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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Poetry of Walt Whitman," readers are invited to explore the expansive and innovative body of work from one of America's most revered poets. Whitman's distinct free verse style redefines the boundaries of poetry, embracing an organic form that mirrors the rhythms of natural speech. Interweaving themes of democracy, individuality, and the human experience, his verses capture the essence of 19th-century America, offering profound insights into the social and political upheavals of the time. The collection includes iconic works such as "Leaves of Grass," showcasing Whitman's ability to reflect on both the personal and the universal, while boldly celebrating the interconnectedness of all life. Walt Whitman, often hailed as the father of American poetry, was deeply influenced by the tumultuous events of his era, including the Civil War and the burgeoning industrial age. His experiences as a volunteer nurse during the war and his unyielding advocacy for equality and human rights shaped his perspective as a poet. Whitman's belief in the transformative power of poetry emerged from his desire to bridge the divides within society, heralding a new era of literary expression that emphasized authenticity and connection. This collection is essential for both casual readers and dedicated scholars alike. Whitman's work transcends time, resonating with contemporary themes of social justice and individualism. Engaging with this complete anthology allows readers to appreciate the lyrical beauty and philosophical depth of Whitman's vision, making it a foundational text in understanding not just American literature but also the enduring power of the poetic form. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Poetry of Walt Whitman
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents the complete poetry of Walt Whitman in a form that foregrounds both its origins and its culmination. It brings together the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the final 1891–1892 edition commonly called the deathbed edition, and a gathering of other poems that fall outside the book’s last arrangement. The purpose is twofold: to preserve the integrity of Whitman’s own major milestones and to provide a comprehensive view of his poetic achievement. Readers can witness a lifelong project unfolding, from an audacious debut to the authoritative summation, while also encountering poems that broaden the record of his art.
By assembling multiple versions of Leaves of Grass alongside other poems, the volume emphasizes Whitman as an author who revised, expanded, and reorganized his work across decades. The collection’s scope respects discrete historical states rather than producing a single synthetic text. It allows comparison between what Whitman first offered and what he ultimately endorsed, illustrating how individual poems shifted titles, positions, and resonances. Presenting these components together underscores that Whitman’s poetry is not a fixed monument but a dynamic, evolving undertaking, and that understanding its growth is essential to appreciating its ambition, reach, and lasting cultural presence.
The contents are poetry, and only poetry. Within that single art, Whitman explores a wide spectrum of modes: expansive free verse sequences, brief inscriptions, catalogs, elegies, hymns of praise, addresses to readers and to the nation, and occasional poems responsive to public events. Some pieces move with narrative momentum; others dwell in meditation. The lines often stretch with oratorical amplitude, yet the poems also include compressed epigrams and intimate lyric moments. There are no novels, short stories, essays, letters, or diaries here, though the poetry frequently incorporates the textures of speech, reportage, and personal testimony within its distinctive verse idiom.
Leaves of Grass The Original 1855 Edition preserves the moment Whitman first announced his poetic enterprise. Published in 1855, it contained twelve poems that introduced a radically open form, long lines, and sweeping lists of people, places, and actions. The voice proclaims individuality while imagining a readership large enough to include the whole nation. The poems celebrate the body alongside the soul, and they move between city streets, fields, rivers, and the wide American horizon. The 1855 volume stands not as a preliminary sketch but as a bold inaugural statement, whose energy and directness continue to shape how the later Whitman is read.
Leaves of Grass The Final Edition presents Whitman’s last authorized arrangement, prepared in 1891–1892. By this point, the book had grown substantially, absorbing poems composed across the intervening decades, including those first published as Drum Taps and later annexes such as Sands at Seventy and Good Bye my Fancy. The final edition gathers clusters that reflect a lifetime of thematic development, while preserving Whitman’s careful sequencing and cross reference. It is both culmination and self commentary: a poet’s retrospective ordering of his work, clarifying emphases, deepening elegiac currents, and reaffirming his democratic address to readers present and imagined.
Other Poems brings together verse that circulated beyond the core architecture of Leaves of Grass or that remained outside its last configuration. These pieces include occasional, early, or uncollected poems published in periodicals, as well as variants that illuminate Whitman’s compositional habits. Their inclusion serves completeness and context. They complicate any singular portrait by showing Whitman testing voices, topics, and scales not always absorbed into the larger book. Read alongside the two featured editions, they broaden a sense of his workshop practice and reveal how his ideals of inclusiveness and revision extended to the margins of his poetic enterprise.
