The Timaru Herald. SATURDAY, MAY 31, 1919. WALT WHITMAN.

Timaru Herald, Volume CVIII, Issue 1682, 31 May 1919, Page 6

The Timaru Herald. SATURDAY, MAY 31, 1919. WALT WHITMAN.

.A nondescript monster, which yet liarl terrible eyes and buffalo •strength., and was indisputably American, which. I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly' with the few to- whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again I shall. 1 ' So, sixty-three years ago, Emerson wrote to Carlvle to inform him of the publication of "Leaves of Grass," a new book of poems, if it was not rather '"'an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse," by a young- man named Walt Whitman, who. if he had lived long enough, would have been one hundred years old to-day. Whitman was then a journeyman printer of Brooklyn. He had been some thin p; of a tramp. Be 'aspired to be the singer and proI phet of the new American demojerarvy, boundless in its strength, ! variety, and -possibilities, and still unsung. It was easier to understand his aspirations than iio judge of his i>erforruances, be-

cause tliey were unconventional and startling' to tlie last degree. The decorous New World had reason, to be astonished by them, as if some unkempt monster with tlie voice of a lion and claiming to be one of the angels oi tlie ApocalvDse had appeared ill its ordered streets. lor the belched words," as he himself called them, of this strange pro-| phfet took no form that had been recognised_ by Doets, there was I noth l - with which they did not deal; they shrunk from no literary vulgarities and knew no reticences, they had strength, and turbulent vin-our and immensity like IS&aa'ara, and seemed ready to go on as long-. To avoid ail conventional language of poetry and sneak "naturally, 5 ' "with 1 the perfect rectitude and insouci-j ahce of the movements of ani- | mals, and the unimpeachableness •of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by. the roads, 51 was the professed aim of Whit-: man. "Ifo one, 3 ' he explained, I "will get at my verses who in-J sists upon viewinq- them as a : literary performance or as aiming* towards art or aestheticism." It was no wonder , that Emerson, j after a first imnulse of admira-j tio-n, shook his head, and that critics wondered, and are still wondering, what to make of the "great hirsute man." i

Whitman went on writing, if New England world was chiefly shocked by his first strange book it was outraged by second and third editions, to I which the soneis of sex were added. In the object with which those poems were written there is no doubt that Whitman failed. He honed to break down an unwholesome', Tfractically immoral sentiment which refused to treat se± naturally, and increased it by the revulsion which his boldness caused. Yet the attempt was part of his creed, and that cr&ed is worth considering- Ail men were equal, and all men. could be levelled up—not downto form a democracv, in America at least, that would bring in the Golden Age, not only of haooiness,, but of splendid thoughts and deeds. Ifo drab sameness was allowed _bv Whitman's vision. The individual, distinct arid precious, none more prefcioua than another, was essential to! his thought_ of the whole. All! that was stimulatm and inspiring, however it mipht seem oversanguine. The shrewdest critiat bas been made against Whitman's creed is that it was not American. All values seemed to be alike for him, and the j • er^ca * lls have & sliarT> fsense for differing values. It is hot in" America, whose true voice he aspired to be, that this Prophet has had most esteem. And, for the rest of his philoisophy, greater i poets have expressed in a few j words what he has taken volumes ot illustrations and examples, belched forth in the manner of a catalogue, in lines that often have the effect of' "hexameters trying to bubble through sewage. to develop. "God's in ,S?, aTen ' All ' s well with the J'Q Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom ha|t lhoil made them all." Whitman does not emphasise this creed or cafry it any further by the evidence; tirelessly detailed and yet incomplete, which he! insists on giving* for it. ■ Be could not_ keep to his artistic creed, which was tti have none. Professing* to speak naturally, ' and eschewing- old words, he invented strange, unnatural new ones—''Oamerado,'' "Libertad." We can believe most reasonably that he wrote his free, often uncouth verse because he found tiiat iorm was not easily commanded by him. 13ut not infrequently the intensity of his emotion caused him to attain a real form of his own, and we have the "superb piece of music and colour," "When Lilacs last m , the llooryard Bloomed," which Swiiiburne praised, and passages of the same kind, beauty sfjots ih a poetical jungle. And he had a real! gift for pictorial phrases. In 1861 the American Civil War began, and Whitman, with his great loVe of humanity, served through it as a nurse in the hospitals. He Was said to have tended personally no fewer tkan 100,000 sick and wounded soldiers, and the experience which lie went through, never spring liimself. changed him from a young to an old man. He was prostrated by malaria, and for twenty-five years before his death suffered from a varying-, but generally increasing paralysis which, however, never depressed his spirit or impaired his sympathy with his fellow men. In the poems of "Druriitaps" he has described with rare vividness, l>ower, and pathos the experiences of his nursiiiT years- Those are endearing pictures, the complements of each other, which Mr Hbert Ilubbard, in "Little Visits," and Mr Edward Carpenter, in "Days with Walt Whitman," have given of his later days. In the Camden suburb of in which he lived simplv. in a small house with simple friends, everv child and every toiler knew him, a bi«\ kindly man with "a face of majestic, simple nroportion, like a Greek temple." who walked, leaninf lieavilv on his stick, accosted by evervone. or basked at his front door in the sun, and spoke of the past and future. "For the most part." Mr Carpenter notes, "his words were few. It was the others who spoke, and aooarentlv without reserve." The impression he conveyed then was not one of violence, but of calm, with "immense vista or background in Ins urt- | sonality. . I was aware of a certain radiant power in him, a large

benign effluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the place where lie was." And the same power and inclusiveness, if less calm, are in his works.