ROBERT BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, WALT WHITMAN
Back in the Old World, in 1841, Tennyson met Robert Browning—three years his junior—at one of Richard Monckton Milnes’s celebrated breakfasts. Aubrey de Vere hardly notices Browning, but he gilds the memory of Tennyson’s “large dark eyes, generally dreamy but with an occasional gleam of imaginative alertness, the dusky, almost Spanish complexion, the high-built head and the massive abundance of curling hair like the finest and blackest silk”—handsome if a bit frayed. Tennyson and Browning did not immediately hit it off, though a few years later at the publisher Edward Moxon’s dinner table (three months before Browning’s elopement with Elizabeth Barrett) they became friends, and though not intimate they remained friends—meeting in France, Italy and England—for the rest of their lives. Tennyson had not relished Browning’s consonantal cacophony since he read Sordello in 1840. But both men swallowed hard and spoke well of one another’s verse, dedicating poems to each other. Browning liked Tennyson’s verse better than Tennyson liked Browning’s.
In The Victorian Age G. K. Chesterton speaks of Thomas De Quincey’s sentences “that lengthen out like nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas.” This well describes Robert Browning’s verse, with its novelistic plots: “The obscurity, to which he must in large degree plead guilty, was, curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it was only impatience.” Readers who spend a few hours with the poet can come to feel, after the rich amusement and opulence of the worlds he creates, an impatience, that what attracted the poet was a character rather than a person, a setting and a historical period rather than abiding emotions that attach to his usually fictional experiences.
One impatient reader is Matthew Arnold, who finds the sugary optimism and gaiety of Browning’s graybeards particularly specious.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made
writes Browning. He entertains ideas, attitudes, sentiments. It is hard to judge when he’s being serious, when he’s being himself. Scattered through his monologues, he makes us watch for him with a prismatic eye. Our impatience reveals two things: a prejudice in favor of a stable, or relatively stable, poetic perspective, an identifiable “I,” and a desire for poetic accountability. Browning’s characters say doubtful things, but the poet can bow aside and insist that they are personae, that the monologues belong to characters who speak, whom he creates as Shakespeare did characters in a play or Chaucer did a pilgrim.
The Ring and the Book (1868–69) is variously claimed as Browning’s masterpiece, as a splendid failure and as an enormous and enormously tedious poem marking the transition between the poet’s good work and the garrulous, unsatisfactory verse of his last twenty years. It is certainly long, recounting a seventeenth-century Roman murder from various points of view and in various voices that fill twelve books. It anticipates Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Browning describes it as “truth broken into prismatic lines.” He got the facts from a “square old yellow book” picked up for eight pence; he swears he never deviated from the facts it described. The impulse behind this as behind some of the dramatic monologues is that of a novelist or storyteller; but verse is his medium. Part of his achievement was to write verse that often outsold the prose of his contemporaries and was read with the same eager prurience as novels are.
Before his critics, Browning becomes that “square old yellow book.” There are as many versions of him as there are solutions to his murder story. Was he a sublimated anal-erotic, an ordinary entertaining chap, a deep thinker, a charlatan? Such variety illustrates his view that individual imaginations deal individually with a given reality. This individuality and human diversity he explored, so some contend. Or were his dramatic monologues simply a trying on of a succession of insubstantial masks? In either case, Browning declares: “Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.” It is a point of departure: What was that mouth like? What truths does it tell?
He was born in Camberwell, London, in 1812, the son of a well-to-do bank employee who provided him with an education as a weekly boarder at the Reverend Thomas Ready’s school in Peckham, but more particularly at home with private tutors supervised by Papa. His father also provided, eventually, a private income. Father and mother—she a sensitive, devout lady—encouraged the boy’s writing. When he was twelve they tried in vain to get his first volume of poetry, Incondita, published. He later destroyed the manuscript. At the age of fourteen he wrote the rather remarkable poem “The Dance of Death,” in which Fever, Consumption, Madness, Ague and Pestilence dance around and each one tries to prove that it is the fiercest foe of mankind. This may be his first set of dramatic monologues: he’d begun to tire of Byron and was reading Shelley, and his appetite for Shelley was never satisfied.