Across the whole, certain themes bind Whitman’s poetry into a unified artistic vision. He celebrates democracy as a lived intimacy among strangers, elevating the common laborer, the traveler, the patient, and the bystander. He insists on the dignity of the body and the sanctity of experience, treating desire, work, and companionship as sources of knowledge. The poems travel the continent while gazing outward to oceans and cosmos, fusing local detail with an expansive horizon. The speaking I is at once particular and capacious, seeking to include the reader within its embrace. In Whitman’s hands, private feeling and public address become mutually generative.
Stylistically, Whitman’s signatures are unmistakable. He develops a pioneering free verse that relies on rhythmic parallelism, anaphora, and accumulative cataloging rather than fixed meter and rhyme. His long lines surge with syntactic momentum, balanced by returns to brief, aphoristic turns. Diction ranges from colloquial to ceremonial, often within the same poem, creating a democratic texture of speech. Lists function as ethical and aesthetic acts, naming to dignify, to remember, and to invite participation. Direct address is frequent, enacting a conversation with the reader. The result is an oracular yet companionable manner that remains distinctive within American and world poetry.
The enduring significance of Whitman’s poetry lies in its reimagining of what a poet might do within a modern, heterogeneous society. He proposes that the poem can be a site of encounter across differences, making hospitality a literary principle. His influence has been sustained across generations of writers, while his work continues to anchor discussions of American literature. The poems retain vitality because they are committed to change: of the self, of the nation, and of the poem as a form. That commitment is mirrored in the multiple editions, which bear witness to an artist revisiting, testing, and renewing his materials.
Whitman’s response to war and loss forms a central thread in the later work. Poems first issued in Drum Taps, later folded into Leaves of Grass, address the American Civil War with an attention to suffering, comradeship, and the textures of daily service. His elegies for Abraham Lincoln, including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd and O Captain My Captain, show how public grief can take lyric shape without abandoning complexity. This current deepens the poetry’s moral weight, connecting early affirmations of vitality to later acts of remembrance, and shaping the final edition’s tone of hard won tenderness.
Reading the two versions of Leaves of Grass side by side highlights Whitman’s method. The 1855 edition exhibits an inaugural confidence, while the final arrangement reshapes that confidence through experience, renaming and regrouping poems to form new constellations. Readers will notice how clusters organize motifs that echo across the book, and how recurring figures and scenes gain altered meanings in new contexts. The Other Poems section, when consulted alongside these volumes, provides further perspectives on Whitman’s choices about inclusion and emphasis. Together they offer a record of poetic self revision unparalleled in scale, and a guide to Whitman’s evolving priorities.
This complete poetry seeks to serve both first time readers and returning admirers. It invites an initial encounter with Whitman’s voice in the concentrated blaze of 1855, and it offers the mature architecture of the final edition as a map of what he ultimately wished to leave behind. The companion gathering of other poems adds breadth and texture without diluting his design. Taken together, the volumes present a full body of work that interweaves intimacy and address, celebration and mourning, experiment and tradition. In these pages, Whitman remains an abiding presence and a continuing conversation partner for readers now and to come.
Author Biography
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist whose expansive, colloquial free verse helped redefine the possibilities of poetry in the nineteenth century. Best known for Leaves of Grass, a life-long, ever-expanding collection, he fashioned a democratic poetics that sought to encompass the nation’s diversity, the body and the spirit, labor and landscape. His work bridged literary Romanticism and emerging modern sensibilities, blending oratorical cadences with newspaper plainness. Celebrated by some contemporaries and condemned by others, Whitman’s voice became a touchstone for later generations seeking a new American idiom—at once intimate and public, skeptical and affirming, inclusive and exploratory.
