"A WELL-INTENDED HALFNESS":
EMERSON’S VIEW OF LEAVES OF GRASS

Jerome Loving

"Thoreau. Perhaps his fancy for Walt Whitman grew out of his taste for wild nature, for an otter, a woodchuck, or a loon." (Emerson’s Journals, 1862)

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Emerson told Whitman in 1855, and his words came back to haunt him. Six months later Whitman committed the unpardonable sin of emblazoning the praise of his "benefactor" in gold on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856). Though Emerson had not been given the opportunity to examine the book or the privilege of deciding whether he wanted his letter of July 21 to become the "charter of an emperor" (as Whitman later described it), he was inducted into service as a blurb writer and made ipso facto the champion of a book which many would consider obscene. Whitman also printed the text of Emerson’s letter in an appendix of his book along with a reply that mawkishly addressed the Concordian as "master" and credited him with finding the "shores" upon which there was no longer any "infidelism about sex."

The incident annoyed Emerson—though perhaps not as much as the conservative literary community of Boston. When the new edition reached him in Concord, one witness noted that "at no other time had I seen a cloud of dissatisfaction darken that serene countenance."¹ Emerson was disturbed because his praise of Whitman’s book had been—naturally enough, in what he considered a "letter of thanks for his book"²—only part of his critique. Indeed, there is probably a good deal of truth in Edward Emerson’s later disclaimer that when "Leaves of Grass [first] appeared . . . the healthy vigor and freedom of this work of a young mechanic seemed to promise so much that Mr. Emerson overlooked the occasional coarseness which offended him, and wrote a letter of commendation to the author. . . ."³ Emerson also commended the book to several of his friends, including his future biographer James Elliot Cabot. Here he also praised the poems but added that their author seemed "hurt by hard life & too animal experience."⁴

The "joke" therefore was on Emerson, and he knew it. As a gentleman he had held back the critical part of his response to Leaves of Grass, and its author—probably in reaction to the mixed review he had received in the New York Tribune of July 23—had

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presented Emerson’s letter as an unqualified endorsement of his book. It was a quandary almost totally of Emerson’s own creation. To denounce the letter, as some advised him, would have further compounded the half-lie he had already issued. And to qualify it, as others probably advised, would have made him look ridiculous. The only solution at this point was to keep silent about Leaves of Grass. This explains, in some measure I believe, Emerson’s failure to speak up during Whitman’s literary battles of 1865 when he was dismissed from government as the author of indecent poetry and of 1876 when he was the subject of the English-American debate.⁵ Emerson never "changed his mind" about the first or even later editions of Whitman’s book; he simply never took the opportunity in public to express it fully.

As a result of what must be considered Whitman’s promotional scheme, Emerson was for the rest of his days linked to a book that became in 1882 the first to earn the phrase "banned in Boston." By that time, of course, Emerson had died, but if he had survived both the grave and the senility that clouded his final years, he might well have viewed the whole matter with amusement. On the one hand, the vice-hunter Anthony Comstock was attempting to have Leaves of Grass banned from the U.S. mail, and on the other Whitman’s friend and champion William Douglas O’Connor was ever insisting that the Concord philosopher had never "gone back" on his judgment of the book.⁶ Emerson would have viewed the fracas as he doubtless viewed Whitman’s poetry as it pursued him through life: a sense of disproportion characterized the whole matter.

Although Emerson is not particularly known for his sense of humor, several biographers have remarked that it probably saved him from the excessive ambition that helped to send his brothers Edward and Charles to an early grave. Of course, he never indulged in the raucous, knee-slapping kind of humor. Instead, his had serious overtones which found a welcome place in the philosophy of "Each and All." Examples of his ability to expose the little incongruities of life abound in his letters and journals. But the place to discover his theory of humor is in the essay "The Comic." This essay has perhaps been overlooked by scholars because it does not appear in Emerson’s collected works till 1875, when it was inserted by Cabot and Ellen Emerson in Letters and Social Aims. Yet it was probably omitted from the earlier essays only because Emerson had published it in The Dial for October 1843. And like the other essays in his principal collections, it had its basis in the early lectures—having been delivered under the heading of "Comedy" in 1839.⁷

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In "The Comic" Emerson observes that man is the only joker in nature: "The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence." There is no humor in lower nature because all activity is spontaneous. For man, however, this spontaneity resides in Reason (Emerson’s name for Intuition or the Over-Soul). And only by Reason is he able to perceive the Whole and the Part and thus avoid becoming a mere part of himself or the object of humor. The essence of comedy, therefore, is "an honest or well-intended halfness." Emerson points to the character of Falstaff as an example of such halfness—because the courtier gives "himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly ignoring the Reason, whilst he invokes its name. . . ." Prince Hal, on the other hand, also enjoys a good joke but is balanced by Reason "to that degree. . . that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another spectator."⁸