When he went up to the University of London he did not quite complete the first year of his course. He led a relatively uneventful life, cultivating an interest in the theater. In 1833 he published his first book, Pauline, anonymously, which was fortunate because it was not well received and did not sell. Some suggest that because of its reception he preferred afterward to wear a metaphorical mask rather than to expose himself directly. Pauline owed a large debt to Shelley: it was vulnerable verse, but it lacked, as derivative verse usually does, a necessary energy. In 1834 he flirted with the notion of entering the diplomatic corps and traveling to St. Petersburg with the Russian consul general. The next year his father paid for his second book, Paracelsus, to be published. Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth and others were generous about it, but it was not a success. He wrote plays. These too fared badly (Strafford, with the great T. N. Macready starring, lasted only five nights at Covent Garden).
Nor did he improve his fortune with Sordello (1840), a poem that baffled readers and was a substantial failure, making his name a byword for willful obscurity for years to come. It tells of a young poet who fails to discover his art when he withdraws from the world. Ezra Pound was the first poet to derive real benefit from it and to understand the nature of its originality. Shelley’s Alastor may be its generic cousin, but Shelley’s is the better poem. His second play, Pippa Passes (1841), is the one that is remembered, thanks to the famous detachable songs. He claimed to have the “perfect gallows” of theater production. Certainly his talents did not lie in that direction. His drama does not hold a mirror up to nature: it is a projection of the spirit. Characters rather get in the way or suffer from garrulity. He wrote other plays and the first of his prose essays, on Chatterton, a poet-ventriloquist (or forger) after his own heart. The Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances (1845) pointed the way to his best work.
In 1845 he wrote his first letter to the consumptive Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole Street (“I love your verses with all my heart”). Eluding the eye of her jealous father, they eloped in 1846 to Italy. Between their arrival and her death in 1861 he wrote Men and Women (1853) and Dramatis Personae, published after his return to England as a widower in 1864. This is the book that began his huge and durable success. The Ring and the Book followed and was a best-seller. Thereafter he produced abundantly: Balaustion’s Adventures and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), Dramatic Idyls (1879–80) and Jocoseria, which includes the engaging “Christina and Monaldeschi” (1883). He died in 1889 at his son’s house in Venice. Ten years later, his correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published.
His work found an English audience only slowly. America proved more permeable than Britain. His fame, based eventually on poems written between 1842 and 1864, increased at home as his writing became more expansive and diffuse. A life that had been a solitary quest, undisturbed by too much attention—indeed, troubled by negative criticism and neglect—became a life of celebrity. His fame rivaled Tennyson’s. Were greatness measured by influence, he would be held the greatest of Victorian poets. His effect on Pound, T. S. Eliot, Auden and many writers of our own day is a matter of record. He perfected the dramatic monologue, the “persona” poem; he insisted on something like a speaking voice in verse of great physical particularity; he lacked a systematic philosophy or worldview. A beguilingly incomplete figure, sufficiently original to instruct and yet not so uniquely original as to intimidate, he epitomizes the derivative Victorian aspirations evident in the architecture, music and painting of the age.
He developed dramatic monologues from various sources. Writing for the stage may have defined the genre for him. He knew Byron’s personae poems, Shelley’s veiled personal statements, Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and other contemporary work. His original stroke was to make the form his primary instrument for exploring the world or, rather, past worlds—Italian, Provençal, English, anything with a lustrous varnish on it. His work seldom intersects the present in which he lived.
He finds a form, an order and design within the variousness of reality, which affirms that variousness. The important task, he says, is to avoid imposing a priori values and forms on experience. He aims to detect, and to a limited extent he succeeds. But as Arnold wrote to Arthur Hugh Clough in 1848–49, “Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness.” Had Arnold written that after reading The Ring and the Book, his judgment would have been harsher. In that work there is a comprehensive organization, but it is an organization of artifice, not of imagination, a conscious patterning not detected but imposed, not thematic but mechanical. It is the kind of organization that appeals to academic critics: it gives them something to describe and explicate. George Santayana—a little brutally, perhaps, but the Browning bandwagon was rolling very fast in 1910—pointed to the inconclusiveness of Browning’s poetry, its gesturing at wholeness, and the limited scope of his comprehension. He possesses a “truncated imagination,” his art is “inchoate and ill-digested,” the personae “always displaying traits of character and never attaining character as a whole.” It is hard to disagree; nor is it necessary to do so. There is much to admire in Browning, without demanding wholeness of vision or of conception. Detail, felicities of rhythm, the occasional masterly vignette are what anyone can value. Idolatry is not compulsory. Nine tenths of the poetry can be read once and not read again. That leaves one tenth, a huge amount of durable work.
