Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 20.djvu/581

* WHITMAN. 4:91 WHITNEY. out the English-speaking world, in editions that grew to several times the bulk of its humble be- ginning. The remainder of Wiiitman's unevent- ful life was given to the elaboration of tliis book. The incidents and date-marks of the remaining thirty-seven years of the poet's life are these: During the second year of the Civil War the wounding of his brother in the battle of Fred- ericksburg led him to volunteer as an army nurse, in which capacity he served until the close of the war, in Washington and Virginia. The immediate literary result of this experiment is Drum Tups (18(J.5), best described in his own words as "a little book containing life's darkness and blood-dripi)ing wounds and psalms of the dead." This is now incorjiorated in the Leaves of Grass. In IStiT he published Memoranda Durinr/ the War, made up chiefly of letters written at the time to the New York Times, from which he drew his chief support. His letters to his mother during the war were posthumously printed as Tlir Wound Dresser (1897). His labors in the field brought on a serious illness in 1804, from which it is believed he never recovered com- pletely. In recognition of his services, he was given a clerkship in the Treasury Be])artment (18fi5-73), after having been dismissed by the Interior Department, on account of his Leaves of Grass. His Washington life was terminated by a slight paralytic stroke (1873). He moved to Camden, N. J., the residence of his brother George, and remained there until his death, in honorable poverty and serene cheerfulness, much sought by literar}' pilgrims, especially Europeans who discerned in him a distinctively American quality. He was never married. The works of this period, many of them incorporated in suc- cessive editions of the Leaves, were: Passage to India (1870) ; Demoeratic Vistas (1870), prose; After All Not to Create Onh/'ilSll) ; As Strong as a Bird on Pinions Free ( 1872) ; Two Rivulets (1873); Specimen Days and Collect (1883), prose; Noremler Boughs. (1888); Sands at Seventy (1888) : and Goodly My Fancy (1891). William Rossetti published in England a selec- tion of his poems in 1868, which liegan his in- fluence there, the work being continued by Dow- den. .S. iiomls, Stevenson, and others. The final editions of the prose works and of the Leaves of Grass were issued in 1892 in two volumes. Ten years after Whitman's death an elaborate, com- plete edition W'as published. The intense individualism of Whitman's nature was strengthened rather than modified by the education of environment. He knew little of the life that came through books, but much of that other life of the democratic masses which to most of his poetic contemporaries v.'as as foreign as classical culture was to him. Perhaps he was sometimes willfully eccentric. Certainly, in la- boring to be natural, he stripped himself some- times of more than the garment of convention. There was some excuse for those who found that he became indecent in his endeavors not to be smug. In subject, the Leaves of Grass were from the beginning distinctively American, dealing with moral and social conditions and with po- litical questionings. "These United States them- selves are essentially the greatest poem." he had said in the preface, and'he finds elsewhere that bis country's crowning glory is to be spiritual and heroic. It is then the glorification of de- VOL. XX.— 32. mocracy, of the average man, the assertion of his right to lie himself, the freedom of the indi- vidual, anil at the same time the ideal of demo- eratic brotherhood which this freedom implies, that are his themes and his inspiration. With this passionate devotion to human nature goes a hatred like that of Rousseau for the conven- tions that hedge it in, and parallel with this, in the style, there is a feeling for poetic beauty and a hatred for the conventions of expression. He has an instinct of rhythm, words come to him in felicitous collocations, but when they do not come he does not seek them. The result of Whitman's eflorts was one of the ironies of lit- erary history. The democratic reader, for whom Whitman wrote, made of it nothing at all. For him poetry must needs be conventional to be com])rchensibk'. So Whitman writing of and for the nuiltitude finds himself the admiration of a cultured coterie, appreciated only by a literary aristocracy. Yet there is no doubt that more peo- ple are coming to tmderstand and to enjoy him. He was willing, he said, to wait to be understood through the growth of the taste for himself and wliat he represented. Up to the present time his cult has been mainly confined to a small group of open-minded lovers of poetry and to those in search of new literary sensations. It may be added that only the pruriency against which he protests could find his work immoral. It is not always agreeable, it is often indelicate and total- ly frank, but it is as lacking in sensuality, even in its most crude and unconventional expression, as was the poet's own life. Although as a whole his unmetrical matter comes under no present deflnition of poetry, and although a large portion of it has no possible poetic significance, yet there remains a small body of his verse that reveals a richness of poetic imagination unexcelled in America and that promises to last as long as anything in existing American poetry. Consult Autohiographia, or the Story of a Life, selected irom Whitman's Writings (1892). There is also an authorized biography by Bucke (1883). Consult also: Burroughs. Whilman, as Poet and Person (1806): Whitman, a Study (1896); O'Connor, The Good, Gray Poet, a Vindication (1866) ; .T. A. Symonds. Fssai/s Speculative and Suggesitire, vol. ii.; and Dowden. Studies in Lit- erature (The Poet of Democracy I . The Philadel- phia Conservator, a monthly edited by Horace Traubel. is the chief organ of Whitman studies. WHIT'NEY, Adeline Dutton (Train) (1824 — ). An American author, born in Boston, Mass. She was married at the age of nineteen, and lived at Milton, Mass. The list of her books is long. It includes: Footsteps on the Seas (18.57) : Mother Goose for Grown Folks (1860), which became popular; Boys at Chequasset (1862); Faith Gartney's Girlhood (1863); The (lai/u'orthys (1865); A Summer in Leslie Gold- thiraitc's Life (1866) ; Patience Strong's Outing (1868) ; Hitherto (1869), with which the period of her best work ends; We Girls (1870) ; Real Folks (1871) : Pansies (1872) ; The Other Side (1873); Sights and Insights (1876); Odd and Even (1880): Bonnid'orough (ISS.t); Homespun. Yarns (1886): Daffodils (1887); Bird-Talk (1887) ; Ascutney Street (1888) ; A Golden Gos- sip (1890); Friendly Letters to Girl Friends (1897).