Songs of Parting (missives).
Walt Whitman
The first three designations explain themselves. The fourth, _Leaves of
Grass_, is not so specially applicable to the particular poems of that
section here as I should have liked it to be; but I could not consent to
drop this typical name. The _Songs of Parting_, my fifth section, are
compositions in which the poet expresses his own sentiment regarding his
works, in which he forecasts their future, or consigns them to the reader's
consideration. It deserves mention that, in the copy of Whitman's last
American edition revised by his own hand, as previously noticed, the series
termed _Songs of Parting_ has been recast, and made to consist of poems of
the same character as those included in my section No. 5.
Comparatively few of Whitman's poems have been endowed by himself with
titles properly so called. Most of them are merely headed with the opening
words of the poems themselves--as "I was looking a long while;" "To get
betimes in Boston Town;" "When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed;" and
so on. It seems to me that in a selection such a lengthy and circuitous
method of identifying the poems is not desirable: I should wish them to be
remembered by brief, repeatable, and significant titles. I have therefore
supplied titles of my own to such pieces as bear none in the original
edition: wherever a real title appears in that edition, I have retained it.
With these remarks I commend to the English reader the ensuing selection
from a writer whom I sincerely believe to be, whatever his faults, of the
order of _great_ poets, and by no means of pretty good ones. I would urge
the reader not to ask himself, and not to return any answer to the
questions, whether or not this poet is like other poets--whether or not the
particular application of rules of art which is found to hold good in the
works of those others, and to constitute a part of their excellence, can be
traced also in Whitman. Let the questions rather be--Is he powerful? Is he
American? Is he new? Is he rousing? Does he feel and make me feel? I
entertain no doubt as to the response which in due course of time will be
returned to these questions and such as these, in America, in England, and
elsewhere--or to the further question, "Is Whitman then indeed a true and a
great poet?" Lincoln's verdict bespeaks the ultimate decision upon him, in
his books as in his habit as he lives--"Well, _he_ looks like a man."
Walt Whitman occupies at the present moment a unique position on the globe,
and one which, even in past time, can have been occupied by only an
infinitesimally small number of men. He is the one man who entertains and
professes respecting himself the grave conviction that he is the actual and
prospective founder of a new poetic literature, and a great one--a
literature proportional to the material vastness and the unmeasured
destinies of America: he believes that the Columbus of the continent or the
Washington of the States was not more truly than himself in the future a
founder and upbuilder of this America. Surely a sublime conviction, and
expressed more than once in magnificent words--none more so than the lines
beginning
"Come, I will make this continent indissoluble."[7]
[Footnote 7: See the poem headed _Love of Comrades_, p. 308.]
Were the idea untrue, it would still be a glorious dream, which a man of
genius might be content to live in and die for: but is it untrue? Is it
not, on the contrary, true, if not absolutely, yet with a most genuine and
substantial approximation? I believe it _is_ thus true. I believe that
Whitman is one of the huge, as yet mainly unrecognised, forces of our time;
privileged to evoke, in a country hitherto still asking for its poet, a
fresh, athletic, and American poetry, and predestined to be traced up to by
generation after generation of believing and ardent--let us hope not
servile--disciples.
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Shelley, who knew
what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and
with a profundity of truth Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out
for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be
potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken--that is
to say, in the four corners of the earth; and in his own American
hemisphere, the uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more
their announcer than their inspirer.