary for future American poets. They must not only identify themselves in every possible way with America, they must be themselves creative and virile. Those who criticise, explain and adjudge, can only create a literary soil; they cannot produce the flower and fruit of poetry.
Returning to his favourite adage that a man is as great as a nation, he asserts that the true poet is America; frankly reading himself as a whole, he will see the meanings of America. Is then America also a symbol? Assuredly. She is the Republic; she is the Kingdom of God; she is Blake’s Jerusalem; but behold, she is already founded and four-square upon the solid earth.
That he was open-eyed to the materialistic spirit rampant throughout the continent while he was writing, is clearly shown in the bitter mockery of “Respondez,”[224] a poem afterwards suppressed. It is a challenge to thought; an ironic assertion of things that are false and futile, and which yet parade as realities. Though suggestive it is obscure, and its subsequent omission was wise.
Thoughts of the destiny of America,[225] and of the evil and imperfection which he saw about him, hindering, as it seemed, the realisation of that destiny, and of the destiny of individual souls, must often have moved him to passionate longing. He was not one of those who confuse good with evil; he always recognised the difference between right and wrong as among the eternal distinctions which could never cease to hold true. He hated sin as he hated disease, and recognised both as threatening and actual.
If he rarely denounces, it is because he has seen that the way of the soul is along the path of love and not of fear or of hate; and because he recognises the office of sin in the story of the soul. He is not anxious about vice or virtue, but only about life and love. Love, at its fullest, is something different from virtue; it contains elements which virtue can never possess, and which most ethical codes consign to the category of vice. Such love alone is the expression of the soul; and every student of love discovers sooner or later that the soul has its own intimate standard for judging what is wrong and what is right, and when that which was wrong has now become right for it to do.
Love, then, is Whitman’s code. And when he seeks to call the youth of America away from selfishness and sin, he issues no new table of Thou-Shalt-Nots, but fills their ears with the words of their destiny, and of the meaning of America. For he knows that to sin is to choose a narrow and despicable delight, and that one must needs choose the nobler, larger joy when it becomes present and real. Hence he recalls all the aspirations that went to the birth of America, and describes the parts that women and men must fill if they are to be realised. He reminds his young readers of all the divine possibilities of manhood and of womanhood, and of how those possibilities are for them; and warns them that the body must necessarily affect the soul, for it is the medium through which the soul comes into consciousness.
Anticipate your own life—retract with merciless power,
Shirk nothing—retract in time—Do you see those errors, diseases, weaknesses, lies, thefts?
Do you see that lost character?—Do you see decay, consumption, rum-drinking, dropsy, fever, mortal cancer or inflammation?
Do you see death, and the approach of death?