Defending the Sacredness of Love

This podcast episode deals with an address given by Robert G. Ingersoll - one of the individuals who spoke at Whitman’s funeral.

He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed of that divine passion that has built every home; that divine passion that has painted every picture and given us every real work of art; that divine passion that has made the world worth living in and has given some value to human life.

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Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 253. - Defending the Sacredness of Love -This is the final episode about Walt Whitman for Pride Month for Celebrate Poe.  But for a far more detailed, and hopefully fascinating look at Walt Whitman, America’s Poet - check out the first episode of Celebrate Whitman, starting July 4th.   And for Poe’s views on democracy check out episode 254 the day before.

In Celebrate Whitman, the podcast will take a even deeper dive into the life, times, and works of Walt Whitman - and there is a lot of great stuff surrounding his life.  But for today, I want to start by briefly talking about his later years.  Due to some book sales, Walt Whitman finally had the opportunity to his own home in Camden, New Jersey. Here he spent his last years while revising and adding more content to his book, Leaves of Grass.

Whitman died on March 26, 1892, and his tomb was personally designed by the poet. He was buried in Harleigh Cemetery.

Robert G. Ingersoll was one of the individuals who spoke at Whitman’s funeral - and he also delivered these lines in Philadelphia regarding the poet - Now - I know the 19th century style of speaking in Ingersoll’s words might make them hard going, but really concentrate and experience how some of these words really flow.

Walt Whitman stood, when he published his book, where all stand to-night—on the perpetually moving line where history ends and prophecy begins. He was full of life to the very tips of his fingers—brave, eager, candid, joyous with health. He was acquainted with the past. He knew something of song and story, of philosophy and art—much of the heroic dead, of brave suffering, of the thoughts of men, the habits of the people—rich as well as poor—familiar with labor, a friend of wind and wave, touched by love and friendship—liking the open road, enjoying the fields and paths, the crags—friend of the forest—feeling that he was free—neither master nor slave—willing that all should know his thoughts—open as the sky, candid as nature—and he gave his thoughts, his dreams, his conclusions, his hopes, and his mental portrait to his fellow-men.

Walt Whitman announced the gospel of the body. He confronted the people. He denied the depravity of man. He insisted that love is not a crime; that men and women should be proudly natural; that they need not grovel on the earth and cover their faces for shame. He taught the dignity and glory of the father and mother; the sacredness of maternity.

It has not been the fashion for people to speak or write their thoughts. We were flooded with the literature of hypocrisy. The writers did not faithfully describe the worlds in which they lived. They endeavored to make a fashionable world. They pretended that the cottage or the hut in which they dwelt was a palace, and they called the little area in which they threw their slops their domain, their realm, their empire. They were ashamed of the real, of what their world actually was. They imitated; that is to say, they told lies, and these lies filled the literature of most lands.

Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion—the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.

They cried out: "He is a defender of passion—he is a libertine! He lives in the mire. He lacks spirituality!"

Whoever differs with the multitude, especially with a led multitude—that is to say, with a multitude of taggers—will find out from their leaders that he has committed an unpardonable sin. It is a crime to travel a road of your own, especially if you put up guide-boards for the information of others.

It was said that Whitman exaggerated the importance of love—that he had made too much of this passion. Let me say that no poet—not excepting Shakespeare—has had imagination enough to exaggerate the importance of human love—a passion that contains all hights and all depths—ample as space, with a sky in which glitter all constellations, and that has within it all storms, all lightnings, all wrecks and ruins, all griefs, all sorrows, all shadows, and all the joy and sunshine of which the heart and brain are capable.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work—by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

Which way does the great stream tend? Is it for good or evil? Are the motives high and noble, or low and infamous?

We cannot measure Shakespeare by a few lines, neither can we measure the Bible by a few chapters, nor "Leaves of Grass" by a few paragraphs. In each there are many things that I neither approve nor believe—but in all books you will find a mingling of wisdom and foolishness, of prophecies and mistakes—in other words, among the excellencies there will be defects. The mine is not all gold, or all silver, or all diamonds—there are baser metals. The trees of the forest are not all of one size. On some of the highest there are dead and useless limbs, and there may be growing beneath the bushes, weeds, and now and then a poisonous vine.

If I were to edit the great books of the world, I might leave out some lines and I might leave out the best. I have no right to make of my brain a sieve and say that only that which passes through belongs to the rest of the human race. I claim the right to choose. I give that right to all.

Walt Whitman had the courage to express his thoughts—the candor to tell the truth. And here let me say it gives me joy—a kind of perfect satisfaction—to look above the bigoted bats, the satisfied owls and wrens and chickadees, and see the great eagle poised, circling higher and higher, unconscious of their existence. And it gives me joy, a kind of perfect satisfaction, to look above the petty passions and jealousies of small and respectable people—above the considerations of place and power and reputation, and see a brave, intrepid man.

It must be remembered that the American people had separated from the Old World—that we had declared not only the independence of colonies, but the independence of the individual. We had done more—we had declared that the state could no longer be ruled by the Church, and that the Church could not be ruled by the state, and that the individual could not be ruled by the Church. These declarations were in danger of being forgotten. We needed a new voice, sonorous, loud and clear, a new poet for America for the new epoch, somebody to chant the morning song of the new day.

The great man who gives a true transcript of his mind, fascinates and instructs. Most writers suppress individuality. They wish to please the public. They flatter the stupid and pander to the prejudice of their readers. They write for the market—making books as other mechanics make shoes. They have no message—they bear no torch—they are simply the slaves of customers. The books they manufacture are handled by "the trade;" they are regarded as harmless. The pulpit does not object; the young person can read the monotonous pages without a blush—or a thought. On the title pages of these books you will find the imprint of the great publishers—on the rest of the pages, nothing. These books might be prescribed for insomnia.

