POEMS BY WALT WHITMAN by WALT WHITMAN SELECTED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI A NEW EDITION "Or si sa il nome, o per tristo o per buono, E si sa pure al mondo ch'io ci sono." --MICHELANGELO. "That Angels are human forms, or men, I have seen a thousand times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms of man's body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and upon which, as on its base, it rests." --SWEDENBORG. "Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate voice--that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means." --CARLYLE. "Les efforts de vos ennemis contre vous, leurs cris, leur rage impuissante, et leurs petits succes, ne doivent pas vous effrayer; ce ne sont que des egratignures sur les epaules d'Hercule." --ROBESPIERRE. TO WILLIAM BELL SCOTT. DEAR SCOTT,--Among various gifts which I have received from you, tangible and intangible, was a copy of the original quarto edition of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_, which you presented to me soon after its first appearance in 1855. At a time when few people on this side of the Atlantic had looked into the book, and still fewer had found in it anything save matter for ridicule, you had appraised it, and seen that its value was real and great. A true poet and a strong thinker like yourself was indeed likely to see that. I read the book eagerly, and perceived that its substantiality and power were still ahead of any eulogium with which it might have come commended to me--and, in fact, ahead of most attempts that could be made at verbal definition of them. Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend Swinburne, I found with much satisfaction that he also was an ardent (not of course a _blind_) admirer of Whitman. Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own works and his exacting acuteness as a critic might have seemed likely to carry him away from Whitman in sympathy at least, if not in actual latitude of perception. Those who find the American poet "utterly formless," "intolerably rough and floundering," "destitute of the A B C of art," and the like, might not unprofitably ponder this very different estimate of him by the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_. May we hope that now, twelve years after the first appearance of _Leaves of Grass_, the English reading public may be prepared for a selection of Whitman's poems, and soon hereafter for a complete edition of them? I trust this may prove to be the case. At any rate, it has been a great gratification to me to be concerned in the experiment; and this is enhanced by my being enabled to associate with it your name, as that of an early and well-qualified appreciator of Whitman, and no less as that of a dear friend. Yours affectionately, W. M. ROSSETTI. _October_ 1867. CONTENTS. PREFATORY NOTICE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF LEAVES OF GRASS CHANTS DEMOCRATIC: STARTING FROM PAUMANOK AMERICAN FEUILLAGE THE PAST-PRESENT YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED FLUX TO WORKING MEN SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE ANTECEDENTS SALUT AU MONDE A BROADWAY PAGEANT OLD IRELAND BOSTON TOWN FRANCE, THE EIGHTEENTH YEAR OF THESE STATES EUROPE, THE SEVENTY-SECOND AND SEVENTY-THIRD YEARS OF THESE STATES TO A FOILED REVOLTER OR REVOLTRESS DRUM TAPS: MANHATTAN ARMING 1861 THE UPRISING BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS! SONG OF THE BANNER AT DAYBREAK THE BIVOUAC'S FLAME BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE CITY OF SHIPS VIGIL ON THE FIELD THE FLAG THE WOUNDED A SIGHT IN CAMP A GRAVE THE DRESSER A LETTER FROM CAMP WAR DREAMS THE VETERAN'S VISION O TAN-FACED PRAIRIE BOY MANHATTAN FACES OVER THE CARNAGE THE MOTHER OF ALL CAMPS OF GREEN DIRGE FOR TWO VETERANS SURVIVORS HYMN OF DEAD SOLDIERS SPIRIT WHOSE WORK IS DONE RECONCILIATION AFTER THE WAR WALT WHITMAN: ASSIMILATIONS A WORD OUT OF THE SEA CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY NIGHT AND DEATH ELEMENTAL DRIFTS WONDERS MIRACLES VISAGES THE DARK SIDE MUSIC WHEREFORE? QUESTIONABLE SONG AT SUNSET LONGINGS FOR HOME APPEARANCES THE FRIEND MEETING AGAIN A DREAM PARTING FRIENDS TO A STRANGER OTHER LANDS ENVY THE CITY OF FRIENDS OUT OF THE CROWD AMONG THE MULTITUDE LEAVES OF GRASS: PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S FUNERAL HYMN O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! (FOR THE DEATH OF LINCOLN) PIONEERS! O PIONEERS TO THE SAYERS OF WORDS VOICES WHOSOEVER BEGINNERS TO A PUPIL LINKS THE WATERS TO THE STATES TEARS A SHIP GREATNESSES THE POET BURIAL THIS COMPOST DESPAIRING CRIES THE CITY DEAD-HOUSE TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE UNNAMED LANDS SIMILITUDE THE SQUARE DEIFIC SONGS OF PARTING: SINGERS AND POETS TO A HISTORIAN FIT AUDIENCE SINGING IN SPRING LOVE OF COMRADES PULSE OF MY LIFE AUXILIARIES REALITIES NEARING DEPARTURE POETS TO COME CENTURIES HENCE SO LONG! POSTSCRIPT PREFATORY NOTICE. During the summer of 1867 I had the opportunity (which I had often wished for) of expressing in print my estimate and admiration of the works of the American poet Walt Whitman.