The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree;

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  And it concluded with a cryptic warning:

  And all should cry Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  “Christabel,” which Coleridge intended to include in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads but never completed, was again a poem in the tradition of Gothic romance, of abduction, bewitchings, and mysterious spells, with heavy sexual overtones. It is no wonder that Wordsworth, to Coleridge’s disappointment, refused to include it in the volume.

  In 1800 Coleridge, who still abased himself before “the giant Wordsworth,” was dismayed and depressed. As he wrote a friend, “I abandon Poetry altogether—I leave the higher and deeper kinds to Wordsworth, the delightful, popular and simply dignified to Southey, and reserve for myself the honourable attempt to make others feel and understand their writings, as they deserve to be felt and understood.” Wordsworth argued that since the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads was to appear under his own name, it would be “indelicate” to include so long and so admirable a poem from another pen. Also, Wordsworth found “Christabel” “discordant” with his own style of celebrating “incidents of common life.” Coleridge justified the exclusion with doubtful humility. “He [Wordsworth] is a great, a true Poet—I am only a kind of Metaphysician.” The German he had learned in his youth had opened for him the world of Kant, Lessing, Schlegel, and the German Romantic philosophers. When Coleridge finally published his own collected poems in 1817, he emphasized their cryptic message by entitling them Sibylline Leaves. So he publicly boasted his oracular style, aiming at “suspension of disbelief” in contrast to Wordsworth’s everyday world.

  Coleridge became increasingly bookish, literary, and philosophical, devoting himself to explaining the works of the great English authors, notably Shakespeare. His autobiography was no song of himself, but a Biographia Literaria, a life in literature. In his later years more and more of his work was what he called “theologico-metaphysical” writing, expounding his own theories of Church and State. “What is it that I employ my metaphysics on?” he asked himself in his notebook. “To perplex our dearest notions and living moral instincts?” Unlike his anti-ego Wordsworth, who had settled into rural self-satisfaction, Coleridge had set himself on “The Road to Xanadu.” The last eighteen years of his life he lodged under the care of “a respectable Surgeon and Naturalist at Highgate,” the generous Dr. James Gillman, who tried to help him keep his opium habit under control. But Coleridge managed to have his laudanum smuggled in to him. Charles Lamb’s “archangel slightly damaged” worked at his long-planned “magnum opus”—a new Summa of theology, morals, psychology, logic, and all the sciences and arts—that was never published. “Coleridge sat at the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years,” wrote Carlyle, “looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle.”

  A half century after Wordsworth’s manifesto, there appeared on the other side of the Atlantic another poets’ proclamation, emphatically American. In 1855 a tall thin volume was published with Leaves of Grass but no author on its title page. This author was no mystic opium addict nor any rural recluse, but a self-educated printer’s devil turned vagrant journalist. “Walter Whitman” was listed as the person who had registered the copyright, and facing the title page was a portrait of the author, “broad-shouldered, rough-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr.” The volume contained twelve poems without titles and a ten-page Preface. From the New World of individualism came a boast of the collective self. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.” “The proof of a poet,” the Preface concluded, “is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” His first lines announced his plain theme:

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,

  I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

  The thirty-six-year-old Whitman was, for a poet, late in making his debut. But Leaves of Grass became a lifework as he continually expanded it, to 456 pages (third edition), into two volumes (sixth edition), and even till his “Deathbed Edition” of 1891–92.

  A journeyman printer, he seems to have set some of the type for the first edition himself. He gave most of the nine hundred copies to friends and critics. But when, after a few weeks, there were no reviews, Whitman rounded out the task of self-creation by writing his own enthusiastic reviews, and publishing them in magazines and the Brooklyn Times. The volume plainly showed the influence of the eminent Ralph Waldo Emerson. From Emerson he received a letter acclaiming “the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass … the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.… I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.” Whitman showed a thoroughly American feeling for public relations when he published Emerson’s letter (without his permission) to promote the second edition.

  The volume startled by its indiscriminate subject matter. The long opening poem, which he would later title “Song of Myself,” celebrated the miscellany of American life—butcher-boy, canal boy, paving-man, prostitute, the crew of a fishing-smack, all the motley of “the Nation of many nations.” It included fragments of American history, the fall of the Alamo, and spoke with unfamiliar frankness.

