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p The poet found much around him that was bright and promising; but he was by no means a blind enthusiast who failed to notice the dark sides of life. After "Song of Myself”, "Song of the Open Road" and many other poems, Whitman wrote "The Eighteenth Presidency”, which included the words: "The sixteenth and seventeenth terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and shallowness of great rulers are just as eligible to These States as to any foreign despotism....”   [158•2 

p Even in "Song of the Open Road" we feel repulsion and horror when the poet portrays people

p ... Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright,
          death under the breast-bones,
          hell under the skull-bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and
          artificial flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable
          of itself,
Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

p This is an aspect of Whitman’s art which deserves special attention, for certain critics would have us believe that Leaves of Grass contains a completely one-sided picture of life, as though Whitman always saw life through rose-colored glasses.

p More often than not, man in Whitman’s poetry is beautiful, noble, passionate, straightforward, loving, athletic, clear-eyed, full-blooded, joyful, healthy, quick, lively, powerful, magnificent, wise, proud, magnanimous, enchanting, godlike, intelligent, moral, heroic, strong, devoted, calm and confident. 159 There are a great many more similarly exultant epithets to be found in Whitman’s book.

p Often the poet glorifies man in general and idealizes all his fellow-countrymen. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass the poet asks a rhetorical question: is the "jealous and passionate instinct of American standards ... for the evergrowing communes of brothers and lovers...?”   [159•1 . Well, that was what Whitman wanted Americans to become. The humanist poet would make every man a “camerado”.

p But in rereading Leaves of Grass we become more and more aware that Whitman did not regard all men and women in the United States as equally good. He loved above all the working people—seamen, farmers, factory-workers, fishermen, artisans. No American poet before Whitman had paid such constant attention to working men and the working class. In the poem "A Song for Occupations" (1855) we find the following lines:

p You workwomen and workmen of these States having your
          own divine and strong life,
And all else giving place to men and women like you.

p Works in which Whitman asserts the grandeur of human labor are very numerous. Everywhere in Leaves of Grass there are pictures of the everyday work of builders, miners, farmers, cobblers, mechanics, bridge-builders, metal-workers. The poet boldly uses terms taken from the world of urban industrial labor. "A Song for Occupations”, "Song of Myself" and other poems present a kind of encyclopedia of men at work. Whitman creates detailed and realistic pictures of the everyday working life of average Americans:

p The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,
The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each
          end, carefully bearing on their shoulders
          a heavy stick for a cross-beam,
The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right
          hands, rapidly laying the long side-wall,
          two hundred feet from front to rear,
The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual
          click of the trowels striking the bricks....

p These lines are from "Song of the Broad-Axe”, and I have quoted only a small part of the very long stanza devoted to the 160 portrayal of human labor. "Song of Myself" also deals time and again with the most various kinds of work. Here is a rather typical example:

p The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the
          reporter’s lead flies swiftly
          over the note-book, the
          sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,
The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper
          counts at his desk, the
          shoemaker waxes his thread....

p And here are some no less realistic scenes of other aspects of American life from the poem "I Sing the Body Electric":

p The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims
          through the transparent green-shine,
          or lies with his face up and rolls silently
          to and fro in the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats,
          the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their
          open dinner kettles, and their
          wives waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in
          the garden or cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving
          his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite
          grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born,
          out on the vacant
          lot at sundown after work....

p It is especially significant that the author of Leaves of Grass speaks with warmth not only of the everyday activities of the farmer and the hunter, to which poets devoted a great deal of attention before Whitman too, but also of the labor of the urban proletarian. William Bryant, it is true, spoke on occasion with genuine sympathy about the American workers, but the first American poet to penetrate to the very heart of the city, to 161 gain a clear awareness of the great role of workers in America, was Whitman.

p The poet reproduces the life of city dwellers honestly, truthfully, accurately, with many unattractive details. It is obvious that here Whitman writes as a realist; but he does not cease to be a realist when he lauds the spiritual beauty of the common American worker.

p Unlike the romantics, who copied details of daily life primarily to expose vulgarity and spiritual poverty, to show the tragic discrepancy between dream and reality, and unlike the popular humorists of the mid-century with their tendency toward realistic satire, who to a considerable degree showed the prosaic sides of everything in order to expose the ugliness of everyday existence, Whitman saw in daily life the normal and natural expression of things truly human. In his opinion, reality itself was noble, and everyday life contained much that was truly poetic.

p Nor did Whitman attempt to dissolve the personality in the mass, to bring it down to a low level. Again and again he emphasizes the rights of each man’s individual personality.

p Yes, traces of romanticism can certainly be found in the image of the American that emerges in Whitman’s works, the image of an independent, noble and bold man ready to fight for what he thinks right. This is already clear from certain previously mentioned epithets which characterize man in Leaves of Grass. At times one can sense the direct influence of American romantics and their ideal images. But nonetheless, in depicting common Americans, Whitman did not wholly give way to the impulses of imagination, did not stay fully within the sphere of romantic images, but started from the visible, from the factual.

