WALT WHITMAN: THE IMMORTAL LEAVE OF GRASS

People emigrated to America to sell their labor and save some money. They wanted a happier life, which meant to them a home with a flower-bed, some well-fed and bred horses. Hardly any of them brought books along - except, maybe, the Bible.

The first of the Whitmans, a Dutch émigré, also brought the Bible. He was the sire of a dynasty in which it was a generally accepted fact that the life stories of saints exhausted the list of interesting information one could have acquired, had one even managed to read all the books in the world. The Bible was kept on the table close to the holy images. In the evenings, it was read out loud. Everybody in the family knew the Bible by heart. Decades later, Walt Whitman's researchers, having analyzed parallel repetitions in his verse and tropes, peculiar of Oriental poetry, would shrug and point out the Bible as the first, if not the only, literary school of the great American poet. They would also mention folk ballads and long émigré recitals to the accompaniment of the banjo (their rhythms could be easily traced in Leaves of Grass). As a matter of fact, even today Walt Whitman remains a puzzling phenomenon to most literary historians, as mysterious and even illogical as a rose bush that has grown overnight in a potato field.

The poet's childhood was typical of his time and country. As the custom dictated, the future author of Leaves of Grass was named after the breadwinner - Walter. Walter Whitman, Jr. was destined to build homes on Long Island, fix roofs and make doors for stables, fitting them with burglarproof locks. At least, that was what he was expected to do (there were nine children in the family and the destiny of each was determined from the very beginning). His parents didn't have the slightest notion that their eldest son would ignore the family plans, let alone change his first name to Walt, and that at age 36 he would publish a book of verse, entitled Leaves of Grass, which would immortalize the name of the Whitman's.

Europe was on the eve of horrible wars and stormy revolutions. Europe saw hundreds of thousands of her children off on their long émigré voyages to America. People were hastily leaving Europe for the New World, looking for peace and prosperity. However, nothing across the Atlantic heralded these benefits.

In America, close to four million black slaves were sweating and toiling, in a country of twenty-five million. They were like a tightly packed barrel of gunpowder, ready to explode any minute and tear the New World to shreds.

The Republican Party had just been formed. An Illinois lawyer by the name of Abraham Lincoln was delivering his first speeches and taking part in debates in front of whirling crowds. The whole country, it seemed, had become a disturbed anthill. One could very easily get lost in that multilingual hubbub. Walt Whitman's at that period was quite unspectacular, and nobody blamed him for this. Nobody but his parents.

The country was getting to know itself. Revolutionary technological discoveries were changing its appearance. Steam boats were paddling and puffing up and down the Mississippi River. Thomas Alva Edison had already been born. Industrialists were learning to value not only muscles, but also the brain controlling them. And the slaves revolted. It was just like in ancient Egypt. Planters, armed with the newest of rifles, plunged into a manhunt. Rev. Beecher of Brooklyn declared that a Sharp gun held greater moral strength than the Bible. He was that same Beecher whom the admirers in Brooklyn revered almost as much as God Himself, that same Beecher whose church was a short distance from the Whitman's.

Walter Whitman, Jr. (his friends had already grown used to calling him Walt) was moving from the present-day America to an America of the future. The road he was to travel would be long and winding.

In 1848, Whitman visited seventeen states. By himself and on foot. He thought he needed such trips and so he consistently made them.

Dozens of his biographers would later comment on his anchoritic inclinations, seeking in them a source of mystical emotions, trying to understand why the poet felt just as comfortable in the thick of the forest as in human company (and, at times, even better). These biographers would unearth Whitman's first love in New Orleans. He was 29 and the woman flashed by and vanished, leaving the poet in one of his greatest emotional experiences of his entire life. As time went by, he remained single. Seclusiveness and reticence were Whitman's most conspicuous features. A man of few words when asked about his plans and persuasions, he liked to take his time in whatever he did, which before long won him the reputation of a lazy crank which he didn't seem to mind very much. Now and then, he lent his father a helping hand, building and selling cabins for new settlers and doing other chores. But whenever his role was that of an assistant, he became as clumsy and lacking in initiative as when he had worked as a reporter of Brooklyn Eagle - a provincial newspaper, in the print shop of which he had been later employed as a compositor.