Whitman was born on Long Island and grew up largely in Brooklyn, receiving basic schooling before apprenticing as a printer. The print shop and the bustling city streets became his classrooms, exposing him to pamphlets, sermons, political speeches, and theater. He read Shakespeare and the Bible, absorbed the rhetoric of civic oratory, and cultivated a journalist’s eye for common scenes and voices. In his twenties he worked intermittently as a teacher and a newspaper contributor, honing a prose style that prized immediacy and breadth. Self-education shaped his aesthetics: a preference for plain diction, catalogues, and free-flowing rhythms that could register a teeming democratic society.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Whitman had become active in New York’s vigorous newspaper culture, editing and writing for various periodicals. A brief sojourn in New Orleans in the late 1840s, taken for a newspaper position, widened his perspective on the nation and slavery. Returning to the Northeast, he continued journalism while drafting poems that diverged from conventional meters and genteel subjects. The press world trained him in address to a broad public and in the handling of timely topics, and it sharpened his interest in politics, labor, and urban life. These experiences fed a poetic ambition to speak across regions, classes, and occupations.
In the mid-1850s Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a slender volume that announced a new voice in free verse. The book’s candid celebration of the body and of democratic fellowship drew both acclaim and censure. Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed the audacity, praising its originality and scope, even as others called it indecent. Whitman revised and expanded the work repeatedly over subsequent decades, adding new poems and rearranging sequences while crafting a public persona of the poet as representative American. The book’s prefaces and addresses framed his aims: to fuse individual experience with a capacious vision of national community.
During the American Civil War, Whitman relocated to the capital area and spent extensive time visiting soldiers in military hospitals, offering small gifts and companionship. The war deepened the gravitas of his poetry, resulting in Drum-Taps and, soon after, elegies mourning Abraham Lincoln, including When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d and O Captain! My Captain! He held modest government clerkships but also faced controversy over the propriety of his writings. Prose recollections later gathered in volumes such as Specimen Days preserved scenes from the wards and the city. The period consolidated his reputation as a national poet who confronted suffering and endurance.
In the years after the war, Whitman continued to publish poetry and prose, including Democratic Vistas, a searching assessment of America’s cultural promise and shortcomings. A serious illness in the early 1870s left him partially disabled, and he settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he lived for the rest of his life. He oversaw successive printings of Leaves of Grass, culminating in a final expanded version often called the deathbed edition. Though finances were uneven, his public profile grew through readings, interviews, and a transatlantic circle of admirers. Critical debate persisted, but recognition of his experiment in scope and form steadily increased.
Whitman’s legacy rests on the breadth of his democratic vision and his radical formal choices. He helped pioneer free verse and the long-lined catalogue, offering a model for twentieth-century poets seeking a direct, flexible idiom. His influence can be traced in American modernists and in the Beat movement, and it extends internationally to poets who adopted his expansive first-person address. Themes of embodiment, comradeship, work, and national plurality continue to invite new readings, including inquiries into sexuality, race, and citizenship. Today Leaves of Grass is widely taught and read as an open, evolving project whose energy still shapes contemporary poetic practice.
Historical Context
Walt Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 at West Hills, Long Island, New York, and grew up amid the mingled rural and urban worlds of Paumanok and Brooklyn. Apprenticed to printers in the 1830s, he absorbed the craft of type, ink, and the democratic energies of the penny press. New York’s docks, markets, and ferries shaped his sensibility long before his poems named them. The discipline of setting lines by hand and the hurly-burly of newsroom work trained his ear for spoken American cadence and his eye for crowds, trades, and machinery—materials that would permeate his lifelong poetic project, from first experiments to late retrospection.
Whitman’s political imagination formed in the era of Jacksonian democracy, when mass rallies, stump oratory, and party newspapers drew ordinary citizens into public life. The elections of 1828 and 1832, the rhetoric of the workingmen’s movement, and urban ward politics taught lessons about voice and audience that his poetry later carried beyond the polling place. He admired egalitarian ideals while watching patronage and factionalism up close. These experiences fed his belief that poetry could serve as civic speech, knitting together a vast electorate into a mythic body politic, and that the poet, like the orator, might address the nation directly, face to face.
New York’s explosive growth between 1820 and 1860—immigrant arrivals at Castle Garden, the spread of omnibuses along Broadway, the expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the daily ferries crossing the East River—provided Whitman a theater of modern life. He rode and walked its streets, listening to dialects and cataloging occupations. The crowded piers and shipyards suggested an American cosmopolis, a concrete foundation for poems that gather multitudes. The urban scene’s rhythms, with their crossings and returns, informed his recurrent images of tides, bridges, and crowds, and offered an emblem of national circulation: people, goods, and ideas streaming in ceaseless democratic motion.
