Emory Holloway

“ Whatever may be the true interpretation of these poems, one finds it difficult to understand either the character or the writings of Whitman unless one’s eye is kept on the chronology of his publications, a feat which his method of grouping has rendered rather difficult; for he was a growth, as his poems were, in which a heroic and loving soul gradually freed itself from the passions of a very human and earthly body. ”

“ I dwelt on Birth and Life, clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give them positive place, identity—saturating them with the vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form’d America from the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past—my enclosing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation and aid, the eternal Bodily Character of One’s-Self. ”

“ Just where, if anywhere, Whitman found the hint for this flexible prose-poetic form critics have not agreed. Perhaps Biblical prosody, Ossian, the blank verse of Shakespeare and Bryant, the writings of Blake, the prose of Carlyle and Emerson, and his own impassioned declamation all assisted; but full allowance must be made for the unquestioned originality of his own genius, working slowly but courageously for the fuller liberation of song. ”

“ When a complication of maladies finally resulted in his death, 26 March, 1892, he had “positively appeared,” a prophet and a poet not without honour even in his own country. He was buried, with unique but impressive ceremony, beside a number of near relatives, in a massive and costly tomb which he had built for the purpose the preceding year. Most of his property, valued at a few thousand dollars, was left for the support of an imbecile brother, to care for whom Whitman had for many years saved money from his own small income. ”

“ Whitman spent some of his time, apparently after school hours, in learning the printing business in the office of James J. Brenton’s Long Island Democrat, to the pages of which he contributed a considerable number of sketches and essays replete with juvenile philosophy, as well as a number of patriotic and sentimental poems in conventional measures. The poet’s tendency to dream—to loaf and invite his soul—to the neglect of more earthly duties, a tendency that was to become a tradition wherever he thereafter worked, had already marked him as an unusual person. ”

“ Criticism that confounds this twofold claim and this twofold appeal of Whitman’s writings is destined to make little progress, as is also that criticism which considers the two methods of approach to be necessarily exclusive. Still a third class of readers, uninterested in poets or prophets, as such, have gone to Whitman for the refreshing presence of a man and a writer who was entirely himself and who loved nature and his fellow men. ”

“ But though he disciplined himself in a style of oratory only less novel than that of his poetry, writing “barrels of lectures” on religion, democracy, language, æsthetics, and politics, and though the desire thus to present his message in a more personal fashion than any sort of authorship, even his own, could afford, persisted throughout life, only a few memorial addresses—such as the tribute to Lincoln—and a few public readings of his own poems written for college commencements or other special occasions ever came of it. ”

“ Chapter I. Whitman § 1. Difficulties in Whitman’s Biography. WALT WHITMAN once declared his Leaves of Grass to be “the most personal of all books ever published.”
This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man. Thus he fits Hazlitt’s description of Montaigne as one who dared to set down as a writer what he thought as a man. ”

“ Most of the reviews in the periodicals that noticed the book at all were as scandalized as had been anticipated; but a highly congratulatory letter from Emerson, who evidently recognized in Whitman the disciple he then professed to be, compensated for all neglect or abuse from other quarters, and a sentence from it was put to good, if indelicate, use as advertising on the back of the second edition (1856) , a volume much larger than the first and more open to criticism because of its attempt to combat prudery in America by a naturalistic but fragmentary treatment of the facts of sex. ”

“ Evidently Whitman was not, in any conventional sense of the term, that “average man” whose praises he sang, else even his novel form of expression would hardly have sufficed to keep his poetry so long a time from the masses. ”

“ But his life was unhappy, full of irresolution and unrest, and frequently given to a morbid brooding on death, while his enormous capacity for sentimental friendship, equalled only by his capacity for taking delight in external nature, had already taught him to sing of unreturned affection, and drove him, no doubt, to take refuge, like Narcissus, in self-admiration. ”

“ These three friends became, by Whitman’s will, his literary excutors. Space is wanting to mention even the most prominent of that host of other visitors, American and foreign, who made Camden the object of their pilgrimages, some with a selfish desire to secure the poet’s bold autograph, others with a reverent wish to pay homage to a liberator of the soul. ”

“ A leisurely trip to Colorado in 1879, a longer one to Canada in the following year, and various briefer visits and lecture journeys—now to New York, now to visit his friend Burroughs at his home on the Hudson, now to his own Long Island birthplace, but oftenest to recuperate and to write charming nature descriptions at his retreat on Timber Creek—except for these furloughs Whitman was to spend the remainder of his days, and to be buried, in Camden. ”

“ New Orleans. The trip which, with his favourite brother Jeff, Whitman made in the spring of 1848 by rail, stage, and Mississippi steamboat to New Orleans, his residence in that city for three months, and his return by way of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes [7] were rather less important than has commonly been supposed. It is doubtful whether the experience brought into his life a great but secret romance, [8] and it appears certain that he was not by it first made conscious of his mission as a poetic prophet. ”

“ When about eleven years old he left school to become an office-boy, first to a lawyer and then to a doctor, the former of whom kindly afforded him opportunities for reading such books as the Arabian Nights and the poetry and romances of Scott. At twelve he was learning to set type, in a building once used as Washington’s headquarters, under the instruction of a veteran printer who had many tales to tell of Revolutionary heroism. ”

“ Here he received many hints for his declamatory and rhythmical style of verse. Altogether more than a score of tales, sketches, essays, and poems have been found which belong to this period. To these must be added a crude and hasty dime novelette, Franklin Evans, [6] addressed, in the cause of temperance, not to the “critics” but to “THE PEOPLE,” and evidently written to order. In this period Whitman was connected with some of the best city magazines and newspapers as contributor, compositor, or editor. ”

“ Notes ↑ For instance, a poem, Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City, taken by many biographers to support the theory that Whitman had a romance with a lady of high social standing during his 1848 visit to New Orleans, proves to have been addressed, in the original draft of the poem, not to a lady but to a “rude and ignorant man” ”

“ He sent forth occasional contributions to various American and British magazines and newspapers, besides new editions of his works. The most notable of these latter was the autographed Centennial or Author’s Edition in two volumes of prose and verse (1876) , designed to be sold in England, his best market, in order to relieve the straitened circumstances of the author, who was then “paralyzed ... poor ... expecting death,” and who had been fleeced by his New York publishers ”

“ Much remains for painstaking research to accomplish. This chapter attempts to set forth only the facts of his biography which are well established or establishable.
§ 2. Youth and Education. Born in the same year as Lowell, Whitman may be said to represent the roots and trunk of democracy, while Lowell may be likened to its flowers or fruits. Whitman, for his part, could hardly have been, or wished to be, a flower ”