Walt Whitman in Boston
Before they died, both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman saw the “general use” of the electric light in Boston, as Sylvester Baxter describes it in an absorbing article from the August 1892 edition of The New England Magazine entitled “Walt Whitman in Boston.” It is the best of a trio of stories about Mr. Whitman, apparently published as a tribute after his death, including a review of his life’s work (with the great line, “Democracy is the faith that no beauty, or grace, or comfort, or treasure, is too great for any human being.”) in which George D. Black describes him as “our greatest singer of death songs”, and “Walt Whitman’s Democracy,” which explains concisely why his poetry is still central to United States literature:
Whitman aimed to be something more than a singer; he aimed to be an evangel of a new gospel of humanity. He was greater than his work, and whether he will be anything more than a name to succeeding generations or not, he will always hold a place in literary history as a tonic and impulse for this generation, and as one of the heroic figures of our literature.
America has been the democratic heart of the modern world for a century, and it has produced five great Democrats, of varying degrees of greatness, and of wholly different intellectual texture — Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
A desire to reacquaint myself with the transcendentalists’ understanding of democracy — with Henry Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience”, Mr. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, and Mr. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass — has absorbed me for more than a week, and eventually brought me to the Cornell University Library’s Making of America Web site. I’ve been poring over page after page of digital reproductions of 19th century publications ever since. Intellectuals of the era were both enlivened by and enthusiastic evangelists of the American democratic experiment. Though grounded by a strict Christian ethic, they were suspicious of Puritanism, and they were anxious to break free of it and emerge into a humanist modernity. None was more determined than Mr. Whitman. He broke with convention as one might break up twigs for kindling, and he celebrated democracy as no writer before or since; if any 19th century poet demands reading in the 21st, it is Walt Whitman.
So I have been glad to set Mr. Whitman in historical context, to read eyewitness accounts of his life and to ponder how his life intersected others. “Walt Whitman in Boston” reflects on his later life, and reveals a number of priceless historical nuggets. He loved the work of French painter Jean-Francois Millet and wondered, “Will America ever have such an artist out of her own gestation, body, soul?” He visited Concord and spent an evening with Mr. Emerson and Louisa May Alcott in Mrs. Frank B. Sanborn’s back parlor, lines that reminded me how much Ms. Alcott’s Little Women displays the roots of an organic feminism grounded in humanism. Mr. Whitman dined with Mr. Emerson, visited the graves of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and stopped by the site of Mr. Thoreau’s hermitage at Walden Pond.
He had a keen sense of the absurd. After spending an evening watching a balding, middle-aged Italian actor play the adolescent Romeo, he quipped, “I’m afraid an old fellow like me is not so impressionable as he was in his old theatre-going days.”
The poet John T. Trowbridge visited Mr. Whitman, and the two discussed a time when, deeply discouraged and on the verge of giving up Leaves of Grass, Mr. Whitman received a letter from Alfred Lord Tennyson that filled him “with new cheer and courage.” Mr. Trowbridge replied, “And Tennyson has shown his admiration for you in no more genuine way than in being directly influenced by you in his later style.”
“Do you think he has?” asked Whitman simply. “Most undoubtedly,” said Trowbridge.
(Why didn’t I recall, though all my reading, that Walt Whitman and Lord Tennyson were contemporaries? Yet I remember elephants walk on their toes, and the left testicle of right-handed human males generally hangs lower than the right.)
I’ll have to save a study of why my brain catalogs one thing ahead of another for a different time. Now I’m off to read the later work of Lord Tennyson. If this entry seems scattered, it is because my I am grasping at straws to keep from drowning in a sea of contemporary bad news and succumbing to a depression incited by grief over our ailing democracy. I want to escape into a time when the concept still had ethical value and was celebrated rather than scorned.
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