' Leaving the reader to chew on and extract the
juice and meaning of this, I will proceed to say in melanged form what
I have had brought out by the English author's essay (he discusses
the poetic art mostly) on my own, real, or by him supposed, views and
purports. If I give any answers to him, or explanations of what my
books intend, they will be not direct but indirect and derivative. Of
course this brief jotting is personal. Something very like querulous
egotism and growling may break through the narrative (for I have been
and am rejected by all the great magazines, carry now my 72d annual
burden, and have been a paralytic for 18 years.)
No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or
new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age,
politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen
soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is
formulated: as the Biblic canticles and their days and spirit--as the
Homeric, or Dante's utterance, or Shakspere's, or the old Scotch or
Irish ballads, or Ossian, or Omar Khayyam. So I have conceiv'd and
launch'd, and work'd for years at, my 'Leaves of Grass'--personal
emanations only at best, but with specialty of emergence and
background--the ripening of the nineteenth century, the thought and
fact and radiation of individuality, of America, the secession war,
and showing the democratic conditions supplanting everything that
insults them or impedes their aggregate way.
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