Walt Whitman Foisted on the British Public ?

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12306, 28 November 1925, Page 12

Walt Whitman Foisted on the British Public ?

Send ns a song oversea for ns, Heart of their hearts who are free. Heart of their singing to he for ns More than our singing can bo.

So Swinburne acclaimed Walt Whitman after reading “Leaves of Grass.” Ho was acclaimed in pros© at the same time fcy William Michael Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, and Edward Howden; and now (says “John o’ London’s”) a strange story on the subject cornea to us from Hr. A. H. Millar, who, in a letter to the “Scotsman,” declaresi that “in tho early ‘seventies’ ” Rossetti “approached three of his literary friends, and suggested that it would be a good joke to foist an inferior literary man upon the public, and test the gullibility of that public by belauding his productions.” Whitman, he says, was the corpus vile selected for the experiment, and his great reputation in these islands is merely the outcome of that hoax. There are, beyond question, passages in the works of “the good grey poet” which give colour to the story: passages of which one might justly say that anyone who discovered poetry in them would be capable of discovering it in the catalogues of the departmental stores; such lines as these, for instance:

The implements for dnguerrotyping—the tools of the rigger, grappler, sailmaker, block-maker. Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colours, brushos, brush-making, glaziers’ implements. The veneer and glue-pot, tho confectioners’ ornaments, the decanter and glasses, tho shears and flat-iron.

But there are oth&r lines in Whitman of a very different quality: some

of tho lines in “Pioneers, O. pioneers.” and the lines on the death of Lincom which silenced all tho scoffers when W. E. Henley read them aloud: —

My captain does not answer, his Ups are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will. But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won!. Exnlt, O shores! and ring, O bells! But I, with silent tread, Wnlk the spot my Captain lies. Fallen cold and dead.

After review! ag tho probabilities, the English writer concludes that such an idea might have come . to Swinburne. who, as >t is known, afterwards “wont back” on what he had said about Whitman, but the others were incapable of planning such a conspiracy.