The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (115 page)

Part of him insisted that since he was only an “average man” he was qualified to speak for the people, another part expressed the prophet-superman who spoke “a word of the modern, the word En Masse.”

A tormented homosexual in a heterosexual world, he was still determined to speak for the whole world. But only his mother and other men are his “darlings.”

In the next years he published eight more expanded editions of
Leaves of Grass
. And while making a living writing for newspapers, he joined a mini-bohemia meeting at “Pfaff’s Cellar” at Broadway and Bleecker Street. The
Leaves of Grass
(third edition) in 1860 contained two complementary groups of poems. One, “Children of Adam,” a “cluster of Poems … to the passion of Woman-Love”:

While this cluster, Whitman said, celebrated the “amative” love of men and women, a complementary “cluster”—the Calamus poems—celebrated the “adhesive love” of men for men. Whitman, vaguely and unpersuasively,
argued that he intended only a political-democratic message. But even before these two clusters, his sexual allusions caused him trouble. The publisher who sold a thousand copies of the second edition refused to handle the book any longer. Emerson had failed to persuade Whitman not to publish his “Children of Adam” or to expurgate the poems. The third edition was far more explicit and sold well in the hands of a new publisher.

Meanwhile, the Civil War engaged Whitman’s life and his talents. In 1862, learning that his brother had been wounded, he went south in search of him, then settled in Washington for the next eleven years. As long as the war lasted he spent himself as itinerant nurse and companion to the wounded Northern and Southern soldiers in Washington’s huge military hospitals. He brought gifts of oranges, jelly, and candy, wrote letters for them, and dressed their wounds. It is not clear how much of his homosexual feelings entered into these friendly efforts. He now wrote some of his best-known poems, inspired by the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which some consider his masterpiece.

And, more familiar:

When the Secretary of the Interior read the
Leaves of Grass
with its two sexual clusters, he promptly fired Whitman from his clerical job. But his friends soon secured a post for him with the Attorney General.

The episode made Whitman a martyr to literary freedom and attracted outspoken champions. The attacks on his indecency only increased his readers. A decade later, when the Society for the Suppression of Vice in Boston threatened prosecution, the publisher withdrew the book, which was taken over by a publisher in more tolerant Philadelphia. A result, phenomenal for the time, was the sale of three thousand copies of the Philadelphia (sixth) edition (1882) in a single day. Still in Washington, in a retort to Carlyle’s antidemocratic diatribe,
Shooting Niagara
, Whitman expressed his passions in the prose of
Democratic Vistas
(1870), criticizing current fashions and championing a future for American literature.

In 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke, which he said resulted from his infection with gangrene and fever when he was attending wounded Civil War soldiers. But these several illnesses were probably complicated by the strains of his sexual ambiguity. He moved in with his brother in Camden, New Jersey, where he remained an invalid and produced little of significance until his death in 1892. Before he left Washington he had written “Passage to India,” included in the fifth edition of
Leaves of Grass
(1871). In this, his last great poem, he tried to tone down his chauvinism, even admitting that America needed the world. It celebrated three world-unifying events: the opening of the Suez Canal, the meeting of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railways in Utah, and the laying of the transatlantic cable. He insisted that America needed its past and “Passage to more than India!”

But Whitman never repaired his divided self. As prophet and pundit receiving the great and famous in Camden, he still carried on his loving correspondence with a young horse-car conductor he had met in Washington in 1866. The refined George Santayana, seeing in Whitman’s poetry only bundles of unassimilated particulars, made him his prototype of “The Poetry of Barbarians”—revealing a “wealth of perception with intelligence and of imagination without taste.” And this new freedom of the self, however tormented, that Whitman declared would mark the future path of poetry. Mostly unappreciated and widely condemned by the America he had idolized, Whitman remained the relentless creator. He lived a long and prosperous afterlife, even in the works of American poets who had abandoned his America and seceded from his idealized collective life. “It was you who broke the new wood,” Ezra Pound said in his poem to Whitman. “Now is the time for carving. We have one sap and one root—Let there be commerce between us.”

A century after the Romantic Revolution announced by Wordsworth, there came into English literature an anti-Romantic Revolution. Its Wordsworth was T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and its manifesto another brief essay, “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” (1917). And he, too, had his Coleridge, his catalyst, anti-ego, and critic, in the person of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). They plainly and simply declared themselves enemies of the Egotistical Self. Denying the poem to be about the poet, Eliot declared that “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.… The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. The emotion of art is impersonal.”

A far cry from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”! Not enough to let powerful emotions overflow. Not enough that the poet “be himself.” The poet, Eliot insisted, must be equipped too with “the historical sense … nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year.… a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.” Which means that the poet must be learned and know his great predecessors. “Someone said: The dead writers are remote from us because we
know
so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” The poet cannot reach the needed “impersonality” without a sense of history—“unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

Eliot’s wariness of the romantic self had led him, as it would lead Joyce, Picasso, and others, to a strange new way of comprehending the world in art. The familiar Western way of portraying the world, whether in poetry or in painting, would no longer do. Just as Picasso, escaping the prison of perspective and the traditional canons of “beauty,” abandoned the familiar arrangements of images in space, so Eliot abandoned the conventional narrative order of poetic images in time. The Romantics had sought to capture the beauty of the world in their feelings. But Eliot would use all available images and experience, learning and fragments of learning, to make an object of the poet’s emotion. Young readers welcomed his expression of the sterile world their elders had made for them.

