Complete Prose Works
more to avoid a mark'd hiatus in it, than to entirely fulfil it, I
end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on death,
immortality, and a free entrance into the spiritual world. In those
thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the mighty
theme, from the point of view necessitated by my foregoing poems, and
by modern science. In them I also seek to set the key-stone to my
democracy's enduring arch. I recollate them now, for the press, in
order to partially occupy and offset days of strange sickness, and the
heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life; and I fondly please
myself with the notion of leaving that cluster to you, O unknown reader
of the future, as "something to remember me by," more especially than
all else. Written in former days of perfect health, little did I think
the pieces had the purport that now, under present circumstances, opens
to me.
[As I write these lines, May 31, 1875, it is again early summer,--again
my birth-day--now my fifty-sixth. Amid the outside beauty and freshness,
the sunlight and verdure of the delightful season, O how different the
moral atmosphere amid which I now revise this Volume, from the jocund
influence surrounding the growth and advent of "Leaves of Grass." I
occupy myself, arranging these pages for publication, still envelopt
in thoughts of the death two years since of my dear Mother, the most
perfect and magnetic character, the rarest combination of practical,
moral and spiritual, and the least selfish, of all and any I have ever
known--and by me O so much the most deeply loved--and also under the
physical affliction of a tedious attack of paralysis, obstinately
lingering and keeping its hold upon me, and quite suspending all bodily
activity and comfort.]
Under these influences, therefore, I still feel to keep "Passage to
India" for last words even to this centennial dithyramb. Not as, in
antiquity, at highest festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of death
was sent on exhibition to the revelers, for zest and shadow to the
occasion's joy and light--but as the marble statue of the normal Greeks
at Elis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and perfect young
man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted torch--emblem of rest and
aspiration after action--of crown and point which all lives and poems
should steadily have reference to, namely, the justified and noble
termination of our identity, this grade of it, and outlet-preparation to
another grade.
[34] Namely, a character, making most of common and normal elements, to
the superstructure of which not only the precious accumulations of the
learning and experiences of the Old World, and the settled social and
municipal necessities and current requirements, so long a-building,
shall still faithfully contribute, but which at its foundations and
carried up thence, and receiving its impetus from the democratic spirit,
and accepting its gauge in all departments from the democratic formulas,
shall again directly be vitalized by the perennial influences of Nature
at first hand, and the old heroic stamina of Nature, the strong air
of prairie and mountain, the dash of the briny sea, the primary
antiseptics--of the passions, in all their fullest heat and potency,
of courage, rankness, amativeness, and of immense pride. Not to lose at
all, therefore, the benefits of artificial progress and civilization,
but to re-occupy for Western tenancy the oldest though ever-fresh
fields, and reap from them the savage and sane nourishment indispensable
to a hardy nation, and the absence of which, threatening to become worse
and worse, is the most serious lack and defect to-day of our New World
literature.
Not but what the brawn of "Leaves of Grass" is, I hope, thoroughly
spiritualized everywhere, for final estimate, but, from the very
subjects, the direct effect is a sense of the life, as it should be, of
flesh and blood, and physical urge, and animalism. While there are other
themes, and plenty of abstract thoughts and poems in the volume--while
I have put in it passing and rapid but actual glimpses of the great
struggle between the nation and the slave-power, (1861-'65,) as the
fierce and bloody panorama of that contest unroll'd itself: while the
whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years' war, which, as I
was in the midst of it, becomes, in "Drum-Taps," pivotal to the rest
entire--and here and there, before and afterward, not a few episodes
and speculations--_that_--namely, to make a type-portrait for living,
active, worldly, healthy personality, objective as well as subjective,
joyful and potent, and modern and free, distinctively for the use of
the United States, male and female, through the long future--has been,
I say, my general object. (Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied
songs, and all my writings, both volumes, only ring changes in some
sort, on the ejaculation, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real,
is a human being, himself or herself.)
