I take occasion now to confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of mine can do so, any elision of them. Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all. Ever since what might be call'd thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance ("to justify the ways of God to men" is Milton's wellknown and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones; to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it-out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through Time. My book ought to emanate buoyancy and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those elements, and has been the comfort of my life since it was originally commenced. One main genesis-motive of the "Leaves" was my conviction, (just as strong to-day as ever) that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth or even to call attention to it, or the need of it is the beginning, middle, and final purpose of the poems. (In fact, when really cipher'd out and summ'd to the last, plowing up in earnest the interminable average fallows of humanity not "good government merely, in the common sense the justification and main purpose of these United States.) Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune - the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past-are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius, and offer no foundation for its fitting verse. Establish'd poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already perform'd, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men. But my volume is a candidate for the future. "All original art," says Taine, anyhow, "is self-regulated, and no original art can be regulated from without; it carries its own counterpoise, and does not receive it from elsewhere- lives on its own blood a solace to my frequent bruises and sulky vanity. As the present is perhaps mainly an attempt at personal statement or illustration, I will allow myself as further help to extract the following anecdote from a book, "Annals of Old Painters," conn'd by me in youth. Rubens, the Flemish painter, in one of his wanderings through the galleries of old convents, came across a singular work. After looking at it thoughtfully for a good while, and listening to the criticisms of his suite of students, he said to the latter, in answer to their questions (as to what school the work implied or belong'd,) "I do not believe the artist, unknown and perhaps no longer living, who has given the world this legacy, ever belong'd to any school, or ever painted anything but this one picture, which is a personal affair a piece out of a man's life." "Leaves of Grass " indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on Leaves of Grass" distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such per formance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism. I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective. In the free evening of my day I give to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore. Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises-First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish'd and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. A lesser proof than old Voltaire's, yet greater analysis in the soul Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials After surmounting threescore and ten. After the dazzle of day is gone After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds After the supper and talk-after the day is done A glimpse through an interstice caught Ah little recks the laborer Ah, not this marble, dead and cold Ah, poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself Amid these days of order, ease, prosperity Among the men and women the multitude 235 An ancient song, reciting, ending 414 And now gentlemen And whence and why come you And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower An old man bending I come among new faces 241 As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing As I sit writing here, sick and grown old As I walk these broad majestic days of peace As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge As one by one withdraw the lofty actors A song for occupations A song of the rolling earth, and of words according As the Greek's signal flame, by antique records told As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud As they draw to a close As toilsome I wander'd Virginia's woods A thousand perfect men and women appear A vague mist hanging 'round half the pages A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power BEAT! beat! drums! - blow! bugles! blow Be composed-be at ease with me- I am Walt Whitman, liberal and Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through the fight By blue Ontario's shore By broad Potomac's shore, again old tongue By that long scan of waves, myself call'd back, resumed upon myself By the city dead-house by the gate CENTRE of equal daughters, equal sons 392 396 169 222 387 Chanting the square deific, out of the One advancing, out of the sides, 339 Come said the Muse Come up from the fields father, here's a letter from our Pete Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life Did we count great, O Soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books Down on the ancient wharf, the sand, I sit, with a new-comer chatting EARTH, my likeness Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man FACING west from California's shores For his o'erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi For the lands and for these passionate days and for myself From far Dakota's cañons From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird From pent-up aching rivers Full of life now, compact, visible Full of wickedness I-of many a smutch'd deed reminiscent GIVE me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling Gliding o'er all, through all Good-bye my Fancy Good-bye my fancy-(I had a word to say Grand is the seen, the light, to me -grand are the sky and stars some message brief and fierce 400 409 How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals 387 HAD I the choice to tally greatest bards Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician Have I no weapon-word for thee Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you, and were ten- Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of the concrete Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest lasting. |