Books: Democracy’s Poet

WHITMAN—Newton Arvin—Macmillan ($2.50).

THE START OF THE ROAD—John Erskine—Stokes ($2.50).

No American poet evokes as much critical excitement as Whitman. The violence of the attacks on him, no less than the unmeasured enthusiasm of his defenders, is proof of how fruitful discussion of him remains 83 years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Last week two new books devoted to him made it clear that the poet of democracy, with all his mysteries, ambiguities, repetitions, vagueness and contradictions, is the biggest literary fig ure the U. S. has produced.

The Start of the Road is a novelized version of Whitman’s stay in New Orleans in 1848. John Erskine pictures Whit man falling in love with an intelligent, Paris-educated quadroon, who bears his son. Inconsequential and not very convincing, the book gives an easy, informal portrait of Whitman, sketches of other historic figures, but is enriched with fine savory quotations from Whitman’s poems which bring it to life when its story grows labored.

Newton Arvin’s biography of Whitman, however, belongs with the best of the books about his poetry. The first clear exposition of his political beliefs, it establishes his relevancy to the present so convincingly that few readers are likely to question it. Brief and compact, with subtle critical formulations worked unobtrusively into its smooth and scholarly prose, it places Whitman’s poems in relation to the life of his time—not only to radicalism, the Abolitionists, the Utopian socialists, the Jacksonian Democrats, the youthful robber barons, the trade unions, but to the educators and scientists whose work Whitman studied and the German philosophers whose tomes he praised without studying.

That Whitman was a democrat everybody knows. But nobody has shown as clearly as Mr. Arvin what Whitman’s democracy meant: stump speeches for the luckless Martin Van Buren, support for Tyler the Whig when Tyler took up Andrew Jackson’s old fight against the United States Bank, disgust with party politics during the Democratic sellout before the Civil War, and always “strong images of a democratic and equal life—of ‘ordinary’ men and women working, building, making things, growing things, sailing ships, fighting battles, eating and drinking, singing, marching.” Whitman was no Utopian socialist, says Mr. Arvin, not only because he was too hardheaded to accept the “lovable insanity” of their more extravagant plans, but because he would not be anything that made him different from the vast mass of plain people. He was no Abolitionist, because of his almost mystical veneration for the Union.

In working out exactly what he was, Mr. Arvin formulates a credo for democrats which is affirmative without being sentimental, sums it up best in Whitman’s own language: “We’ve got a hell of a lot to learn yet, before we’re a real democracy: we’ve gone beyond all the others, very far beyond some, but we’re far from having yet achieved our dream. . . . We’ll get there in the end: God knows we’re not there yet.”