So here I sit gossiping in the early candlelight of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel’d road. After completing, as it were, the journey—(a varied jaunt of years, with many halts and gaps of intervals—or some lengthen’d ship-voyage, wherein more than once the last hour had apparently arrived, and we seem’d certainly going down—yet reaching port in a sufficient way through all discomfitures at last)—After completing my poems, I am curious to review them in the light of their own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions, with certain unfoldings of the thirty years they seek to embody. These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations, with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments.
Result of seven or eight stages and struggles extending through nearly thirty years, (as I nigh my threescore-and-ten I live largely on memory,) I look upon Leaves of Grass, now finish’d to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World,6 if I may assume to say so. That I have not gain’d the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future—anticipations—(“still lives the song, though Regnar dies”)—That from a worldly and business point of view Leaves of Grass has been worse than a failure—that public criticism on the book and myself as author of it yet shows mark’d anger and contempt more than anything else—(“I find a solid line of enemies to you everywhere,”—letter from W. S. K., Boston, May 28, 1884)—And that solely for publishing it I have been the object of two or three pretty serious special official buffetings—is all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I commenc’d. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. As fulfill’d or partially fulfill’d, the best comfort of the whole business (after a small band of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause—doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising—this little phalanx!—for being so few) is that, unstopp’d and unwarp’d by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time.
In calculating that decision, William O’Connor and Dr. Bucke are far more peremptory than I am. Behind all else that can be said, I consider Leaves of Grass and its theory experimental—as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American republic itself to be, with its theory. (I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of anything, or any results.) In the second place, the volume is a sortie—whether to prove triumphant, and conquer its field of aim and escape and construction, nothing less than a hundred years from now can fully answer. I consider the point that I have positively gain’d a hearing, to far more than make up for any and all other lacks and withholdings. Essentially, that was from the first, and has remain’d throughout, the main object. Now it seems to be achiev’d, I am certainly contented to waive any otherwise momentous drawbacks, as of little account. Candidly and dispassionately reviewing all my intentions, I feel that they were creditable—and I accept the result, whatever it may be.
After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc.—to take part in the great melee, both for victory’s prize itself and to do some good—After years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possess’d, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America—and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book.
Perhaps this is in brief, or suggests, all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century, with the United States, and what they furnish as area and points of view, Leaves of Grass is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-will’d record. In the midst of all, it gives one man’s—the author’s—identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, color’d hardly at all with any decided coloring from other faiths or other identities. Plenty of songs had been sung—beautiful, matchless songs—adjusted to other lands than these—another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and today. Modern science and democracy seem’d to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late,) I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements—which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means.
For grounds for Leaves of Grass, as a poem, I abandon’d the conventional themes, which do not appear
