SOURCE: Wellek, René. “American Criticism.” In A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, Vol. 4: The Later Nineteenth Century, pp. 191-200. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

[In the following excerpt, Wellek explains Whitman's call for an American poetry that was intended for the masses and was free from the restraints of tradition in both its style and its content.]

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman called for a poetry of the future, for a clean break with the past, for democratic poetry written for the masses about the masses, for poetry inspired by modern science and technological progress, for poetry freed from the shackles of rhyme and traditional meter, from any restrictions in subject matter and reticence about sex. At first Whitman was ridiculed and ostracized; but he won devoted disciples and, slowly, critical recognition, particularly in Europe. For a time he loomed almost as the founder of modern poetry, the inventor of free verse. His influence on Lindsay, Sandburg, and Hart Crane in America, on Dylan Thomas, Laforgue and Verhaeren, Arno Holz, and Mayakovsky in Europe (to cite only representative names) was highly important. Now the Whitmanians have mostly receded into limbo, ousted by a new race of poets for whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé might rather be claimed as the ancestors.

The impression created by Whitman's pronouncements of a revolution in poetry and of a total rejection of the past is in many ways deceptive. His prophetic voice is also a voice from the past. His appeal to individual intuition, to the “inner light,” owes something to his Quaker background. Much is due to the inheritance of the Enlightenment, to Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, of which the young Whitman was an ardent propagandist. His “populism” has surprising French affinities in the flushed rhetoric of Jules Michelet's Le Peuple, and the vague socialism of Pierre Leroux mediated by George Sand. It has even been argued that Whitman's assumed personality or mask (unfairly described as a “pose”) is derived from the ideal artist described in Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.¹ But Whitman's main inspiration was clearly Emerson's version of Transcendentalism. Whitman said himself that his main purpose was “the religious purpose.” The “new theology,” “the supreme and final science, the science of God,” will accept natural science, and will grow out of science, superseding any conflict between philosophies, to reach “the eternal soul of man (of all else too), the spiritual, the religious,”²

I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true,
          I reject no part …
I adopt each theory, myth, God, and demi-god.(3)

A monstrous syncretism transposes transcendentalism in a different key: the distinctions between nature and man, soul and body disappear. Yet the original debt to Emerson seems undeniable.

As early as 1847 Whitman wrote that Emerson joins “on equal terms the few great sages and original seers. He represents the freeman, America, the individual”⁴—just as Whitman wanted to represent them. Whitman heard Emerson lecture in 1842 and in 1855 sent him a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which elicited the famous enthusiastic letter. Emerson sought him out in New York several times; and Whitman accompanied the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) with a long open letter addressing Emerson as “dear Friend and Master.”⁵ In 1860 Whitman visited him in Boston, and Emerson's attempt to dissuade Whitman from including “The Children of Adam” in the third edition did not dim the personal relationship of the men. Whitman was a guest in Concord in 1881 and the next year wrote a moving obituary.⁶ Even in 1881 he declared Emerson to be “unmistakably at the head” of all American poets; and he had early recognized that Emerson had helped him to “find himself.”⁷ Whitman nonetheless saw the temperamental and social differences that divided him from Emerson. There are always reservations in his praise: Emerson is “too perfect, too concentrated,” “best as a critic or diagnoser.” He holds “a singularly dandified theory of manners,” shows “too great prudence, too rigid a caution.” “Cold and bloodless intellectuality dominates him.”⁸ But when Whitman tries to minimize Emerson's influence, saying that “I began like most youngsters to have a touch (though it came late, and was only on the surface) of Emerson-on-the-brain” and that he “address'd him in print as ‘Master,’ and for a month or so thought him as such,” he was definitely covering up his traces, and he was falsifying history when he denied having read Emerson before starting Leaves of Grass.⁹

