No More Learning

He may be termed formless by those who, not without much
reason to show for themselves, are wedded to the established forms and
ratified refinements of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to enlarge the
canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than to draw
it close and exclude him. His work is practically certain to stand as
archetypal for many future poetic efforts--so great is his power as an
originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the _largest_
performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's _Legende des Siecles_
alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of
a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all
precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal
relation of the intensest kind: to anything in the way of prescription, no
relation at all. But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his
Americanism; with the movement of his predominant nation he is moved. His
comprehension, energy, and tenderness are all extreme, and all inspired by
actualities. And, as for poetic genius, those who, without being ready to
concede that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness and his
Titanic power of temperament, working in the sphere of poetry, do in effect
confess his genius as well.

Such, still further condensed, was the critical summary which I gave of
Whitman's position among poets. It remains to say something a little more
precise of the particular qualities of his works. And first, not to slur
over defects, I shall extract some sentences from a letter which a friend,
most highly entitled to form and express an opinion on any poetic
question--one, too, who abundantly upholds the greatness of Whitman as a
poet--has addressed to me with regard to the criticism above condensed. His
observations, though severe on this individual point, appear to me not
other than correct. "I don't think that you quite put strength enough into
your blame on one side, while you make at least enough of minor faults or
eccentricities. To me it seems always that Whitman's great flaw is a fault
of debility, not an excess of strength--I mean his bluster.
His own
personal and national self-reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I
applaud, and sympathise and rejoice in; but the blatant ebullience of
feeling and speech, at times, is feeble for so great a poet of so great a
people. He is in part certainly the poet of democracy; but not wholly,
_because_ he tries so openly to be, and asserts so violently that he is--
always as if he was fighting the case out on a platform. This is the only
thing I really or greatly dislike or revolt from. On the whole" (adds my
correspondent), "my admiration and enjoyment of his greatness grow keener
and warmer every time I think of him"--a feeling, I may be permitted to
observe, which is fully shared by myself, and, I suppose, by all who
consent in any adequate measure to recognise Whitman, and to yield
themselves to his influence.

To continue. Besides originality and daring, which have been already
insisted upon, width and intensity are leading characteristics of his
writings--width both of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity of
self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and expresses. He scans and
presents an enormous panorama, unrolled before him as from a mountain-top;
and yet, whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his eye glances
upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him
with it for a time, be the object what it may. There is a singular
interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While
he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees
them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show
is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and
profounder reality beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations
and auguries. He is the poet indeed of literality, but of passionate and
significant literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of
readings between the lines. If he is the 'cutest of Yankees, he is also as
truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet. All his faculties and
performance glow into a white heat of brotherliness; and there is a
_poignancy_ both of tenderness and of beauty about his finer works which
discriminates them quite as much as their modernness, audacity, or any
other exceptional point. If the reader wishes to see the great and more
intimate powers of Whitman in their fullest expression, he may consult the
_Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln_; than which it would be difficult to
find anywhere a purer, more elevated, more poetic, more ideally abstract,
or at the same time more pathetically personal, threnody--uniting the
thrilling chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final unfathomed
satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman is a master of words and
of sounds: he has them at his command--made for, and instinct with, his
purpose--messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and intelligence between
himself and his readers. The entire book may be called the paean of the
natural man--not of the merely physical, still less of the disjunctively
intellectual or spiritual man, but of him who, being a man first and
foremost, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.

There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's:
that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate
societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man.