Walter Whitman, Entrepreneur

...ButJarrell, one of the best critics of Whitman's poetry, also remarked that "baby critics who have barely learned to complain of the lack of ambiguity in Peter Rabbit can tell you what is wrong with Leaves of Grass...

...You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened...

...For the more we know about the man, the more we become tantalized by the peculiarities of his personality, and so tend to read the poems as glosses on his psyche...

...I am a habitan of Vienna," Whitman proclaims, which provoked Randall Jarrell to remark: "One has an immediate vision of him as a sort of French-Canadian half-breed to whom the Viennese are offering, with trepidation, through the bars of a zoological garden, little mounds of whipped cream...

...He spoke about his "children" to others as well, yet biographers have found no concrete evidence that Whitman had any children...

...Like other biographers, Kaplan duly notes influences: the sermons of Elias Hicks, the prose of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (one of Whitman's favorite books), the poems of Tennyson, especially "Ulysses," and the operas of Donizetti and Rossini...

...In "Song of Myself," Whitman himself acknowledges that "logic and sermons never convince," and although he often is a vacuous sermonizer, one does not have to search very long to discover occasions on which he takes his own advice seriously...

...Perhaps because he was an autodidact, Whitman had a weakness for high-sounding phrases -"Partaker of influx and efflux I," he says in "Song of Myself'-as well as for foreign phrases...

...Like many other successful Americans, Whitman was a brilliant entrepreneur in behalf of his "product,"'' someone who did not mind bending the truth to make sure that his book got noticed...

...Instead of burdening them with pious tracts, Whitman, Kaplan tells us, played games such as Twenty Questions with them, wrote letters for them, and declaimed passages from his favorite writers-Shakespeare and Scott...

...Something," Kaplan says, "compelled the poet . . . to create myths, suppress history, and reveal himself only in riddles and obliquities...

...the odds and ends of Walter do not prepare us for the glitter of Walt...

...Again, from "Song of Myself': The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his / saw,./ Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, / and long, dull, tapering groan, / These so, these irretrievable...

...Nevertheless, reading Whitman can be a jarring experience, for the very bad and the very good are often only a few lines apart...

...Whatever we may think of Whitman's character, it surely has little bearing upon the question of his poetic achievement...

...Whitman immediately sent clippings of the article to a band of English admirers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and they in turn circulated the story that a philistine America had scandalously neglected a great American poet's work...

...Whitman's admirers were forever tryingto pin Whitman down-to have him declare once and for all where he stood on certain matters...

...and the man is also present, one feels, in those poems that are strongly homoerotic...

...One such admirer wasJohn Addington Symonds, the English historian and essayist, whom Whitman dubbed "a great fellow for delving into persons...

...Kaplan, I suspect, knows better, but for some reason prefers not to wrestle with the difficulty of arriving at a fair assessment of Whitman's poetic achievement...

...Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...The story of how Walter Whitman, a relatively obscure journalist, became Walt Whitman, a major American poet, continues to exert its fascination because the transformation seems well-nigh miraculous...

...Strangely enough, the author of "Song of Myself' is a most elusive individual...

...Although Whitman's excesses and absurdities cannot be dismissed, they need not detract from the work of a poet who breathed new life into an American poetry mired in stale poetic language...

...Moreover, to ward off those who read homosexual avowals into his poems, he often suggested that his sexual bent was heterosexual...

...And since we cannot solve the puzzle, we must simply acknowledge it and try to evaluate the poetry without having it obscured by the gloss of Whitman's personality...

...His shorter masterpieces--"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"--eschew sermonizing altogether...

...Walt Whitman came out of nowhere...

...an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech...

...Moreover, throughout his life Whitman wrote and published anonymous reviews in praise of his own work...

...have been met, and are met today, with the determined denial, disgust and scorn of orthodox American authors, publishers and editors, and, in a pecuniary and worldly sense, have certainly wrecked the life of their author'' (a half-truth at best...

...We talked long that night of Leaves of Grass, " Wharton says, "tossing back and forth to each other treasure after treasure...

...But the "actual W.W...

...come from...

...If Kaplan tends to use the poetry to support his speculations about Whitman's psyche, Quentin Anderson wants to make Whitman central to a certain conception of American man...

...Not THE IrMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1981wrong, but a banal half-truth that fails to suggest why we should read Whitman at all, implying rather that Whitman is important only as a forerunner of the therapeutic radicalism of the 1960s...

...But the poem endson a note of optimism about the ceaseless activity of a great port city...

...By the time he died scarcely a period in his life had not been 'revised' in one way or another...

...One such admirer was Henry James, who called him "a great genius...

...Wanting to find out what manner of man Whitman was, we look through the poems rather than at them...

...In 1872 Symonds wrote Whitman-calling him "My Master"-and asked him to "tell me more about the Love of Friends...

