America prepares with Composure and good-will for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome.
The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite, are not unappreciated--they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets.
PREFACE, 1872 To As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free Now Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood, _in permanent edition_.
The impetus and ideas urging me, for some years past, to an utterance, or attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of Democracy, having already had their publish"d expression, as well as I can expect to give it, in "Leaves of Gra.s.s," the present and any future pieces from me are really but the surplusage forming after that volume, or the wake eddying behind it. I fulfill"d in that an imperious conviction, and the commands of my nature as total and irresistible as those which make the sea flow, or the globe revolve. But of this supplementary volume, I confess I am not so certain. Having from early manhood abandon"d the business pursuits and applications usual in my time and country, and obediently yielded myself up ever since to the impetus mention"d, and to the work of expressing those ideas, it may be that mere habit has got dominion of me, when there is no real need of saying anything further.
But what is life but an experiment? and mortality but an exercise? with reference to results beyond. And so shall my poems be. If incomplete here, and superfluous there, _n" importe_--the earnest trial and persistent exploration shall at least be mine, and other success failing shall be success enough. I have been more anxious, anyhow, to suggest the songs of vital endeavor and manly evolution, and furnish something for races of outdoor athletes, than to make perfect rhymes, or reign in the parlors. I ventur"d from the beginning my own way, taking chances--and would keep on venturing.
I will therefore not conceal from any persons, known or unknown to me, who take an interest in the matter, that I have the ambition of devoting yet a few years to poetic composition. The mighty present age! To absorb and express in poetry, anything of it--of its world--America--cities and States--the years, the events of our Nineteeth century--the rapidity of movement--the violent contrasts, fluctuations of light and shade, of hope and fear--the entire revolution made by science in the poetic method--these great new underlying facts and new ideas rushing and spreading everywhere;--truly a mighty age! As if in some colossal drama, acted again like those of old under the open sun, the Nations of our time, and all the characteristics of Civilization, seem hurrying, stalking across, flitting from wing to wing, gathering, closing up, toward some long-prepared, most tremendous denouement. Not to conclude the infinite scenas of the race"s life and toil and happiness and sorrow, but haply that the boards be clear"d from oldest, worst inc.u.mbrances, acc.u.mulations, and Man resume the eternal play anew, and under happier, freer auspices. To me, the United States are important because in this colossal drama they are unquestionably designated for the leading parts, for many a century to come. In them history and humanity seem to seek to culminate. Our broad areas are even now the busy theatre of plots, pa.s.sions, interests, and suspended problems, compared to which the intrigues of the past of Europe, the wars of dynasties, the scope of kings and kingdoms, and even the development of peoples, as. .h.i.therto, exhibit scales of measurement comparatively narrow and trivial. And on these areas of ours, as on a stage, sooner or later, something like an _eclairiss.e.m.e.nt_ of all the past civilization of Europe and Asia is probably to be evolved.
The leading parts. Not to be acted, emulated here, by us again, that role till now foremost in history--not to become a conqueror nation, or to achieve the glory of mere military, or diplomatic, or commercial superiority--but to become the grand producing land of n.o.bler men and women--of copious races, cheerful, healthy, tolerant, free--to become the most friendly nation, (the United States indeed)--the modern composite nation, form"d from all, with room for all, welcoming all immigrants--accepting the work of our own interior development, as the work fitly filling ages and ages to come;--the leading nation of peace, but neither ignorant nor incapable of being the leading nation of war;--not the man"s nation only, but the woman"s nation--a land of splendid mothers, daughters, sisters, wives.
Our America to-day I consider in many respects as but indeed a vast seething ma.s.s of _materials_, ampler, better, (worse also,) than previously known--eligible to be used to carry towards its crowning stage, and build for good, the great ideal nationality of the future, the nation of the body and the soul,[32]--no limit here to land, help, opportunities, mines, products, demands, supplies, etc.;--with (I think) our political organization, National, State, and Munic.i.p.al, permanently establish"d, as far ahead as we can calculate--but, so far, no social, literary, religious, or esthetic organizations, consistent with our politics, or becoming to us--which organizations can only come, in time, through great democratic ideas, religion--through science, which now, like a new sunrise, ascending, begins to illuminate all--and through our own begotten poets and literatuses. (The moral of a late well-written book on civilization seems to be that the only real foundation-walls and bases--and also _sine qua non_ afterward--of true and full civilization, is the eligibility and certainty of boundless products for feeding, clothing, sheltering everybody--perennial fountains of physical and domestic comfort, with intercommunication, and with civil and ecclesiastical freedom--and that then the esthetic and mental business will take care of itself. Well, the United States have establish"d this basis, and upon scales of extent, variety, vitality, and continuity, rivaling those of Nature; and have now to proceed to build an edifice upon it. I say this edifice is only to be fitly built by new literatures, especially the poetic. I say a modern image-making creation is indispensable to fuse and express the modern political and scientific creations--and then the trinity will be complete.)
When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, and continued turning over that plan, and shifting it in my mind through many years, (from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five,) experimenting much, and writing and abandoning much, one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since--and that has been the religious purpose. Amid many changes, and a formulation taking far different shape from what I at first supposed, this basic purpose has never been departed from in the composition of my verses. Not of course to exhibit itself in the old ways, as in writing hymns or psalms with an eye to the church-pew, or to express conventional pietism, or the sickly yearnings of devotees, but in new ways, and aiming at the widest sub-bases and inclusions of humanity, and tallying the fresh air of sea and land. I will see, (said I to myself,) whether there is not, for my purposes as poet, a religion, and a sound religious germenancy in the average human race, at least in their modern development in the United States, and in the hardy common fiber and native yearnings and elements, deeper and larger, and affording more profitable returns, than all mere sects or churches--as boundless, joyous, and vital as Nature itself--a germenancy that has too long been unencouraged, unsung, almost unknown. With science, the old theology of the East, long in its dotage, begins evidently to die and disappear. But (to my mind) science--and may-be such will prove its princ.i.p.al service--as evidently prepares the way for One indescribably grander--Time"s young but perfect offspring--the new theology--heir of the West--l.u.s.ty and loving, and wondrous beautiful. For America, and for today, just the same as any day, the supreme and final science is the science of G.o.d--what we call science being only its minister--as Democracy is, or shall be also. And a poet of America (I said) must fill himself with such thoughts, and chant his best out of them. And as those were the convictions and aims, for good or bad, of "Leaves of Gra.s.s," they are no less the intention of this volume. As there can be, in my opinion, no sane and complete personality, nor any grand and electric nationality, without the stock element of religion imbuing all the other elements, (like heat in chemistry, invisible itself, but the life of all visible life,) so there can be no poetry worthy the name without that element behind all. The time has certainly come to begin to discharge the idea of religion, in the United States, from mere ecclesiasticism, and from Sundays and churches and church-going, and a.s.sign it to that general position, chiefest, most indispensable, most exhilarating, to which the others are to be adjusted, inside of all human character, and education, and affairs. The people, especially the young men and women of America, must begin to learn that religion, (like poetry,) is something far, far different from what they supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of the New World to be consign"d any longer to the churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant--Saint this, or Saint that. It must be consign"d henceforth to democracy _en ma.s.se_, and to literature. It must enter into the poems of the nation. It must make the nation.
The Four Years" War is over--and in the peaceful, strong, exciting, fresh occasions of to-day, and of the future, that strange, sad war is hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons, the hospitals--(ah! the hospitals!)--all have pa.s.sed away--all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and l.u.s.ty generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death. So let It be obliterated. I say the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all, south, north, east, west. To help put the United States (even if only in imagination) hand in hand, in one unbroken circle in a chant--to rouse them to the unprecedented grandeur of the part they are to play, and are even now playing--to the thought of their great future, and the att.i.tude conform"d to it--especially their great esthetic, moral, scientific future, (of which their vulgar material and political present is but as the preparatory tuning of instruments by an orchestra,) these, as. .h.i.therto, are still, for me, among my hopes, ambitions.
"Leaves of Gra.s.s," already publish"d, is, in its intentions, the song of a great composite _democratic individual_, male or female. And following on and amplifying the same purpose, I suppose I have in my mind to run through the chants of this volume, (if ever completed,) the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric _democratic nationality_.
Purposing, then, to still fill out, from time to time through years to come, the following volume, (unless prevented,) I conclude this preface to the first instalment of it, pencil"d in the open air, on my fifty-third birth-day, by wafting to you, dear reader, whoever you are, (from amid the fresh scent of the gra.s.s, the pleasant coolness of the forenoon breeze, the lights and shades of tree-boughs silently dappling and playing around me, and the notes of the cat-bird for undertone and accompaniment,) my true good-will and love. W. W. _Washington, D. C., May_ 31, 1872.
Note:
[32] The problems of the achievements of this crowning stage through future first-cla.s.s National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others--of creating in literature an _imaginative_ New World, the correspondent and counterpart of the current Scientific and Political New Worlds,--and the perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America, and, indeed, all Christian lands everywhere, from the thin moribund and watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry--by putting something really alive and substantial in its place--I have undertaken to grapple with, and argue, in the preceding "Democratic Vistas."
PREFACE, 1876 _To the two-volume Centennial Edition of_ Leaves of Gra.s.s _and_ Two Rivulets.
At the eleventh hour, under grave illness, I gather up the pieces of prose and poetry left over since publishing, a while since, my first and main volume, "Leaves or Gra.s.s"--pieces, here, some new, some old--nearly all of them (sombre as many are, making this almost death"s book) composed in by-gone atmospheres of perfect health--and preceded by the freshest collection, the little "Two Rivulets," now send them out, embodied in the present melange, partly as my contribution and outpouring to celebrate, in some sort, the feature of the time, the first centennial of our New World nationality--and then as chyle and nutriment to that moral, indissoluble union, equally representing all, and the mother of many coming centennials.
And e"en for flush and proof of our America--for reminder, just as much, or more, in moods of towering pride and joy, I keep my special chants of death and immortality[33] to stamp the coloring-finish of all, present and past. For terminus and temperer to all, they were originally written; and that shall be their office at the last.
For some reason--not explainable or definite to my own mind, yet secretly pleasing and satisfactory to it--I have not hesitated to embody in, and run through the volume, two altogether distinct veins, or strata--politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought of immortality. Thus, too, the prose and poetic, the dual forms of the present book. The volume, therefore, after its minor episodes, probably divides into these two, at first sight far diverse, veins of topic and treatment. Three points, in especial, have become very dear to me, and all through I seek to make them again and again, in many forms and repet.i.tions, as will be seen: 1. That the true growth-characteristics of the democracy of the New World are henceforth to radiate in superior literary, artistic and religious expressions, far more than in its republican forms, universal suffrage, and frequent elections, (though these are unspeakably important.) 2. That the vital political mission of the United States is, to practically solve and settle the problem of two sets of rights--the fusion, thorough compatibility and junction of individual State prerogatives, with the indispensable necessity of centrality and Oneness--the national ident.i.ty power--the sovereign Union, relentless, permanently comprising all, and over all, and in that never yielding an inch: then 3d. Do we not, amid a general malaria of fogs and vapors, our day, unmistakably see two pillars of promise, with grandest, indestructible indications--one, that the morbid facts of American politics and society everywhere are but pa.s.sing incidents and f.l.a.n.g.es of our unbounded impetus of growth? weeds, annuals, of the rank, rich soil--not central, enduring, perennial things? The other, that all the hitherto experience of the States, their first century, has been but preparation, adolescence--and that this Union is only now and henceforth, (_i.e._, since the secession war,) to enter on its full democratic career?
Of the whole, poems and prose, (not attending at all to chronological order, and with original dates and pa.s.sing allusions in the heat and impression of the hour, left shuffled in, and undisturb"d,) the chants of "Leaves of Gra.s.s," my former volume, yet serve as the indispensable deep soil, or basis, out of which, and out of which only, could come the roots and stems more definitely indicated by these later pages. (While that volume radiates physiology alone, the present one, though of the like origin in the main, more palpably doubtless shows the pathology which was pretty sure to come in time from the other.)
In that former and main volume, composed in the flush of my health and strength, from the age of 30 to 50 years, I dwelt on birth and life, clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give them positive place, ident.i.ty--saturating them with that vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form"d America from the acc.u.mulated folds, the superst.i.tions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic authorities of the Asiatic and European past--my enclosing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation and aid, the eternal bodily composite, c.u.mulative, natural character of one"s self.[34]
Estimating the American Union as so far, and for some time to come, in its yet formative condition, I bequeath poems and essays as nutriment and influences to help truly a.s.similate and harden, and especially to furnish something toward what the States most need of all, and which seems to me yet quite unsupplied in literature, namely, to show them, or begin to show them, themselves distinctively, and what they are for.
For though perhaps the main points of all ages and nations are points of resemblance, and, even while granting evolution, are substantially the same, there are some vital things in which this Republic, as to its individualities, and as a compacted Nation, is to specially stand forth, and culminate modern humanity. And these are the very things it least morally and mentally knows--(though, curiously enough, it is at the same time faithfully acting upon them.)
I count with such absolute certainty on the great future of the United States--different from, though founded on, the past--that I have always invoked that future, and surrounded myself with it, before or while singing my songs. (As ever, all tends to followings--America, too, is a prophecy. What, even of the best and most successful, would be justified by itself alone? by the present, or the material ostent alone? Of men or States, few realize how much they live in the future. That, rising like pinnacles, gives its main significance to all You and I are doing to-day. Without it, there were little meaning in lands or poems--little purport in human lives. All ages, all Nations and States, have been such prophecies. But where any former ones with prophecy so broad, so clear, as our times, our lands--as those of the West?)
Without being a scientist, I have thoroughly adopted the conclusions of the great savants and experimentalists of our time, and of the last hundred years, and they have interiorly tinged the chyle of all my verse, for purposes beyond. Following the modern spirit, the real poems of the present, ever solidifying and expanding into the future, must vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which scientism has invested man and the universe, (all that is called creation) and must henceforth launch humanity into new orbits, consonant, with that vastness, splendor, and reality, (unknown to the old poems,) like new systems of orbs, balanced upon themselves, revolving in limitless s.p.a.ce, more subtle than the stars. Poetry, so largely hitherto and even at present wedded to children"s tales, and to mere amorousness, upholstery and superficial rhyme, will have to accept, and, while not denying the past, nor the themes of the past, will be revivified by this tremendous innovation, the kosmic spirit, which must henceforth, in my opinion, be the background and underlying impetus, more or less visible, of all first-cla.s.s songs.
Only, (for me, at any rate, in all my prose and poetry,) joyfully accepting modern science, and loyally following it without the slightest hesitation, there remains ever recognized still a higher flight, a higher fact, the eternal soul of man, (of all else too,) the spiritual, the religious--which it is to be the greatest office of scientism, in my opinion, and of future poetry also, to free from fables, crudities and superst.i.tions, and launch forth in renew"d faith and scope a hundred fold. To me, the worlds of religiousness, of the conception of the divine, and of the ideal, though mainly latent, are just as absolute in humanity and the universe as the world of chemistry, or anything in the objective worlds. To me
The prophet and the bard, Shall yet maintain themselves--in higher circles yet, Shall mediate to the modern, to democracy--interpret yet to them, G.o.d and eidolons.
To me, the crown of savantism is to be, that it surely opens the way for a more splendid theology, and for ampler and diviner songs. No year, nor even century, will settle this. There is a phase of the real, lurking behind the real, which it is all for. There is also in the intellect of man, in time, far in prospective recesses, a judgment, a last appellate court, which will settle it.
In certain parts in these flights, or attempting to depict or suggest them, I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity, in either of my two volumes-because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and outlets-must possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin to s.p.a.ce itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination,--but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address"d to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effect thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor.
Finally, as I have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify the points of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, altogether in my own way.
Thus my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the a.n.a.logy of them. Within my time the United States have emerged from nebulous vagueness and suspense, to full orbic, (though varied,) decision--have done the deeds and achiev"d the triumphs of half a score of centuries--and are henceforth to enter upon their real history the way being now, (_i.e._ since the result of the secession war,) clear"d of death-threatening impedimenta, and the free areas around and ahead of us a.s.sured and certain, which were not so before--(the past century being but preparations, trial voyages and experiments of the ship, before her starting out upon deep water.)
In estimating my volumes, the world"s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must be first profoundly estimated. Out of the hundred years just ending, (1776-1876,) with their genesis of inevitable wilful events, and new experiments and introductions, and many unprecedented things of war and peace, (to be realized better, perhaps only realized, at the remove of a century hence;) out of that stretch of time, and especially out of the immediately preceding twenty-five years, (1850-"75,) with all their rapid changes, innovations, and audacious movements-and bearing their own inevitable wilful birth-marks--the experiments of my poems too have found genesis.
W. W.
Notes:
[33] Pa.s.sAGE TO INDIA.--As in some ancient legend-play, to close the plot and the hero"s career, there is a farewell gathering on ship"s deck and on sh.o.r.e, a loosing of hawsers and ties, a spreading of sails to the wind--a starting out on unknown seas, to fetch up no one knows whither--to return no more--and the curtain falls, and there is the end of it--so I have reserv"d that poem, with its cl.u.s.ter, to finish and explain much that, without them, would not be explain"d, and to take leave, and escape for good, from all that has preceded them. (Then probably "Pa.s.sage to India," and its cl.u.s.ter, are but freer vent and fuller expression to what, from the first, and so on throughout, more or less lurks in my writings, underneath every page, every line, everywhere.)
I am not sure but the last inclosing sublimation of race or poem is, what it thinks of death. After the rest has been comprehended and said, even the grandest--after those contributions to mightiest nationality, or to sweetest song, or to the best personalism, male or female, have been glean"d from the rich and varied themes of tangible life, and have been fully accepted and sung, and the pervading fact of visible existence, with the duty it devolves, is rounded and apparently completed, it still remains to be really completed by suffusing through the whole and several, that other pervading invisible fact, so large a part, (is it not the largest part?) of life here, combining the rest, and furnishing, for person or State, the only permanent and unitary meaning to all, even the meanest life, consistently with the dignity of the universe, in Time. As from the eligibility to this thought, and the cheerful conquest of this fact, flash forth the first distinctive proofs of the soul, so to me, (extending it only a little further,) the ultimate Democratic purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones, are to concentrate here, and as fixed stars, radiate hence. For, in my opinion, it is no less than this idea of immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to democracy in the New World.
It was originally my intention, after chanting in "Leaves of Gra.s.s"
the songs of the body and 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 greatest part of existence, and something that life is at least as much for, as it is for itself. But the full construction of such a work is beyond my powers, and must remain for some bard in the future. The physical and the sensuous, in themselves or in their immediate continuations, retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely releas"d; and those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly wish"d to weaken.
Meanwhile, not entirely to give the go-by to my original plan, and far more to avoid a mark"d hiatus in it, than to entirely fulfil it, I end my books with thoughts, or radiations from thoughts, on death, immortality, and a free entrance into the spiritual world. In those thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the mighty theme, from the point of view necessitated by my foregoing poems, and by modern science. In them I also seek to set the key-stone to my democracy"s enduring arch. I recollate them now, for the press, in order to partially occupy and offset days of strange sickness, and the heaviest affliction and bereavement of my life; and I fondly please myself with the notion of leaving that cl.u.s.ter to you, O unknown reader of the future, as "something to remember me by," more especially than all else. Written in former days of perfect health, little did I think the pieces had the purport that now, under present circ.u.mstances, opens to me.
[As I write these lines, May 31, 1875, it is again early summer,--again my birth-day--now my fifty-sixth. Amid the outside beauty and freshness, the sunlight and verdure of the delightful season, O how different the moral atmosphere amid which I now revise this Volume, from the jocund influence surrounding the growth and advent of "Leaves of Gra.s.s." I occupy myself, arranging these pages for publication, still envelopt in thoughts of the death two years since of my dear Mother, the most perfect and magnetic character, the rarest combination of practical, moral and spiritual, and the least selfish, of all and any I have ever known--and by me O so much the most deeply loved--and also under the physical affliction of a tedious attack of paralysis, obstinately lingering and keeping its hold upon me, and quite suspending all bodily activity and comfort.]
Under these influences, therefore, I still feel to keep "Pa.s.sage to India" for last words even to this centennial dithyramb. Not as, in antiquity, at highest festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of death was sent on exhibition to the revelers, for zest and shadow to the occasion"s joy and light--but as the marble statue of the normal Greeks at Elis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and perfect young man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted torch--emblem of rest and aspiration after action--of crown and point which all lives and poems should steadily have reference to, namely, the justified and n.o.ble termination of our ident.i.ty, this grade of it, and outlet-preparation to another grade.
[34] Namely, a character, making most of common and normal elements, to the superstructure of which not only the precious acc.u.mulations of the learning and experiences of the Old World, and the settled social and munic.i.p.al necessities and current requirements, so long a-building, shall still faithfully contribute, but which at its foundations and carried up thence, and receiving its impetus from the democratic spirit, and accepting its gauge in all departments from the democratic formulas, shall again directly be vitalized by the perennial influences of Nature at first hand, and the old heroic stamina of Nature, the strong air of prairie and mountain, the dash of the briny sea, the primary antiseptics--of the pa.s.sions, in all their fullest heat and potency, of courage, rankness, amativeness, and of immense pride. Not to lose at all, therefore, the benefits of artificial progress and civilization, but to re-occupy for Western tenancy the oldest though ever-fresh fields, and reap from them the savage and sane nourishment indispensable to a hardy nation, and the absence of which, threatening to become worse and worse, is the most serious lack and defect to-day of our New World literature.