Whitman found his goal when he was already halfway through his life. The second half of his life had very little in common with the first. Used to storing within himself every emotion, he was frantically afraid to betray to others what was in his heart. And yet, he opened his heart in his verse, as wide as very few men of the arts had ever done in the thousand-year history of civilization. His father, Brooklyn's reputed carpenter, slept on the dirt floor of his workshop. Walt also did not seek any comfort or conveniences. Till the end of his life, the poet didn't have a family and cared little for a permanent residence. That same soil which had served as a bed for his father suited Walt perfectly. This soil made the roads of his travels. He slept on it when tired and even spoke to it; he didn't seem to need any live interlocutors. This despite the fact that he had a great number of acquaintances. The poet abided by his inborn habit in taking time making friends with people. He was deliberately unhurried in letting them into his inner circle. He dined out with them, took part in their discussions and, did what is generally regarded as maintaining social contacts. His choice of friends was quite versatile: actors, stevedores, literati, sailors, publishers, journalists and even vagabonds. As a child, he had been repeatedly told about human equality by his Quaker parents. Walt continued to believe in it with pathetic wholeheartedness. His poetry-this emotional outburst which many later considered quite unexpected-was ripening in his behavior and in his inclinations, just as it was in the manner in which he built his relationships with people. The poet was maturing toward his famous book the way a wild apple sapling, hardly noticeable in the thick of the brush, grows until it bears fruit. No matter what he did, Walt Whitman remained consistently strong in his life and world outlooks.

His journalistic work - attempts to do what may be described as quick touch of life - provided the forefront through which shimmered the first glimpse of what would become his world-famous poetic accomplishment. Strange as it may seem, the difference in literary quality between his newspaper and private literary endeavors remains stunning. In fact, his first steps toward authorship and recognition - his articles and the first story, Franklin Evans, even his early verse - turned out hopelessly naive. In these, one would be unable to spot even the slightest hint of the future blossom of Leaves of Grass. True, one should grant him, even at that stage, his inherent realism of description - probably, to be attributed to his journalistic experience - and the original manner of expression. Actually, this manner could be placed somewhere between poetry and prose.

His first work was published by The Democratic Review, alongside the poetry of Ralph W. Emerson, the then indisputable authority in English verse. Alas, this authority deigned to notice Whitman only when Leaves of Grass had come off the press. Everything written by Whitman before was simply shrugged off as something not worth discussing. The poet wrote in his foreword to Leaves of Grass:

"The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky, of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes.... but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects.... they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls."

Walt Whitman knew that what he sought and what he tried to create required a great deal of talent. Did he have it? Certainly.

In some way, a poet knows his worth. I mean a poet who is fully aware of his creative responsibility. Walt Whitman never tried to please his reader. He made him realize that the author must leave half of his job to him - understanding. The reader, Walt Whitman wrote, has constantly to take upon himself an appropriate share of the work. The poet did so himself, consistently and invariably. He did his poet's job which is honorable, although often enough uneasy and ungratifying. He not only thought up his images, but also forced his reader to consider them.

Walt Whitman, sporting a patriarchal beard, found himself at the head of a cultural youth movement in the New World. It happened when the media of the United States refused to recognize him, ridiculed and denounced him. It took America - or, rather, its most advanced strata - as many as fifty years to become aware of its own celebrated bard. A genius is always modern, so far as coming generations are concerned, and almost invariably he pays a bitter price to his contemporaries for his supremacy. Philistines. coexists with the past - which is precisely the reason why anyone prophesying the future is feared and opposed by the Philistines. Almost all those whom Walt Whitman had sent or given his Leaves of Grass returned it to him. Ralph W. Emerson was the only one to sincerely congratulate the author (later, he was sorry he had done so). In his book, Walt Whitman exposed himself to thousands of eyes and none as much as gave him a sympathetic look. Instead, gossips about him were spread, his friends passed him by, looked away, and his parents felt scandalized by him. His own country, America, which would before long pride itself on his name as its glorious son, refused to accept him. One of the greatest humanists of the New World, the poet was destined to live through an inhuman period in the history of his native land.

