The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (114 page)

Perhaps there was a natural limit to the length of a “lyric” (originally a poem for singing to the lyre) which was the proper medium for the Romantic spirit. When the celebration of the self in poetry expanded beyond bounds, it defeated its object.

John Keats (1795–1821), master of the lyric, saw this weakness, the hypertrophy of the self, in Wordsworth. He met Wordsworth several times, dined with him, heard him pontificate about poetry, and after each meeting found him less sympathetic. “For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages,” Keats asked in 1818, “are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist?… Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood.”

Perhaps the decline of Wordsworth’s poetry was a natural consequence of his specific talent. Having defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” he made his best poems works of remembrance. He was a poet of what he called “the two consciousnesses,” the moments of the present called up moments of the youthful past. As his later life became increasingly calm and sedentary there was ever less contrast between the agony of the
present and the delights of youth. Wordsworth’s remembrance of things past, so focused on himself, became a drama with only one actor, which was not enough to sustain an epic. And he lamented:

Coleridge, Wordsworth’s stimulus and catalyst, was quite another story. He had his own problems, but he did not feed on himself. His plague was his reaching out to the ungraspable exotic, demanding universal truths of theology and philosophy. In his youth in 1793, in a characteristic flight of fancy and in despair over an unrequited love, during his third year at the university, Coleridge had fled Cambridge. Happening on a recruiting office for the Light Dragoons, he was sworn in as “Silas Titus Comberbacke.” But his cavalry career was not a success. He could not groom his horse, ride, or even keep his equipment in order, and was finally assigned to cleaning stables and serving as a hospital orderly. When his older brother James responded to his frantic appeals and bought his release, he returned to Cambridge and the world of letters.

Romantic in a most un-Wordsworthian sense, he was seduced by the otherworldly. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” his main contribution to the
Lyrical Ballads
, had originated in the dream of a friend who imagined a skeleton ship with figures in it.

Coleridge’s idea for the poem had convinced Wordsworth “that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate.” Still Wordsworth claimed to have contributed the idea of shooting an albatross, which made the poem an allegory of man’s sins against nature. “Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream” (1798) was first published in 1816 with Coleridge’s apology that it was only a “fragment … here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity,” Lord Byron. Coleridge offered his own opinion that it was “rather a psychological curiosity, than … of any supposed
poetic
merit.” Conceived in Coleridge’s own opium dream, it began quite simply:

And it concluded with a cryptic warning:

“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
dis
belief” 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:

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.

And he hailed the unpoetic vocations.

Who was this who celebrated the collective self of America?

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 foreground” 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?