The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“The originality of Leaves of Grass,” says a French critic, “is perhaps the most absolute which has ever been manifest in literature.” Originality first in words: here are no delicate nuances of language, no Shelleyan cloudiness of metaphysical speech, but masculine adjectives and nouns, plain blunt words, daringly raised from the streets and the fields to poetry. (“I had great trouble in leaving out the stock poetical touches, but succeeded at last.”) And then originality of form: no rhymes, except in occasional failures like “Captain, My Captain” and no regular meter or rhythm, but only such free and varying rhythms as breathing might show, or the wind, or the sea.Above all, originality of matter: the simple approach of an admiring child to the old and unhackneyed wonders of nature (“the noiseless splash of the sun-rise,” “the mad pushes of waves upon the land”); the vivid identification of himself with every soul in every experience (“My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs; they fetch my man’s body up, dripping and drowned”); the brave sincerity of an open mind, rejecting and loving all creeds; the frank and lusty sense of the flesh, the tang and fragrance of the open road; the defense and understanding of woman:

The old face of the mother of many children!

Whist! I am fully content….

Behold a woman!

She looks out from her Quaker cap-her face is clearer and more beautiful than the sky.

She sits in an armchair, under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,

The sun just shines on her old white head.

Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen;

Her grandsons raised the flax, and her granddaughters spun it with the distaff and the wheel.

The melodious character of the earth,

The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go, and does not wish to go,

The justified mother of men—

the profound synthesis of individualism and democracy; the cosmic sweep of his imagination and his sympathy, accepting all peoples and saluting the world: these were vivifying shocks to all traditions, all prejudices, all spirits caught in ancient grooves and molds; and the very protests they aroused proved their power and their necessity. All America denounced him except one man, who redeemed them with a letter that is the seal of his nobility. On July 21, 1855, Emerson wrote to Whitman:

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy…. I give you joy of your free and brave thought…. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illu-sion; for the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty…. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt very much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

—R.W. Emerson

Whitman is gone—but how lately! He lived when we were children; even in our time, then, there can be giants, and even America, so crass and young, can produce a poet unique and among the best. Some months ago I stood in his Camden home, where paralysis kept him an invalid for many years; and I mourned to see about me all these reminders that genius, too, must die. But then I took up his book, and read once more the lines that have always haunted me, lines that are here left as the parting word, to haunt other memories endlessly:

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.