Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/274

 w Book III CHAPTER I Whitman ALT WHITMAN once declared his Leaves of Grass to be "the most personal of all books ever published." This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man. Thus he fits Hazlitt's description of Montaigne as one who dared to set down as a writer what he thought as a man. This being the claim of the volume, it becomes highly important to determine the character of the author. Evidently Whitman was not, in any conventional sense of the term, that ' ' average man " whose praises he sang, else even his novel form of expres- sion would hardly have sufficed to keep his poetry so long a time from the masses. He was a man and a writer who could be hated as an impostor or adored as a Messiah but who was w in any case a challenge to discussion. Much Hght is thrown on his character, of course, by the autobiographical parts of his writings; but here it is frequently difficult to determine which incidents belong to his outward and which to his inner, or imaginative, life, so deftly do his vicarious mystical experi- ences blend with the sublimations of his own deeds, and so carefully have many of those deeds been mystified or concealed. ' ' For instance, a poem, Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City, taken by many biographers to support the theory that Whitman had a romance with a lady of high social standing during his 1 848 visit to New Orleans, proves to have been addressed, in the original draft of the poem, not to a lady but to a "rude and ignorant man"; 258