From Byron, Browning picked up a tourist’s easy vulgarity. The materialism of his “historical” characters, the concerns they express at moments of crisis, are Victorian and English concerns. His sentiments, too, can be cloyingly Victorian. He selects the eccentric, the morally deformed, the man with a grudge, guilt, secret or crime to his credit. He chooses them for effect. His vulgarity is a kind of journalistic prurience in love with opulent detail: he is wide-eyed. The Italy he evokes is not that of Dante or Michelangelo, as Santayana says. One learns more from the poems about his prejudices and tastes than about his ostensible subjects. His monologues are less explorations of character than stories obliquely told. Soliloquy lays bare a mind or conscience; but Browning’s monologues inform and entertain, face always toward an audience. “Though lyric in expression,” he writes of his 1863 poems, they are “always Dramatic in principle.” They are “utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.” This is disingenuous: the imagination is his, after all. His “persons” may have “pasts,” unique gestures, but they are not distinguished by diction. They speak a similar language, choosing different forms and faces.
The shorter poems he called “lyric in expression,” spoken from a single perspective and sensibility. Their dramatic nature is evident if we consult the index of first lines: “ ‘Ay, but, Ferishta,’ a disciple smirked”; “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”; “Escape me?”; “Going his rounds one day in Isphahan”; “ ‘Heigho,’ yawned one day King Francis”; “Hist, but a word, fair and soft”; “You’ll love me yet!—and I can tarry.” Like Donne, whom he admired, Browning plucks at our sleeve with a startling phrase, plunges us in medias res, ignites our curiosity time and again. He satisfies our curiosity. His syntax can be effectively mimetic, scurrying in breathless clauses to a climax, or pacing with dignity, or deliberating ponderously, as the action, rather than the character, requires.
Many of the monologues address an imagined interlocutor: we get two personae for the price of one, the interlocutor inferred from the tonalities and attitudes of the speaker. The poems confess. In “The Laboratory” the speaker gleefully chuckles with a Jacobean relish, “To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, / A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree-basket...” Women reveal secret acts, men secret desires. Some speakers frankly address a large audience (“How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”); some, apparently mumbled into a beard, are overheard. “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” has a jealous monk railing against his brother in God, Father Lawrence. A masterpiece of malice, uncannily complete in its delineation of the monk’s own deadly vices, it is charged with bitter, relentless eroticism:
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs,
—Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
The actual speaking aloud of lines three, four and five causes the reader to salivate. The poem is an anthology of malicious expressions, seeming to condense all the variety of Byron into a little span. Other poems respond to one another. Best are the pair “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning”: in the first a man arrives (evoked at speed, verbally thrifty), in the second a woman experiences his departure.
Browning’s themes are the big ones: desire, love, religion (if not belief), time and sometimes death. Desire is largely a matter of the lower passions: it does not exalt but taxes its subjects. Religion is a world of color, ceremony and dark desire: not where the physical world is transcended, but where its material qualities are heightened. Time and the isolation of the individual provoke memorable statements, redolent of Hardy’s bleak view, but entertained less earnestly than Hardy’s. “Never the time and the place / And the loved ones all together,” a late poem begins. Unfulfillment: Hardy quotes the lines and owes much to Browning. The right moment passes; a chance of fulfillment, in love or in action, is overlooked. Each lost moment drives one further into isolation. Browning’s couples are separated by incompatibility, by a third party’s jealousy, by death. “My Last Duchess” expresses the duke’s desire for unmolested solitude. His last duchess has been reduced to a painted likeness, the human form retained as an unresponsive, unbetraying artifact. Characters on the point of death express final isolation and individuation: they become luminously single and particular as their lives, lusts or worries pass before them in review. Few are noble in thought, sentiment or deed: we deal with the middle-range of mankind, each unique, none transcendent. Even aristocratic and humble speakers are imbued with bourgeois individuality. Browning was inescapably the son of a prosperous bank employee. When he speaks, or seems to speak, for himself, a tempered and credible voice sounds, as in “By the Fire-side.” Its setting and comforts are those of a man with a private income, at home and petulant and spoiled, like the older Auden.
