WALT WHITMAN
: A GREAT MAN AND A GREAT POET
Walt Whitman
is the poet whose poems I studied long ago but whose influence on my mind continues
to grow perpetually. He was a great humanist and a great poet of political,
social and spiritual democracy.
He was born
on 31st May 1819 at West Hills, Long Island, USA, attended Brooklyn
public schools, worked in printing offices, taught in a country school, edited
newspapers, ran a book store and a printing
office.
His literary
career started in 1851 and ended with his death on 26th March 1892
in Camden where he was buried in Harleigh Cemetry.
What makes
him an immortal poet of the world is his bulky collection of poems The
Leaves of Grass. Its first edition was published in 1855 and the 6th
which was the last in 1876.
According to
Leslie A. Fielder (Selections from Leaves of Grass, Bell Publishing
Company, USA, 1959), the first edition appeared without any name on the
title page, though in the poem eventually called “Song of Myself”, the name
“Walt Whitman” was used.
The following
lines which were written in 1876 were signed in 1881:
Come, said my
Soul,
Such verses
for my Body let us write,
(for we
are one,)
That should I
after death invisibly return,
Or, long,
long hence, in other spheres,
There to some
group of mates
The chants
resuming,
(Tallying
Earth’s soil, trees, winds,
tumultuous
waves,)
Ever with
pleas’d smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever
yet the verses coming ------
As, first, I
here and now,
Singing for Soul
and Body,
Set to them
my name,
WALT WHITMAN.
Initially,
there was a heart-breaking criticism
about the book. The London Critic called it “the expression of a beast”;
and The New York Times disgracefully observed: “What a conglomerate of
thought is this before us, with insolence, philosophy, beauty, and gross
indecency tumbling in drunken confusion
through the pages? Who is this arrogant young man who proclaims himself
the Poet of the time, and who writes like a pig among a rotten garbage of
licentious thoughts?”
It was,
however, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the leader of the transcendentalist movement
, who defended Walt Whitman and wrote to him in a letter dated 21st
July 1855 that his book was a wonderful
gift and the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America had yet
contributed. “I give you joy of your
free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said
incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so
delights us, and which large perception only can inspire . It has the best
merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.”
It is true
that Whitman’s poetry lacks aesthetic discipline and artistic design because it
is mostly a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions un-recollected in
tranquility. Yet, Whitman is a great poet of democracy and humanism. His peculiar
art of versification has its own charm and beauty. Through his original feelings,
thoughts and ideas, he vigorously touches
our hearts , minds and souls and transports us to a new world of poetry created
by him. A massive number of his poetic
lines haunt us for a long, long.
A unique feature of Whitman the man is that he
celebrates every particle of life with fulsome vigour.
He loves the
entire world irrespective of its
manifold castes and creeds, religions and cultures, politics and governments. His poetic voice has a touch of
universality. He is as much a poet of both the material world as of spiritual
heavens. Artistic deficiency in a great
poet of the masses as he is does not offend our aesthetic sense. It rather adds a new respectable dimension to it.
Literary
historian Arthur Compton-Rickett writes in his A History of English Literature (THOMAS NELSON AND
SONS LTD, LONDON, 1955): In aim a
literary revolutionary, Whitman is essentially a loafer, a loafer along the
crowded streets, a loafer along the
countryside, a loafer both in the spiritual and physical sense; and his
writings are the frankly direct expression of his loafings.
According to
another English writer and critic W.M.Rossetti (1829-1919), Whitman breaks with
all precedent. He thinks, sees, invents, executes, and initiates out of his own
personality. He brings a glowing mind into contact with his own time and
people, and the flame from which it
catches fire is Americanism.
What follows
is a selection of a small bunch of lines from Whitman’s different poems. They pose no difficulty of
comprehension because the language used by him is that of the common people
spoken in streets.
E X
T R A C T S
“Walt
Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent,
fleshy, sensual, eating , drinking and breeding,
No
sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more
modest than immodest.
Unscrew the
locks from the doors!
Unscrew the
doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever
degrades another degrades me,
And whatever
is done or said returns at last to me.
Through me
the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.
I speak the pass-word
primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I
will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same
terms.
Through me
many long dumb voices,
Voices of the
in terminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the
diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, …
Through me
forbidden voices,
Voices of
sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices
indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
……
I hear the
sound I love, the sound of human voice,
I hear all
sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the
city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative
young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals.
…….
To be in any
form, what is that?
(Round and
round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither.)
…..
I have said that
the soul is not mor than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the
soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self
is,
And whoever
walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud….
……..
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I
assume you shall assume,
For every
atom belonging to me as good belongs to you
I loafe and
invite my soul,
I lean and
loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
………..
Swiftly arose
and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the
earth,
And I know
that the hand of God is the promise of
my own,
And I know
that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all
the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a
kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless
are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy
scabs of the worm fence, heap’s stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
Returning,
resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and
wounded I pacify with soothing hand .
I sit by the
restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so
much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a
soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested) ……
Many a
soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded
lips.)
…………….
I was looking
a long while for Intentions,
For a clew to
the history of the past for myself, and
for these chants ---and now I have found it,
It is not in
those paged fables in the libraries (them I neither accept nor reject,)
It is not more
in the legends than in all else,
It is in the
present --- it is in this earth to-day,
It is in
Democracy --- (the purport and aim of all the past,)
It is t he
life of one man or one woman today ----the average man of to-day.
……………
……..
A child said What
is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I
answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it
must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it
is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented
gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the
owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark , and say Whose?
Or I guess
the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
……..
I am not an
earth nor an adjunct of earth,
I am the mate
and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself. (They
do not know how immortal, but I know.)
……….
I am of old
and young, of foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of
others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as
well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff’d with
the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the
same and the larger the same.
…..
In all people
I see myself, none more and not one a barley corn less,
And the good
or bad I say of myself I say of them….
I know I am
deathless,
I know this
orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I
shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am
august,..
I exist as I
am, that is enough.
…..
I am the poet
of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures
of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,…
I am the poet
of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it
is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say
there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
………
I accept
Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism
first and last imbuing.
……..
The following
extract was quoted by Bertrand Russell in one of his books while dealing with
the secret of happiness.
I think I
could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and
look at them long and long,
They do not
sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not
lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not
make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is
dissatisfied, nor one is demented with the mania of owning things,
No one kneels
to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is
respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So, they show
their relation to me and I accept them,
They bring me
tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
I wonder
where they get those tokens,
Did I pass
that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?”
-------------------------------
And finally, an
extract from OLD CHANTS about America’s indebtedness to the great poems, books and authors of the past.
“(Of many
debts incalculable,
Happy our New
World’s chieftest debt is to old poems.)
Ever so far
back, precluding these, America,
Old chants,
Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
The Hindu
epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
The Bible
books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
The Iliad,
Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
Hesiod,
Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
The Cid,
Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
The troubadours,
minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
Chaucer,
Dante, flocks of singing birds,
The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads,
feudal tales, essays, plays,
Shakspere,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson, . . . .
Thou! Pausing
a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them,
blent with their music,
Well pleased ,
accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
Thou enterest
at thy entrance porch.”
(Note the original spellings of words and names in
this extract have been retained as they
were.)
****************
2nd March 2021 G. R. Kanwal
No comments:
Post a Comment