Placing a distance between himself and Emerson ran parallel with Whitman's new desire to identify himself with German idealism. He stated that he “had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel” before the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, calling himself “the greatest poetical representative of German philosophy” and his book “the song of idealism.”¹⁰ He claimed that the “history of [Leaves of Grass] not only resembles and tallies, in certain respects, the development of the great system of Idealistic Philosophy in Germany by the ‘illustrious four’—except that the development of Leaves of Grass has been carried on within the region of a single mind—but it is to be demonstrated, that the same theory of essential identity of the spiritual and material worlds … are expressed and stated in Leaves of Grass, from the poet's point of view.”¹¹ Whitman's enthusiasm for Hegel, in particular, went to astonishing lengths. Hegel is “Humanity's chiefest teacher and the choicest loved physician of my mind and soul.”¹² Whitman proposed that all the principal works of Hegel and Carlyle be “this day” collected and “bound up under the conspicuous title: Speculations for the Use of North America, and Democracy there,”¹³ since, oddly enough, Whitman thought Hegel “fit for America—large enough and free enough.” He “most fully and definitely illustrates Democracy.” “The formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World Democracy.”¹⁴ German philosophy “is the most important emanation of the mind of modern ages and of all ages, leaving even the wonderful inventions, discoveries of science, political progress, great engineering works, utilitarian comforts etc. of the last hundred years in a comparatively inferior rank of importance—outstripping them all.”¹⁵ A poem written “after reading Hegel” has the comforting thought:

I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening
          towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening
          to merge itself and become lost and dead.(16)

An examination of Whitman's knowledge of the German philosophers reveals, however, that he knew hardly more than a few secondhand accounts in a history of German literature, an anthology, and encyclopedias.¹⁷ He did not even go to the translations that were then available. His enthusiasm is due in part, no doubt, to his desire for support by the prestige of philosophy; and at that time the St. Louis Hegelian movement had helped to transplant Hegel's fame to America when it was on the wane in Germany. On the other hand, it was also a genuine sense of kinship. Hegel advocates evolution, progress, freedom, a reconciliation of science and religion: he was an optimist and determinist. What more was needed for Whitman, who could not see and would not have cared for the differences?

This attempt by Walt Whitman, compounded by worshipful disciples and interpreters, to make himself a philosopher or even an exponent of German philosophy could not succeed. Whitman has no coherent metaphysics, aesthetics, or theory of criticism. But there is a concept of poetry and a program for poetry and an ideal of the poet that give him a position in the history of criticism. Like many others, he preaches contemporaneity, nationalism, and realism; but with him these slogans are in the service not of a critical, social realism (as it was formulated in France or Russia) but of a poetry of the future, a worship of nature, of the world, America, the masses, science, and technology.

In ever new variations, in the prefaces and postscripts to the various editions of Leaves of Grass, in Democratic Vistas (1871), and in any number of articles and pronouncements, Whitman rhapsodically proclaims the hope for this new poetry which “needs tally and express Nature, and the spirit of Nature,” which must incarnate America, “its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes,”¹⁸ its teeming humanity, its masses, men and women, soul and body, and especially sex, which had hitherto been excluded from poetry. These poems “must vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which Scientism has invested Man and the Universe.” The scientists “are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem,” for “in the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.”¹⁹

This new American, democratic, scientific, optimistic poetry will make a clean break with the past. When Whitman says that “in these Leaves, everything is literally photographed,” he adds immediately “nothing is poetized, no divergence, not a step, not an inch, nothing for beauty's sake—no legend, or myth, or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme.”²⁰ The photographic realism means mainly a rejection of the themes and spirit of older poetry. “No, I do not choose to write a poem on a lady's sparrow, like Catullus—or on a parrot, like Ovid—nor love-songs like Anacreon—nor even … like Homer—or the siege of Jerusalem—nor … as Shakespeare. What have these themes to do in America?”²¹ The new poetry of the West is insistently opposed to the feudal poetry of the East, i.e., Europe. The “petty environage and limited area” of European poets contrasts with the “cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness”²² open to the American. Whitman wants a poem “altogether our own, without a trace, or taste of Europe's soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit.”²³

English literature, in particular, seemed to Whitman inferior to others: “material, sensual, cold, anti-democratic” or “moody, melancholy,” with no first-class genius except Shakespeare.²⁴ Whitman's own favorite English authors—Shakespeare, Scott, Tennyson, Carlyle—“exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy.”²⁵ Shakespeare is “offensive to democracy,” he represents “incarnated, uncompromising feudalism, in literature.” “The democratic requirements are not only not fulfilled in the Shakespearian productions, but are insulted on every page.”²⁶ Tennyson supplies “the last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism.” He is “the poetic cream-skimmer of our age's melody, ennui and polish.” He contains “never one democratic page.”²⁷ Carlyle, though admired as a prophet and as “a perfectly honest intellect,” is “feudal at the core.”²⁸ A very early paper, “The Anti-Democratic Bearing of Scott's Novels,”²⁹ has no trouble in establishing the thesis of the title.

