SAYS WALT WHITMAN DID INTERPRET OUR DEMOCRACY
STREIT, CLARENCE K.
Says Walt Whitman Did Interpret Our Democracy From CLARFACE K. STREET JAMBS HOHTY. in his review of Louis Untermeyer's Poetry and Prose 0/ Walt Whitman in your issue of Jan. 28, asserts,...
...Is there any evidence that he ever read it...
...But among the thoughts which it suggests, there is always one that is full of poetry, and this is the hidden nerve which gives vigor to the whole frame...
...Rorty, and .Mr...
...I know of none...
...Is there any...
...He goes on to imply that because a man lived a lonely life, played little part in the democratic process of his time and was never read by the democratic masses, he addressed, it follows that he was not a prophet and interpreter of democracy...
...I cannot allow that they have no poetic ideas...
...28, asserts, "Prophet and interpreter of democracy Whitman was not...
...nor did the subsequent evolution of the American social process imitate Whitman's art...
...Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature, but they are excited in reality only by a survey of themselves...
...Nor do I recall any allusion by Whitman to de Tocqueville...
...Streit can establish a vital connection* between Whitman and the democratic process, I shall be happy to learn from him...
...In 1874 Tufts Commencement heard his "Song of the Universal...
...A Reply From JAMIS RORTY Mr, STREITS citation of De Tocqueville is interesting and impressive—as indeed would be almost any citation of that author...
...Whitman found no model in the life of his time for the "«mtce»er he tsfrettetfinhis poetry...
...All these resources fail him...
...This magniflcient image of themselves does not meet the gaze of the Americans at intervals only...
...Their eyes are Axed upon another sight: the American people views its own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the court* of rivers, peopling sottHuttm and subduing nature...
...Fifteen years later Whitman wrote in the Preface to Leaves of Grass: "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature...
...I suggest that Mr...
...I readily admit that the Americans have no poets...
...I have never made a thorough search for evidence that either had read the other...
...This forces the poet constantly to search below the external surface...
...The United States themselves are essentially the greatest pocrnt" Twenty-five years later, in 1865 cams his "Pioneers...
...That was scarcely the nature and quality of the American community in either de Tocqueville's time or Whitman's...
...It #** merely because of "sexual inversion," Mr...
...and in 1167, "One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic...
...Ho proceeds without a nicker of doubt to attribute "that extraordinary explosion of genius," as he terms the 185S edition of Leaves of Grass, entirely to "the intolerable psychological conflict" within the poet...
...It may be foreseen in like manner that poets living in democratic times will prefer the delineation of passions and ideas to that of persons and achievements...
...Four years after Leaves of Grass first appeared, de Tocqueville died, April 16, 1859...
...O Pioneers...
...but Man remains, and the poet needs no more...
...The point I attempted to make in my review was (Mai Wkttrtan was primarily a literary person, whose fife and work were bom heavily conditioned by his special emotional and physical nature...
...The daily actio** of seenin democracies are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal...
...In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them...
...was not equipped to be...
...I do not want to seem polemic or contentious...
...The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, if not (he sole, theme of poetry among these nations...
...I need- not traverse earth and sky to discover a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of infinite greatness and littleness, of intense gloom snd amazing brightness, capable at once of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt I have only to look a democratic people . . . the poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings...
...Much in Whitman's life snd work still puzzles me...
...I quote a few of the many lines I would like to cite: "I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man and fixes it on man alone...
...Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests — in one word, so anti-poetic — as the life of a man in the United States...
...What it chiefly suggests to me is that Whitman probably did read de Tocqueville and used that source without acknowledgement, just as he seems to have used George Sand's actional character as the model for his pose a* a free and easy democratic "rough.'* De Toqueville's idealizations are as flagrant as Whitman's, Consider: "As all the citizens who compose a democratic community are nearly equal and alike...
...For in that chapter, entitled "Of Some Sources of Poetry Among Democratic Nations," and published in 1840^-when Whitman was only 21 and quite unknown — the great Frenchman predicted by sheer reasoning power that American democracy would produce the kind of poetry that it actually produced 15 years later when Leaves of Grass appeared...
...I should like to see Mr...
...Rorty concludes, that "Whitman was forced to project a vast dream-America, to mate in spirit with 'ma femme," democracy...
...in order to read the Inner soul...
...If any of your readers has found such evidence I would be very interested in it...
...If Mr...
...Marx Van Dorett Whom he calls to his support, and all your readers may find it enlightening to read the 17th chapter of the First Book of Volume II of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America...
...Streit expand and develop his contribution...
...He seems to reason that no one can ever be what he was not equipped (by the critic's standards) to be...
...Here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry among such nations are to be found...
...it may be said to haunt every one of them in his least as well as in his m&L important actions and to be always flitting before his mind...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 9