For Emerson, Whitman at his worst became a Falstaff of sorts. As the poet of the Body and the Soul, he often gave himself "unreservedly" to his senses while falsely invoking the name of Reason. In other words, no poet guided by Reason would revel as Whitman did in the senses or nature (which Emerson considered the "Not-me" or merely emblem of the Over-Soul). Instead of a linear movement toward the Over-Soul, Emerson sometimes found a lateral development. This was best exemplified by Whitman’s endless use of catalogs. According to John Burroughs, one of Whitman’s closest friends, Emerson told a visitor to Boston in 1870: "tell Walt I am not satisfied, not satisfied. I expect—him—to make—songs of—the nation—but he seems to be contented to—make the inventories."⁹ Four years earlier he had described Leaves of Grass to Carlyle as "an auctioneer’s inventory of a warehouse."¹⁰ Such catalogs prevented the poetry from going beyond the Understanding (all empirical knowledge) to celebrate Reason. They were mere pedantry in which—as Emerson stated in "The Comic"—the mind seizes a classification to help it to a sincerer knowledge of the fact, [but] stops in the classification." The catalogs were "confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for the night" which became "through indolence a barrack and a prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain others."¹¹

Emerson, therefore, was only a partial believer in Whitman, and it was the part he liked—the poet’s celebration of America he himself had celebrated in the "American Scholar Address," for example—that he recommended to his friends. Most backed away, however, blinded by what they considered crudity in Leaves of Grass; but one

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who found only innocence in Whitman’s candor and who responded with wonderment was Henry David Thoreau. He told his friend Harrison Blake that the world "ought to rejoice greatly in [Whitman]. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human." As to the "indecencies" in the book he asked Blake, "if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded Of?"12 Thoreau’s question sheds light on Emerson’s journal comment about Henry’s fondness for "wild nature." He believed in Whitman in ways that Emerson could not. According to Whitman, Emerson told him: "Henry carried your book around Concord like a red flag— defiantly, challenging the plentiful current opposition there!" When Whitman related this interesting item in 1888, Horace Traubel asked him: "‘But Emerson: did he carry his copy around?’ W. smiled. ‘Scarcely so: that was not his way: he probably never apologized for it: all the same he did not go out and sow it in the world.’ "¹³

This anecdote probably exaggerates Thoreau’s response to Whitman’s book, but it does document the poet’s disappointment in Emerson. The New Englander clearly could not endorse all of Leaves of Grass. Parts of it were simply too wild for Emerson—so wild as to be unnatural for the only creature on earth that had access to Reason. An example of what Emerson probably considered wildness is found in the so-called "primitivism" section (32) of "Song of Myself," where the poet confesses:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself. . . .¹⁴

 To Emerson, this kind of poetic fancy was absurd because it cut man off from the history of the human condition. To admire such freedom was useless because it was spiritually regressive. And despite its originality (a quality that even Whitman’s severest critics credited him with), it was a flight that had no context in pre-Darwinian intellectual and moral history. Hence, it was the object of humor—

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according to Emerson’s theory in "The Comic." And doubtless, it was not without humor that in his assessment of Thoreau’s appreciation of Whitman he placed the poet beside the otter, the woodchuck, and the loon.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Emerson banished Whitman to the Animal Kingdom because he found a halfness throughout Leaves of Grass. Certainly the satire of journal remark is aimed at Thoreau as well—perhaps because he, like Whitman, often worshipped nature as much for its own sake as for its metaphysical significance. Whitman later bragged that he and Emerson had met "twenty or more times," which is probably an exaggeration. We are fairly certain, however, that Emerson visited Whitman on December 11, 1855, shortly before the publication of the second edition but after Whitman’s publication of the Emerson letter in the Tribune of October 10.¹⁵ He may also have been with the poet on other occasions when his lectures brought him to New York. And there is no question that they met in Boston in 1860 when Whitman’s third edition was going through the press there. These meetings, which were usually initiated by Emerson, suggest that the New Englander had an enduring interest in the poet from Brooklyn. It was in 1860, in fact, that he urged Whitman to expurgate the "Children of Adam" poems. Emerson’s argument on Boston Common that year characterized his hope that the poet would eventually grow out of his preoccupation with the sensuous and concern himself more with Reason, which the senses merely reflected. Whitman later insisted that Emerson had argued for the excisions merely on the grounds that the book would sell better. But in view of the encouragement he had given to Thoreau’s disastrously unsuccessful Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1848), it seems unlikely that he would offer Whitman such practical advice. Doubtless, Emerson saw the sex emphasis as a "well-intended halfness" in an otherwise "spontaneous" celebration of loftier subjects.

