Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
Much is there, yet, demanding line and outline in our Vistas, not only
on these topics, but others quite unwritten. Indeed, we could talk the
matter, and expand it, through lifetime. But it is necessary to return
to our original premises. In view of them, we have again pointedly
to confess that all the objective grandeurs of the world, for highest
purposes, yield themselves up, and depend on mentality alone. Here, and
here only, all balances, all rests. For the mind, which alone builds
the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself. By it, with
what follows it, are convey'd to mortal sense the culminations of
the materialistic, the known, and a prophecy of the unknown. To
take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and
archetypal models--to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and
to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future--these, and these
only, satisfy the soul. We must not say one word against real materials;
but the wise know that they do not become real till touched by emotions,
the mind. Did we call the latter imponderable? Ah, let us rather
proclaim that the slightest song-tune, the countless ephemera of
passions arous'd by orators and tale-tellers, are more dense, more
weighty than the engines there in the great factories, or the granite
blocks in their foundations.
Approaching thus the momentous spaces, and considering with reference to
a new and greater personalism, the needs and possibilities of American
imaginative literature, through the medium-light of what we have already
broach'd, it will at once be appreciated that a vast gulf of difference
separates the present accepted condition of these spaces, inclusive of
what is floating in them, from any condition adjusted to, or fit for,
the world, the America, there sought to be indicated, and the copious
races of complete men and women, along these Vistas crudely outlined.
It is, in some sort, no less a difference than lies between that
long-continued nebular state and vagueness of the astronomical worlds,
compared with the subsequent state, the definitely-form'd worlds
themselves, duly compacted, clustering in systems, hung up there,
chandeliers of the universe, beholding and mutually lit by each other's
lights, serving for ground of all substantial foothold, all vulgar
uses--yet serving still more as an undying chain and echelon of
spiritual proofs and shows. A boundless field to fill! A new creation,
with needed orbic works launch'd forth, to revolve in free and lawful
circuits--to move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine like
heaven's own suns! With such, and nothing less, we suggest that New
World literature, fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these
States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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