The technical delight and brilliant urgency of image and voice of such poems as “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Two in the Campagna” draw even a skeptical reader back to Browning. Poems that merely tell a story are exhausted in a couple of readings; those more than conventional in sentiment (“Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn”) or brilliantly conceived and executed are more enduring. One of Browning’s inexhaustible poems is “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” a dark quest, an allegory with but a vague connection to the common world, a nightmare (indeed, it is based on a dream) in which action alone seems to save the knightly protagonist. From the opening stanza...
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursued and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
...to the thirty-fourth and last...
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
...the spell is maintained, even over patches of uncompelling writing and awkward rhyme. The theme is unspecified, individual triumph over strange forces and in the face of the defeat of others. This nebulous, not quite disclosed (perhaps not fully apprehended) theme draws from Browning his best poems: something not deliberate but sought in a deep region of the mind. The mask becomes transparent, so much is concentrated in language and urgent rhythm. His purpose may have been, as a character says in “Old Pictures in Florence,” “To bring the invisible full into play.” He does so not when he renders the invisible visible, but when he deepens the visible, giving psychological verity to a vivid surface. Browning is no more or less a realist than Dickens: realists can, at their best, be fantasists. Walter Savage Landor had something like this in mind when he wrote “To Robert Browning”:
There is delight in singing, though none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
In praising, though the praiser sit alone
And see the prais’d far off him, far above.
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world’s,
Therefore on him no speech; and short for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk’d along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse. But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
Robert looms so large that he occludes Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She deserves limelight, not as the object of his romantic attention but as a significant poet herself. In her time she was prolific and very highly thought of; he lived rather in her shadow, whatever adjustments posterity has made. Virginia Woolf described her as one of those “rare writers who risk themselves adventurously and disinterestedly in an imaginative life.” Woolf’s novel Flush is the story of Elizabeth up to her elopement, told by the dog to whom the poet devoted a witty, sentimental poem. Flush was a real canine and the gift of the famous (and forgotten) essayist, Elizabeth’s friend Mary Russell Mitford. An anthology of poets’ dogs would feature the plucky and eloquent Flush (Woolf’s version) alongside Pope’s Danish dog, Bounce; William Cowper’s spaniel, Beau; Wordsworth’s Music; Scott’s Maida; Byron’s Boatswain; Thomas Hood’s (and later Charles Lamb’s) Dash; Arnold’s Geist (how integrated his vision was, extending even to the domestic pooch); Emily Brontë’s bulldog, Keeper; and Landor’s Pomeranian pair, Pomero and Giallo. Dogs reveal their masters.
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806, the eldest of a large and prosperous family, at Hope End, Durham, Hertfordshire. The family fortune derived from extensive Jamaican sugar-cane plantations. She wrote her first poem in her sixth year. Her father, an affectionate autocrat, encouraged her, as Robert’s parents had encouraged him, publishing her epic Battle of Marathon when she was fourteen. She was a sickly child with bad lungs and suffered a kind of nervous collapse in her midteens, becoming invalid and dependent on opiates. Tucked away in a dim room at 50 Wimpole Street, London, she was cherished by her severe, doting father. She became famous there, publishing her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and in 1838 The Seraphim and Other Poems. That was the year that her favorite brother was drowned swimming at Torquay, and she entered her strict reclusion and determined grief. By the time Poems appeared in 1844 (the American edition with an introduction by Edgar Allan Poe), she was a well-known poet and scholar. It was this book that in 1845 drew Robert to her like a magnet. Six years her junior, he courted her; they eloped in 1846, and her father never forgave her.
They went to France, where Elizabeth paid her intense respects to George Sand (“Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man...”), then to Italy, settling in Florence in the Casa Guidi; there Elizabeth gave birth to a son. She wrote in the years following The Casa Guidi Windows, about the Italian risorgimento, and her successful and controversial “epic” verse novel, Aurora Leigh, in which she considers the situation of a woman and the role of the poet. She was spoken of at one time as a possible poet laureate when Wordsworth died. The job went to her admirer Tennyson. In her later years, political and spiritual concerns affected what had been the subtly nuanced and very particular texture of her verse: ideas took command of her feelings and imagination.
