No More Learning

Even since this issue, the book has been slightly
revised by its author's own hand, with a special view to possible English
circulation. The copy so revised has reached me (through the liberal and
friendly hands of Mr. Conway) after my selection had already been decided
on; and the few departures from the last printed text which might on
comparison be found in the present volume are due to my having had the
advantage of following this revised copy. In all other respects I have felt
bound to reproduce the last edition, without so much as considering whether
here and there I might personally prefer the readings of the earlier
issues.

The selection here offered to the English reader contains a little less
than half the entire bulk of Whitman's poetry. My choice has proceeded upon
two simple rules: first, to omit entirely every poem which could with any
tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of morals or
propriety in this peculiarly nervous age; and, second, to include every
remaining poem which appeared to me of conspicuous beauty or interest. I
have also inserted the very remarkable prose preface which Whitman printed
in the original edition of _Leaves of Grass_, an edition that has become a
literary rarity. This preface has not been reproduced in any later
publication, although its materials have to some extent been worked up into
poems of a subsequent date. [6] From this prose composition, contrary to
what has been my rule with any of the poems, it has appeared to me
permissible to omit two or three short phrases which would have shocked
ordinary readers, and the retention of which, had I held it obligatory,
would have entailed the exclusion of the preface itself as a whole.

[Footnote 6: Compare, for instance, the Preface, pp. 38, 39, with the poem
_To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress_, p. 133. ]

A few words must be added as to the indecencies scattered through Whitman's
writings. Indecencies or improprieties--or, still better, deforming
crudities--they may rightly be termed; to call them immoralities would be
going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a
compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent
and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have
cognisance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things,
and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and
he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and
right, should not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech.
That such a
view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight, and at any rate
to candid consideration and construction, appears to me not to admit of a
doubt: neither is it dubious that the contrary view, the only view which a
mealy-mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable, amounts to
the condemnation of nearly every great or eminent literary work of past
time, whatever the century it belongs to, the country it comes from, the
department of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it
possesses. Tenth, second, or first century before Christ--first, eighth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or even eighteenth century
A. D. --it is still the same: no book whose subject-matter admits as possible
of an impropriety according to current notions can be depended upon to fail
of containing such impropriety,--can, if those notions are accepted as the
canon, be placed with a sense of security in the hands of girls and youths,
or read aloud to women; and this holds good just as much of severely moral
or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, knowing, or licentious
books. For my part, I am far from thinking that earlier state of
literature, and the public feeling from which it sprang, the wrong ones--
and our present condition the only right one. Equally far, therefore, am I
from indignantly condemning Whitman for every startling allusion or
expression which he has admitted into his book, and which I, from motives
of policy, have excluded from this selection; except, indeed, that I think
many of his tabooed passages are extremely raw and ugly on the ground of
poetic or literary art, whatever aspect they may bear in morals. I have
been rigid in exclusion, because it appears to me highly desirable that a
fair verdict on Whitman should now be pronounced in England on poetic
grounds alone; and because it was clearly impossible that the book, with
its audacities of topic and of expression included, should run the same
chance of justice, and of circulation through refined minds and hands,
which may possibly be accorded to it after the rejection of all such
peccant poems. As already intimated, I have not in a single instance
excised any _parts_ of poems: to do so would have been, I conceive, no less
wrongful towards the illustrious American than repugnant, and indeed
unendurable, to myself, who aspire to no Bowdlerian honours. The
consequence is, that the reader loses _in toto_ several important poems,
and some extremely fine ones--notably the one previously alluded to, of
quite exceptional value and excellence, entitled _Walt Whitman_. I
sacrifice them grudgingly; and yet willingly, because I believe this to be
the only thing to do with due regard to the one reasonable object which a
selection can subserve--that of paving the way towards the issue and
unprejudiced reception of a complete edition of the poems in England. For
the benefit of misconstructionists, let me add in distinct terms that, in
respect of morals and propriety, I neither admire nor approve the
incriminated passages in Whitman's poems, but, on the contrary, consider
that most of them would be much better away; and, in respect of art, I
doubt whether even one of them deserves to be retained in the exact
phraseology it at present exhibits. This, however, does not amount to
saying that Whitman is a vile man, or a corrupt or corrupting writer; he is
none of these.

The only division of his poems into sections, made by Whitman himself, has
been noted above: _Leaves of Grass_, _Songs before Parting_, supplementary
to the preceding, and _Drum Taps_, with their _Sequel_. The peculiar title,
_Leaves of Grass_, has become almost inseparable from the name of Whitman;
it seems to express with some aptness the simplicity, universality, and
spontaneity of the poems to which it is applied. _Songs before Parting_ may
indicate that these compositions close Whitman's poetic roll. _Drum Taps_
are, of course, songs of the Civil War, and their _Sequel_ is mainly on the
same theme: the chief poem in this last section being the one on the death
of Lincoln.