Whitman’s journalism in the 1840s—editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846–1848) and briefly the New Orleans Daily Crescent in 1848—widened his vantage. The Mississippi and Gulf Coast introduced him to plantation slavery, auction blocks, and Creole cultures, complicating northern abstractions about union and freedom. The Free Soil campaign of 1848, resisting the expansion of slavery, aligned with his editorial voice. Returning to Brooklyn after the southward journey, he carried a sharpened sense of continental scale and sectional tension. His later poetry’s panoramic catalogs and ethical urgency draw on the nation-spanning newsroom geography he mapped as a reporter, editor, and traveler following the rails and rivers.
Intellectual currents reshaped Whitman’s ambitions. Transcendentalist ideas circulating in Boston and Concord—Emerson’s essays and lectures in the 1840s—advanced a doctrine of self-reliance and the sanctity of the present moment. Emerson’s 1855 letter greeting Whitman at the beginning of a great career legitimized a bold experiment in poetic form and subject. In New York he frequented Pfaff’s beer cellar with Henry Clapp Jr. and the Saturday Press circle, a bohemian milieu mixing radical politics, theater, and free talk. These networks encouraged a poetry that fused philosophical assertion with street-level observation, trading academic meters for oratorical breath and the cadence of lived speech.
In 1855, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn, likely at the Rome Brothers’ shop, setting and correcting type himself. Fewer than a thousand copies appeared, bound in green cloth without conventional author attribution. Distributed with help from the phrenologists Fowler and Wells, the volume announced a new free-verse line, long-breathed and unrhymed, assembling images in cascading catalogs. The poet’s body and the American body were joined thematically and typographically. Emerson’s private praise, used publicly in 1856 advertisements, ignited controversy that amplified Whitman’s renown. Subsequent editions in 1856, 1860–61, 1867, 1871–72, 1881–82, and the 1891–92 deathbed text made revision a central feature of his art.
The 1850s political crisis framed Whitman’s early audacity. The Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Act tested Northern consciences. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, popular sovereignty, and border violence laid bare the nation’s fracture. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 denied Black citizenship, while John Brown’s 1859 raid made insurrection a household word. Whitman’s all-embracing voice emerged in tension with these realities, aspiring to contain contradiction while acknowledging convulsion. His commitment to union existed alongside a wary eye for mob rule and demagoguery, honed by years in partisan newsrooms. The competing pressures of freedom and order forged the dramatis personae of his nation-sized verse.
The Civil War (1861–1865) transformed Whitman’s poetry and life. After learning that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg in December 1862, he traveled south and soon settled in Washington, D.C., visiting wards at Armory Square, Campbell, and Harewood hospitals. He carried tobacco, stationery, and fruit; he wrote letters for soldiers and listened. Drum-Taps (1865) gathered the war’s immediacies, later folded into Leaves of Grass. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on 14 April 1865 prompted elegies that became touchstones of national mourning. The proximity to amputations, fevers, and death reoriented Whitman’s grand democratic vision around the intimate economies of touch, care, and the ledger of human cost.
Employment in the federal bureaucracy both steadied and imperiled Whitman. In 1865 he joined the Department of the Interior, only to be dismissed by Secretary James Harlan, who deemed his poems immoral. William D. O’Connor’s pamphlet The Good Gray Poet (1866) defended him, and friends secured a new clerkship in the office of the Attorney General, which he held for years. The episode revealed the cultural fault lines between a candid, body-affirming poetics and official propriety. It also embedded Whitman in the administrative machinery of Reconstruction Washington, where he watched laws, pensions, and pardons processed, absorbing the prose of government into the cadence of his verse.
Reconstruction’s legal milestones—Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth Amendments (1870)—reframed citizenship and suffrage while sparking resistance and backlash. Washington’s Freedmen’s Village and the expansion of federal institutions made the capital a laboratory for new social arrangements. Whitman’s poems increasingly leaned on the language of union, comradeship, and a broader American destiny, even as violence in the South and political scandals in the 1870s complicated triumphal narratives. The centennial year 1876, with its orations, parades, and exhibitions, gave ceremonial shape to sentiments he had voiced since 1855: that the nation’s greatest text was the living people and that poetry should accompany their rites of becoming.