She was quite rapidly forgotten after her death in 1861, apart from the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) which she dedicated to her husband and in which the traditionally male preserve of the love sonnet became a new kind of instrument, capable of quite unexpected tonalities.
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented?
Those tonalities sound in many of the love poems. Who—male or female—before her wrote in this manner?
We paled with love, we shook with love,
We kissed so close we could not vow;
Till Giulio whispered “Sweet, above
God’s ever guaranties this Now.”
And through his words the nightingales
Drove straight and full their long clear call,
Like arrows through heroic mails,
And love was awful in it all.
The nightingales, the nightingales!
Published posthumously by her bereaved husband, this poem (“Bianca among the Nightingales”) with its modulation from joy to bereaved betrayal, and others equally dramatic in trajectory, point up a fundamental difference. How much more than her husband she trusts in the value of vowels, how much closer to Tennyson her music; yet Giulio’s seductive sophistries, which the speaker wishes to believe and we believe too, are the sophistries of a shared love and not of a seducer. There is a sexual complicity in the joy of her love poems, as though the man and the woman understandingly in love are on the same side of the language. “Let us stay / Rather on earth, Beloved.” And of course the favorite, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is being revalued by feminists and general readers. Her political concerns—as an abolitionist (remembering her father’s Jamaican plantations), an advocate of Italian unification, an ur-feminist—render her more alive to the tensions of her age than many of her celebrated male contemporaries. But it is the poems by which she will revive, if she does, and in them she is more vigorous and defined than is the soft-focus woman drawn (and then erased) by the Victorians whom her husband subsequently beguiled. The claims that can be made for her are real claims, if not far-reaching.
Ezra Pound loved Browning as only poets love—with jealousy and disappointment. “And half your dates are out,” he exclaims,
...you mix your eras
For that great font Sordello sat beside—
’Tis an immortal passage, but the font?—
In some two centuries outside the picture.
An “immortal passage” founded on a factual error, like Larkin’s monumental couple holding hands in “An Arundel Tomb” (the gesture was a Victorian sentimental emendation to the medieval tomb sculpture). One cannot withhold response to a great poem just because it is factually out of true, but having responded one can come back with indignation, feeling a little cheated by the false authority, which one then forgives.
What Pound loves in Browning is Italy and the play of voices (which Pound learns to weave together in the Cantos). “Sordello” is the threshold over which Pound passes, at last, into his great, contested work. It was in part Browning who made it possible for Pound to make peace with another voice of which he is made, his American precursor Walt Whitman. He resented and resisted Whitman; he read again, and resisted, but at last he makes a pact: “Let there be commerce between us.”
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough...
It was you that broke new wood,
Now it is a time for carving...
For good or ill, Pound was made of Whitman, the American cadences rang in his ears. In 1909 he wrote, “What I feel about Walt Whitman”: “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ‘voice triumphant.’ He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.” Whatever pain he causes, Pound concedes that “when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms.” And, “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt.” Whitman is his “spiritual father” and he cannot conceal the fact. “I think we have not yet paid enough attention to the deliberate artistry of the man, not in details but in the large.” And “His message is my message.” Twenty-five years later he closes his ABC of Reading with Whitman (and Thomas Hardy). There are thirty well-written pages in Whitman, but he can’t now find them. Yet his “faults are superficial, he does convey an image of his time, he has written histoire morale, as Montaigne wrote the history of his epoch.” Because history is not only the facts retold but the style of address, the attitude of mind. The problem with Whitman, says Pound, is not that he broke the rules but that he sometimes obeyed them, and the moments of obedience undercut his expansive originality: “Certainly the last author to be tried in a classroom.”
Out of his reflections on Whitman came Pound’s general thoughts on the teaching of poetry. The best it can do is “expose counterfeit work, thus gradually leading the student to the valid.” But “it is only maturer patience that can sweep aside a writer’s honest error, and overlook unaccomplished clumsiness or outlandishness or old-fashionedness, for the sake of the solid center.”
