WALT WHITMAN
from WALT WHITMAN
TO RALPH WALDO EMERSON
. . . A profound person can easily know more of the people
than they know of themselves. Always waiting untold in the souls of the
armies of common people, is stuff better than anything that can possibly
appear in the leadership of the same. That gives final verdicts. In every
department of These States, he who travels with a coterie, or with selected
persons, or with imitators, or with infidels, or with the owners of slaves,
or with that which is ashamed of the body of a man, or with that which
is ashamed of the body of a woman, or with any thing less than the bravest
and the openest, travels straight for the slopes of dissolution. The genius
of all foreign literature is clipped and cut small, compared to our genius,
and is essentially insulting to our usages, and to the organic compacts
of These States. Old forms, old poems, majestic and proper in their own
lands here in this land are exiles; the air here is very strong. Much that
stands well and has a little enough place provided for it in the small
scales of European kingdoms, empires, and the like, here stands haggard,
dwarfed, ludicrous, or has no place little enough provided for it. Authorities,
poems, models, laws, names, imported into America, are useful to America
today to destroy them, and so move disencumbered to great works, great
days.
Just so long, in our
country or any country, as no revolutionists advance, and are backed by
the people, sweeping off the swarms of routine representatives, officers
in power, book-makers, teachers, ecclesiastics, politicians, just so long,
I perceive, do they who are in power fairly represent that country, and
remain of use, probably of very great use. To supersede them, when it is
the pleasure of These States, full provision is made; and I say the time
has arrived to use it with a strong hand. Here also the souls of the armies
have not only overtaken the souls of the officers, but passed on, and left
the souls of the officers behind out of sight many weeks’ journey; and
the souls of the armies now go en-masse without officers. Here also formulas,
glosses, blanks, minutiæ, are choking the throats of the spokesmen
to death. Those things most listened for, certainly those are the things
least said. There is not a single History of the World. There is not one
of America, or of the organic compacts of These States, or of Washington,
or of Jefferson, nor of Language, nor any Dictionary of the English Language.
There is no great author; every one has demeaned himself to some etiquette
or some impotence. There is no manhood or lifepower in poems; there are
shoats and geldings more like. Or literature will be dressed up, a fine
gentleman, distasteful to our instincts, foreign to our soil. Its neck
bends right and left wherever it goes. Its costumes and jewelry prove how
little it knows Nature. Its flesh is soft; it shows less and less of the
indefinable hard something that is Nature. Where is any thing but the shaved
Nature of synods and schools? Where is a savage and luxuriant man? Where
is an overseer? In lives, in poems, in codes of law, in Congress, in tuitions,
theatres, conversations, argumentations, not a single head lifts itself
clean out, with proof that it is their master, and has subordinated them
to itself, and is ready to try their superiors. None believes in These
States, boldly illustrating them in himself. Not a man faces round at the
rest with terrible negative voice, refusing all terms to be bought off
from his own eye-sight, or from the soul that he is, or from friendship,
or from the body that he is, or from the soil and sea. To creeds, literature,
art, the army, the navy, the executive, life is hardly proposed, but the
sick and dying are proposed to cure the sick and dying. The churches are
one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves;
the, priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not
so, and keeping back what they know is so. The spectacle is a pitiful one.
I think there can never be again upon the festive earth more bad-disordered
persons deliberately taking seats, as of late in These States, at the heads
of the public tables—such corpses’ eyes for judges—such a rascal and thief
in the Presidency.
Up to the present,
as helps best, the people, like a lot of large boys, have no determined
tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, and of their destiny,
and of their immense strides—accept with voracity whatever is presented
them in novels, histories, newspapers, poems, schools, lectures, every
thing. Pretty soon, through these and other means, their development makes
the fibre that is capable of itself, and will assume determined tastes.
The young men will be clear what they want, and will have it. They will
follow none except him whose spirit leads them in the like spirit with
themselves. Any such man will be welcome as the flowers of May. Others
will be put out without ceremony. How much is there anyhow, to the young
men of These States, in a parcel of helpless dandies, who can neither fight,
work, shoot, ride, run, command—some of them devout, some quite insane,
some castrated—all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand—waited
upon by waiters, putting not this land first, but always other lands first,
talking of art, doing the most ridiculous things for fear of being called
ridiculous, smirking and skipping along, continually taking off their hats—no
one behaving, dressing, writing, talking, loving, out of any natural and
manly tastes of his own, but each one looking cautiously to see how the
rest behave, dress, write, talk, love—pressing the noses of dead books
upon themselves and upon their country—favoring no poets, philosophs, literats
here, but dog-like danglers at the heels of the. poets, philosophs, literats,
of enemies’ lands—favoring mental expressions, models of gentlemen and
ladies, social habitudes in These States, to grow up in sneaking defiance
of the popular substratums of The States? Of course they and the likes
of them can never justify the strong poems of America. Of course no feed
of theirs is to stop and be made welcome to muscle the bodies, male and
female, for Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Boston, Worcester, Hartford, Portland,
Montreal, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleaveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis,
Chicago, Cincinnati, Iowa City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Raleigh, Savannah,
Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, Brownsville, San Francisco,
Havana, and a thousand equal cities, present and to come. Of course what
they and the likes of them have been used for, draws toward its close,
after which they will all be discharged, and not one of them will ever
be heard of any more.
