FullReads

There were many who didn’t. Henry James, for instance, wrote a review of “Drum Taps” in the Nation, November 16, 1865. In the lusty heyday and assurance of twenty-two years, he laid the birch on smartly. It is just a little saddening to find that even so clear-sighted an observer as Henry James could not see through the chaotic form of Whitman to the great vision and throbbing music that seem so plain to us to-day. Whitman himself, writing about “Drum Taps” before its publication, said, “Its passion has the indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see that it is yet under control.” With this, evidently, the young Henry James did not agree. He wrote:

It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper’s “Philosophy” there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good patriots, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for a poet…. But he is not a poet who merely reiterates these plain facts ore rotundo. He only sings them worthily who views them from a height…. Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own trumpet, and he has made very explicit claims for his book…. The frequent capitals are the only marks of verse in Mr. Whitman’s writing. There is, fortunately, but one attempt at rhyme…. Each line starts off by itself, in resolute independence of its companions, without a visible goal … it begins like verse and turns out to be arrant prose. It is more like Mr. Tupper’s proverbs than anything we have met…. No triumph, however small, is won but through the exercise of art, and this volume is an offence against art…. We look in vain through the book for a single idea. We find nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We find a medley of extravagances and commonplaces.

We do not know whether H.J. ever recanted this very youthful disposal of old Walt. The only importance of it at this moment seems to us this: that appreciation of all kinds of art is so tenderly interwoven with inherited respect for the traditional forms of expression by which they are conveyed that a new and surprising vehicle quite unfits most observers for any reasonable assessment of the passenger.

As for Walt himself, he was quite unabashed by this or any other onslaught. He was not gleg at argument, and probably rolled up the issue of the Nation in his pocket and went down to Coney Island to lie on the sand and muse (but no, we forget, it was November!). In the same issue of the Nation he doubtless read, in the “Literary Notes,” that “Poems Relating to the American Revolution,” by Philip Freneau, was “in press under the scholarly editing of Evart A. Duyckinck to form a complete presentment of the genius of an author whose influence in the affairs of his time would alone impart a lasting value to his works.” At this Walt smiled gently to himself, wondered how soon “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” would get into the anthologies, and “sped to the certainties suitable to him.”

II

These miscellaneous thoughts on the fallibility of critics were suggested to us by finding some old bound volumes of the Edinburgh Review on a bookstall, five cents each. In the issue for November, 1814, we read with relish what the Review had to say about Wordsworth’s “Excursion.” These are a few excerpts: