FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126  
127   128   129   130   131   132   133   >>  
t necessary to prepare yourself for a course of Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery about Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about his work, as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a new order, and the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes require adjusting before they can value it properly. There is no question about a "Return to Nature" with Whitman. He never left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman? It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less. He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are no mere paeans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women--of every type--no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere. Thoreau found it in the Indian, Borrow in the gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the multitude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and women rejoice in--not shrink from--the great primal forces of life. But he is not for moralizing-- "I give nothing as duties, What others give as duties I give as loving impulses. (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)" He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle's pleasantry about the communistic experiments of the American Transcendentalists would have no application for him. "A return to Acorns and expecting the Golden Age to arrive." Here is no exclusive child of Nature:-- "I tramp a perpetual journey, . . . My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods . . . I hav
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126  
127   128   129   130   131   132   133   >>  



Top keywords:
Whitman
 

Borrow

 

Nature

 

Thoreau

 

country

 
duties
 
barbarian
 

elemental

 
pioneer
 

moralizing


forces

 

primal

 
rejoice
 

shrink

 
impulses
 

loving

 
surface
 
prepare
 

business

 

fields


streets

 

streams

 

comprehensiveness

 

multitude

 

gypsies

 

Indian

 

exclusive

 

arrive

 

Acorns

 

expecting


Golden

 
perpetual
 

journey

 

rainproof

 

return

 
teeming
 

wonderful

 
civilization
 

quarrel

 
action

solitude
 

American

 
Transcendentalists
 
application
 

experiments

 

communistic

 
Carlyle
 

pleasantry

 
crowded
 

paeans