The wholesale condemnation of feudalism in literature includes dogmatic theology, aestheticism, and “culture.” Goethe seems to Whitman not only a courtier but also a cold aesthete who “operates upon the world” and whose view that “the artist or poet is to live in art or poetry alone apart from affairs, politics, facts, vulgar life, persons and things—seeking his ‘high ideal’” is enough to incapacitate him forever from “suiting America and the forthcoming years.”³⁰ Whitman has only contempt for Arnold. “He brings to the world what the world already has a surfeit of: is rich, hefted, lousy, reeking, with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis.”³¹ Whitman is no admirer of Dr. Johnson, “a sycophant of power and rank,” “a vile low nature.”³² Milton's Paradise Lost is “nonsense” and “offensive to modern science and intelligence.”³³ The only exceptions are Burns, in spite of his sentimental Jacobitism, and Dickens, a “truly democratic writer,” in spite of his satire on the United States.³⁴

But Whitman's break with European literature is by no means so clear-cut as these or similar quotations might suggest. He knew and loved precisely the authors he attacked most—Shakespeare, Scott, Tennyson, and Carlyle; and he admired Italian opera—hardly a democratic art in his sense. In Whitman we feel a nostalgia for the European past, most often for something dead and buried, as in “Song of the Exposition.”:

Pass'd, pass'd, for us, for ever pass'd,
that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate,
          phantom world …
Pass'd to its charnel vault
Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page,
And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme.

After the Civil War, moreover, when Whitman's high hopes were dashed and he saw too much of the corruption of the Gilded Age, he recognized the need of literary continuity. Americans “need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance.” He knows that “what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry.”³⁵ His nationalism becomes more tolerant; his concept of poetry becomes that of diverse national poetries, each representing its national spirit. Whitman appeals to Herder and Friedrich Schlegel.³⁶ Poetry is “Voices of the Nations in Song.” Folk poetry in this broad sense includes even the Indian epics, the Bible, Homer, Ossian (of whom Whitman must be the last important admirer), the Cid, the Arthurian romances, the Nibelungenlied, and the English and Scottish ballads.³⁷ Even this ideal is finally expanded to include all poetry as one poetry, one great tradition:

The whole earth's poets and poetry—en masse—the Oriental, the Greek, and what there is of Roman—the oldest myths—the interminable ballad-romances of the Middle Ages—the hymns and psalms of worship—the epics, plays, swarms of lyrics of the British Islands, or the Teutonic old or new—or modern French—or what there is in America, Bryant's, for instance, or Whittier's or Longfellow's—the verse of all tongues and ages, all forms, all subjects, from primitive times to our own day inclusive—really combine in one aggregate and electric globe or universe. All poetry becomes essentially, like the planetary globe itself, compact and orbic and whole.³⁸

As he himself recognized, Whitman was obviously not a historian or critic. He was mainly a manifesto writer: a defender of his own art and inspiration and a propagandist for a similar poetry of the future. The poet's role is conceived in the most grandiose fashion. He is to define his nation, give it “moral identity,”³⁹ help to unify it truly after the ordeal of the Civil War. Poetry “alone is to define the Union (namely, to give it artistic character, spirituality, dignity). What American humanity is most in danger of is an overwhelming prosperity, ‘business,’ worldliness, materialism: what is most lacking, East, West, North, South, is a fervid and glowing Nationality and patriotism.” A “class of loftiest poets” will fill this lack in the future. The danger is, however, that they may be voices crying in the wilderness: “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.”⁴⁰ “The best literature is always the result of something greater than itself—not the hero but the portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there must be transaction. Beyond the old masterpieces, the Iliad, the interminable Hindu epics, the Greek tragedies, even the Bible itself, range the immense facts that preceded them, their sine qua non—the veritable poems and masterpieces of which, grand as they are, the word-statements are but shreds and cartoons.”⁴¹ This view of literature as a dimmer mirror of reality, as a passive recorder of the past (which may have been fortified by Whitman's interest in Taine)⁴² is inconsistent with his usual mood of ascribing to the poet a creative function. The poets are not only “divine mediums” through whom “come spirits and materials to all the people, men and women,”⁴³ but “a few first-class poets, philosophs, and authors, have substantially settled and given status to the entire religion, education, law, sociology, etc. of the hitherto civilized world.” They must also “stamp, and more than ever stamp, the interior and real democratic construction of this American continent, today, and days to come.”⁴⁴ The means to achieve this Whitman envisages to be largely the creation of “an American stock personality,”⁴⁵ or of “national, original archetypes.”⁴⁶ He appeals to the experience of the past: “In all ages, all lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women, as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable.” Whitman lists, as instances, Achilles, Ulysses, Prometheus, Hercules, Aeneas, Plutarch's heroes, the Merlin of Celtic bards, the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen, Roland and Oliver, and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Richard II, Lear, Marc Antony, and the modern Faust. He does not forget female characters: Cleopatra, Penelope, the portraits of Brunhilde and Chriemhilde; Oriana, Una, the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeannie and Effie Deans.⁴⁷ As in France and in Russia at the time, all hopes for literature are centered on the social power of the fictional hero held up as a model for human behavior. With his “personalism,” his desire to create one representative American man who is himself, his nation, and humanity, Whitman gives this view a special formulation.

