A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

I laugh at what you call dissolution;

And I know the amplitude of time.

To the hostile critic he offered an abundance of lines for unfriendly quotation, as almost every prolific poet has done. Furthermore, he opened to attack all the series of “catalogue,” or “inventory,” passages, in which he abandoned the artistic habit of selective suggestion and overwhelmed the reader with an avalanche of detail. It is not necessary to defend these vagaries or excesses; they are obvious eccentricities in Whitman’s workmanship, as are also the wanton barbarisms of wording into which he occasionally lapsed. There are good English equivalents for omnes and allons and dolce and résumé, and better ones than promulge, philosoph, and imperturbe.

The most violent objections launched at Whitman were based on his unprecedented frankness in matters of sex. It was the habit of the Victorian period, whether in England or in America, to shroud in an unwholesome silence the impulse to beget life and the facts surrounding it as if they were shameful matters. In consequence a central element in social and individual experience tended to become a subject of morbid curiosity to young people and one of furtive self-indulgence to adults. This bred vicious ignorance, distorted half-knowledge, and, among other things, hysterical protestations at any open violation of the code in action or in speech. People seemed to feel that they were vindicating their own probity by the voluminousness of their invective. So Whitman was made a scapegoat, just as Byron was at an earlier date; and the merits of the controversies are obscured by the fact that however much in error the poets may have been, their accusers were hardly less in the wrong. Out of the babel of discussion one clearest note emerged in the form of a letter from an Englishwoman to W. M. Rossetti, who had lent her “Leaves of Grass”:

I rejoice to have read these poems; and if I or any true woman feel that, certainly men may hold their peace about them. You will understand that I still think that instinct of silence I spoke of a right and beautiful thing; and that it is only lovers and poets (perhaps only lovers and this poet) who may say what they will—the lover to his own, the poet to all because all are in a sense his own. Shame is like a very flexible veil that takes faithfully the shape of what it covers—lovely when it hides a lovely thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. There is not any fear that the freedom of such impassioned words will destroy the sweet shame, the happy silence, that enfold and brood over the secrets of love in a woman’s heart.

This single judgment naturally cannot serve as a universal ultimatum, but it should serve as a warning for those who jump to the conclusion that only one mood is possible for the writer or reader of such passages. Those who are disturbed by them should be willing not to read the few score lines that are responsible for all the turmoil.

The only other charge against Whitman worth mentioning—the complaint at his “colossal egotism”—is a subject more for interpretation than for defense. Properly understood, it leads far toward an understanding of the whole man. In the first place, if all his “I’s” should be taken literally they would amount to no more than an unusual frankness of artistic expression. Every creative artist is of necessity an egotist. He is bound to believe in the special significance of what he is privileged to utter in words or tones or lines and colors. The whole anthology of poems on the poet and his work is a catalogue of supreme egotisms, even though most of them are written in the third person rather than the first. Whitman cast aside the regular locution without apology. But, as a further caution to the supersensitive, his “I’s” do not always mean the same thing. Sometimes they are explicitly personal, as in,

I, now, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Sometimes they stand just as explicitly for “the average man.” This he explained in the preface to the 1876 edition: “I meant ‘Leaves of Grass,’ as published, to be the poem of average Identity (of yours, whoever you are, now reading these lines).... To sing the Song of that law of average Identity, and of Yourself, consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a main purpose of these ‘Leaves.’”