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
Of what is called the drama, or dramatic presentation in the United
States, as now put forth at the theatres, I should say it deserves to
be treated with the same gravity, and on a par with the questions
of ornamental confectionery at public dinners, or the arrangement of
curtains and hangings in a ball-room--nor more, nor less. Of the other,
I will not insult the reader's intelligence, (once really entering into
the atmosphere of these Vistas,) by supposing it necessary to show,
in detail, why the copious dribble, either of our little or well-known
rhymesters, does not fulfil, in any respect, the needs and august
occasions of this land. America demands a poetry that is bold, modern,
and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no
respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science
and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than
the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest
models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith
in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only. Like her,
it must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the banner of
the divine pride of man in himself, (the radical foundation of the new
religion.) Long enough have the People been listening to poems in which
common humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging
superiors. But America listens to no such poems. Erect, inflated, and
fully self-esteeming be the chant; and then America will listen with
pleased ears.
Nor may the genuine gold, the gems, when brought to light at last, be
probably usher'd forth from any of the quarters currently counted on.
To-day, doubtless, the infant genius of American poetic expression,
(eluding those highly-refined imported and gilt-edged themes,
and sentimental and butterfly flights, pleasant to orthodox
publishers--causing tender spasms in the coteries, and warranted not to
chafe the sensitive cuticle of the most exquisitely artificial gossamer
delicacy,) lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by
the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons,
or the lecturers in the colleges--lies sleeping, aside, unrecking
itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee,
or stumpspeech--or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the Carolinas--or in some
slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia
or Baltimore mechanic--or up in the Maine woods--or off in the hut of
the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along
the Pacific railroad--or on the breasts of the young farmers of
the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. Rude and coarse
nursing-beds, these; but only from such beginnings and stocks,
indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time,
flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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