listened, I
who gabbled. My father, who had never read Leaves, had sterner
criticism to offer: "If I ever hear of you going to see that fellow
you'll be sorry!" This coming from the most amiable of parents,
surprised me. Later I discovered the root of his objection, for, to be
quite frank, Walt did not bear a good reputation in Philadelphia, and
I have heard him spoken of so contemptuously that it would bring a
blush to the shining brow of a Whitmaniac. Yet dogs followed him and
children loved him. I saw Walt accidentally at intervals, though never
again in Camden. I met him on the streets, and several times took him
from the Carl Gaertner String Quartet Concerts in the foyer of the
Broad Street Academy of Music to the Market Street cars. He lumbered
majestically, his hairy breast exposed, but was a feeble old man,
older than his years; paralysis had maimed him. He is said to have
incurred it from his unselfish labours as nurse in the camp hospitals
at Washington during the Civil War; however, it was in his family on
the paternal side, and at thirty he was quite grey. The truth is, Walt
was not the healthy hero he celebrates in his book. That he never
dissipated we know; but his husky masculinity, his posing as the Great
God Priapus in the garb of a Bowery boy is discounted by the facts.
Parsiphallic, he was, but not of Pan's breed. In the Children of Adam,
the part most unfavourably criticised of Leaves, he is the Great
Bridegroom, and in no literature, ancient or modern, have been the
"mysteries" of the temple of love so brutally exposed. With all his
genius in naming certain unmentionable matters, I don't believe in the
virility of these pieces, scintillating with sexual images. They leave
one cold despite their erotic vehemence; the abuse of the vocative is
not persuasive, their raptures are largely rhetorical. This
exaltation, this ecstasy, seen at its best in William Blake, is sexual
ecstasy, but only when the mood is married to the mot lumiere is
there authentic conflagration. Then his "barbaric yawp is heard across
the roofs of the world"; but in the underhumming harmonics of Calamus,
where Walt really loafs and invites his soul, we get the real man, not
the inflated hum-buggery of These States, Camerados, or My Message,
which fills Leaves with their patriotic frounces. His philosophy is
fudge. It was an artistic misfortune for Walt that he had a "mission,"
it is a worse one that his disciples endeavour to ape hi