America, having duly
conceived, bears out of herself offspring of her own to do the workmanship
wanted. To freedom, to strength, to poems, to personal greatness, it is
never permitted to rest, not a generation or part of a generation. To be
ripe beyond further increase is to prepare to die. The architects of These
States laid their foundations, and passed to further spheres. What they
laid is a work done; as much more remains. Now are needed other architects,
whose duty is not less difficult, but perhaps more difficult. Each age
forever needs architects. America is not finished, perhaps never will be;
now America is a divine true sketch. There are Thirty-Two States sketched—the
population thirty millions. In a few years there will be Fifty States.
Again in a few years there will be A Hundred States, the population hundreds
of millions, the freshest and freest of men. Of course such men stand to
nothing less than the freshest and freest expression.
Poets here, literats
here, are to rest on organic different bases from other countries; not
a class set apart, circling only in the circle of themselves, modest and
pretty, desperately scratching for rhymes, pallid with white paper, shut
off, aware of the old pictures and traditions of the. race, but unaware
of the actual race around them—not breeding in and in among each other
till they all have the scrofula. Lands of ensemble, bards of ensemble!
Walking freely out from the old traditions, as our politics has walked
out, American poets and literats recognize nothing behind them superior
to what is present with them—recognize with joy the sturdy living forms
of the men and women of These States, the divinity of sex, the perfect
eligibility of the female with the male, all The States, liberty and equality,
real articles, the different trades, mechanics, the young fellows of Manhattan
Island, customs, instincts, slang, Wisconsin, Georgia, the noble Southern
heart, the hot blood, the spirit that will be nothing less than master,
the filibuster spirit, the Western man, native-born perceptions, the eye
for forms, the perfect models of made things, the wild smack of freedom,
California, money, electric-telegraphs, free-trade, iron and the iron mines—recognize
without demur those splendid resistless black poems, the steam-ships of
the sea-board states, and those other resistless splendid poems, the locomotives,
followed through the interior states by trains of railroad cars.
A word remains to be
said, as of one ever present, not yet permitted to be acknowledged, discarded
or made dumb by literature, and the results apparent. To the lack of an
avowed, em-powered, unabashed development of sex, (the only salvation for
the same,) and to the fact of speakers and writers fraudulently assuming
as always dead what every one knows to be always alive, is attributable
the remarkable non-personality and indistinctness of modern productions
in books, art, talk; also that in the scanned lives of men and women most
of them appear to have been for some time past of the neuter gender; and
also the stinging fact that in orthodox society today, if the dresses were
changed, the men might easily pass for women and the women for men.
Infidelism usurps most
with fśtid polite face; among the rest infidelism about sex. By silence
or obedience the pens of savans, poets, historians, biographers, and the
rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that
what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires,
lusty animations, organs, acts, are unmentionable and to be ashamed of,
to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them.
This filthy law has to be repealed—it stands in the way of great
reforms. Of women just as much as men, it is the interest that there should
not be infidelism about sex, but perfect faith. Women in These States approach
the day of that organic equality with men, without which, I see, men cannot
have organic equality among themselves. This empty dish, gallantry, will
then be filled with something. This tepid wash, this diluted deferential
love, as in songs, fictions, and so forth, is enough to make a man vomit;
as to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not
the first breath of it to be observed in print. I say that the body of
a man or woman, the main matter, is so far quite unexpressed in poems;
but that the body is to be expressed, and sex is. Of bards for These States,
if it come to a question, it is whether they shall celebrate in poems the
eternal decency of the amativeness of Nature, the motherhood of all, or
whether they shall be the bards of the fashionable delusion of the inherent
nastiness of sex, and of the feeble and querulous modesty of deprivation.
This is important in poems, because the whole of the other expressions
of a nation are but flanges out of its great poems. To me, henceforth,
that theory of any thing, no matter what, stagnates in its vitals, cowardly
and rotten, while it cannot publicly accept, and publicly name, with specific
words, the things on which all existence, all souls, all realization, all
decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and
of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, all strength,
all life, all immortality depend. The courageous soul, for a year or two
to come, maybe proved by faith in sex, and by disdaining concessions.
To poets and literats—to
every woman and man, today or any day, the conditions of the present, needs,
dangers, prejudices, and the like, are the perfect conditions on which
we are here, and the conditions for wording the future with undissuadable
words. These States, receivers of the stamina of past ages and lands, initiate
the outlines of repayment a thousand fold. They fetch the American great
masters, waited for by old worlds and new, who accept evil as well as good,
ignorance as well as erudition, black as soon as white, foreign-born materials
as well as home-born, reject none, force discrepancies into range, surround
the whole, concentrate them on present periods and places, show the application
to each and any one’s body and soul, and show the true use of precedents.
Always America will be agitated and turbulent. This day it is taking shape,
not to be less so, but to be more so, stormily, capriciously, on native
principles, with such vast proportions of parts! As for me, I love screaming,
wrestling, boiling-hot days.
Of course, we shall have a national character,
an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will
be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause
of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon—with the states
around the Mexican sea—with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe,
Asia, Africa—with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island—with
all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis—there is being fused
a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and
freemen of The States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any
exception whatever—each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states
and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners,
talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to
one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including
literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just open-mouthed,
American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness,
is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that
new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent
remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat—that newer America, answering
face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable
seas and shores.
Those shores you found.
I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none
has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your
deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up
farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea,
intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any
report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their
arriving and departing, many years after you...
[Walt Whitman. In Leaves of Grass (second edition). Fowler and Wells, 1856.]