In an unguarded moment Whitman said that he “sometimes thinks the Leaves is only a language experiment.”⁴⁸ But he surely was mistaken; his experimenting is an extension to language of his desire for all-inclusiveness, for an equalitarianism, for freedom from restraints and taboos. “An American Primer,” lecture notes which seem to date from 1856, is a celebration of the English language as spoken in America. “Words follow character, nativity, independence, individuality”: words have beauty and texture. Whitman would like to have slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, and prostitutes collected: he would like to get rid of names like St. Lawrence or St. Louis in order to substitute the original Indian names. He likes new words which “would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.”⁴⁹ A much later small piece on “Slang in America” defends slang as the “lawless, germinal element, below all words and sentences, and behind all poetry,” and as “an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express it illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems.”⁵⁰ But what Whitman wants is not metaphor but local color and freedom. Throughout his writings he rejects all metaphors, all ornamentation, and all similes and wants a style of perfectly, transparent clearness, “a plate-glassy style.”⁵¹ Language must be free as poetry must be free. “A great poet is followed by laws—they conform to him.”⁵² Freedom is spontaneity, instinct. “To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance 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.”⁵³

Freedom is also metrical freedom. “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.”⁵⁴ “Rhyme” must mean “verse” here, since Whitman rejects rhyme violently as obsolete and feels it must be restricted to comic effects. He thinks that the “time has arrived to break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry.”⁵⁵ His own free verse, which is often that of dipodic versets modeled on the English Bible or Ossian, drops sometimes into prose. Its rhythms overflow into the professed prose writings, which are often a string of rhapsodic, incoherent, long-breathed exclamations and enumerations, far from the coveted ideal of clarity. Whitman himself seems to have wavered on this point; he sometimes defended a measure of obscurity, “vista, music, half-tints.”⁵⁶ But his main rhetorical device in both his poetry and his prose is metonymy: examples, specimens of the elements comprising democratic inclusiveness,⁵⁷ an enormous spreadout of names—of insects, birds, animals, diseases, places, countries, parts of the body, and so on. It all serves to assert a suffused pantheism in which the Platonic ladder has been pulled down. Body and soul, spirit and flesh, heterosexual “amativeness” and homosexual “adhesiveness,” nature worship and the glorification of machine technology are elaborately confounded. Poetry melts into religion and philosophy, into life, and into nature.

Notes

1. Cf. G. W. Allen, “Walt Whitman and Jules Michelet,” Etudes Anglaises, 1 (1937), 230-37; and Esther Shephard, Walt Whitman's Pose (New York, 1938), on George Sand.

2. W, 5, 189-90, 201.

3. Birds of Passage: “With Antecedents,” W, 1, 294.

4. Rivulets of Prose, ed. C. Wells and A. F. Goldsmith (New York, 1928), p. 223.

5. Second ed. of Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, August 1856), p. 346.

6. W, 5, 26, 37-8.

7. W, 5, 8. J. T. Trowbridge, My Own Story (Boston, 1903), p. 367.

8. W, 5, 266-68. Uncollected Poetry and Prose, ed. E. Holloway (2 vols. Garden City, N.Y., 1921), 2, 53.

9. W, 5, 270. A letter (25 February 1887) in William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (London, 1896), p. 76.

10. Letter by W. J. O'Connor to R. M. Bucke, 23 February 1883, in R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman (Philadelphia, 1883), p. 82. Clifton J. Furness, Walt Whitman's Workshop (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), p. 236. Cf. poem “The Base of All Metaphysic”: “And now gentlemen …,” p. 149.

11. Advertisement, p. 4 (John Burrough's “Note”) in As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Washington, 1872.

