1879 America’s most expansive, most inclusive poet was prone to prophesy about a literature that would somehow embody the whole country. In his Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) he went as far as to say that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.’
This may have been cribbed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous remark – in ‘The Poet’ (1844) – that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’, but its meaning is quite different. Emerson was talking about contemporary, native raw materials for the creative imagination that might equal the impact of the fall of Troy and the Delphic oracle on classical literature – things like ‘our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians’.
As he writes in the Preface, by ‘The United States’ Whitman means the sum total of the country’s progressive institutions and its common people:
[T]heir manners speech dress friendships – the freshness and candor of their physiognomy – the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom … the fluency of their speech … their good temper and openhandedness – the terrible significance of their elections – the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him – these too are unrhymed poetry.
Nearly a quarter century on, his interview on the subject published on this day suggested that the literary millennium might be delayed. The country had endured a horrific civil war, yet no American War and Peace had emerged. Asked, ‘Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?’, he answered, in the version reprinted in his prose collection, Specimen Days (1892):
It seems to me that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks of intercommunication … materialistic prosperity in all its varied forms … are first to be attended to. When those have their results and get settled, then a literature worthy of us will be defined.
This reason for the delayed development of American literature had been advanced for over a century. But Whitman still had his hopes for the power of the demotic. ‘Our American superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people, not in a gentry like the old world.’ And this was true. Trouble was, America needed to find a way to allow its citizens the security and leisure to write without encouraging the snooty elitism of the Old World gentry. But wouldn’t that mean letting some people take a holiday from agriculture and commerce? Not easy.