Complete Prose Works
the leading parts, for many a century to come. In them history and
humanity seem to seek to culminate. Our broad areas are even now the
busy theatre of plots, passions, interests, and suspended problems,
compared to which the intrigues of the past of Europe, the wars of
dynasties, the scope of kings and kingdoms, and even the development of
peoples, as hitherto, exhibit scales of measurement comparatively narrow
and trivial. And on these areas of ours, as on a stage, sooner or later,
something like an _eclairissement_ of all the past civilization of
Europe and Asia is probably to be evolved.
The leading parts. Not to be acted, emulated here, by us again, that
role till now foremost in history--not to become a conqueror nation,
or to achieve the glory of mere military, or diplomatic, or commercial
superiority--but to become the grand producing land of nobler men and
women--of copious races, cheerful, healthy, tolerant, free--to become
the most friendly nation, (the United States indeed)--the modern
composite nation, form'd from all, with room for all, welcoming all
immigrants--accepting the work of our own interior development, as the
work fitly filling ages and ages to come;--the leading nation of peace,
but neither ignorant nor incapable of being the leading nation of
war;--not the man's nation only, but the woman's nation--a land of
splendid mothers, daughters, sisters, wives.
Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a vast
seething mass of _materials_, ampler, better, (worse also,) than
previously known--eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning
stage, and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future,
the nation of the body and the soul,[32]--no limit here to land, help,
opportunities, mines, products, demands, supplies, etc.;--with (I think)
our political organization, National, State, and Municipal, permanently
establish'd, as far ahead as we can calculate--but, so far, no social,
literary, religious, or esthetic organizations, consistent with our
politics, or becoming to us--which organizations can only come, in time,
through great democratic ideas, religion--through science, which now,
like a new sunrise, ascending, begins to illuminate all--and through our
own begotten poets and literatuses. (The moral of a late well-written
book on civilization seems to be that the only real foundation-walls and
bases--and also _sine qua non_ afterward--of true and full civilization,
is the eligibility and certainty of boundless products for feeding,
clothing, sheltering everybody--perennial fountains of physical
and domestic comfort, with intercommunication, and with civil and
ecclesiastical freedom--and that then the esthetic and mental business
will take care of itself. Well, the United States have establish'd this
basis, and upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity,
rivaling those of Nature; and have now to proceed to build an
edifice upon it. I say this edifice is only to be fitly built by new
literatures, especially the poetic. I say a modern image-making creation
is indispensable to fuse and express the modern political and scientific
creations--and then the trinity will be complete.)
When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, and
continued turning over that plan, and shifting it in my mind through
many years, (from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five,) experimenting
much, and writing and abandoning much, one deep purpose underlay the
others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since--and that has
been the religious purpose. Amid many changes, and a formulation taking
far different shape from what I at first supposed, this basic purpose
has never been departed from in the composition of my verses. Not of
course to exhibit itself in the old ways, as in writing hymns or psalms
with an eye to the church-pew, or to express conventional pietism, or
the sickly yearnings of devotees, but in new ways, and aiming at the
widest sub-bases and inclusions of humanity, and tallying the fresh air
of sea and land. I will see, (said I to myself,) whether there is not,
for my purposes as poet, a religion, and a sound religious germenancy
in the average human race, at least in their modern development in the
United States, and in the hardy common fiber and native yearnings and
elements, deeper and larger, and affording more profitable returns, than
all mere sects or churches--as boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature
itself--a germenancy that has too long been unencouraged, unsung, almost
unknown. With science, the old theology of the East, long in its dotage,
begins evidently to die and disappear. But (to my mind) science--and
may-be such will prove its principal service--as evidently prepares
the way for One indescribably grander--Time's young but perfect
offspring--the new theology--heir of the West--lusty and loving, and
wondrous beautiful. For America, and for today, just the same as any
day, the supreme and final science is the science of God--what we call
science being only its minister--as Democracy is, or shall be also. And
a poet of America (I said) must fill himself with such thoughts, and
chant his best out of them. And as those were the convictions and aims,
for good or bad, of "Leaves of Grass," they are no less the intention
of this volume. As there can be, in my opinion, no sane and complete
personality, nor any grand and electric nationality, without the stock
element of religion imbuing all the other elements, (like heat in
chemistry, invisible itself, but the life of all visible life,) so there
can be no poetry worthy the name without that element behind all. The
time has certainly come to begin to discharge the idea of religion,
in the United States, from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and
churches and church-going, and assign it to that general position,
chiefest, most indispensable, most exhilarating, to which the others
are to be adjusted, inside of all human character, and education, and
affairs. The people, especially the young men and women of America,
must begin to learn that religion, (like poetry,) is something far, far
different from what they supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the
power and perpetuity of the New World to be consign'd any longer to the
churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant--Saint this, or Saint
that. It must be consign'd henceforth to democracy _en masse_, and to
literature. It must enter into the poems of the nation. It must make the
nation.