  On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babies,

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  And he hailed the unpoetic vocations.

  Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!

  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,

  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches,

  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,

  This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.

  Who was this who celebrated the collective self of America?

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

  No more modest than immodest.

  The form was just as surprising. This New World self would no longer be channeled and confined by rhyme or meter, nor imprisoned in stanzas. “A poem must be unconventional, organic, like a tree growing out of its own proper soil.” The freedom of “blank verse” with its iambic pentameters, though good enough for Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton, was not free enough for Whitman. Instead, he proclaimed the utter freedom of “free verse.” French poets in the 1880s would give this a name as if it were a form (vers libre). But Whitman had already demonstrated that freedom in Leaves of Grass. And that free “form” inspired twentieth-century poetry in the works of the Imagists, of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and many others. Free verse aimed “to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” Some found Whitman’s free verse prosaic. Emerson, who had hoped Whitman would write the nation’s songs, appeared disappointed that Whitman “seemed content to make the inventories.”

  By his late thirties Whitman was experienced at making the nation’s inventories. His years as a wandering journalist had provided the “long foregro
und” that Emerson imagined—a varied American experience of village, city, and countryside, north and south. Born in Huntington, Long Island, in 1819, he was the second of nine children of whom both the eldest and the youngest were mentally defective. When Walt was only four, his father, Walter Whitman, a farmer turned carpenter, moved the family to Brooklyn, then a town of ten thousand. His whole schooling was five years in the Brooklyn public schools. After four years as an apprentice printer, at thirteen he became a printer’s devil. Before 1848 he had held a half-dozen different jobs on newspapers in New York and Brooklyn. The longest was a two-year stint (1846–48) as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He wrote a few poems, many stories, and a temperance novel, Franklin Evans: the Inebriate, a Tale of the Times (1842). Enjoying the color and variety of urban life, he rode omnibuses and ferries, bathed on the beaches, frequented the opera and the Bowery Theater where he saw Fanny Kemble, Junius Brutus Booth, and Edwin Forrest. He read the Bible, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Dickens, the Ossianic poems, and Sir Walter Scott. Though an active Democrat, he lost his job on the Democratic Eagle because of his vocal Free Soil sentiments.

  Then, in a theater lobby, someone offered him a job writing for the New Orleans Crescent. He and his brother crossed Pennsylvania and Virginia and took a steamer down the Ohio and Mississippi. He was stirred by the sights and sounds of New Orleans. He later spread the legend that a New Orleans romance had produced six illegitimate children, but these seem to be the offspring of his imagination at the age of seventy. His poem “Once I passed through a Populous City,” was formerly thought to refer to his procreative romance. “Day by day and night by night we were together all else has long been forgotten by me.” But close examination of the original manuscript now reveals that the object of the romance was not a woman but a man.

  After three months in New Orleans he and his brother took a roundabout return to Brooklyn via St. Louis, Chicago, the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, Albany, and the Hudson River. He was collecting the impressions and tag ends of experience that would be strung together in Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s biographers suggest that, in New Orleans or just after, he somehow experienced an epiphany. Did some sudden revelation of reality and of himself prepare him over the next seven years to produce the twelve poems of his shocking book, and transform him from a vagrant journalist into the first American poet? When did he know that his talent set him apart?

  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  Part of him insisted that since he was only an “average man” he was qualified to speak for the people, another part expressed the prophet-superman who spoke “a word of the modern, the word En Masse.”

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,

  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  A tormented homosexual in a heterosexual world, he was still determined to speak for the whole world. But only his mother and other men are his “darlings.”

  In the next years he published eight more expanded editions of Leaves of Grass. And while making a living writing for newspapers, he joined a mini-bohemia meeting at “Pfaff’s Cellar” at Broadway and Bleecker Street. The Leaves of Grass (third edition) in 1860 contained two complementary groups of poems. One, “Children of Adam,” a “cluster of Poems … to the passion of Woman-Love”:

  From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus,

  Singing the song of procreation,

  Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people,

  Singing the muscular urge and the blending,

  Singing the bedfellow’s song (O resistless yearning!

  O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all else you delighting!)