Though from no definite plan at the time, I see now that I have
unconsciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions, to
express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United States,
the prevailing tendency and events of the Nineteenth century, and
largely the spirit of the whole current world, my time; for I feel that
I have partaken of that spirit, as I have been deeply interested in
all those events, the closing of long-stretch'd eras and ages, and,
illustrated in the history of the United States, the opening of larger
ones. (The death of President Lincoln, for instance, fitly, historically
closes, in the civilization of feudalism, many old influences--drops on
them, suddenly, a vast, gloomy, as it were, separating curtain.)
Since I have been ill, (1873-'74-'75,) mostly without serious pain, and
with plenty of time and frequent inclination to judge my poems,
(never composed with eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any
pecuniary profit,) I have felt temporary depression more than once, for
fear that in "Leaves of Grass" the _moral_ parts were not sufficiently
pronounced. But in my clearest and calmest moods I have realized that
as those "Leaves," all and several, surely prepare the way for, and
necessitate morals, and are adjusted to them, just the same as Nature
does and is, they are what, consistently with my plan, they must and
probably should be. (In a certain sense, while the Moral is the purport
and last intelligence of all Nature, there is absolutely nothing of
the moral in the works, or laws, or shows of Nature. Those only lead
inevitably to it--begin and necessitate it.)
Then I meant "Leaves of Grass," as publish'd, to be the Poem of average
Identity, (of _yours_, whoever you are, now reading these lines.) A man
is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or explorer, nor even
in science, or in his intellectual or artistic capacity, or exemplar
in some vast benevolence. To the highest democratic view, man is most
acceptable in living well the practical life and lot which happens
to him as ordinary farmer, sea-farer, mechanic, clerk, laborer, or
driver--upon and from which position as a central basis or pedestal,
while performing its labors, and his duties as citizen, son, husband,
father and employ'd person, he preserves his physique, ascends,
developing, radiating himself in other regions--and especially where
and when, (greatest of all, and nobler than the proudest mere genius or
magnate in any field,) he fully realizes the conscience, the spiritual,
the divine faculty, cultivated well, exemplified in all his deeds and
words, through life, uncompromising to the end--a flight loftier
than any of Homer's or Shakspere's--broader than all poems and
bibles--namely, Nature's own, and in the midst of it, Yourself, your own
Identity, body and soul. (All serves, helps--but in the centre of all,
absorbing all, giving, for your purpose, the only meaning and vitality
to all, master or mistress of all, under the law, stands Yourself.)
To sing the Song of that law of average Identity, and of Yourself,
consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a main intention
of those "Leaves."
Something more may be added--for, while I am about it, I would make a
full confession. I also sent out "Leaves of Grass" to arouse and set
flowing in men's and women's hearts, young and old, endless streams of
living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now
and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more or less
down underneath in most human souls)--this never-satisfied appetite
for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy--this universal
democratic comradeship-this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of
adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America--I have given in that book,
undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides, important
as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the
special meaning of the "Calamus" cluster of "Leaves of Grass," (and
more or less running through the book, and cropping out in "Drum-Taps,")
mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by
a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane
affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and
south, east and west--it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly
and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, (I
cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together,
intercalated, anneal'd into a living union.
Then, for enclosing clue of all, it is imperatively and ever to be
borne in mind that "Leaves of Grass" entire is not to be construed as an
intellectual or scholastic effort or poem mainly, but more as a radical
utterance out of the Emotions and the Physique--an utterance adjusted
to, perhaps born of, Democracy and the Modern--in its very nature
regardless of the old conventions, and, under the great laws, following
only its own impulses.
POETRY TO-DAY IN AMERICA
SHAKSPERE--THE FUTURE
Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born
poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As
the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or
the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches
and foliage, here waits _sine qua non_ at last. The stamp of entire and
finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the
rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what it stands for in the
blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do.
And though no _esthetik_ worthy the present condition or future
certainties of the New World seems to have been outlined in men's minds,
or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that
until the United States have just such definite and native expressers
in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical,
wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing
and predominant, will constitute but a more and more expanded and
well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul.
Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible
words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the
land this blank is plain; a barren void exists. For the meanings and
maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world
of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more
determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of
democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not
establish'd for the States, to form their only permanent tie and hold,
the first-named would be of little avail.