400
PARTISAN REVIEW
I perceive I have not really understood anything, not a single object,
and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon
me and sting me,
Because I was assuming so much,
Because I have dared to open my mouth at all.
In
that "distant ironical laughter" many of Whitman's cntlcs
have heard not only the doom of his American legend, but the judg–
ment of time against his claims to major greatness as a poet. Today
it is temptingly easy to conclude with Santayana, for instance, that
Whitman was a poet of "barbarism" who muddled the ideal and
the real; or with D. H. Lawrence that Whitman, having mistaken
Eros for sympathy, lost his genius in "the old love idea"; or with
Esther Shephard that Whitman's democratic "personality" was a
derivative literary pretense; or with Leslie Fiedler that we should
wholly discount "the absurd ideas, the outlived posturing" and find
Whitman's measure of greatness only in the darker elegies or in his
witty and sly manipulations of the mythic role he was "condemned to
play." No doubt each of these judgments has its relevance, and
all
needed to be forcefully made; but neither singly nor together are they
conclusive for our time, as no judgment can be that rests content with
a disjunction of human values. For ultimately we must and do judge
poetry as we judge character and will; we judge style not as an
artifice but as a voice; we judge the poet, or at least the modern
poet, not by his intelligence regarded absolutely but by his human
breadth and depth, by the largeness of the risks he takes in his
"cri–
ticism of life," by
his
power and
his
luck to make
his
work a fact
of culture-an embodiment of the spiritual dialectics of his world.
And even the failures in such a body of work are exemplary.
If
they
should lack what Whitman had often achieved- the "precision and
balance" of art-they testify the more strongly, therefore, to the
constant modern need to sustain an ever more substantial balance
of the human fact with human possibilities; though they should lack
all other virtue, they bear witness to the stubborn integrity of a
mind that "insists," as William James insisted, "that the ideal and
the real are dynamically continuous."