Not but what the brawn of "Leaves of Gra.s.s" is, I hope, thoroughly spiritualized everywhere, for final estimate, but, from the very subjects, the direct effect is a sense of the life, as it should be, of flesh and blood, and physical urge, and animalism. While there are other themes, and plenty of abstract thoughts and poems in the volume--while I have put in it pa.s.sing and rapid but actual glimpses of the great struggle between the nation and the slave-power, (1861-"65,) as the fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y panorama of that contest unroll"d itself: while the whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years" war, which, as I was in the midst of it, becomes, in "Drum-Taps," pivotal to the rest entire--and here and there, before and afterward, not a few episodes and speculations--_that_--namely, to make a type-portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy personality, objective as well as subjective, joyful and potent, and modern and free, distinctively for the use of the United States, male and female, through the long future--has been, I say, my general object. (Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied songs, and all my writings, both volumes, only ring changes in some sort, on the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a human being, himself or herself.)
Though from no definite plan at the time, I see now that I have unconsciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions, to express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United States, the prevailing tendency and events of the Nineteenth century, and largely the spirit of the whole current world, my time; for I feel that I have partaken of that spirit, as I have been deeply interested in all those events, the closing of long-stretch"d eras and ages, and, ill.u.s.trated in the history of the United States, the opening of larger ones. (The death of President Lincoln, for instance, fitly, historically closes, in the civilization of feudalism, many old influences--drops on them, suddenly, a vast, gloomy, as it were, separating curtain.)
Since I have been ill, (1873-"74-"75,) mostly without serious pain, and with plenty of time and frequent inclination to judge my poems, (never composed with eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any pecuniary profit,) I have felt temporary depression more than once, for fear that in "Leaves of Gra.s.s" the _moral_ parts were not sufficiently p.r.o.nounced. But in my clearest and calmest moods I have realized that as those "Leaves," all and several, surely prepare the way for, and necessitate morals, and are adjusted to them, just the same as Nature does and is, they are what, consistently with my plan, they must and probably should be. (In a certain sense, while the Moral is the purport and last intelligence of all Nature, there is absolutely nothing of the moral in the works, or laws, or shows of Nature. Those only lead inevitably to it--begin and necessitate it.)
Then I meant "Leaves of Gra.s.s," as publish"d, to be the Poem of average Ident.i.ty, (of _yours_, whoever you are, now reading these lines.) A man is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or explorer, nor even in science, or in his intellectual or artistic capacity, or exemplar in some vast benevolence. To the highest democratic view, man is most acceptable in living well the practical life and lot which happens to him as ordinary farmer, sea-farer, mechanic, clerk, laborer, or driver--upon and from which position as a central basis or pedestal, while performing its labors, and his duties as citizen, son, husband, father and employ"d person, he preserves his physique, ascends, developing, radiating himself in other regions--and especially where and when, (greatest of all, and n.o.bler than the proudest mere genius or magnate in any field,) he fully realizes the conscience, the spiritual, the divine faculty, cultivated well, exemplified in all his deeds and words, through life, uncompromising to the end--a flight loftier than any of Homer"s or Shakspere"s--broader than all poems and bibles--namely, Nature"s own, and in the midst of it, Yourself, your own Ident.i.ty, body and soul. (All serves, helps--but in the centre of all, absorbing all, giving, for your purpose, the only meaning and vitality to all, master or mistress of all, under the law, stands Yourself.) To sing the Song of that law of average Ident.i.ty, and of Yourself, consistently with the divine law of the universal, is a main intention of those "Leaves."
Something more may be added--for, while I am about it, I would make a full confession. I also sent out "Leaves of Gra.s.s" to arouse and set flowing in men"s and women"s hearts, young and old, endless streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls)--this never-satisfied appet.i.te for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy--this universal democratic comradeship-this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America--I have given in that book, undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides, important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the "Calamus" cl.u.s.ter of "Leaves of Gra.s.s," (and more or less running through the book, and cropping out in "Drum-Taps,") mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west--it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal"d into a living union.
Then, for enclosing clue of all, it is imperatively and ever to be borne in mind that "Leaves of Gra.s.s" entire is not to be construed as an intellectual or scholastic effort or poem mainly, but more as a radical utterance out of the Emotions and the Physique--an utterance adjusted to, perhaps born of, Democracy and the Modern--in its very nature regardless of the old conventions, and, under the great laws, following only its own impulses.
POETRY TO-DAY IN AMERICA