p Even in the works which were included in the early editions of Leaves of Grass there are none of the abstractions which are scattered so liberally through the odes of Lowell or Bryant. Whitman, the poet of man, is no friend to phrase-mongering. His language is most often that of the farmers or the city dweller, but it is always free from adulteration; it is not distorted and exaggerated to comic ends as in the writings of newspaper humorists or in Lowell’s The Biglow Papers. It is dignified and authentic. Whitman speaks of man witn respect and faith, glorifying people in the manner of the travelling anti-slavery orators.

p In order to appreciate the specific features of Whitman’s view of man as expressed in his lyrical poetry, which, for all its tendency to realism, is rich in romantic inflections, let us 162 compare Leaves of Grass with Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, which was published at almost exactly the same time (1854). Walden is built on the romantic negation of morality and the spiritual essence of bourgeois relations. In this witty and vivid work, full of ironic aphorisms and occasional realistic passages, Thoreau eulogizes the virtues of a life in which the material needs and economic ties of man with society are reduced to a minimum. In his foreword to a Russian translation of Walden, the Soviet critic A. Startsev rightly points out that Thoreau does not put forward any specific “ program” in his book, but rather writes as a polemicist. In a highly paradoxical manner he puts forth his ideas on the perniciousness of the laws and practices of the world of propert v.

p Thoreau had his fellow-countrymen in mind when he proffered the following generalization: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country....”   [162•1  He goes on to say that the laboring man has no time to be anything but a machine. As for the farmers, they "are sure to fail...".  [162•2 

p In still another part of his book Thoreau declares: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord: and everywhere, in shops, and offices,and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”  [162•3 

p Like almost all the American romantics, the author of Walden compares the way of life of civilized people and that of savages, to the advantage of the latter.

p It is easy to find features common to Leaves of Grass and Walden. The similarity in lyrical tone immediately stands out. Certain passages in Walden contain clearly Whitmanesque pictures of life, unexpectedly sharp, hyperbolic images. Thoreau says, for instance: "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life....”  [162•4 

p The proximity of the views held by these two authors is undeniable, especially where slavery is concerned. Thoreau’s mention of how he once sheltered a runaway slave brings to mind the story in "Song of Myself”. And correspondingly, Whitman would quite willingly have concurred with several of Thoreau’s indignant harangues about money-grubbers.

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p Still, the differences between Whitman and the author of Walden are quite obvious. Whereas Thoreau repeatedly emphasizes the debasement and spiritual vacuity of man, we have seen that one of the corner-stones of Leaves of Grass is the idea of the magnificence of the working people. Whitman rejects the principle of curtailing human needs and demands; he dreams of the endless development of man, of his all-embracing progress which knows no limits.

p Thoreau could see little of value or worthy of attention in the contemporary world. This philosophy is expressed in Walden in the following words, for example: "... if we stay at home and mind our business who will want railroads?”   [163•1  In Whitman there is none of Thoreau’s romantic tendency to contrast exalted nature to wretched man; he is the champion of the harmonious fusion of man and nature, nature and civilization.

p Thoreau glorified solitude. No matter what individualistic tendencies we may find in Whitman’s poetry, he decisively rejects the ideal of solitude and asceticism and bases his world-view on the irresistible attraction of people for each other.

p It is interesting that the author of Leaves of Grass was aware of Thoreau’s individualism and took him sharply to task for his insufficient democratic commitment.

p Whereas Thoreau preferred to watch life pass by, Whitman strove to penetrate to the very depths of contemporary reality. The poet was also drawn toward the future, envisioned as far more joyful and dignified than the present. His revolutionary democratic instincts made him feel at the same time that the road to the future lay through conflict and struggle.

p Thoreau did not immediately define his attitude to Whitman. He was initially antagonized by Whitman’s truly militant democratism, and also by his defiance of established canons in the treatment of physical love. But eventually he spoke of Whitman’s poetry as very brave and American. Still Whitman and Thoreau never became very close.

p On the whole, Whitman accepted his isolation from the majority of recognized American men of letters with calm dignity. He knew especially well that he had nothing in common with the poets who were most popular with the critics.

p A version of a poem unpublished during the poet’s lifetime has been preserved, in which Whitman addresses "the prevailing bards”. He calls himself "the bard of Democracy" and says:

164

p Others are more correct and elegant than I, and more at
          home in the parlors and schools than I,
But I alone advance among the people en-masse, coarse and
          strong....  [164•1 

p The poet’s genuine “I”, Whitman continues, lives in his poems, and only his “shadow”, his “likeness” rushes about "seeking a livelihood".  [164•2  Whitman sadly admits that while observing himself he often sees a creature which looks like him but is "never substantially" he at all.

But as a rule Whitman remained true to himself: a man of deep democratic convictions, a poet who loved the beautiful and knew how to create it.