Technological accelerations enlarged Whitman’s planetary frame. The first permanent transatlantic cable in 1866, the golden spike uniting the transcontinental railroad in May 1869, and the Suez Canal’s opening in November 1869 reconfigured distance and trade. World’s fairs, including Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial, displayed engines and exoticized cultures side by side. Poems envisioning global passage and electrical interconnection emerged from this milieu, linking American enterprise with an almost mystical geography of routes, currents, and radiations. The steamship, telegraph key, and locomotive offered both imagery and structure: lines that proceed in single, unpunctuated thrusts, intent on spanning oceans, mountains, and the invisible circuits of modern communication.
Mid-century intellectual ferment sharpened Whitman’s syncretic spirituality. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) unsettled theological certainties while inviting organic metaphors of growth and evolution. Comparative religion, then gaining currency through translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Persian Sufi poets, suggested a capacious pantheism compatible with American democracy. Hospital experience deepened his interest in physiology, pulse, and breath, which he internalized as prosodic measures. Astronomy lectures, museums, and the popular sciences of phrenology and mesmerism, however dubious, shaped a vocabulary of soul and body. The poems translate these stimuli into expansive, nonsectarian affirmations of the self as both microscopic citizen and cosmic participant.
Cultural battles over sexuality and print erupted around Whitman’s candor. The postwar Comstock Act (1873) criminalized the circulation of obscene materials through the mails. In 1881, Boston’s district attorney Oliver Stevens pressured publisher James R. Osgood to expurgate Leaves of Grass; Whitman refused, Osgood withdrew, and Rees Welsh of Philadelphia issued the 1882 edition, which sold briskly. Clusters celebrating physical love and male comradeship—controversial since the 1860 edition—thus became flashpoints in national debates about morality and literature. The resulting notoriety broadened his audience and solidified his commitment to an integrated body-soul democracy, insisting that the American poem must admit eros as well as piety.
Immigration and labor reshaped the nation Whitman addressed. Irish and German influxes from the 1840s onward, followed by Scandinavians, Italians, and Eastern Europeans later in the century, filled tenements and workshops, altered city soundscapes, and provoked nativist movements. Docks, foundries, and railroads expanded with immigrant hands, creating new solidarities and conflicts in the streets and at the ballot box. Whitman’s lists of trades and nations—sailors, stevedores, midwives, printers, Masai and Patagonians imagined as neighbors—registered both the reality and aspiration of a cosmopolitan republic. His democratic address, pitched to the crowd, gathered these disparate faces into a single chorus without erasing their many languages.
The arts of Whitman’s New York and Philadelphia offered models of scale and performance. He frequented opera, absorbing Italian arias and the vocal bravura of the 1840s and 1850s, translating bel canto into elongated, recitative-like lines. The Astor Place Riot of 1849 dramatized class tensions around high and popular culture, a divide he sought to bridge. Photographers such as Mathew Brady and painters like Thomas Eakins crafted public images of Whitman in the 1860s–1880s, reinforcing the persona of the Good Gray Poet. Vaudeville, minstrel shows, and melodrama, though fraught, taught timing and address, encouraging a poetry that could stride the stage of the nation.
After a paralytic stroke in January 1873, Whitman relocated to Camden, New Jersey, near his brother George; his mother died that May. From 328 Mickle Street he edited new printings, published Specimen Days in 1882, received admirers, and posed for portraits. English allies William Michael Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist, and visitors like Oscar Wilde in 1882, extended his transatlantic reach. Horace Traubel, Thomas Harned, and Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke formed a local circle that sustained him. The final 1891–92 edition of Leaves of Grass gathered a lifetime’s revisions. Whitman died on 26 March 1892 and was entombed at Harleigh Cemetery in a mausoleum he designed.
Across four decades of composition and self-revision, Whitman treated poetry as a national project under construction, mirroring the republic’s own contested growth. His pages record the shift from sail to steam, from slavery to emancipation, from state fairs to world’s fairs, from provincial journalism to global circulation. They integrate city pavements and prairie horizons, hospital wards and capitol corridors, the idioms of stump speeches and arias. By making the book a living document—expanded in 1856, reset in 1860–61, renewed after 1865, and finalized in 1891–92—he aligned form with history. The full compass of his work remains a ledger of American becoming.
