Complete Prose Works
Union, relentless, permanently comprising all, and over all, and in that
never yielding an inch: then 3d. Do we not, amid a general malaria of
fogs and vapors, our day, unmistakably see two pillars of promise, with
grandest, indestructible indications--one, that the morbid facts of
American politics and society everywhere are but passing incidents and
flanges of our unbounded impetus of growth? weeds, annuals, of the rank,
rich soil--not central, enduring, perennial things? The other, that all
the hitherto experience of the States, their first century, has been
but preparation, adolescence--and that this Union is only now and
henceforth, (_i.e._, since the secession war,) to enter on its full
democratic career?
Of the whole, poems and prose, (not attending at all to chronological
order, and with original dates and passing allusions in the heat and
impression of the hour, left shuffled in, and undisturb'd,) the chants
of "Leaves of Grass," my former volume, yet serve as the indispensable
deep soil, or basis, out of which, and out of which only, could come the
roots and stems more definitely indicated by these later pages. (While
that volume radiates physiology alone, the present one, though of the
like origin in the main, more palpably doubtless shows the pathology
which was pretty sure to come in time from the other.)
In that former and main volume, composed in the flush of my health and
strength, from the age of 30 to 50 years, I dwelt on birth and life,
clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give
them positive place, identity--saturating them with that vehemence
of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind
of still-to-be-form'd America from the accumulated folds, the
superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic
authorities of the Asiatic and European past--my enclosing purport being
to express, above all artificial regulation and aid, the eternal bodily
composite, cumulative, natural character of one's self.[34]
Estimating the American Union as so far, and for some time to come, in
its yet formative condition, I bequeath poems and essays as nutriment
and influences to help truly assimilate and harden, and especially to
furnish something toward what the States most need of all, and which
seems to me yet quite unsupplied in literature, namely, to show them, or
begin to show them, themselves distinctively, and what they are for.
For though perhaps the main points of all ages and nations are points of
resemblance, and, even while granting evolution, are substantially the
same, there are some vital things in which this Republic, as to its
individualities, and as a compacted Nation, is to specially stand forth,
and culminate modern humanity. And these are the very things it least
morally and mentally knows--(though, curiously enough, it is at the same
time faithfully acting upon them.)
I count with such absolute certainty on the great future of the United
States--different from, though founded on, the past--that I have always
invoked that future, and surrounded myself with it, before or while
singing my songs. (As ever, all tends to followings--America, too, is a
prophecy. What, even of the best and most successful, would be justified
by itself alone? by the present, or the material ostent alone? Of men or
States, few realize how much they live in the future. That, rising
like pinnacles, gives its main significance to all You and I are doing
to-day. Without it, there were little meaning in lands or poems--little
purport in human lives. All ages, all Nations and States, have been such
prophecies. But where any former ones with prophecy so broad, so clear,
as our times, our lands--as those of the West?)
Without being a scientist, I have thoroughly adopted the conclusions
of the great savants and experimentalists of our time, and of the last
hundred years, and they have interiorly tinged the chyle of all my
verse, for purposes beyond. Following the modern spirit, the real poems
of the present, ever solidifying and expanding into the future, must
vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which scientism has
invested man and the universe, (all that is called creation) and
must henceforth launch humanity into new orbits, consonant, with that
vastness, splendor, and reality, (unknown to the old poems,) like new
systems of orbs, balanced upon themselves, revolving in limitless space,
more subtle than the stars. Poetry, so largely hitherto and even at
present wedded to children's tales, and to mere amorousness, upholstery
and superficial rhyme, will have to accept, and, while not denying the
past, nor the themes of the past, will be revivified by this tremendous
innovation, the kosmic spirit, which must henceforth, in my opinion,
be the background and underlying impetus, more or less visible, of all
first-class songs.
Only, (for me, at any rate, in all my prose and poetry,) joyfully
accepting modern science, and loyally following it without the slightest
hesitation, there remains ever recognized still a higher flight, a
higher fact, the eternal soul of man, (of all else too,) the spiritual,
the religious--which it is to be the greatest office of scientism, in my
opinion, and of future poetry also, to free from fables, crudities and
superstitions, and launch forth in renew'd faith and scope a hundred
fold. To me, the worlds of religiousness, of the conception of the
divine, and of the ideal, though mainly latent, are just as absolute in
humanity and the universe as the world of chemistry, or anything in the
objective worlds. To me
The prophet and the bard,
Shall yet maintain themselves--in higher circles yet,
Shall mediate to the modern, to democracy--interpret yet to them,
God and eidólons.