  While this cluster, Whitman said, celebrated the “amative” love of men and women, a complementary “cluster”—the Calamus poems—celebrated the “adhesive love” of men for men. Whitman, vaguely and unpersuasively, argued that he intended only a political-democratic message. But even before these two clusters, his sexual allusions caused him trouble. The publisher who sold a thousand copies of the second edition refused to handle the book any longer. Emerson had failed to persuade Whitman not to publish his “Children of Adam” or to expurgate the poems. The third edition was far more explicit and sold well in the hands of a new publisher.

  Meanwhile, the Civil War engaged Whitman’s life and his talents. In 1862, learning that his brother had been wounded, he went south in search of him, then settled in Washington for the next eleven years. As long as the war lasted he spent himself as itinerant nurse and companion to the wounded Northern and Southern soldiers in Washington’s huge military hospitals. He brought gifts of oranges, jelly, and candy, wrote letters for them, and dressed their wounds. It is not clear how much of his homosexual feelings entered into these friendly efforts. He now wrote some of his best-known poems, inspired by the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which some consider his masterpiece.

  Come lovely and soothing death,

  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

  In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

  Sooner or later, delicate death.

  And, more familiar:

  O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,

  The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,

  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

  When the Secretary of the Interior read the Leaves of Grass with its two sexual clusters, he promptly fired Whitman from his clerical job. But his friends soon secured a post for him with the Attorney General.

  The episode made Whitman a martyr to literary freedom and attracted outspoken champions. The attacks on his indecency only increased his readers. A decade later, when the Society for the Suppression of Vice in Boston threatened prosecution, the publisher withdrew the book, which was taken over by a publisher in more tolerant Philadelphia. A result, phenomenal for the time, was the sale of three thousand copies of the Philadelphia (sixth) edition (1882) in a single day. Still in Washington, in a retort to Carlyle’s antidemocratic diatribe, Shooting Niagara, Whitman expressed his passions in the prose of Democratic Vistas (1870), criticizing current fashions and championing a future for American literature.

  In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke, which he said resulted from his infection with gangrene and fever when he was attending wounded Civil War soldiers. But these several illnesses were probably complicated by the strains of his sexual ambiguity. He moved in with his brother in Camden, New Jersey, where he remained an invalid and produced little of significance until his death in 1892. Before he left Washington he had written “Passage to India,” included in the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass (1871). In this, his last great poem, he tried to tone down his chauvinism, even admitting that America needed the world. It celebrated three world-unifying events: the opening of the Suez Canal, the meeting of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railways in Utah, and the laying of the transatlantic cable. He insisted that America needed its past and “Passage to more than India!”

  But Whitman never repaired his divided self. As prophet and pundit receiving the great and famous in Camden, he still carried on his loving correspondence with a young horse-car conductor he had met in Washington in 1866. The refined George Santayana, seeing in Whitman’s poetry only bundles of unassimilated particulars, made him his prototype of “The Poetry of Barbarians”—revealing a “wealth of perception with intelligence and of imagination without taste.” And this new freedom of the self, however tormented, that Whitman declared would mark the future path of poetry. Mostly unappreciated and widely condemned by the America he had idolized, Whitman remained the relentless cre
ator. He lived a long and prosperous afterlife, even in the works of American poets who had abandoned his America and seceded from his idealized collective life. “It was you who broke the new wood,” Ezra Pound said in his poem to Whitman. “Now is the time for carving. We have one sap and one root—Let there be commerce between us.”

  63

  In a Dry Season

  A century after the Romantic Revolution announced by Wordsworth, there came into English literature an anti-Romantic Revolution. Its Wordsworth was T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and its manifesto another brief essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). And he, too, had his Coleridge, his catalyst, anti-ego, and critic, in the person of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). They plainly and simply declared themselves enemies of the Egotistical Self. Denying the poem to be about the poet, Eliot declared that “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.… The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. The emotion of art is impersonal.”

  A far cry from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”! Not enough to let powerful emotions overflow. Not enough that the poet “be himself.” The poet, Eliot insisted, must be equipped too with “the historical sense … nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year.… a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.” Which means that the poet must be learned and know his great predecessors. “Someone said: The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” The poet cannot reach the needed “impersonality” without a sense of history—“unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”