Synopsis (Selection)
Leaves of Grass (The Original 1855 Edition)
Whitman’s 12-poem debut introduces a prophetic democratic voice that merges the individual with the American collective, celebrating the body, sexuality, labor, and the natural world in expansive free verse. It sketches a metaphysical unity of self and cosmos that frames the project to come.
Leaves of Grass (The Final Edition)
The 1891–92 deathbed version gathers a lifetime of revisions and additions into a panoramic epic of America—from comradeship and the open road to Civil War witness and elegy for Lincoln—and extends into reflections on urban life, nature, and the cosmos. It deepens the early celebration into meditations on aging, death, and spiritual continuance while cataloging a plural, evolving nation.
Other Poems
Uncollected, occasional, and variant pieces outside Leaves of Grass—inscriptions, tributes, epigrams, and brief lyrics tied to public events or private moments—show Whitman in a more situational, compact mode. They echo his core commitments to democracy, intimacy, nature, and the soul while rounding out his poetic record.
The Complete Poetry of Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (The Original 1855 Edition)
Preface
America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions... accepts the lesson with calmness... is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms... perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house... perceives that it waits a little while in the door... that it was fittest for its days... that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches... and that he shall be fittest for his days.
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.[1q] In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes.... Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the performance disdaining the trivial unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its perspective spreads with crampless and flowing breadth and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.
Other states indicate themselves in their deputies... but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors... but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage... their deathless attachment to freedom — their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean — the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states — the fierceness of their roused resentment — their curiosity and welcome of novelty — their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy — their susceptibility to a slight — the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors — the fluency of their speech — their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul... their good temper and open-handedness — the terrible significance of their elections — the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him — these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.
The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not nature nor swarming states nor streets and steamships nor prosperous business nor farms nor capital nor learning may suffice for the ideal of man... nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark and can have the best authority the cheapest... namely from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses of individuals or states and of present action and grandeur and of the subjects of poets. — As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery and what has transpired since in North and South America were less than the small theatre of the antique or the aimless sleepwalking of the middle ages! The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities and all returns of commerce and agriculture and all the magnitude of geography or shows of exterior victory to enjoy the breed of fullsized men or one fullsized man unconquerable and simple.
The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions... he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit.... he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine and over Manhattan bay and over Champlain and Erie and over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and liveoak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tuliptree and cactus and wildvine and tamarind and persimmon... and tangles as tangled as any canebrake or swamp... and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind... and sides and peaks of mountains... and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie... with flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wildpigeon and highhold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and redshouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white- ibis and indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mockingbird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle. To him the hereditary countenance descends both mother’s and father’s. To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events — of the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines — the tribes of red aborigines — the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts — the first settlements north or south — the rapid stature and muscle — the haughty defiance of ‘76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution... the union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable — the perpetual coming of immigrants — the wharfhem’d cities and superior marine — the unsurveyed interior — the log-houses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers... the free commerce — the fisheries and whaling and gold- digging — the endless gestation of new states — the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts... the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen... the general ardor and friendliness and enterprise — the perfect equality of the female with the male... the large amativeness — the fluid movement of the population — the factories and mercantile life and laborsaving machinery — the Yankee swap — the New York firemen and the target excursion — the southern plantation life — the character of the northeast and of the northwest and southwest — slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease. For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendant and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista. Here comes one among the wellbeloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms.
Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land... he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking. If peace is the routine out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities, encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce — lighting the study of man, the soul, immortality — federal, state or municipal government, marriage, health, freetrade, intertravel by land and sea... nothing too close, nothing too far off... the stars not too far off. In war he is the most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him recruits horse and foot... he fetches parks of artillery the best that engineer ever knew. If the time becomes slothful and heavy he knows how to arouse it... he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach he stands turning a concentrated light... he turns the pivot with his finger... he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands and easily overtakes and envelops them. The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady faith... he spreads out his dishes... he offers the sweet firmfibred meat that grows men and women. His brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer... he is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest he has the most faith. His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul and eternity and God off of his equal plane he is silent. He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement... he sees eternity in men and women... he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Faith is the antiseptic of the soul... it pervades the common people and preserves them... they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist.... The power to destroy or remould is freely used by him but never the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose superior models and prove himself by every step he takes he is not what is wanted. The presence of the greatest poet conquers... not parleying or struggling or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way see after him! there is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness or the ignominy of a nativity or color or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell... and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.
