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PARTISAN REVIEW
his comedy is a more pervasive affair than his deliberate feints, jokes
and evasions; is, in truth, a deep-running strain of instinctive self–
appraisal.
What you appreciate as soon as you contemplate the atrocious jog–
trot in which Emerson cast some of his most sublime meditations, is
Whitman's phenomenal
luck.
He may have had his nerve, but more
than that, he had his luck. Growing up with the last of the world cities;
sublimely average in his appetites but far above average in his powers;
never beyond walking distance of the country, river and seashore; tem–
peramentally attuned to the most
recherche
of America's thinkers but
far more plastically adaptable to ordinary life; in the Civil War but not
of it; with plenty of opportunity to indulge his precariously innocent
taste for young manhood; strongly innoculated with the huckstering virus
but just as strongly protected from it by an immense indolence, delicacy
and purity of feeling;-with all this in his favor, Whitman could hardly
have missed finding that
sine qua non
of great poetry, namely, a new
rhythm,
a "natural" tempo and an accurate sense of stress. Compare
Emerson's lines from "Compensation" :
In changing moon and tidal wave
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space,
Electric star or pencil plays,
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls
and so on, like Sophocles arranged for a German band, with Whitman's:
City of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make
you illustrious .
..
A temptation follows from this seemingly naive metrical success to
treat Whitman as a master of Free Verse who composes "by phrase"
rather than by foot, line or stanza. Of all the heresies attached to Whit–
man, this may be the most dangerous, being just true enough to lead
weaker heads astray. The ground-beat of his poetry grew steadily
stronger, until, in poems like "Patrolling Barnegat" and "The Dalliance
of the Eagles," you find the Whitman "form" in its abstract purity, a
loose-jointed variation of the classical hexameter, gracefully monumen–
tal, a species of American Romanesque with the balance if not the pre–
cision we think of as neo-classical. But even though these homogene–
ous poems are rarely his best, Whitman is a strongly metered poet,
