Masters of Poetry - Walt Whitman. August Nemo

lunatic is carried at last to the asylum, a confirmed case,

      He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom;

      The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,

      He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;

      The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table,

      What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

      The quadroon girl is sold at the stand—the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,

      The machinist rolls up his sleeves—the policeman travels his beat—the gate-keeper marks who pass,

      The young fellow drives the express-wagon—I love him, though I do not know him,

      The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,

      The western turkey-shooting draws old and young—some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,

      Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;

      The groups of newly-come emigrants cover the wharf or levee,

      As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,

      The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,

      The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret, and harks to the musical rain,

      The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,

      The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose,

      ········

      Seasons pursuing each other, the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground,

      Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface,

      The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe,

      Flatboatmen make fast, towards dusk, near the cotton-wood or pekan-trees,

      Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through

      those of the Arkansas,

      Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,

      Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,

      In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport,

      The city sleeps and the country sleeps,

      The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,

      The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife;

      And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

      And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am."

      What is this but tufts and tussocks of grass; not branching trees, nor yet something framed and deftly put together, but a succession of simple things, objects, actions, persons; handfuls of native growths, a stretch of prairie or savanna; no composition, no artistic wholes, no logical sequence, yet all vital and real; jets of warm life that shoot and play over the surface of contemporary America, and that the poet uses as the stuff out of which to weave the song of himself.

      This simple aggregating or cataloguing style as it has been called, and which often occurs in the "Leaves," has been much criticised, but it seems to me in perfect keeping in a work that does not aim at total artistic effects, at finished structural perfection like architecture, but to picture the elements of a man's life and character in outward scenes and objects and to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until, so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this succession of one line genre word painting.

      But this is not the way of the great artists. No, but it is Whitman's way, and these things have a certain artistic value in his work, a work that professedly aims to typify his country and times,—the value of multitude, processions, mass-movements, and the gathering together of elements and forces from wide areas.