Text 62

Left inactive on the Stalk

All its Purle fled

Revolution shakes it for

Test if it be dead

The Russet Base of Revolution seems to be a prophetically precise definition of the 20^th century political history. In her peace and solitude, Dickinson seemed to be able to contemplate many of the major issues forever actual. Her poetry is organic, it just is there. Like air, and water, and the sky and the sun, and trees and grass.

Incidentally, Leaves of Grass is the title of a poetry collection first published in 1855 and destined to become the manifesto of a new school of writing. The author of the book, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), is a great poet. It well may be that it was by him that the greatest poetical revelations of the 19^th century in America were made.

He was born in Brooklyn, the second of nine children, and by his twelfths year he had quit school altogether and was apprenticed to the printing trade. He was generally self-educated. He actually read more widely than many or the authors pf the period who had attended famous colleges.

Whitman was a paradoxical figure. He recited Shakespeare from the top of a Broadway omnibus; he carried translations of Homer in his pocket when he went on fishing trips; by choice he consorted with the most ignorant men, but loved opera and was welcomed in the studios of leading painters and sculptors. He continued to revise the first edition of Leaves of Grass and add new ones until his death. Most of the poems are about man and nature. Some very good poems deal with New York, and with the Civil War, in which he served as a volunteer male nurse. In his poems, Whitman envisioned the poet as a hero, a savior and a prophet, one who leads the community by his expressions of the truth.

Emerson, upon receiving a copy of the book in July 1855, wrote a letter of praise at once. It has become one of the most famous letters in American literary history: "I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career…"Here is an example of Whitman's poetry (Text 63).