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Furthermore, Whitman's main problem is to project into literature the new democratic man as he conceives him, the man of the future, intensely American, but in the broadest sense human and cosmopolitan; he is to project him on a scale large enough for all uses and conditions, ignoring the feudal and aristocratic types which have for the most part dominated literature, and matching them with a type more copious in friendship, charity, sympathy, religion, candor, and of equal egoism and power.
The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived.
At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me. I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, an advance copy of which had just been sent him.
He knows what a complex, contradictory thing the universe is, and that the most any poet can do is to break the old firmament up into new forms. To put his arms around it? No. Put your arms around your fellow-man, and then you have encompassed it as nearly as mortal can do. Whitman's attraction toward the common people was real.
He scribbled a line to Mother Clemm notifying her to be ready to receive him and his bride and went so far as to engage the services of a clergyman, and to sign a marriage contract, in which Mrs. Whitman's property was made over to her mother. But just at this point a note was slipped into the hand of "Helen," informing her that her lover had been seen drinking wine in the hotel.
Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country became one of the most poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the soul of man.
Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" is one of the truest of American poems because it beats with the pulse of this onward movement, because it is full of this laughing and conquering fellowship and of undefeated faith. American Idealism Our endeavor to state the general characteristics of the American mind has already given us some indication of what Americans really care for.
Whitman's ideal is undoubtedly much larger, coarser, stronger much more racy and democratic than the ideal we are familiar with in current literature, and upon which our culture is largely based.
But it must not be inferred from this that Whitman's life was devoid of suffering.
His French critic, Gabriel Sarrazin, calls him an apostle, the apostle of the idea that man is an indivisible fragment of the universal Divinity. What has a poet of Whitman's aims to do with decency or indecency, with modesty or immodesty? These are social or conventional virtues; he represents mainly primary qualities and forces.
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