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But fame of this sort had its down side, beyond annoyances like the constant
letters requesting his autograph, most of which he used to light his wood
fires. The real problem was that from the start he had aimed to be more
than an American institution, more than another celebrity to be ogled and
feted. He had intended to be an agent of social change. "The proof of a
poet," he had written in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, "is that his
country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." This was a
ringing proclamation of what he regarded as a vital, symbiotic relationship
between the poet and society. He had fulfilled his role in this
relationship. But had America absorbed him? Fancy fetes, the Walt Whitman
Cigar, and money from Andrew Carnegie were hardly what he had in mind when
he had envisaged being absorbed by his country.
To be sure, he had effected real change in the realm of literature. Stylistically, he had exploded conventional patterns of rhyme and meter, freeing the poetic line to follow the organic rhythms of feeling and voice. Thematically, he had introduced a new democratic inclusiveness, absorbing images from virtually every aspect of social and cultural life.
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But there, exactly, was the rub. His expansiveness and
inclusiveness had never been merely a literary exercise. "I think of art,"
he declared, "as something to serve the people--the mass: when it fails to
do that it's false to its promises." The irony was that while he was
appreciated by a growing number of the educated elite, he remained, as one
of his contemporaries put it, "caviare to the multitude." He was largely
unread those vibrant American masses whose concerns, attitudes, and language
had provided the basis for some of his greatest poems.
When he left Morgan's Hall that stormy May evening he took with him a rose and the memory of a grand occasion. It was not long, however, before an underlying sense of dissatisfaction would resurface. He confessed to his friend Horace Traubel that he could never get it through his old head that he was not popular. "The people: the crowd--I have had no way of reaching them," he said. "I needed to reach the people:...but it's too late now." He had needed to reach the people ever since he had started writing serious poetry. He had much to tell them, about America and about themselves. This is the story of how he absorbed his country and how he tried to make his country absorb him. Introduction to Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography |
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