“The originality of Leaves of Grass,” says a French critic, “is perhaps the most absolute which has ever been manifest in literature.” Originality first in words: here are no delicate nuances of language, no Shelleyan cloudiness of metaphysical speech, but masculine adjectives and nouns, plain blunt words, daringly raised from the streets and the fields to poetry. (“I had great trouble in leaving out the stock poetical touches, but succeeded at last.”) And then originality of form: no rhymes, except in occasional failures like “Captain, My Captain” and no regular meter or rhythm, but only such free and varying rhythms as breathing might show, or the wind, or the sea.Above all, originality of matter: the simple approach of an admiring child to the old and unhackneyed wonders of nature (“the noiseless splash of the sun-rise,” “the mad pushes of waves upon the land”); the vivid identification of himself with every soul in every experience (“My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs; they fetch my man’s body up, dripping and drowned”); the brave sincerity of an open mind, rejecting and loving all creeds; the frank and lusty sense of the flesh, the tang and fragrance of the open road; the defense and understanding of woman:
The old face of the mother of many children!
Whist! I am fully content….
Behold a woman!
She looks out from her Quaker cap-her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky.
She sits in an armchair, under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,
The sun just shines on her old white head.
Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen;
Her grandsons raised the flax, and her granddaughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel.
The melodious character of the earth,
The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go, and does not wish to go,
The justified mother of men—
the profound synthesis of individualism and democracy; the cosmic sweep of his imagination and his sympathy, accepting all peoples and saluting the world: these were vivifying shocks to all traditions, all prejudices, all spirits caught in ancient grooves and molds; and the very protests they aroused proved their power and their necessity. All America denounced him except one man, who redeemed them with a letter that is the seal of his nobility. On July 21, 1855, Emerson wrote to Whitman:
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy…. I give you joy of your free and brave thought…. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illu-sion; for the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty…. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt very much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
—R.W. Emerson
Whitman is gone—but how lately! He lived when we were children; even in our time, then, there can be giants, and even America, so crass and young, can produce a poet unique and among the best. Some months ago I stood in his Camden home, where paralysis kept him an invalid for many years; and I mourned to see about me all these reminders that genius, too, must die. But then I took up his book, and read once more the lines that have always haunted me, lines that are here left as the parting word, to haunt other memories endlessly:
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere,waiting for you.
CHAPTER FOUR
The One Hundred “Best” Books for an Education
IF I WERERICH I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young.
I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a rosary. I would have my library spacious and dark and cool, safe from alien sights and sounds, with slender casements opening on quiet fields, voluptuous chairs inviting communion and reverie, shaded lamps illuminating sanctuaries here and there, and every inch of the walls concealed with the mental heritage of our race. And there at any hour my hand or spirit would welcome my friends, if their souls were hungry and their hands were clean. In the center of that temple of my books I would gather the One Hundred Best of all the educative literature in the world.
I picture to myself a massive redwood table, worked out in loving detail by the artists who carved the wood for King Henry’s chapel at Westminster Abbey (I must be an old reactionary, for I abominate the hard materials that make our concrete homes and iron beds and desks today, and I find something organically responsive to my affection in everything made of wood). Along the center of the table would stand a glass case protecting and yet revealing my One Hundred Best. I picture my friends treated comfortably there, occasional hours of every week, passing from volume to volume with loving leisureliness.
Will you sit down with me? Perhaps you are a college graduate, and are ready, then, to begin your education. Perhaps you have never had a chance to go to college, and have never considered what else our children learn there except the latest morals. They might learn many fine things if they came to it old enough, but our youngsters take so long to grow up in these complex days that they are too immature, when they enter college, to absorb or understand the treasures offered them there so lavishly. If you have studied with life rather than with courses, it may be as well; the rough tutelage of reality has ripened you into some readiness to know great men. Here at this spacious table you will prepare yourself for membership in the International of the Mind; you will be friends with Plato and Leonardo, with Bacon and Montaigne; and when you have passed through that goodly company you will be fit for the fellowship of the finest leaders of your time and place.
Can you spare an hour a day? Or, if some days are too crowded with life and duty to give you leisure for these subtler things, can you atone for such bookless evenings by an extra hour or two on those Sunday mornings when the endless newspaper consumes you to no end? Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.