Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today

Excerpt

On a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional literary world was startled into indecorous behavior by the unannounced appearance of a thin quarto sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, and there were but twelve poems in the volume. No author’s name appeared upon the title page, the separate poems bore no captions, there was no imprint of publisher. A steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the neck, and a copyright notice identifying Walter Whitman with the publication, furnished the only clues. Uncouth in size, atrociously printed, and shockingly frank in the language employed, the volume evoked such a tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no parallel in the history of letters. From contemporary criticisms might be compiled an Anthology of Anathema comparable to Wagner’s Schimpf-Lexicon, or the Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for Henrik Ibsen. Some of the striking adjectives and phrases employed in print would include the following, as applied either to the verses or their author:

• The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman.
• A belief in the preciousness of filth.
• Entirely bestial.
• Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame.
• Noxious weeds.
• Impious and obscene.
• Disgusting burlesque.
• Broken out of Bedlam.
• Libidinousness and swell of self-applause.
• Defilement.
• Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity.
• Ithyphallic audacity.
• Gross indecency.
• Sunken sensualist.
• Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.
• Roots like a pig.
• Rowdy Knight Errant.
• A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils.
• Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust!
• Priapus—worshipping obscenity.
• Rant and rubbish.
• Linguistic silliness.
• Inhumanly insolent.
• Apotheosis of Sweat.
• Mouthings of a mountebank.
• Venomously malignant.
• Pretentious twaddle.
• Degraded helot of literature.
• His work, like a maniac’s robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors.
• Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought.
• Muck of abomination.

A few quotations from the press of this period will serve to indicate the general tenor of comment:

“The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludicrous, if it were not something a great deal more offensive,” observed the Christian Examiner (Boston, 1856). “It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, and appetites in terms that admit of no double sense. The author is ‘one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, sensual, divine inside and out. The scent of these armpits an aroma finer than prayer.’ He leaves ‘washes and razors for foofoos,’ thinks the talk about virtue and vice only ‘blurt,’ he being above and indifferent to both of them. These quotations are made with cautious delicacy. We pick our way as cleanly as we can between other passages which are more detestable.”

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying his style of all-inclusiveness, the United States Review (1855) characterizes Walt Whitman thus: “No skulker or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He will bring poems to fill the days and nights—fit for men and women with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful. Are you to be put down, he seems to ask, to that shallow level of literature and conversation that stops a man’s recognizing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or a woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. Sex will not be put aside; it is the great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort. To men and women, he says, you can have healthy and powerful breeds of children on no less terms than these of mine. Follow me, and there shall be taller and richer crops of humanity on the earth.”

From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the Crayon (New York, 1856), this extract may be taken: “With a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity of perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of Grass has no identity, no concentration, no purpose—it is barbarous, undisciplined, like the poetry of a half-civilized people, and as a whole useless, save to those miners of thought who prefer the metal in its unworked state.”

The New York Daily Times (1856) asks: “What Centaur have we here, half man, half beast, neighing defiance to all the world?...