The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

READING 30.

Q Was Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond an

adventure in practical survival or an extended

mystical experience?

Q What might Thoreau mean by “the indescribable

innocence and beneficence of nature”?

CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 19

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autobiographical masterpiece, Leaves of Grass(1855). The

first edition of this collection of poems was met with

strident criticism for its freewheeling verse forms and its

candid celebration of all forms of sexuality—one reviewer

attacked the book as “a mixture of Yankee transcendental-

ism and New York rowdyism.” “Song of Myself,” the

longest of the lyric poems included in Leaves of Grass, pro-

claims the expansive individualism of America’s Romantic

movement. At the same time, it voices Whitman’s impas-

sioned plea for unity with nature and with all humankind.

From Whitman’s

“Song of Myself”(1855)

1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, 1

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,

I learn and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. 5

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this

air,

Born of parents born here from parents the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Figure 27.12 THOMAS EAKINS, Walt Whitman, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 30^1 ⁄ 8  241 ⁄ 4 in.

rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close,

to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,

and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and

genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;

or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to

give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it

appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it

is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastilyconcluded 50

that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy

him forever.”...

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as

two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a

million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your

thumb-nail.... Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary

eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other

things in proportion....

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—

of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, 60

such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they

ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the

sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and

the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put

on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just

cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I

not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?...

Walt Whitman’s Romantic Individualism

Though technically not a transcendentalist, Walt Whitman
(1818–1892; Figure 27.12) gave voice to the transcenden-
tal world-view and to the Emersonian credo of self-
reliance. He worked as a Brooklyn printer and newspaper
editor, a teacher, and a nurse in the American Civil War.
His essays and poems, which have become an influential
part of the American canon, assert his affection for the
American landscape and its human inhabitants.
Like Wordsworth, Whitman took everyday life as his
subject; he too had little use for the artificiality of tradi-
tional poetic diction. What he referred to as his “barbaric
yawp” found ideal expression in free verse(poetry based
on irregular rhythmic patterns rather than on the conven-
tional use of meter). His unmetrical rhythms and sonorous
cadences are rich in alliteration, assonance, and repetition.
He loved Italian opera, and his style often simulates the
musical grandeur of that genre.
The prevailing themes in Whitman’s poetry are nation-
alism and democracy. He embraced the ordinary individual
and sympathized with marginal people, felons, and
prostitutes. Claiming to be a poet of the body as well as the
soul, he defended an honest recognition of the physical
self. The American scene was the source of endless inspira-
tion for the sprawling, cosmic images that dominate his