It was not until the end of the decade that Whitman began to heed Emerson’s advice. By this time Whitman had adopted the mantle of the Good Gray Poet, a pose that tended to muffle the "barbaric yawp" and emphasize the poet’s humanity and serenity. In 1868 he sent Emerson "Proud Music of the Storm," which the latter promptly placed in the Atlantic Monthly.¹⁶ Asked later why he had appealed to Emerson after their confrontation in Boston, Whitman told Traubel: "For several reasons, I may say. But the best reason I had was in his own suggestion that I should permit him to do such things for me when the moment seemed ripe for it."¹⁷ Whitman

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knew the moment was ripe with Emerson, I suggest, when his poetry minimized the physical. "Proud Music of the Storm," as the editors of the Comprehensive Reader’s Edition point out, announced a new phase in which the poet turns to the sphere of "Spiritual law. "¹⁸ This thematic shift is borne out by the 1872 and 1876 prefaces. In the first he announces that he will attempt to make clearer the original intention of his book—that of showing his "religious purpose." In the Centennial Edition, however, he is almost conciliatory. Though still defending "the physical and the sensuous," he confesses to having "felt temporary depression more than once, for fear that in ‘Leaves of Grass’ the moral parts were not sufficiently pronounc’d." There remained therefore the need to complement the earlier poems with "still a higher flight." "In a certain sense," Whitman wrote (and Emerson may have read with satisfaction), "while the Moral is the purport and last intelligence of all Nature, there is absolutely nothing of the moral in the works, or laws, or shows of Nature. Those only lead inevitably to it—begin and necessitate it"¹⁹

The culmination of Whitman’s "higher flight" is found in "Passage to India." At the outset the poet celebrates the mundane in observing the opening of the Suez Canal, the junction of the Union and Central Pacific transcontinental railroads, and the laying of the Atlantic and Pacific cables. But this is not another poem of material classifications, for the poet ultimately sails forth on "the seas of God"—a passage to "more than India!" "Proud Music of the Storm" has the same purpose. In a dream the poet hears the music not only of physical nature but of the "hidden orchestras" of human history. He awakens to a "new rhythmus" which will enable him to write "Poems bridging the way from Life to Death"—poems "vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten, / Which let us go forth in the bold day and write." This was the Moral Sentiment Emerson had argued for in 1860. And had the phrase been available to him in 1868 when he first read the poem, he might have hailed its achievement as a passage "to more than India!"

Of course, Emerson probably considered "Proud Music of the Storm" and "Passage to India" merely exceptions to a literary canon that suffered from a preoccupation with the sensuous. Emerson had sought the sublime in poetry, a re-commencement that rendered the poet "Adam in the garden again."²⁰ But Whitman, it appeared to Emerson, had dwelled too often on the shadow of the Over-Soul. Furthermore, in adherence to Emerson’s advice in "The Poet" that the new poetry would "embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation," Whitman celebrated parts of the Trope that

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were considered unsavory by most readers. We have no proof, certainly, that Whitman actually read "The Poet" before 1856,²¹ but we do know that he heard the lecture on which it was based. In "Nature and the Powers of the Poet," delivered in New York City in March 1842, Emerson encouraged the same kind of abandon when he told his auditors: "Small and mean things serve just as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a spiritual law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men."²² Yet as far back as 1836 in Nature he had argued that all symbols—from nature’s everyday utility to the moral discipline it encourages in us—are merely the steps by which we reach the level of genuine Moral Sentiment. As Joe Porte observes, Emerson was driven to this theory of Idealism because he was convinced "by temperament and training that the mind and the body, the spirit and nature, were not only separate but unequal. . . . " Whitman, on the other hand, celebrated the Body and Soul as equals. And in doing so, he was found wanting in "ambition"—the same fault Emerson found in Thoreau, who, as he complained, was content to pound beans instead of empires. But—to quote Porte again—"it was not only beans, but beans plus a kind of ecstasy that serve Thoreau as the basis of his art."²³ The same can be said for Whitman, and had Emerson been able to put his Unitarian background completely behind him he might have seen not only the Part but the Whole of Whitman’s book.

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

NOTES

   ¹Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906), p. 115.
   ²Ralph L. Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 373.
   ³Edward W. Emerson,Emerson of Concord (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), p. 228n.
   ⁴Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), IV, 531.
   ⁵See Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion: William Douglas O’Connor (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978), pp. 55-71, 109-123.
   ⁶Loving, pp. 226-33.
   ⁷Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Willis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), III, 121.
   ⁸Letters and Social Aims (Boston: Houghton, Muffin and Company, 1884), pp. 151-166.
   ⁹Life and Letters of John Burroughs, ed. Clara Barrus (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1925), I, 144.
   ¹⁰Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 509.

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   ¹¹Letters and Social Aims, pp. 160-61.
   ¹²Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958), pp. 444-45.
   ¹³Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (New York: Mitchell-Kennerley, 1914), III, 405.
   ¹⁴Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold V. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965), p. 60.
   ¹⁵Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 374.
   ¹⁶Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961), II, 71n.
   ¹⁷With Walt Whitman in Camden, II, 22.
   ¹⁸Leaves of Grass, p. 403n.
   ¹⁹Walt Whitman: Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), II, 470.
   ²⁰"Poetry and Imagination," Letters and Social Aims, p. 35.
   ²¹It is difficult to believe that Whitman did not read Emerson’s essays of 1841 and 1844 during his famous foreground; yet the poet denied having done so until 1856. See John Burroughs, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (New York: American News Co., 1867), pp. 16-17.
   ²²Early Lectures. III. 352-53; see also Walt Whitman of the "New York Aurora," ed. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 105.
   ²³Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), pp. 53-54. 56.

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