[1] Like a stone dropped into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its concentric circles of consequences. One of these is the invitation which I have received to edit a selection from Whitman's writings; virtually the first sample of his work ever published in England, and offering the first tolerably fair chance he has had of making his way with English readers on his own showing. Hitherto, such readers--except the small percentage of them to whom it has happened to come across the poems in some one of their American editions--have picked acquaintance with them only through the medium of newspaper extracts and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory, and rather intercepting than forwarding the candid construction which people might be willing to put upon the poems, alike in their beauties and their aberrations. Some English critics, no doubt, have been more discerning--as W. J. Fox, of old, in the _Dispatch_, the writer of the notice in the _Leader_, and of late two in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _London Review_;[2] but these have been the exceptions among us, the great majority of the reviewers presenting that happy and familiar critical combination-- scurrility and superciliousness. [Footnote 1: See _The Chronicle_ for 6th July 1867, article _Walt Whitman's Poems_.] [Footnote 2: Since this Prefatory Notice was written [in 1868], another eulogistic review of Whitman has appeared--that by Mr. Robert Buchanan, in the _Broadway_.] As it was my lot to set down so recently several of the considerations which seem to me most essential and most obvious in regard to Whitman's writings, I can scarcely now recur to the subject without either repeating something of what I then said, or else leaving unstated some points of principal importance. I shall therefore adopt the simplest course--that of summarising the critical remarks in my former article; after which, I shall leave without further development (ample as is the amount of development most of them would claim) the particular topics there glanced at, and shall proceed to some other phases of the subject. Whitman republished in 1867 his complete poetical works in one moderate- sized volume, consisting of the whole _Leaves of Grass_, with a sort of supplement thereto named _Songs before Parting_,[3] and of the _Drum Taps_, with its _Sequel_. It has been intimated that he does not expect to write any more poems, unless it might be in expression of the religious side of man's nature. However, one poem on the last American harvest sown and reaped by those who had been soldiers in the great war, has already appeared since the volume in question, and has been republished in England. [Footnote 3: In a copy of the book revised by Whitman himself, which we have seen, this title is modified into _Songs of Parting_.] Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, such as Shakespeare furnishes the precedent for in drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic rhythmical sense throughout. Lavish and persistent has been the abuse poured forth upon Whitman by his own countrymen; the tricklings of the British press give but a moderate idea of it. The poet is known to repay scorn with scorn. Emerson can, however, from the first be claimed as on Whitman's side; nor, it is understood after some inquiry, has that great thinker since then retreated from this position in fundamentals, although his admiration may have entailed some worry upon him, and reports of his recantation have been rife. Of other writers on Whitman's side, expressing themselves with no measured enthusiasm, one may cite Mr. M. D. Conway; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, who wrote a pamphlet named _The Good Grey Poet_; and Mr. John Burroughs, author of _Walt Whitman as Poet and Person_, published quite recently in New York. His thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond rivalry _the_ poet of the epoch; an estimate which, startling as it will sound at the first, may nevertheless be upheld, on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his competitors a man of the period, one of audacious personal ascendant, incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works. Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as they are true, shall frankly stand confessed--some of them as very serious faults. Firstly, he speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms. Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature. Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative--giving long strings of successive and detached items, not, however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self- assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These and any other faults appear most harshly on a cursory reading; Whitman is a poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then the volume and torrent of his power carry the disfigurements along with it, and away. The subject-matter of Whitman's poems, taken individually, is absolutely miscellaneous: he touches upon any and every subject. But he has prefixed to his last edition an "Inscription" in the following terms, showing that the key-words of the whole book are two--"One's-self" and "En Masse:"-- Small is the theme of the following chant, yet the greatest.--namely, ONE'S-SELF; that wondrous thing, a simple separate person. That, for the use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse: I say the form complete is worthier far. The female equally with the male I sing. Nor cease at the theme of One's-self. I speak the word of the modern, the word EN MASSE. My days I sing, and the lands--with interstice I knew of hapless war. O friend, whoe'er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return. And thus upon our journey linked together let us go. The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is _par excellence_ the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity-- that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the _litterateur_; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and pervading quality of the book is the exuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter much under different conditions. Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as in some sense not existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which Whitman stands to all sorts and all aspects of them. But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute and entire originality. 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