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I hear America singing. I celebrate myself. I loaf and invite my soul. I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bonйs. I am the man, I suffered, I was there. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. Passage to нndia. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. A woman waits for me. When I give I give myself. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. The never-ending audacity of elected persons. Pioneers! o Pioneers! Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. o Captain! My

Captain! Who touches this, touches a man. I think I could turn and live with animais. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. The United States themselves are the great­est poem. The mania of owning things. These United States. To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. Me imperturbe, standing at ease in nature. Powerful uneducated persons. Leaves of grass.

I have omitted the quotation marks around these lines and phrases because the marks hardly exist in our minds and mem- ories. It is Whitman^ language rather than his message that exerts power. He worked with ali his soul to become a national bard, the voice of "the divine average," the Muse of Democracy. But we have no national bards; the average man or woman does not feel divine, nor wants to; democracy prefers to get along without a muse. Whitman loved his coun­try and often wrote thrillingly about it, but it is probable that he never really understood it. He has penetrated not because he is accepted by the "powerful uneducated persons" he ideal­izes, but because he is a poet in the original sense, a maker, a coiner of wonderful new language.

His ideas, if you can call them that, he borrowed from many sources, including Emerson [69], who was among the first to hail his genius. His rhythms echo, among other books, the Bible. Nonetheless he is a true revolutionary in poetry. His free-swinging, cadenced, wavelike verse, his fresh (even if often absurd) manipulations of language, his boldness of vocabulary—ali helped to liberate American poetry, and have had a profound effect abroad. There is no doubt also that his erotic candor was useful in the revolt against the genteel tradi- tion.

The first three issues of Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860) contain ninety percent of his best work. After that he tended to repeat himself or to create poses rather than poetry. Whitman was a bit of a charlatan; if you want to be fancy you can say that he wore masks.

He was homosexual. His verse, and particularly his odd notion of democracy, cannot be understood except in the light of his bias toward males.

He had an original temperament, a certain peasant shrewd- ness, but only a moderate amount of brains. He can excite us with his rhapsodic, prophetic note. He can move us with his musical threnodies. He can cause to pass before our eyes a series of wonderful tiny images of people and things in action. These are not small gifts. They are enough to make him the greatest of American poets.

On the other hand, he tries too hard to make a virtue of his deficiencies. He was poorly educated, his experience of life (despite the legends he busily circulated) seems to have been limited, and he depended too much on the resources of his own rich temperament and too little on the common stock of three thousand years of the Western tradition. This makes him parochial when he thinks he is being daringly American. It lends a certain hollowness to his boast that he is "non-literary and non-decorous."

Ignoring scales of values, he embraces and celebrates ali creation—often with infectious passion, often absurdly. Everything in Whitman seems to be equal to everything else; everything becomes equally divine. Sometimes the reader, fatigued by so many unvarying hosannas, is inclined to agree with the poet Sidney Lanier, who said that Whitman argues that "because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God."

Ali these criticisms have been made often, and more severely. Yet he somehow remains. England and the Continent, anxious to believe that his barbaric yawp is the true voice of America (it satisfies their conventional romantic notion of us), appreciate him more widely than we do. But rea- sonably cultivated Americans, if not Whitman's beloved work- ers, also acknowledge his curious and thrilling spell. It is not because his is a truly native voice—Frost [106] is far more authentically American. It is rather because his chant is univer­sal, almost Homeric [2,3], touching in us primitive feelings

about death and nature and the gods who refuse to die in even the most civilized among us. Trail-breaking in form, Whitman seems to be preclassical, pre-Christian in feeling, though he thought of himself as the trumpeter of a new time.