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Daniel Webster (search for this): chapter 8
y similar rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, O pioneers. Yet this new America is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is one and indivisible. This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the Captain, dies indeed on the deck of the victor ship, but the ship comes into the harbor with object won. Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity has but
Nathaniel Hawthorne (search for this): chapter 8
a dinner-table laid for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. What would the others think of Poe? I fancy that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, but would not greatly care for him. George Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and understand him better than the rest. But Stevenson would be immensely interested; he would begin an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has seen ty impressible. The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the Democratic review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall, and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats,
Henry D. Thoreau (search for this): chapter 8
ure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than sixty years. Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the single man of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa a The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the Democratic review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall, and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with
Charles A. Dana (search for this): chapter 8
f independence for the separate person, the single man of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out. Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb. So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a carpenter, who leaned to the Quakers. There were many children. When little Walt --as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter — was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, extraordinarily impressible.
Italian (search for this): chapter 8
The next sixteen years were full of happy vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper in New York, and furnishing short stories to the Democratic review, a literary journal which numbered Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He wrote a novel on temperance, mostly in the reading-room of Tammany Hall, and tried here and there an experiment in free verse. He was in love with the pavements of New York and the Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with Italian opera and with long tramps over Long Island. He left his position on The Brooklyn Eagle and wandered south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back 199 to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the carpenter's trade with his father, and brooded over a book-a book of new things. This was the famous Leaves of Grass. He set the type himself, in a Brooklyn printing-office, and printed about eight hundred copies. The book had a portrait of the author — a meditative, gray-bearded poet in w
Roderick Usher (search for this): chapter 8
liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to school in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark, short, bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good record in French and Latin, read, wrote and recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did not notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling. But his Scotch fosterfather disapproved of his conduct and withtrikes the key and the closing sentence contains the climax. In the whole composition every sentence is modulated to the one end in view. The autumn landscape tones with the melancholy house; the somber chamber frames the cadaverous face of Roderick Usher; the face is an index of the tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with the grim phantom Fear and awaiting the cumulative horror of the final moment. In Ligeia, which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his tales, the theme is the cease
Moore (search for this): chapter 8
an Romanticism. But they were also late comers, and they were caught in the more morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams, and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a dead-beat. A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston, but he hated Frogpondium his favorite name for the city of his nativity-as much as
Henry Clay (search for this): chapter 8
d in many similar rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, O pioneers. Yet this new America is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is one and indivisible. This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the Captain, dies indeed on the deck of the victor ship, but the ship comes into the harbor with object won. Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that humanity
Alexander Hamilton (search for this): chapter 8
this and in many similar rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to what may be termed the three points of his national creed. The first is the newness of America, and its expression is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, O pioneers. Yet this new America is subtly related to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, such as Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of orient and occident is emphasized. The second article of the creed is the unity of America. Here he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in external aspects the republic is one and indivisible. This unity, in Whitman's view, was cemented forever by the issue of the Civil War. Lincoln, the Captain, dies indeed on the deck of the victor ship, but the ship comes into the harbor with object won. Third and finally, Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived that h
Swinburne (search for this): chapter 8
wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. Until the Civil War was half over, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, patiently composing new poems for successive printings of his book. Then he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, and finally settled down in a Washington garret to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. He wrote Drum Taps and other magnificent poems about the War, culminating in his threnody on Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Swinburne called this the most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. After the war had ended, Whitman stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. O'Connor. John Hay was a staunch friend. Some of the best known poets and critics of England and the Continent now began to recognize his genius. But his health had been permanently shattered by his heroic service as a nurse, and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which forced him to r
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