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WALT WHITMAN

_Yesterday & Today_

BY

HENRY EDUARD LEGLER




   CHICAGO
   BROTHERS OF THE BOOK
   1916


   COPYRIGHT 1916
   BY THE
   BROTHERS OF THE BOOK


The edition of this book consists of six hundred copies on this
Fabriano hand-made paper, and the type distributed.

This copy is Number 2


   TO DR. MAX HENIUS

   CONSISTENT HATER OF SHAMS
   ARDENT LOVER OF ALL OUTDOORS
   AND GENEROUS GIVER OF SELF
   IN GENUINE FELLOWSHIP

   THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED




_Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today_




I


On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional literary world was
startled into indecorous behavior by the unannounced appearance of a
thin quarto sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of
precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, and there were but
twelve poems in the volume. No author's name appeared upon the title
page, the separate poems bore no captions, there was no imprint of
publisher. A steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and
forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the neck, and a
copyright notice identifying Walter Whitman with the publication,
furnished the only clues. Uncouth in size, atrociously printed, and
shockingly frank in the language employed, the volume evoked such a
tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no parallel in the
history of letters. From contemporary criticisms might be compiled an
Anthology of Anathema comparable to Wagner's Schimpf-Lexicon, or the
Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for Henrik Ibsen. Some
of the striking adjectives and phrases employed in print would include
the following, as applied either to the verses or their author:

   The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.
   A belief in the preciousness of filth.
   Entirely bestial.
   Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.
   Noxious weeds.
   Impious and obscene.
   Disgusting burlesque.
   Broken out of Bedlam.
   Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.
   Defilement.
   Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.
   Ithyphallic audacity.
   Gross indecency.
   Sunken sensualist.
   Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.
   Roots like a pig.
   Rowdy Knight Errant.
   A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.
   Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of
     the lowest lust!
   Priapus--worshipping obscenity.
   Rant and rubbish.
   Linguistic silliness.
   Inhumanly insolent.
   Apotheosis of Sweat.
   Mouthings of a mountebank.
   Venomously malignant.
   Pretentious twaddle.
   Degraded helot of literature.
   His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering
     tags of a thousand colors.
   Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through
     every field of lascivious thought.
   Muck of abomination.

A few quotations from the press of this period will serve to indicate
the general tenor of comment:

"The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludicrous, if it were
not something a great deal more offensive," observed the Christian
Examiner (Boston, 1856). "It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses,
and appetites in terms that admit of no double sense. The author is
'one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, sensual, divine
inside and out. The scent of these armpits an aroma finer than
prayer.' He leaves 'washes and razors for foofoos,' thinks the talk
about virtue and vice only 'blurt,' he being above and indifferent to
both of them. These quotations are made with cautious delicacy. We
pick our way as cleanly as we can between other passages which are
more detestable."

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of
all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (1855) characterizes Walt
Whitman thus: "No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He
will bring poems to fill the days and nights--fit for men and women
with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. The body, he
teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful. Are you to be put down,
he seems to ask, to that shallow level of literature and conversation
that stops a man's recognizing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or a
woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. Sex will not be put
aside; it is the great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle
of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his
writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention
and effort. To men and women, he says, you can have healthy and
powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine.
Follow me, and there shall be taller and richer crops of humanity on
the earth."

From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the Crayon (New York, 1856),
this extract may be taken: "With a wonderful vigor of thought and
intensity of perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of
Grass has no identity, no concentration, no purpose--it is barbarous,
undisciplined, like the poetry of a half-civilized people, and as a
whole useless, save to those miners of thought who prefer the metal in
its unworked state."

The New York Daily Times (1856) asks: "What Centaur have we here, half
man, half beast, neighing defiance to all the world? What conglomerate
of thought is this before us, with insolence, philosophy, tenderness,
blasphemy, 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 roots like a pig among a rotten
garbage of licentious thoughts?"

"Other poets," notes a writer in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1856),
"other poets celebrate great events, personages, romances, wars,
loves, passions, the victories and power of their country, or some
real or imagined incident--and polish their work, and come to
conclusions, and satisfy the reader. This poet celebrates natural
propensities in himself; and that is the way he celebrates all. He
comes to no conclusions, and does not satisfy the reader. He certainly
leaves him what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of
the Paradise tree of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be
erased again."

"He stalks among the dapper gentlemen of this generation like a
drunken Hercules amid the dainty dancers," suggested the Christian
Spiritualist (1856). "The book abounds in passages that cannot be
quoted in drawing rooms, and expressions that fall upon ears polite
with a terrible dissonance."

