manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all. Fortunately there is the original inexhaustible fund of buoyancy, normally resident in the race, forever eligible to be appeal'd to and relied on. As for native American individuality, though certain to come, and on a large scale, the distinctive and ideal type of Western character (as consistent with the operative political and even money-making features of United States' humanity in the Nineteenth Century as chosen knights, gentlemen and warriors were the ideals of the centuries of European feudalism) it has not yet appear'd. I have allow'd the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality and assist it—not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy and for other reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant "the great pride of man in himself," and permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning. Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform, bring in stragglers, and reduce everything to a dead level. While the ambitious thought of my song is to help the forming of a great aggregate Nation, it is, perhaps, altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop'd and enclosing individuals. Welcome as are equality's and fraternity's doctrines and popular education, a certain liability accompanies them all, as we see. That primal and interior something in man, in his soul's abysms, coloring all, and, by exceptional fruitions, giving the last majesty to him-something continually touch'd upon and attain'd by the old poems and ballads of feudalism, and often the principal foundation of them-modern science and democracy appear to be endangering, perhaps eliminating. But that forms an appearance only; the reality is quite different. The new influences, upon the whole, are surely preparing the way for grander individualities than ever. To-day and here personal force is behind everything, just the same. The times and depictions from the Iliad to Shakspere inclusive can happily never again be realized- but the elements of courageous and lofty manhood are unchanged. Without yielding an inch the working-man and workingwoman were to be in my pages from first to last. The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets →→ dow'd their god-like or lordly born characters-indeed prace and better based and with fuller ranges than those — I was endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best more eligible now than any times of old were. I will also w my utterances (I said to myself before beginning) to be in sp -the poems of the morning. (They have been founded and mainly written in the sunny forenoon and early midday of life.) I will want them to be the poems of women entire.. 5 much as men. I have wish'd to put the complete Union of the States in my songs without any preference or partiality whatever Henceforth, if they live and are read, it must be just as mu South as North - just as much along the Pacific as Atlanticin the valley of the Mississippi, in Canada, up in Maine, das in Texas, and on the shores of Puget Sound. From another point of view "Leaves of Grass" is avowe the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality—thout meanings that do not usually go along with those words are be hind all, and will duly emerge; and all are sought to be liftra into a different light and atmosphere. Of this feature, inter tionally palpable in a few lines, I shall only say the espous:"g principle of those lines so gives breath of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left Dwritten were those lines omitted. Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emot as and a theme in literature. I am not going to argue the ques tion by itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it s altogether in its relations, bearings, significance-like the cet of a symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to, and the spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all "Leaves of Grass" and the work must stand or fall with them, as the human bod and soul must remain as an entirety. Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities or individuals all times, there is nothing so rare in modern cua ventions and poetry as their normal recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for consultation and confessie and always giving evasions and swathing suppressions in place of that "heroic nudity" on which only a genuine diagnos of serious cases can be built. And in respect to editions of "Leaves of Grass" in time to come (if there should be such • "Nineteenth Century," July, 1883. I take occasion now to confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of mine can do so, any elision of them. Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all. Ever since what might be call'd thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance ("to justify the ways of God to men" is Milton's wellknown and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones; to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through Time. My book ought to emanate buoyancy and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those elements, and has been the comfort of my life since it was originally commenced. - is One main genesis-motive of the "Leaves" was my conviction (just as strong to-day as ever) that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth or even to call attention to it, or the need of it is the beginning, middle, and final purpose of the poems. (In fact, when really cipher'd out and summ'd to the last, plowing up in earnest the interminable average fallows of humanity not "good government" merely, in the common sense the justification and main purpose of these United States.) Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune — the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past my opinion distasteful to the republican genius, and offer no foundation for its fitting verse. Establish'd poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already perform'd, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men. But my volume is a candidate for the future. "All original art," says Taine, anyhow, "is self-regulated, and no original art can be regulated from without; it carries its own counterpoise, and does not receive it from elsewhere- lives on its own blood" a solace to my frequent bruises and sulky vanity. - are in As the present is perhaps mainly an attempt at personal statement or illustration, I will allow myself as further help to extract the following anecdote from a book, "Annals of Old Painters," conn'd by me in youth. Rubens, the Flemish painter in one of his wanderings through the galleries of old convent came across a singular work. After looking at it thought. for a good while, and listening to the criticisms of his suite a students, he said to the latter, in answer to their questions as to what school the work implied or belong'd,) "I do not be eit the artist, unknown and perhaps no longer living, who has gives the world this legacy, ever belong'd to any school, or ever painted anything but this one picture, which is a person affair a piece out of a man's life." "Leaves of Grass" indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and cther personal nature-an attempt, from first to last, to put a Pers a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I co not find any similar personal record in current literature th satisfied me. But it is not on "Leaves of Grass" distinctive.r as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or acvance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists up t viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such pe formance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism. I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, aze for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue t: absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they st.p short of first-class Nationality and remain defective. In the free evening of my day I give to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore. Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises-First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit and not the privilege of a polish'd and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. INDEX OF FIRST LINES PAGE Ah, whispering, something again, unseen A BATTER'D, wreck'd old man Aboard at a ship's helm A California song A carol closing sixty-nine - a résumé - a repetition Add to your show, before you close it, France Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials After surmounting threescore and ten After the dazzle of day is gone After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds After the supper and talk—after the day is done A glimpse through an interstice caught A great year and place Ah little recks the laborer Ah, not this marble, dead and cold Ah, poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats . A leaf for hand in hand A lesser proof than old Voltaire's, yet greater 401 A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to 235 All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages Always our old feuillage A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself Amid these days of order, ease, prosperity Among the men and women the multitude And now gentlemen And whence and why come you And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower An old man bending I come among new faces 305 215 |