“The Waste Landers” would become a cult and
The Waste Land
a sovereign metaphor. The most effective polemic against television was to call it “a vast wasteland.” Seldom has a poet so successfully imprisoned his age in a phrase. But Eliot, an expert at self-disparagement, still affirmed the sovereign self in the poet. He said
The Waste Land
was not so much “an important bit of social criticism” as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”

Eliot was no more predictable as a spokesman for modern anti-Romanticism than Wordsworth had been as a prophet of Romanticism. He was born in 1888 in St. Louis to a scion of an old New England family with a long line of ministers known for their Unitarian conscience. His grandfather, leaving Boston in 1834 to carry the faith to the frontier, had been a founder of Washington University. The university might have been named after him if he had not objected. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, defied family tradition by becoming a businessman. After several unsuccessful ventures he finally went into brick manufacturing, which prospered in burgeoning St. Louis. Proud of his own business success, he admired it in others. Eliot’s mother wrote poems and seems to have been a woman of some literary talent, but felt herself a failure because she had never managed to go to college, and had to earn her living as a schoolteacher. For young T. S. Eliot the family tradition prevailed, he was sent to Milton Academy and entered Harvard in 1906. He graduated in three years, but with no show of brilliance.

At Harvard his lifelong attitudes were shaped by the dogmatic and domineering Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), professor of French and comparative literature, the apostle of anti-Romanticism. In
Rousseau and Romanticism
and other books he made Rousseau the anti-Christ and Romanticism the modern heresy that aimed to replace the reason and restraint of the classics and religion by the mush and conceit of self-expression. “Those who call themselves modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life.” They had abandoned discipline and made their ideal “the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues.” He liked to quote Byron’s “true Rousseauistic logic”—“Man being reasonable must
therefore get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.” To compose a poem like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” “in an opium dream without any participation of his rational self is a triumph of romantic art.”

Eliot stayed on at Harvard to work for an M.A. in philosophy. Then his father staked him to a year in Paris, where he followed Bergson’s lectures and improved his French and his knowledge of the Symbolist poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Returning to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, he studied Sanskrit, and was temporarily tempted by Buddhism. He was attracted by F. H. Bradley’s philosophy of the Absolute and chose him as the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. Bradley preached skepticism of the uses of conceptual intelligence in defining reality, and insisted that truth could be reached only through some systematic whole. In Bertrand Russell’s seminar on logic, Eliot surprised the professor by his learning, and made an acquaintance that would complicate his later life. Russell characterized Eliot as “altogether impeccable in his tastes but has no vigor or life—or enthusiasm.”

A Sheldon traveling fellowship from Harvard sent him to Merton College, Oxford, to pursue his studies of Bradley. In 1914 at the urging of his friend Conrad Aiken, but only after some hesitation, he went to see Ezra Pound and his wife, Dorothy, in London. This was the crucial encounter of his life. Eliot said that Pound reminded him of Irving Babbitt. Pound himself, born in Idaho and raised in Philadelphia, noted Eliot’s “Americanness” and said he “has it perhaps worse than I have—poor devil.” Their quests had converged, for both were seeking an authentic tradition abroad as an antidote to American philistinism and to the sentimental tradition in English poetry. Eliot all his life was known for his Anglophile obsession with correct dress. But a friend once remarked of him that while his clothes were English, his underclothes were American. Instantly, Pound responded to Eliot’s talent and began to promote him. When Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” Pound sent them to Harriet Monroe, the Chicago patron and editor of
Poetry
magazine. He declared them “the best poems I have yet seen or had from an American.… He has actually trained himself
and
modernized himself
on his own
.” Pound may not have known that Eliot did not admire the poems of Pound that he had seen.

Both Pound and Eliot had arrived in Europe with interrupted academic careers, but their paths had been quite different. Pound’s father, Homer, had set up the government land office in Hailey, Idaho, a town with one hotel and forty-seven bars. There Homer’s job was to certify the land titles of optimistic mining prospectors and deal with angry competing claimants. Ezra was born in 1885, and when he was four his family moved to Philadelphia
where his father had obtained a job in the United States Mint. Homer became an elder in the local Presbyterian church, and sent Ezra to a nearby military school. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, when he was only sixteen, but the family was troubled by his erratic interests and associates (one was a young medical student, William Carlos Williams). After two years they encouraged him to transfer to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, where his studies and his morals might be more closely supervised. Then he returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study. He never completed his Ph.D., but en route he acquired the classical and modern European languages, in addition to Provençal and Anglo-Saxon.