Volume 15, Number 7 · October 22, 1970
The Great American Poet
By Alfred Kazin
In 1882, when Walt Whitman finally put into one untidy package, Specimen Days and Collect,[*] reminiscences of his youth, his various 'memoranda' of the Civil War, his travel diaries and 'nature notes' after the war, he was almost at the point of becoming that mythic figure, the universal poet, that he had celebrated in his own poems. In these last years of his life he had become strangely important to writers in England otherwise so different a Gosse, Tennyson, Hopkins. At home though his reputation in respectable literary circles was still bad, he was becoming a cause to all sorts of lonely American iconoclasts. Then, after his death in 1892, Whitman was gradually to be seen as the first truly comprehensive writer America had produced, the first whose imaginative interest concretely included the different peoples in the world. Before Emily Dickinson was recognized as an original poet and Melville as a great myth-maker Whitman was valued abroad as the American writer who had somehow brought his country into world literature—the poet of a 'democracy' not limited to Americans. During the 1914-1918 war, fallen French and German writers alike were found in the trenches with Whitman's poems in their uniforms.
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