XI. - America Center of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law, and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time. America means to Whitman the incarnation of sovereign individuals associated in perfect democracy. Hence his adoration of the national ideal. No subject is the theme of so many poems, none receives such frequent mention in all poems as this idealized, glorified Union of Many in One, which the poet sees in America. In his earliest poems, he expresses his longing to sing the songs of "These States," but it remained for his maturer years to adequately embody this rapturous devotion and exalted expectation. His demand upon those who would be poets of America is exacting. They must know its people in all their general traits and local peculiarities, must be "possessed of" its history and great charters; must have rid them selves of all feudal poems and have "assumed the poems and processes of democracy"; must be "faithful to things." His catechism of this would-be poet is searching. Are you really of the whole People? Are you not of some coterie? Some school of mere religion? Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? Animating now to life itself? Have you vivified yourself with the Maternity of these States? Have you, too, the old, ever fresh forbearance and impartiality? Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? For the last born? Little or big, and for the errant? He insists that this poet shall be alive and speak for himself, not be a mere amanuensis for worn-out traditions. "Have you not imported this, or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?" We must have no more assumption that "what is notoriously gone is still here.” Whitman is not blind to the imperfections of the actual America, but in this, as in all things, he sees the present in the light of the past and the future, and wastes no time in querulous fault-finding The best way to rid existing conditions of their blots is to arouse a sense of the sacred inheritance of the past, the blessed significance of the hopes and plans of the prophets and the mighty possibilities of the future through truth to the higher principles. The mission of the poet is to see the potential ideal in and through the present, however disappointing For the great Idea, That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets. Of these States the poet is the equable man, The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith, He is no arguer, he is judgment (Nature accepts him absolutely). He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. He sees eternity in men and women; he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals, For that the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders; The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies for eign despots. Without extinction is liberty, without retrograde is Equality. They live in the feelings of young men and the best women. (Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always ready to fall for Liberty.) The history of modern times has been the working-out of two great objects: the strengthening of individuality and the development of organic unity among large bodies of people in society and nation. Unity and individuality-these have been the motifs in great national and social dramas for centuries of human history, and indeed for eras of animal evolution. These have seemed warring for the ascendancy. At times the gain of one would crush to insignificance the other. When national unity secured real existence through the centralization of monarchy, as in France, the individual appeared lost in this larger entity. In Italy, as the rivalry of cities disintegrated all national life, the individual blossomed into a full development which enriched the wide world. But neither factor could be permanently suppressed. France has, in its later developments with chaos and tumult, shown that the individual must be felt in the united mass. Italy has, in this century, proven, with scarcely less struggle and pain, that developed |