Walt Whitman
(Sri Aurobindo:) “Whitman will remain great after all the objections that can be made against his method or his use of it, but the question is whether what served his unique personality, can be made a rule for lesser or different spirits, and whether the defects which we see but do not and cannot weigh too closely in him, will not be fatal when not saved by his all-uplifting largeness.”[1]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “In the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was the one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they are leading. He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth century by the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking, by his emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the cosmic and universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his democratic enthusiasm, by his eye fixed on the future, by his intellectual reconciling vision at once of the greatness of the individual and the community of mankind, by his nationalism and internationalism, by his gospel of comradeship and fraternity in our common average manhood, by almost all in fact of the immense mass of ideas which form the connecting tissue of his work. But he brings into them an element which gives them another potency and meaning and restores something which in most of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and sicklied over by an excessive intellectual tendency more leaned to observe life than strong and swift to live it and which in the practicality of the time was caught up from its healthful soul of nature and converted into a huge grinding mechanism. He has the intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he utters, an almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life, — that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare, — and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a broad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made subject and object and substance of a free and a powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is made one with the pulse of life and the grave reflective pallor and want of blood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that vigorous union. Whitman writes with a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear self-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into speech, —
- One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person
- Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En Masse . . .
- Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power,
- Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine,
- The Modern Man I sing.
No other writer of the time has had this large and definite consciousness of the work of a modern poet as a representative voice of his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation conceived as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind, of universal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and action. His creation, triumphing over all defect and shortcoming, draws from it a unique broadness of view, vitality of force and sky-wide atmosphere of greatness.
But beyond this representation of the largest thought and life and broadest turn to the future possible to his age, there is something else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards what is now opening to man around or above, towards a vision of new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence. Whitman by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things, who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their oneness. That which the old Indian seers called the mahān ātmā, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast strain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, — the French poets, influenced in their form and substance by Whitman, have seized on this element with the clear discernment and intellectual precision and lucidity of the Latin mind and given it the name of unanimism, — is the subject of some of his highest strains. He gets to it repeatedly through his vision of the past opening to the ideal future, the organic universal movement of bygone nations and ages and the labour and creation of the present and some nobler coming turn to a freedom of unified completion, —
- The journey done, the journeyman come home,
- And man and art with Nature fused again . . .
- The Almighty leader now for once has signalled with his wand.
And some part of his work, as in the Passage to India, opens out even into a fuller and profounder sense of its meaning. He sees it here as a new voyage of the human spirit, — “O farther sail!”
- Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only . . .
- For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
- And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all . . .
- O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
And with a singularly clear first seeing of the ideal goal and the ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure.
- The circumnavigation of the world begin,
- Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,
- To reason’s early paradise,
- Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,
- Again with fair creation.
He casts forward too the ideal heart of this wider movement of man into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion, brings out the divinity of the soul in man and its kinship to the divinity of the Eternal, —
- O Thou transcendent,
- Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
- Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
- Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, . . .
- How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if out of myself
- I could not launch to those superior universes?
- Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
- At nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
- But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, O actual Me,
- And, lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
- Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
- And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of space, —
and he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to conscious fruition in oneness,
- Greater than stars or suns,
- Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth;
- What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
- What aspirations, wishes outvie thine and ours, O soul?
- What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?
- What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?
- For others’ sake to suffer all?
- Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achieved, . . .
- Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attained,
- As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
- The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
These passages, — one of the seers of old time reborn in ours might so have expressed himself in a modern and intellectualised language, — send forward an arclight of prophetic expression on what is at the very heart of the new movement of humanity. It is in some degree an indication of that which the twentieth century is slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own in a closer actuality of insight and experience.”[2]
- ↑ The Future Poetry, p.166, “English Poetry – I”
- ↑ Ibid., p.195, “Recent English Poetry – IV”
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