In 1876 a number of English admirers subscribed freely to the new edition of Whitman’s writings and garnished their guineas with comfortable words. The poet was sick, poor, discouraged, and by his own grateful testimony this show of interest put new heart into him—‘saved my life,’ he said. It might well have had that effect, since no less names than those of Tennyson, Ruskin, Rossetti, and Lord Houghton were to be found in the list of subscribers. Even Robert Buchanan, who assailed with virulence the author of ‘Jenny,’ had no scruple in bidding God speed to the author of the ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Children of Adam.’

A momentary set-back occurred in 1882, when Whitman’s Boston publisher was threatened with prosecution. ‘The official mind’ declared that it would be content if two poems were suppressed, the poems in question resembling in some particulars the stories an English editor omitted from the Thousand-and-One Nights, on the ground that they were ‘interesting only to Arabs and old gentlemen.’ Whitman refused to omit so much as a word, and the book was transferred to a Philadelphia publishing house.

After 1882 Whitman found himself able to publish freely and without the fear of the district attorney before his eyes. Since his death he has been accorded a niche in the American literary pantheon, if we may believe the critics, who now treat his work with the confidence which marks their attitude towards Lowell or Longfellow.

III
THE WRITER

Unless indeed, as some maintain, Whitman got the suggestion of a rhapsodical form from the once famous Poems of Ossian, he may be said to have invented his own ‘verse.’ These unrhymed and unmetred chants give a pleasure the degree of which is largely determined by the reader’s willingness to allow Whitman to speak in his own manner and wholly without reference to time-honored modes of poetic expression. Such receptivity of mind is indispensable.

Whitman called his rhapsodies ‘poems,’ ‘chants,’ or ‘songs’ indifferently; the last term was a favorite with him, in later editions; he has a ‘Song of the Open Road,’ a ‘Song of the Broad-Axe,’ a ‘Song for Occupations,’ a ‘Song of the Rolling Earth,’ a ‘Song of Myself,’ a ‘Song of the Exposition,’ a ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree,’ ‘Songs of Parting,’ and yet more songs. Obviously he used the word without reference to the traditional meaning. Says Whitman: ‘... it is not on Leaves of Grass distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism.’ Holding as he did that so long as ‘the States’ were dominated by the poetic ideals of the Old World they would stop short of first-class nationality, his own practice necessarily involved getting rid, first of all, of the forms in which poetry had hitherto found expression.

That the structure of Whitman’s rhapsodies is determined by some law cannot be questioned. After one has read these pieces many times, he will find himself instinctively expecting a certain cadence. The change of a word spoils it, the introduction of a rhyme is intolerable. They who are versed in Whitman’s style can probably detect at once a variation from his best manner. That his peculiarities in the arrangement of words are very subtile is plain from a glance at the numerous and generally unsuccessful parodies of Leaves of Grass. The parodists have not grasped Whitman’s secret. Merely to write in irregular lines and begin each line with a capital is to represent only the obvious and superficial side. Whitman is inimitable even in his catalogues. The ninth stanza of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ reads like an extract from a papal anathema, but it has the Whitmanesque quality; no one can reproduce it. The imitations of Whitman are always amusing and often ingenious, but they are not, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘Three Voices,’ true parodies.

Whitman probably did not know every step of the process by which he attained his results. He was a poet who created his own laws and had no philosophy of poetic form to expound.

IV
LEAVES OF GRASS

A first impression of Leaves of Grass is of uncouthness and blatancy, together with something yet more objectionable. The writer would seem to be a man fond of shocking what are called the proprieties, so frank and egregious is his animalism, so overpowering his self-assertiveness.