Men of talent, men of business, touch life upon few sides. They travel but the beaten path. The creative spirit is not in them. They regard with suspicion a poet who touches life on every side. They have little confidence in that divine thing called sympathy, and they do not and cannot understand the man who enters into the hopes, the aims, and the feelings of all others.

In all genius there is the touch of chaos—a little of the vagabond; and the successful tradesman, the man who buys and sells, or manages a bank, does not care to deal with a person who has only poems for collaterals—they have a little fear of such people, and regard them as the awkward countryman does a sleight-of-hand performer.

In every age in which books have been produced the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius. If what are known as the best people could have had their way, if the pulpit had been consulted—the provincial moralists—the works of Shakespeare would have been suppressed. Not a line would have reached our time. And the same may be said of every dramatist of his age.

It is not too much to say that every book now held in high esteem would have been destroyed, if those in authority could have had their will. Every book of modern times, that has a real value, that has enlarged the intellectual horizon of mankind, that has developed the brain, that has furnished real food for thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius of the Papacy, and nearly every one has been commended to the free minds of men by the denunciations of Protestants.

If the guardians of society, the protectors of "young persons," could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that thrill the world would now be silent. If authority could have had its way, the world would have been as ignorant now as it was when our ancestors lived in holes or hung from dead limbs by their prehensile tails.

But we are not forced to go very far back. If Shakespeare had been published for the first time now, those divine plays—greater than continents and seas, greater even than the constellations of the midnight sky—would be excluded from the mails by the decision of the present enlightened postmaster-general.

The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and that ideal world has always been far better than the real world. As a consequence, they have forever roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies—the enthusiasm of the human race.

The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed—of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved, and whenever and wherever man has suffered for the right, wherever the hero has been stricken down—whether on field or scaffold—some man of genius has walked by his side, and some poet has given form and expression, not simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations.

From the Greek and Roman world we still hear the voices of a few. The poets, the philosophers, the artists and the orators still speak. Countless millions have been covered by the waves of oblivion, but the few who uttered the elemental truths, who had sympathy for the whole human race, and who were great enough to prophesy a grander day, are as alive to-night as when they roused, by their bodily presence, by their living voices, by their works of art, the enthusiasm of their fellow men.

Think of the respectable people, of the men of wealth and position, those who dwelt in mansions, children of success, who went down to the grave voiceless, and whose names we do not know. Think of the vast multitudes, the endless processions, that entered the caverns of eternal night—leaving no thought—no truth as a legacy to mankind!

The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.

Walt Whitman is in the highest sense a believer in democracy. He knows that there is but one excuse for government—the preservation of liberty; to the end that man may be happy. He knows that there is but one excuse for any institution, secular and religious—the preservation of liberty; and that there is but one excuse for schools, for universal education, for the ascertainment of facts, namely, the preservation of liberty. He resents the arrogance and cruelty of power. He has sworn never to be tyrant or slave. He has solemnly declared:

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
            counterpart of on the same terms.

This one declaration covers the entire ground. It is a declaration of independence, and it is also a declaration of justice, that is to say, a declaration of the independence of the individual, and a declaration that all shall be free. The man who has this spirit can truthfully say:

I have taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown.
I am for those that have never been master'd.

There is in Whitman what he calls "The boundless impatience of restraint"—together with that sense of justice which compelled him to say, "Neither a servant nor a master am I."

He was wise enough to know that giving others the same rights that he claims for himself could not harm him, and he was great enough to say: "As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same."

He felt as all should feel, that the liberty of no man is safe unless the liberty of each is safe.

There is in our country a little of the old servile spirit, a little of the bowing and cringing to others. Many Americans do not understand that the officers of the government are simply the servants of the people. Nothing is so demoralizing as the worship of place. Whitman has reminded the people of this country that they are supreme, and he has said to them:

The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them.
Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you.

Long ago, when the politicians were wrong, when the judges were subservient, when the pulpit was a coward, Walt Whitman shouted:

Man shall not hold property in man.
The least developed person on earth is just as important and
        sacred to himself or herself as the most develop'd person
        is to himself or herself.

This is the very soul of true democracy.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

Walt Whitman utters the elemental truths and is the poet of democracy. He is also the poet of individuality.

He was the poet of life. It was a joy simply to breathe. He loved the clouds; he enjoyed the breath of morning, the twilight, the wind, the winding streams. He loved to look at the sea when the waves burst into the whitecaps of joy. He loved the fields, the hills; he was acquainted with the trees, with birds, with all the beautiful objects of the earth. He not only saw these objects, but understood their meaning, and he used them that he might exhibit his heart to his fellow-men.

He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed of that divine passion that has built every home; that divine passion that has painted every picture and given us every real work of art; that divine passion that has made the world worth living in and has given some value to human life.

He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment. The laughing nymphs of day did not desert him. They remained that they might clasp the hands and greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the night. And when they did come, Walt Whitman stretched his hand to them. On one side were the nymphs of day, and on the other the silent sisters of the night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles and tears, he reached his journey's end.

To-day we give back to Mother Nature, to her clasp and kiss, one of the bravest, sweetest souls that ever lived in human clay.

Long after we are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying.

And so I lay this little wreath upon this great man's tomb. I loved him living, and I love him still.

Join Celebrate Poe as the topic of the podcast returns to Edgar Allan Poe.
That episode is episode 254 and is scheduled to be released July 2, 2024. This episode deals with Poe’s views on government and democracy, and is is an episode that might really surprise you.

Sources include - the online Walt Whitman archives, and excerpts from Walt Whitman: An Address by Robert G. Ingersoll.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.