The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer... he is individual... he is complete in himself... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus... he does not stop for any regulation... he is the president of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space of a peachpit and given audience to far and near and to the sunset and had all things enter with electric swiftness softly and duly without confusion or jostling or jam.
The land and sea, the animals fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests mountains and rivers, are not small themes... but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects... they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough... probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive... some may but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough... the fact will prevail through the universe... but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body —
The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches... and shall master all attachment.
The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the daybreak or a scene of the winter woods or the presence of children playing or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love above all love has leisure and expanse... he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover... he is sure... he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him... suffering and darkness cannot — death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth... he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than he is of the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty.
The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss... it is inevitable as life... it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the rest but in the rest themselves just the same. These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods... that its finish is to each for itself and onward from itself... that it is profuse and impartial... that there is not a minute of the light or dark nor an acre of the earth or sea without it — nor any direction of the sky nor any trade or employment nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about the proper expression of beauty there is precision and balance... one part does not need to be thrust above another. The best singer is not the one who has the most lithe and powerful organ... the pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound.
Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time. What is the purpose must surely be there and the clue of it must be there... and the faintest indication is the indication of the best and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet... he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson... he places himself where the future becomes present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions... he finally ascends and finishes all... he exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond... he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown... by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals... he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both and they are vital in his style and thoughts.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity... nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the graygull over the bay or the mettlesome action of the blood horse or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven or the appearance of the moon afterward with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of the brotherhood of writers savans musicians inventors and artists nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the need of poems philosophy politics mechanism science behaviour, the craft of art, an appropriate native grand-opera, shipcraft, or any craft, he is greatest forever and forever who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails another... and that men can be good or grand only of the consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do you think is the grandeur of storms and dismemberments and the deadliest battles and wrecks and the wildest fury of the elements and the power of the sea and the motion of nature and of the throes of human desires and dignity and hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says, Rage on, Whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere, Master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, Master of nature and passion and death, And of all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors... They shall be kosmos... without monopoly or secrecy... glad to pass any thing to any one... hungry for equals night and day. They shall not be careful of riches and privilege... they shall be riches and privilege... they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no class of persons nor one or two out of the strata of interests nor love most nor truth most nor the soul most nor the body most... and not be for the eastern states more than the western or the northern states more than the southern.
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet but always his encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance are there... there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best... there he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveler... the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered they sent the seed of the conception of it... of them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls... always of their fatherstuff must be begotten the sinewy races of bards. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet yet is president of itself always. The depths are fathomless and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed... they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and supernatural and all that was twined with it or educed out of it departs as a dream. What has ever happened... what happens and whatever may or shall happen, the vital laws enclose all... they are sufficient for any case and for all cases... none to be hurried or retarded... any miracle of affairs or persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme where every motion and every spear of grass and the frames and spirits of men and women and all that concerns them are unspeakably perfect miracles all referring to all and each distinct and in its place. It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women.
Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted and shall be done with perfect candor. Upon this basis philosophy speculates ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness never inconsistent with what is clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever comprehends less than that... whatever is less than the laws of light and of astronomical motion... or less than the laws that follow the thief the liar the glutton and the drunkard through this life and doubtless afterward... or less than vast stretches of time or the slow formation of density or the patient upheaving of strata — is of no account. Whatever would put God in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against some being or influence is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble characterise the great master... spoilt in one principle all is spoilt. The great master has nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for himself in being one of the mass... he sees the hiatus in singular eminence. To the perfect shape comes common ground. To be under the general law is great for that is to correspond with it. The master knows that he is unspeakably great and that all are unspeakably great... that nothing for instance is greater than to conceive children and bring them up well... that to be is just as great as to perceive or tell.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensible. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women exist... but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages are worthy the grand idea... to them it is confided and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it and nothing can warp or degrade it. The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them awhile and though they neither speak or advise you shall learn the faithful American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat... the enemy triumphs... the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote and leadballs do their work... the cause is asleep... the strong throats are choked with their own blood... the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other... and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go... it waits for all the rest to go... it is the last.... When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away... when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators... when the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead... when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people... when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master — and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves... when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority... when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet — when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth — then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.