Nor was savage criticism in the years 1855 and 1856 limited to this
side of the Atlantic. The London Critic, in a caustic review, found
this the mildest comment that Whitman's verse warranted: "Walt
Whitman gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the
place of regularity. * * * Walt Whitman libels the highest type of
humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man; we
who may have been misdirected by civilization, call it the expression
of a beast."

Noisy as was this babel of discordant voices, one friendly greeting
rang clear. Leaves of Grass had but just come from the press, when
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his home in Concord, under date of July 21,
1855, wrote to the author in genuine fellowship:

"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.

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have
had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a
little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of
the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of
fortifying and encouraging."

Tracing the popular estimates of Walt Whitman through the next five
years, expressions of unmeasured disapproval similar to those quoted
may be found in periodicals and in the daily press, with here and
there grudging admission that despite unseemly tendencies, there is
evident originality and even genius in the pages of this unusual book.
In a comparatively temperate review, August 4, 1860, the Cosmopolite,
of Boston, while deploring that nature is treated here without
fig-leaves, declares the style wonderfully idiomatic and graphic,
adding: "In his frenzy, in the fire of his inspiration, are fused and
poured out together elements hitherto considered antagonistic in
poetry--passion, arrogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility,
rowdyism, spirituality, laughter, tears, together with the most ardent
and tender love, the most comprehensive human sympathy which ever
radiated its divine glow through the pages of poems."

A contemporary of this date, the Boston Post, found nothing to
commend. "Grass," said the writer, making the title of the book his
text, "grass is the gift of God for the healthy sustenance of his
creatures, and its name ought not to be desecrated by being so
improperly bestowed upon these foul and rank leaves of the
poison-plants of egotism, irreverance, and of lust, run rampant and
holding high revel in its shame."

And the London Lancet, July 7, 1860, comments in this wise: "Of all
the writers we have ever perused, Walt Whitman is the most silly, the
most blasphemous, and the most disgusting. If we can think of any
stronger epithets, we will print them in a second edition."




II


What were these poems which excited such vitriolic epithets? Taking
both the editions of 1855 and of the year following, and indeed
including all of the four hundred poems bearing Whitman's authorship
in the three-quarters of a half-century during which his final volume
was in the making, scarcely half a dozen poems can be found which
could give offense to the most prudish persons. Nearly all of these
have been grouped, with some others, under the general sub-title
Children of Adam. There are poems which excite the risibles of some
readers, there are poems which read like the lists of a mail-order
house, and others which appear in spots to have been copied bodily
from a gazetteer. These, however, are more likely to provoke
good-natured banter than violent denunciatory passion. Even Ralph
Waldo Emerson, whose generous greeting and meed of praise in the
birth-year of Leaves of Grass will be recalled, in sending a copy of
it to Carlyle in 1860, and commending it to his interest, added: "And
after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is
only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe
with it."

Had Whitman omitted the few poems whose titles are given here,
doubtless a few readers would have found his formless verses either
curious or ludicrous, or merely stupid, and others would have passed
them by as unmeriting even casual attention. The poems which are
chiefly responsible for a controversy which raged for half a century,
are these:

   I sing the body electric.
   A woman waits for me.
   To a common prostitute.
   The dalliance of the eagles.

Wholly dissociated from the picturesque personality from which the
book emanated, Leaves of Grass bears a unique story margined on its
pages. The sprawling types whose muddy imprint on the ill-proportioned
pages made up the uncouth first edition of the book, were put together
by the author's hands, and the sorry press work was his handiwork as
well. The unusual preface and the twelve poems that followed he wrote
in the open, while lounging on the wharves, while crossing on
ferry-boats, while loitering in the fields, while sitting on the tops
of omnibuses. His physical materials were the stubs of pencils, the
backs of used envelopes, scraps of paper that easily came to hand. The
same open-air workshops and like crude tools of writing he utilized
for nearly forty years. During the thirty-seven years that intervened
between the first printing of his Leaves and his death in 1892, he
followed as his chief purpose in life the task he had set himself at
the beginning of his serious authorship--the cumulative expression of
personality in the larger sense which is manifest in the successive
and expanding editions of his Leaves of Grass. That book becomes
therefore, a life history. Incompletely as he may have performed this
self-imposed task, his own explanation of his purpose may well be
accepted as made in good faith. That explanation appears in the
preface to the 1876 edition, and amid the multitude of paper scraps
that came into the possession of his executors, following his passing
away, may be found similar clues:

"It was originally my intention, after chanting in Leaves of Grass the
songs of the body and of existence, to then compose a further,
equally-needed volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and
conservation which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul
govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort continuing the
theme of my first chants, to shift the slides and exhibit the problem
and paradox of the same ardent and fully appointed personality
entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law,
and with cheerful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation,
but as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon by far the
greater part of existence, and something