It is Whitman’s solid center that appeals to composers, notably Vaughan Williams in the Sea Symphony and Delius’s setting of “Sea Drift,” finding in the flow of Whitman’s richly vocalic cadences a superb musical aria. Charles Ives responded, setting some of the poems as songs. Franz Kafka regarded Whitman as a supreme formal innovator, and he had more impact abroad, on the free verse of the Continent, than he did at home. Van Gogh admired him as one admires a healer who promises “a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank” under a benign starlit sky (a sky depicted in some of Van Gogh’s paintings). Henry James, Melville and Swinburne responded to him; rather tetchily Tennyson nodded in his direction, and then the Rossettis, and Yeats. He touched William Carlos Williams and, very differently, Hart Crane. E. M. Forster takes the title Passage to India from Whitman, a deliberate encoding of a crucial unstated sexual theme. Also the Spaniards and Latin Americans, most notably Federico Garcia Lorca, for whom the old poet’s beard was “alive with butterflies.” And then there was the Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who fathered a whole movement on the threadbare visionary American. There are those who respond to his technical experimentation and those who warm to his political and sexual vision. “He occasionally suggests something a little more than human,” said Thoreau to a friend. For Emerson he was “a Minotaur of a man.” The wonderful poet-critic Guy Davenport says: “I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again.” Whitman declared himself “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual...” He touched T. S. Eliot and Williams, D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann (for whom Song of Myself was “a great, important, indeed holy gift”). Allen Ginsberg makes use of him almost as often as he uses William Blake.
Born in 1819, Whitman was seven years Browning’s junior and outlived him by three years, dying (as Tennyson did) in 1892. Yet they are so wholly remote from one another that they seem to exist in different languages.
Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s principal work, is huge. The title suggests individual growth and common growth together, a political and comradely image. If the sections of the poem are read as a sequence, there is a narrative: the progress of a man among men, his soul growing and opening out on a journey of immense moment and magnitude, which ends in a fulfilled vision. Whitman began the book when he was thirty-six and worked on it for the rest of his days. He published the first edition of Song of Myself in 1855 but kept adding and adjusting until he was seventy-two and the last edition was published.
Born in West Hills, Long Island, he came of farming stock. His father, a small-town carpenter in Brooklyn (Brooklyn was then little more than a village) was volatile and intemperate, so the boy turned for love and security to his mother:
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor
falling off her person and clothes as she walks by,
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure...
The surviving correspondence between the two reveals how close their bond was.
Whitman became apprenticed to a printer. Then, at nineteen, he set up his own newspaper, Long Islander. He became a schoolteacher, wrote a temperance tract, stories, conventional verse. He could not hold down journalistic jobs because he would be radical. His life was gathering shadows and secrets, not least of which was his motive for going in 1848 to New Orleans to work on the Crescent newspapers, and what happened there. This journey of a few months, his notebooks make clear, effected in him a complete transformation. The Bohemian dandy was a prophet, the voice of the single man was ready to speak for America. Leaves of Grass was conceived. What happened? Was it the grandeur of the landscapes that he saw, the variety of people and scenes (he returned via the Great Lakes, Niagara and the Hudson), or was it a love affair with a woman (the “Children of Adam” sequence in Leaves of Grass)—or a man (the “Calamus” poems)? Was it a religious reckoning? There is a kind of joyful mysticism in the verse, to which Emerson responded. A compelling image relating to this period, written in 1860 and published seven years later, comes in this astounding poem:
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without
its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined
around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a
wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend or lover near,
I know very well I could not.
Many stories are contained in the uncircumstantial candor of his statement here. Mark Strand speaks of the poet’s “democratic” syntax, by which he means “the nonsubordination of the clauses,” and this is surely the key to his poetry’s even, accruing power and to the way it repels poets reared in the Browning school of dramatic climax. Whitman is all about access: to experience, to language, to each other. He spreads in space and into new vistas. The isolating monologue would have chilled his blood. Shortly after he returned to New York, in 1849, he stood behind the other mourners at the funeral of Edgar Allan Poe.
