31 May: Boreham on Walt Whitman

Garlick and Capsicum
Walt Whitman, whose birthday this is, represents the most distinctive literary character that America has produced. The man himself has a strange fascination for us. We may not like him, but we can neither ignore nor forget him. He is the most uncompromising egotist in American history, and that is saying a good deal. He insisted on living life in his own way, and, in his stern determination to be master of his own fate and captain of his own soul, he was too much inclined to ride roughshod over the social standards of his time and over the sensibilities and susceptibilities of those about him. If Walt Whitman took it into his head to do a thing, he did it, never troubling to ask what other people might think. What cared he for the tyranny conventions? He would stop any man in the street and engage him in conversation if they looked sufficiently interesting. On the contrary, he would continue a conversation with no man, however exalted his rank, after it had ceased to be attractive to him.

He figures in history as one of our outstanding originals. He snapped his contemptuous fingers at everything in the shape of precedent: he revered no tradition. He made up his mind to write his own poetry in his own way. It was nothing to him that his way was vastly different from Longfellow's way or Whittier's way or Lowell's way. These men modelled themselves on the great masters. They observed the recognised English standards and followed the classical English tradition. To all intents and purposes they were English poets. With all this, Whitman had no quarrel. They were free to do as they pleased. But so, he urged, was he. Whether the world smiled or scowled, Whitman expressed convictions that had never before been voiced in a style with which men were entirely unfamiliar.

Fitting An Odd Piece Into The Social Mosaic
Men of this stamp make enemies but they also make friends. So long as they are scrupulously honest and transparently sincere, there is something about their very oddities and whimsicalities that compels a certain quality of wondering admiration. Those who knew Whitman intimately worshipped the very ground he trod. His very appearance carried with it a subtle fascination. At one period of his life his features were so fine that Mr. Gilchrist declared that his face was the only satisfying model for a painting of Christ that the artists of his time had seen. Later on, he grew heavy and a trifle stout, but even then his figure was so striking that anyone meeting him on the street would turn instinctively to indulge a second glance. He was tall, massive, grey-haired, grey-bearded, with clear blue eyes and slow, swinging, unconventional gait, dressed in a plain grey suit and a quaint slouch hat, and exhibiting a marked disposition to nod, smile or talk to anyone on the slightest provocation.

His variegated career was as amazing as his gnarled personality. He was determined to do, strictly in his own way, the work that he had been sent into the world to perform. The trouble was that for some time he found it by no means easy to discover the precise role for which he had been specially equipped. In his anxiety to determine his mission, he groped blindly about him for several years. He began as an errand boy in a lawyer's office, but his propensity for literature rendered him impatient of ordinary routine, and, in order to get a little nearer to the haven of his fond desire, he jumped at the chance of becoming a printer's devil. Assisted by the lightning progress and mushroom development for which America was in those days remarkable, he quickly became the editor of a popular magazine. He gave up journalism in disgust, however, becoming a carpenter and builder.

A Pioneer Of Stark Naturalness
Dabbling in many callings and becoming a veritable jack-of-all-trades, he eventually dropped them all in order to immerse himself in the hazards and excitements of the Civil War. To one ideal, however, he remained constant throughout. Whether engaged in civil or military duties, he was secretly devoting every leisure moment to the authorship of those turgid and billowy verses, which, remaining for so long unpublished, and then remaining for so long unnoticed, eventually came to be regarded as an integral and valuable part of his country's literary heritage. Walt Whitman's poems are simply Walt Whitman on paper. He was a genius, but he was a riotous genius, and his stanzas are the exuberant overflow of his intellectual intoxication. He stands in American poetry where Carlyle stood in English prose. He is a literary hurricane. His contemporaries stood bewildered. Lowell, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes met one day, and, in the course of the chat, Whitman's name was mentioned. Lowell confessed that he could see nothing at all in Whitman's outpourings. Longfellow thought that a decent education might have made all the difference. Holmes stated his view piquantly. Some chefs he said, added to their concoctions the faintest suspicion of garlick or capsicum. Whitman drenched every dish with those pungent flavourings and spoiled everything in the process.

Such opinions represent the ripest judgment of his time—and of our time. Walt Whitman can never be a popular or a classical poet. His massive personality, his rugged originality, his passionate love of every phase of humanity, and his downright goodness of heart, make an irresistible appeal to us. But this does not entitle him to a throne among the immortals; and the most that can be said for him is that his audacious example nerved a younger generation of poets, shaking themselves free of the trammels of established precedent, and flinging aside the shackles of hoary tradition, to express themselves tunefully and effectively in the way most befitting their distinctive personalities.

F W Boreham

Image: Walt Whitman