12. W, 9, 172.

13. W, 4, 311 n.

14. W, 9, 170, 184; 4, 322 n.

15. W, 9, 181-82.

16. “Roaming in Thought over the Universe,” W, 2, 35.

17. See the bibliography, above.

18. W, 5, 134. Brown, p. 337.

19. W, 5, 201. Brown p. 343.

20. W, 9, 21; 3, 45.

21. W, 9, 11-12.

22. W, 3, 49.

23. W, 4, 270.

24. W, 5, 276-77.

25. W, 5, 209.

26. W, 5, 275-76.

27. W, 5, 229; 6, 295; 5, 210.

28. W, 4, 323-24.

29. The Gathering of the Forces (26 April 1847), 2, 264.

30. W, 9, 112.

31. H. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (New York, 1914), 3, 400.

32. The Gathering of the Forces (7 December 1846), 2, 282-83.

33. W, 9, 97.

34. W, 6, 137, “Boz and Democracy” (1842), in Rivulets of Prose, p. 23.

35. W, 5, 212-13.

36. W, 3, 66; 9, 120-21.

37. W, 6, 102, 104 ff., 124 etc. On Ossian, see W, 9, 94-95, 188.

38. W, 6, 183. Cf. poem “Old Chants,” “An ancient song …”

39. W, 5, 58.

40. W, 5, 274.

41. W, 6, 102.

42. Cf. Roger Asselineau, “Un inédit de Walt Whitman; ‘Taine's History of English Literature,’” Etudes Anglaises, 10 (1957) 128-38. Horace Traubel reports (With Walt Whitman in Camden, 21 January to 7 April 1889, ed. Scully Bradley, Philadelphia, 1953, p. 109) that Whitman called Taine's History of English Literature “one of the greatest books of our time: most genuine, most subtle, most profound.”

43. W, 9, 127.

44. W, 5, 56-57.

45. W, 5, 60.

46. W, 5, 116.

47. W, 5, 95-96 n.

48. The American Primer, ed. H. Traubel (Boston, 1914), p. viii.

49. Ibid., pp. 4, 8, 34. For date, see p. 11, where Whitman speaks of 80 years since the Declaration of Independence.

50. W, 6, 149-50.

51. W, 9, 33-34.

52. W, 9, 39.

53. Brown, p. 342.

54. Ibid., p. 340.

55. W, 5, 271-72.

56. W, 5, 202.

57. See D. S. Mirsky, “Walt Whitman: Poet of American Democracy,” in Critics Group Dialectics, No. 1, New York, 1937.

Bibliography

On Whitman: I quote from the Complete Writings, ed. R. M. Bucke, T. B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel (10 vols. New York, 1902), as W.

The Gathering of the Forces, ed. C. Rogers and J. Black, 2 vols. New York, 1920.

I quote the preface to the 1st edition of Leaves of Grass (not in W) from Clarence A. Brown, ed., The Achievement of American Criticism (New York, 1956), pp. 336-51, as Brown.

The literature is surveyed in Willard Thorp's chapter in Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York, 1956), pp. 271-318.

There is an excellent chapter on Whitman in Norman Foerster, American Criticism, Boston, 1928. Maurice O. Johnson, “Walt Whitman as a Critic of Literature,” University of Nebraska Studies in Languages, Literature, and Criticism, 16, 73 pp., is useful. Roger Asselineau, “A Poet's Dilemma: Walt Whitman's Attitude to Literary History and Literary Criticism,” in Leon Edel, ed., Literary History and Literary Criticism: Acta of the Ninth Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literature (New York, 1965), pp. 50-61.

Much can be learned of the many general treatments of Whitman's philosophy, language, reading, etc. in monographs, e.g. the chapter in F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance, New York, 1941; Newton Arvin, Whitman, New York, 1938; Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook, Chicago, 1946; Roger Asselineau, L'Evolution de Walt Whitman, Paris, 1953; English trans., 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1960-62.

On German sources see, besides Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America, Madison, Wisc., 1957. Mody C. Boatright, “Whitman and Hegel,” University of Texas Studies in English, 9 (1929), 134-50. W. B. Fulghum, “Whitman's Debt to Joseph Gostwick,” American Literature, 12 (1941), 491-96. Olive W. Parsons, “Whitman the Non-Hegelian,” PMLA, 58 (1943), 1073-93. Sister Mary Eleanor, “Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany as a Source of Whitman's Knowledge of German Philosophy,” Modern Language Notes, 61 (1946), 381-88.