Instead of his name, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman placed a daguerreotype: the poet in proletarian garb. He required a big page for his long lines, eight by eleven inches. A thousand copies or so were issued, and only one shop, Fowler & Wells of New York and Boston, was willing to take stock. Naturally it didn’t sell, but the poet sent copies to people who might be of use to him, including Emerson. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier burned the copy he received, no doubt revolted by the unexpected candor. “Copulation is no more rank to me than death is,” wrote Whitman. The lines were of biblical verse length, and there were apparent improprieties in the diction and in the images of bathing, and women watching men bathe. “They do not think whom they souse with spray.” Even before Freud, there is no mistaking what the poem says, though what it means is rather more complex.
No sales, critical neglect, despite the great prose “Preface,” as central in American poetry as Dryden’s in British. “The direct trail of him who would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides... and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge...” Whitman dives headlong and makes no apology. He is there: “I celebrate myself.” He beckons and he repels, like the prophet or priest of a new religion less particular than Thoreau’s, more full-bodied than Emerson’s, “the great psalm of the republic.” “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks... read these leaves in the open air in every season of every year of your life... dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” The poem happens before us, giant and inclusive. We ride as much as read the long-cadenced lines. There are the great lists that itemize America, the continuous repetitions of phrase and syntactical structure, the unhallowed liturgy of love and desire. There is the man himself:
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms...
Upon receiving his copy of Leaves of Grass, Emerson alone responded: “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed... I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions only can inspire.” Of course, without Emerson’s permission, Whitman reproduced his commendation at every opportunity. He had been recognized by a great man of letters. The 1856 edition had a preface that was a kind of declaration of independence from British poetry. In the third edition, 1860, he added—against Emerson’s advice—the poems in which sexual concerns are more directly dealt with and changed the title to Song of Myself. It was banned in Boston, and in Britain an edition appeared omitting the newly added work.
For Whitman, as for Melville (and for Henry James), the Civil War gave serious shape to his imagination. Before he finished the collection of new work for the fourth edition of Leaves, the war began. Like the rest of America, he was anxious and excited at the outset. The national emotional trajectory was comparable to that in Britain in the First World War: hope and optimism—
Beat! beat! drums—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying...
followed by a recognition that the forces released had run out of control. Whitman did not enlist, but hearing that his brother was wounded he set off in search of him and became a bearded, attentive Florence Nightingale figure, comforting men, writing their letters, helping to dress wounds, listening and writing prose and the verse that became Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, later published in Leaves of Grass.
Compassion became his keynote. He stayed in Washington to help in the wards. President Lincoln on horseback passed him in the street and raised his hat. It was the soon-to-be-assassinated Lincoln who elicited his famous elegies “O Captain, My Captain” and “When Lilacs.”
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky at night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with the ever-returning spring.
Whitman was not a poet of despair: he rises above grief to celebration, through nature. For Swinburne this poem was “the most sweet and sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world.”
Whitman stayed in Washington from 1865 until 1873, holding down a clerk’s job. He suffered a stroke and retired to Camden, New Jersey, where—looked after by young friends—he worked on his evolving, reforming book, which did not finally please him until the last “death-bed edition,” of 1891. In the later years of his life Whitman’s most devoted readership was English, not American; and they read him not for his prosody or formal invention but for his matter, his “exuberant homo-eroticism,” as Gregory Woods puts it. He “sent shock waves through the furtive gentility of Britain’s Uranian community,” transforming their aesthetic, classicizing homosexuality into something forward-looking and visionary: a modern sensual world with a place in it for them. When Wilde was thirteen his mother had read him passages from Leaves of Grass. At Oxford during his exams, one of the questions asked was what Aristotle might have made of Whitman. Whitman was in his blood, and four years later, visiting and lecturing in America, he went to call on him in Camden, New Jersey. The old poet and the young man regarded one another with respect and misunderstanding. Whitman found Wilde “frank and outspoken” as well as “manly.”
Upon being asked in a convoluted way in a letter from one prominent British Uranian admirer whether, perhaps, sometimes, a bit of sex was implied in Whitman’s great psalms and paeans, he replied unambiguously, no, and further insisted that he had fathered six children and had a grandchild. None of these relations has been traced. Wilde, who had met the man face to face, insisted that he made no secret of his homosexuality. “The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips.” That, too, sounds implausible. The poems are quite clear about the matter and take it as far as we have any right to go.