The Four Years' War is over--and in the peaceful, strong, exciting,
fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is
hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of
sentries, the prisons, the hospitals--(ah! the hospitals!)--all have
passed away--all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty
generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the
war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of
hatred, conflict, death. So let It be obliterated. I say the life of the
present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all,
south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even if only in
imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant--to rouse
them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are
even now playing--to the thought of their great future, and the attitude
conform'd to it--especially their great esthetic, moral, scientific
future, (of which their vulgar material and political present is but
as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra,) these, as
hitherto, are still, for me, among my hopes, ambitions.
"Leaves of Grass," already publish'd, is, in its intentions, the song of
a great composite _democratic individual_, male or female. And following
on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my mind to
run through the chants of this volume, (if ever completed,) the
thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable,
unprecedented, vast, composite, electric _democratic nationality_.
Purposing, then, to still fill out, from time to time through years to
come, the following volume, (unless prevented,) I conclude this
preface to the first instalment of it, pencil'd in the open air, on my
fifty-third birth-day, by wafting to you, dear reader, whoever you are,
(from amid the fresh scent of the grass, the pleasant coolness of the
forenoon breeze, the lights and shades of tree-boughs silently dappling
and playing around me, and the notes of the cat-bird for undertone and
accompaniment,) my true good-will and love. W. W. _Washington, D. C.,
May_ 31, 1872.
Note:
[32] The problems of the achievements of this crowning stage through
future first-class National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others--of
creating in literature an _imaginative_ New World, the correspondent and
counterpart of the current Scientific and Political New Worlds,--and the
perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for our children, if
not in our own day,) of delivering America, and, indeed, all Christian
lands everywhere, from the thin moribund and watery, but appallingly
extensive nuisance of conventional poetry--by putting something really
alive and substantial in its place--I have undertaken to grapple with,
and argue, in the preceding "Democratic Vistas."
PREFACE, 1876 _To the two-volume Centennial Edition of_ Leaves of Grass
_and_ Two Rivulets.
At the eleventh hour, under grave illness, I gather up the pieces of
prose and poetry left over since publishing, a while since, my first and
main volume, "Leaves or Grass"--pieces, here, some new, some old--nearly
all of them (sombre as many are, making this almost death's book)
composed in by-gone atmospheres of perfect health--and preceded by
the freshest collection, the little "Two Rivulets," now send them
out, embodied in the present melange, partly as my contribution and
outpouring to celebrate, in some sort, the feature of the time, the
first centennial of our New World nationality--and then as chyle and
nutriment to that moral, indissoluble union, equally representing all,
and the mother of many coming centennials.
And e'en for flush and proof of our America--for reminder, just as much,
or more, in moods of towering pride and joy, I keep my special chants of
death and immortality[33] to stamp the coloring-finish of all, present
and past. For terminus and temperer to all, they were originally
written; and that shall be their office at the last.
For some reason--not explainable or definite to my own mind, yet
secretly pleasing and satisfactory to it--I have not hesitated to
embody in, and run through the volume, two altogether distinct veins,
or strata--politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought
of immortality. Thus, too, the prose and poetic, the dual forms of the
present book. The volume, therefore, after its minor episodes, probably
divides into these two, at first sight far diverse, veins of topic and
treatment. Three points, in especial, have become very dear to me,
and all through I seek to make them again and again, in many forms and
repetitions, as will be seen: 1. That the true growth-characteristics
of the democracy of the New World are henceforth to radiate in superior
literary, artistic and religious expressions, far more than in its
republican forms, universal suffrage, and frequent elections, (though
these are unspeakably important.) 2. That the vital political mission of
the United States is, to practically solve and settle the problem of
two sets of rights--the fusion, thorough compatibility and junction
of individual State prerogatives, with the indispensable necessity
of centrality and Oneness--the national identity power--the sovereign