Leaves of Grass must be read poem after poem, line after line. Quoted at random it says very little, because it is truly a book of verse in which poems are like stones put together to form a neat and everlasting structure. The form is dictated by the content, it is superimposed on the content and is inseparable from it. This book is extremely difficult to translate into other languages. It is simply unprecedented.

Whitman's followers would subsequently unite into a separate poetic school which would take decades to grow mature, reaching outside the United States. Only true talents would survive within its framework, those like Carl Sandbag (US) and Vladimir Mayakovsky, a prominent Soviet poet, born one year after Whitman's death, who would subsequently regard the brilliant American as one of his teachers.

Whitman professed his love for all of mankind. He sought to fill the entire planet with the kindness of his heart, because moral wretchedness was to him the gravest ailment of spirit. His poetic school taught not only the ability to write for all, but also the ability to love.

Once again, Whitman should not be quoted in order to be understood. Quoting simply doesn't suffice. However, what is said above concerning his emotional revelations and his moral criteria might well be used as an epigraph for each essay on humanism. Whitman thought in the categories of millions. Writing about a group of people, he singled out each individual. He himself was always a part of this group and constantly regarded himself from the side. Whitman fanatically believed in progress and was pained immensely by the realization that thousands and thousands of people followed those who didn't believe in humanity.

He searched every human soul for kindness and virtues and was pathetically Quixotic in striving to change the surrounding world.

Others did their best to ridicule him. His first poetic collection was considered not worth reading at all. Later, when Walt Whitman had added to it poems about Adam's children, a remarkably affectionate piece of lyrics, he was branded as an immoral character. But the poet remained tender and tranquil all through his ordeals, subsequently to become known as "the good gray poet." His kindness of heart was so unusual that it could survive even under the pressure of the surrounding unrestrained cruelty and hatred.

The Civil War was raging in America. The country was writhing, choking in its vain efforts to perform self-purification. The slaves and their holders, people who had come from all countries, had clashed on a battlefield where the only line dividing the hostile parties was one's attitude to the status of an individual and to the country's future. In a conversation with Horace L. Traubel, Walt Whitman formulated his credo when he said that he couldn't bring himself to love America and wish it prosperity at the expense of any other people. These thoughts were not only his own. When the poet voiced them, he found himself in the camp of Lincoln, the camp of that same Abraham Lincoln whose first steps in politics had coincided with the appearance, in print, of Whitman's Leaves of Grass and whose death inspired the poet to write his famous 0 Captain My Captain! - a requiem which is today known by every American student.

Whitman could not be placed on a par with prominent U.S. politicians, but each of his poetic lines seems to be prompted by the battles fought during his lifetime. As for his prophecies, he proved to possess a much greater foresight than many US. presidents.

In 1862, Whitman made a trip to Virginia in search of his brother George. He found him in, a hospital bed, suffering from a wound he had received from the Southerners. The hospital was in Washington, small verdant town on the Potomac-the river marking the boundary with the Southern states. The patients had been jammed into the available apartment buildings and the functioning of the personnel left much to be desired. Having considered the situation, Walt Whitman saw the only solution to the problem in getting himself employed, right on the spot, as an office clerk. He would thus make enough money to sustain his brother and other wounded soldiers of the North. He bought them bread, grapes, roasted meat and spent his leisure time by their beds. Ever sensitive to human tragedy, Whitman felt himself bend under the weight of the suffering of others. He wrote letters for the illiterate and read them messages from their relatives. He also read them the Bible -a book reminiscent of his childhood, a book to which the sick and those about to die often looked.

The great American poet reached the point when he felt he was merging into his country's very life. He no longer had his name, his former habits and sympathies, It was then he felt that what he did could well be called a sanitation job. And still, his new life had not begun from nowhere. It was a continuation of the daily existence of a young fellow from Long Island, a poet whose book of verse had made its debut in Brooklyn. Walt Whitman was going up the stairway of life, where each flight looked so very different. His experience as an employee at several hospitals in Washington would let itself be remembered as the number of his admirers would continue to grow, the poet himself reaching acclaim (which, however, was very little, compared to his posthumous glory). But even then his recognition was rather appreciable.