...Whitman even took a sentence from Emerson's original letterwhich was meant to be private, not a blurb-and had it stamped in gold on the spine of the second edition...

...Such cosmic rapport suggests that he is a figure without a local habitation and a name, a figure floating free of any real ties...

...That is how I felt in writing Leaves of Grass...

...In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" Whitman speaks of the "dark patches" of life...

...And, like Mark Twain, Whitman made sure that he was photographed, painted, and sculpted innumerable times...

...Representative or not, homosexual or not-Whitman was a great poet whose best work celebrates what he calls "the procreant urge of the world" while recognizing the destructive element in nature and in the human soul...

...was attached to his own family and had many close friends...

...Eliot-possible...

...The difficulty is simply this: If Whitman's "message" is trite and if he is guilty...

...But perhaps the most extraordinary American success story is that of a printer, schoolteacher, housebuilder, and journalist-one of eight children of a ne'er-do-well family-who in the early 1850s transformed himself from a hack writer (stories, poems, one potboiler novel) into a writer considered by many to be America's greatest poet...

...For all the power of Whitman's best poems, most of which were written during the 1850s, critics find it difficult to focus on the poetry...

...told Symonds that the "one great difference between you and me, temperament & theory, is restraint...

...Some manuscripts he carefully altered, transposing genders, changing 'him' to 'her' or a man's initials to a number code...

...is a very plain personage, and entirely unworthy of such devotion...

...And yet one can hardly blame Whitman's admirers for expecting the poet to be more forthcoming, for Whitman preaches continually of nakedness and openness...

...Worse, Whitman repeated this lie in a letter to Emerson which he placed at the end of the second edition of Leaves, published in 1856...

...Twenty years later, having pestered Whitman continually to explain the meaning of certain poems that seemed to be homoerotic confessions, Symonds asked point blank: "In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men...

...And Kaplan is especially good on the quackeries of animal magnetism and phrenology, current at the time, and their part in shaping Whitman's sense of himself as an American bard who was less a poet than a prophet with an important message for his readers...

...profoundly in touch with Americans who shared his deep impulse to come out of culture, to get rid of familial and social roles, to envision themselves as natural forces...

...In his best poems the minor key of loss and despair usually modulates into the major key of energy and hopefulness...

...As Kaplan says, "the lessons of P.T...

...The effect of this ploy was to boost the sales of the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass...

...In art as well as in popular entertainment, the name of the game was always promotion...

...It is awful," Whitman said, "to see so much, & not be able to relieve it...

...As D.H...

...these poems are complex dramatic exercises in which the poet comes to terms with the reality of death-its awfulness and attraction...

...is present especially in those poems that dwell on the suffering of soldiers and the crowds of people in New York City...

...Was Whitman then a representative American...

...When not selling his product, he seems to have been a decent and considerate man...

...20 a If Kaplan can do little but wonder about the genesis of Leaves of Grass, he can describe Whitman's efforts to ensure that Leaves of Grass would be a success...

...Whitman did more than introduce new words-and new subjects-into the house of poetry...

...These poems make it clear that it is wrong to regard Whitman as an enthusiastic celebrant of Nature...

...Before rushing to pass judgment on Whitman-the-entrepreneur, we should consider another facet of Whitman's character-his self-effacing efforts as a medical aide during the Civil War...

...We should not conclude, however, that Whitman's poetry improves as his vision darkens...

...In "Song of Myself' he says: "It is time to explain myself-let us stand up...

...Eight lines after "influx and efflux" Whitman offers us the following gem: "I moisten the roots of all that has grown...

...undoubtedly a very great genius...

...The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul...

...Edith Wharton recounts an evening when James read to her from "Song of Myself," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his voice filling the hushed room "like an organ adagio...

...He speaks of "Whitman's representative character," and argues that Whitman "was painfully isolated and yet...

...And so it was with Whitman...

...Identifying himself with everyone and everything, he says that he "contains multitudes": "of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion...

...In the letter to Symonds, he wrote: "Tho' always unmarried I have had six children...

...And was he a homosexual...

...The "message" of Leaves of Grass is troubling because it is trite...

...The "actual W.W...

...The actual W.W...

...And the "actual W.W...

...These two questions don't lend themselves readily to answers...

...But ultimately the biographer is at a loss for words when confronted with what we embarrassingly call the mystery of creation...

...A morning glory at my window satisfics me more than the metaphysics of books," the poet says in "Song of Myself...

...Whitman provided a clue as to how we should read Leaves of Grass: "I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment...

...When we think of great American success stories, of men who rose from obscure origins to successes that matched -or came close to matching-their ambitions, we tend to think of such political figures as Hamilton, Lincoln, and Truman, or such entrepreneurs as Edison, Carnegie, and Ford...

...It was a point he made over and over again...

...Anderson's view cannot be easily dismissed, since the mythic Walt of Leaves of Grass is a curiously uprooted and disembodied creature...

