Walt Whitman, American

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 145, 2 April 1942, Page 4

Walt Whitman, American

listeners heard and how many welcomed the BBC tribute to Walt Whitman last week. Whitman has been dead for fifty*years, and the fame he enjoyed during his lifetime was not of the kind that usually lives on. For every reader who revered him as a poet ten reviled him as a sensualist and ten more for what he himself called his barbaric yawpings. Those who admired him seldom approved of him, and some of those who approved imitated him and left out the spark. Nothing seemed so likely as that a lapse of half a century would remove him from the literary scene altogether, only scholars and critics remaining aware of him. Yet the BBC thought it worth while to broadcast a tribute to him throughout the English-speaking world. And the BBC was right. Whitman was not only a real, but in some respects a great, poet. He was as fiery a democrat as Burns, as genuine a "Comrade" as Lenin or Lincoln. Thoreau gave clearer feasons for his devotion to liberty, Emerson gave self-reliance a more coherent philosophy; but neither Thoreau nor Emerson loved liberty more than he did, and he outdistanced both in rallying common men. But his supreme political achievement was his rallying of the spirit of America. An American to him was a man who had | turned his back on privilege and embraced liberty; who refreshed himself in the open « air; who took his hat off to no man; who | maintained contact with animals and trees and birds; who had bold thoughts and strong and natural passions, All this he expressed both in prose and in verse, occasionally (though admittedly not often) in verse that will outlive nearly everything that has so far been written in English in any of the New Worlds. To remember him to-day is therefore to remember nearly everything that is best in America politically and socially. It is to bring Britain closer, and New Zealand closer, to a hundred and thirty million democrats whose battle-cry is the same as our own. It is (in almost his own last words) to bring us all back from our "persistent strayings and sickly abstractions" to the standards of average decent men and brothers. We are, not glorifying one who is dead, and reach or need of us, but (as his hero Lincoln put it at Gettysburg) trying to get some good from him for ourselves, ik would be interesting to know how many