After his 54th birthday, Walt Whitman remained the victim of his paralysis. Even when photographed with his friends, he wouldn't leave the safety of his armchair, his friends forming an amiable semicircle. Incidentally, the number of his friends had increased by that period.

His guests visited him in Camden, NJ, where he treated one and all with considerate cordiality. The number of his devotees in Europe increased very quickly. This was especially true of the British Isles where American poets were hailed even before domestic celebrities as is seen from the examples of Robert Frost, Thomas Stearns Eliot and many others.

Remarkably enough, America, then puritan in its literary tastes, did not accept Whitman in those of his works which, formally, were not his boldest. The unexpectedness of the Whitman literary phenomenon was altogether different. As at a feast of evil and cruelty, there suddenly appeared a bard who began to tell people about love and good and didn't try to play that hypocritical game which was pompously referred to as fine literature, cultivated for the farmer and family reading.

With Walt Whitman, everything was genuine. Even his rudeness was natural, so true to life that it simply couldn't make one feel ashamed, just as a worker is not ashamed of sweat running from his brow. He spoke to people as though speaking to himself, but people didn't understand him because they weren't used to such frankness. He addressed his verse to those, and on behalf of those, who had to work for a living. But even the laborers failed at first to see their poet in him. His words found no response in those for whom they were meant. Whitman was trying to instill in his reader his own love of life not the kind of life one sees printed on candy wrappers but real life, smelling of earth, milk, bricks and blood. Probably one of the most life-loving men in world poetry, he lived neglected and sick. But not once was he untrue to his sincere optimism. He was like a people which remains always vital and optimistic. He sought to merge with the people and become their spokesman. Pavlo Tychyna wrote in his poem In a Cosmic Orchestra:

"Mankind's voice is in the sound of three trumpets: Shevchenko, Whitman and Verhaeren. They are like bridges linking nations."

All in him - his rationalism and even a degree of monotony which suddenly unleashed themselves, becoming free and outpouring, like folk ballads -yielded to his genius which strove to speak to the whole world, being rooted in his native American soil. Some ten years before his death, Walt Whitman wrote that he would be happy if he were heard by the great peoples of Russia; if they entered into emotional contact with him. All peoples were great to him and although he expressed his respect for them in different words, he remained frank at all times.

The poet foresaw his contact with the world of tomorrow. Geniuses are entitled to such prophecies. Approaching his end and pondering over the transitoriness of all things in this world, he believed in the immortality of man's intellect and the deeds of man's hands. He found a stone block for his grave and specified the mound where he wished to find his last respite. The poet died on March 26, 1892. His friends read from the holy books of different nations over his grave and recited from the greatest poets, including Whitman. The brilliant American poet was already separated forever from his writings which started off on their lonely trips around the world. Newspapers carried large obituaries and hundreds attended the funeral. One of the speakers at the graveside said what then sounded as an appropriate exaggeration but was later corroborated a thousand times; "The brave words he spoke will continue to be heard long after all of us are gone..."

The greatest of the poets of the New World was born of the new nation on that continent- a sure sign of that nation's maturity. Poets glorify their people, write hymns and lullabies for them. Whitman was not only America's herald, but also its mirror, reflecting in his work and life all the intricate curves in the historical road of his country. He was a truly national poet who couldn't be born anywhere else but in America. Personalities such as his appear once in a lifetime and hundreds of years pass before their nations reach their level.

Walt Whitman was one of the most eloquent speakers of the worldwide assembly, assembly that has no intermissions and where debates about the future are endless.

Poetry is a very sensitive matter and more often than not is forbidding to free interpretation, especially in so far as giants like Whitman are concerned. In this sense, the fact that his 'works were translated in the Ukraine by Ivan Kulyk and Vasyl Mysyk -poets of exceptional caliber explains why his literary heritage has been found desirable and even necessary by several of our generations. Not so long ago, a collection of works of the great American hit the shelves and almost instantly disappeared, sotted by poetry hunters. New publications are in order. The literary life of Walt Whitman in the Ukraine continues. It is as perpetual as the immortal Leaves of Grass in our hearts.

VITALIY KOROTYCH, writer.