...Barnum's American Museum, General Tom Thumb and the Swedish Nightingale had not been wasted on him...

...Unfortunately, those who delve into Whitman's life often cannot properly appreciate his poetry...

...Perhaps Whitman's most audacious effort at self-promotion was an unsigned article he wrote for a Camden newspaper in 1876, lamenting that "Whitman's poems...

...No contemporary of Whitman's was capable of the following line, from "Song of Myself': The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains i of my gab and my loitering...

...never did stand up...

...Although he gave the appearance of writing a confession, he sought to eliminate himself from Leaves of Grass and to create an archtypal American figure-part common laborer, part visionary bard...

...W here, we want to know, did Walt Walt Whitman: A Life, Simon and Schuster, $15.00...

...Whitman enriched the poetic language of his day with new words, though some of his experiments failed miserably...

...But relieve it in some manner he did, for Whitman made recuperation more pleasant-and dying easier-for many soldiers...

...The sentence is: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career...

...The urge to sermonize results in some of Whitman's worst lines: Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I/touch or am touch'd from, / The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds...

...Eliot, in fact, had nothing but disdain for Whitman's faith in "Nature without check with original energy...

...To Anne Gilchrist, intent upon marriage to the Walt of Leaves of Grass, he wrote: "You must not construct such an unauthorized and imaginary ideal Figure and call it W.W...

...According to Kaplan, Whitman at first had no intention of answering this "singular letter," but eventually he did, replying vaguely that Leaves of Grass "is only rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character," by which he meant presumably that the work should not be read as autobiography...

...Or as one critic recently put it, how did the author of Franklin Evans: or the Inebriate, the third-rate novel Whitman wrote in the 1840s, "levitate" into the author of "Song of Myself...

...Whitman, Kaplan says, was "renowned for the obscurity in which he supposedly languished...

...But Whitman was not completely successful: His own experiences and preoccupations obviously shaped the work...

...Lawrence said, Whitman is ''the poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death.'' In "Lilacs" the hermit thrush sings the "song of the bleeding throat...

...Whitman took risks with language, but his successes are more compelling than his failures...

...For Eliot, Whitman was a master of technique-not, as Symonds hoped, a master with a message to impart...

...of writing an enormous amount of bad poetry, then why read him at all...

...And Whitman promoted his product shamelessly...

...The maddening thing about "Song of Myself'' is that we see in it Whitman at both his best and worst...

...Whitman may have had a deep impulse to come out of culture, but the "actual W.W...

...He even made up foreignsounding words...

...As Whitman himself admitted: "There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen...

...But for the opera," Whitman said, "I could never have written Leaves of Grass...

...In response to Emerson, who had written him a letter in praise of Leaves of Grass, Whitman said that the first edition had "readily sold" a thousand copies when in fact it had virtually gone unsold...

...And despite Whitman's professions to the contrary, in his lifetime he was considered a great poet by many writers...

...I too knitted the old knot of contrariety," he says, "Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd...

...The work was not for the squeamish: He saw young men die from battlefield wounds and from operations performed under appalling conditions...

...I am referring, of course, to Walt Whitman...

...As Justin Kaplan makes clear in his generally well-written and informative biography, * nothing Whitman wrote before he published Leaves of Grass in 1855 bears the slightest resemblance to the poems we find in that volume...

...But the relation of the real Whitman to the all-seeing ''I" of the poems will always remain, I suspect, a puzzle...

...and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it...

...To call attention, then, to Whitman's message is to emphasize the inferior in Whitman's work, yet Kaplan is content to describe Leaves of Grass as a "work that celebrates the democratization of the whole person, the liberation of impulse and instinct from involuntary servitude...

...Early in his career, James had written a review sharply critical of Whitman, but he came to despise it in later life, calling it "a little atrocity...

...Aside from deflecting our attention from the poetry, the quest for the "real" Whitman is likely to get us nowhere...

...They bought the product the poet-entrepreneur had spent half a lifetime selling...

...He sedulously cultivated his image as a common American--"one of the roughs," as he puts it in "Song of Myself '-when, in reality, he had always shunned physical labor...

...A shrewd and cautious biographer, Kaplan realizes that Whitman is unfathomable...

...These efforts were often pathetic and comical...

...The artist," James said, "is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself...

...he also experimented with new rhythms and new syntactical arrangements...

...Whit-man would have appreciated this use of the active present participle-their tossing his poetry, declaiming it...

...Whitman's language, rhythms, and syntax made free verse respectable, and the poetry of the great modernists-particularly T.S...

...And, for all his supposedly confessional bent, Whitman would have been pleased that his two admirers were interested in what he had written, not in who he was...

...Whitman fervently desired admirers for his poems, but he did not want these admirers to go rummaging inthe closets of his life...

...A remark by Henry James may help to clarify the relation between Whitman and the Walt of Leaves of Grass...