To me, the crown of savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way for
a more splendid theology, and for ampler and diviner songs. No year, nor
even century, will settle this. There is a phase of the real, lurking
behind the real, which it is all for. There is also in the intellect of
man, in time, far in prospective recesses, a judgment, a last appellate
court, which will settle it.
In certain parts in these flights, or attempting to depict or suggest
them, I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity, in either of
my two volumes-because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim
escapes and outlets-must possess a certain fluid, aerial character,
akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination,--but
indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address'd to
the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista,
music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be
architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best
effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and
the impalpable odor.
Finally, as I have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a
revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify the points
of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, altogether in my own way.
Thus my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the
analogy of them. Within my time the United States have emerged from
nebulous vagueness and suspense, to full orbic, (though varied,)
decision--have done the deeds and achiev'd the triumphs of half a score
of centuries--and are henceforth to enter upon their real history the
way being now, (_i.e._ since the result of the secession war,) clear'd
of death-threatening impedimenta, and the free areas around and ahead
of us assured and certain, which were not so before--(the past century
being but preparations, trial voyages and experiments of the ship,
before her starting out upon deep water.)
In estimating my volumes, the world's current times and deeds, and their
spirit, must be first profoundly estimated. Out of the hundred years
just ending, (1776-1876,) with their genesis of inevitable wilful
events, and new experiments and introductions, and many unprecedented
things of war and peace, (to be realized better, perhaps only realized,
at the remove of a century hence;) out of that stretch of time,
and especially out of the immediately preceding twenty-five years,
(1850-'75,) with all their rapid changes, innovations, and audacious
movements-and bearing their own inevitable wilful birth-marks--the
experiments of my poems too have found genesis.
W. W.
Notes:
[33] PASSAGE TO INDIA.--As in some ancient legend-play, to close the
plot and the hero's career, there is a farewell gathering on ship's deck
and on shore, a loosing of hawsers and ties, a spreading of sails to
the wind--a starting out on unknown seas, to fetch up no one knows
whither--to return no more--and the curtain falls, and there is the end
of it--so I have reserv'd that poem, with its cluster, to finish and
explain much that, without them, would not be explain'd, and to take
leave, and escape for good, from all that has preceded them. (Then
probably "Passage to India," and its cluster, are but freer vent and
fuller expression to what, from the first, and so on throughout, more
or less lurks in my writings, underneath every page, every line,
everywhere.)
I am not sure but the last inclosing sublimation of race or poem is,
what it thinks of death. After the rest has been comprehended and said,
even the grandest--after those contributions to mightiest nationality,
or to sweetest song, or to the best personalism, male or female, have
been glean'd from the rich and varied themes of tangible life, and
have been fully accepted and sung, and the pervading fact of visible
existence, with the duty it devolves, is rounded and apparently
completed, it still remains to be really completed by suffusing through
the whole and several, that other pervading invisible fact, so large a
part, (is it not the largest part?) of life here, combining the rest,
and furnishing, for person or State, the only permanent and unitary
meaning to all, even the meanest life, consistently with the dignity of
the universe, in Time. As from the eligibility to this thought, and the
cheerful conquest of this fact, flash forth the first distinctive
proofs of the soul, so to me, (extending it only a little further,) the
ultimate Democratic purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones, are to
concentrate here, and as fixed stars, radiate hence. For, in my opinion,
it is no less than this idea of immortality, above all other ideas,
that is to enter into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to
democracy in the New World.
It was originally my intention, after chanting in "Leaves of Grass"
the songs of the body and existence, to then compose a further, equally
needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation
which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul govern absolutely
at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the theme of my first
chants, to shift the slides, and exhibit the problem and paradox of the
same ardent and fully appointed personality entering the sphere of
the resistless gravitation of spiritual law, and with cheerful face
estimating death, not at all as the cessation, but as somehow what
I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the greatest part of
existence, and something that life is at least as much for, as it is for
itself. But the full construction of such a work is beyond my powers,
and must remain for some bard in the future. The physical and the
sensuous, in themselves or in their immediate continuations, retain
holds upon me which I think are never entirely releas'd; and those holds
I have not only not denied, but hardly wish'd to weaken.
Meanwhile, not entirely to give the go-by to my original plan, and far