AMERICA'S FIRST TRUE POET

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22723, 8 May 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

AMERICA'S FIRST TRUE POET

of Walt Whitman By PROFESSOR W. A. SEWELL WALT WHITMAN is the first poet of that strange amalgam of peoples which is the United States of America. He knew himself as such. Striking deep and towering/ high in his verse, there was the fact of "the United States to-day—the facts of these thirty-eight or forty million empires soldered into one —sixty or seventy millions of equals, with their lives, their passions, their future —these incalculable, modern, American, seething multitudes around us," of which he felt himself "an inseparable part." Poetry, lie knew, is a thing of place and date: lie felt around him, in 'America, "niultitudinousness," "vitality," and the imprecedented stimulants of to-day and here. As he looked hack "o'er travelled roads" in the evening of his life, it seemed to him that he had tried to answer the need of the New. World for poems of realities and science and "the democratic average and basic equality"—to sing the Modern Man in America. Nowhere does the problem of "colonialism" in literature receive more lively and penetrating discussion than in the few paragraphs which Whitman devotes to it- in his "Backward Glance." He . speaks for every poet throughout the .British Commonwealth of Nations, when ho says: Europe's Rich Fund The New World receives with joy the poems of the antique with European feudalism's rich fund of epics, plays, ballads—holds them indeed as indispensablo studies, influences, records, comparisons. But though the dawndazzle of tho sun of literature is in those poems for us to-day . . . some serious words and debits remain; some acrid considerations demand a hearing 1 . Of the great poems received from abroad and from the apes, and to-day enveloping and penetrating America, is there one that is consistent with these United States, or essentially applicable to them as they are and are to be? Is there one whose underlying basis is not a denial and insult to democracy? What is there in those works that so imperiously and scornfully dominates all our advanced civilisation, and culture? Whitman felt the need, as Dominion poets must one day feel the need and do indeed even now feel the need, to celebrate a new country's peculiar youth, its awful "eligibilties." We approach Whitman in the way he himself suggested. He knew that nowhere more clearly than in poetry, can we investigate "the causes, growths, tally-marks of the time—the age's matter and malady." The age's matter for Whitman was an enormous faith in -the birth of a new democracy, a new race. This faith lies behind all his work—its mystical materialism, its belief in Nationality, its exuberant rejection of. old forms and' old conventions, its delighted u?e of a truly contemporary imagery, its aggressive humanism. Walt Whitman's is the first attempt, and s6 far," I think, the most comprehensive, to make a poetical record of that "entire faith and acceptance which is the foundation of moral 'America." Pennants of Labour The American world was modern for him. He knew and sang of the "intertransportation" of that world, its steam-power, its gas, its petroleum. He mentioned in poetry those great "triumphs of our time," the delicate cable which crosses the Atlantic, the trans - continental rail - roads, the Suez canal, tho mighty Brooklyn bridge. He saw the great globe itself, spanned with iron _ rails, with steamships threading their way across the oceans. He made a.glad acceptance of all the facts and implications of an industrial civilisation. A little too optimistically, perhaps, when he banished hence the fact of war, "that hell unpent and raid of blood'," and welcomed in its stead the campaigns of industry, the pennants of labour. Mark the spirit *of invention everywhere. thy rapid patents, . Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream. This spirit and the prosperity it produced he dictated to America, "protectress absolute." All thine, O sacred Union! Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories. mines, „ City and Stale, North, South, item and aggregate, We dedicate, dread Mother, all fo theel

S It was part of Whitman's faith that there is wisdom, health, mystery and beauty in every process: that there is a "clue and purpose" in Nature, whether we think of it as One or Many. It is this faith which makes his delight so catholic: for he regards himself as the very epitome of that process gathering up into his experience the' very indication and promise of cternitv. Nothing, nobody can come amiss to his generous outlook. If he is, as lie supposes, the " acme of things accomplished," and the "eneloser of things to be,'* he must delight in his own variety and welcome as parts of himself "the black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas'd, the illiterate person." He must learn the "profound lesson of reception." Open Comradeship This belief in the Oneness and harmonv of things arose from Whitman's vision of a democratic people living in open comradeship, co-operating with Nature to make Nature's riches their own. He felt in his own muscle and nerve, in the very energy of all his enjoyments, the strength of the pioneer, the brave and nonchalant American. He felt, too, the strength and dignity of | the common people, whose "steady, square and unobtrusive lives" are the mark of the "average, good American." , He loved the'soil of America, "the dark, fat earth in long, slanting stripes uptum'd." T think ho thought of the soil as the verv condition and safety of American democracy. Certainly, he believed that "democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and bardv and sane only with Nature." He puts'his finger on a part of the malady of modern life, when be eays:

American democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, workshops, stores, offices —through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold, sophisticated -life—must either be fibred, vitalised by regular contact with outdoor light, and air and growth, farmscenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sunwarmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale.

He is *he poet of comradeship, as ho himself says. Ther« is a poetic splendour in the swaggering romanticism with which he of the ''Open JRoad." Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long, brown path before mo leading wherever I choose.

It is a sad proof of the way in which time may make a mockery of onr virtues that in modern America, Whitman's splendid vision of the the truly open road, tends too often to dwindle into the sentimental flapdoodle of Babbitt fellowship.