`Something a Little More Than Human'

“We ought to rejoice greatly in him.”

That’s what Henry David Thoreau wrote to his friend Harrison Blake in December 1856 about his meeting the previous month with Walt Whitman, though the convergence of these American heroes, spawn of Emerson, almost didn’t happen. On Nov. 9, 1856, in the company of Amos Bronson Alcott, the stage manager of this Transcendentalist farce, Thoreau traveled to Whitman’s house on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Alcott knocked and the door was opened not by Walt but his mother – “a stately sensible matron,” Alcott noted in his journal. Walt wasn’t home, but Mrs. Whitman, like a stage mother, trumpeted her son’s virtues at worrisome length.

Alcott and Thoreau returned the following day and found Whitman at home. According to Alcott, not always a reliable witness, Whitman greeted them “kindly, yet awkwardly.” Not surprisingly, the author of Leaves of Grass did most of the talking. Alcott writes:

“He is very curious of criticism on himself or his book, inviting it from all quarters, nor suffering the conversation to stray very wide away from Walt’s godhead without recalling it to that high mark. I hoped to put him in communication direct with Thoreau, and tried my hand a little after we came downstairs and sat in the parlour below; but each seemed planted fast in reserves, surveying the other curiously, -- like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them….At all events, our stay was not long.”

Thoreau made no mention of the meeting in his journal. While staying in Eagleswood, N.J., that night, however, he noted the most common oak in that region was Quercus montana. That makes his letter to Blake, written Dec. 7, all the more curious and precious:

“That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remember best the poem of Walt Whitman, an American, and the Sun-Down Poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. But even on this side he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. I have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. As for its sensuality--and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears--I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them. One woman told me that no woman could read it--as if a man could read what a woman could not. Of course Walt Whitman can communicate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of?

“On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that I have preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching.

“We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! He is awfully good.

“To be sure I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders--as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain--stirs me well up, and then--throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude, and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem--an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering that when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, `No: tell me about them.’

“I did not get far in conversation with him--two more being present--and among the few things which I chanced to say, I remember that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America or of politics, and so on, which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.

“Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident.

“He is a great fellow.”

Bravo, Henry! I love this letter. After confessing his discomfort with Whitman’s frankness over the “simply sensual” – an uneasiness shared by many readers of that day and ours -- he forthrightly asks: “and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of?”

I recount this episode at some length because I’ve been browsing in Vol. 3 of With Walt Whitman in Camden, the nine-volume transcription of Whitman’s conversation kept by Horace Traubel during the poet’s final, illness-plagued years. Traubel visited the poet at his home in Camden, N.J., almost daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. He started taking notes of their talks in March 1888, and transcribed them nightly. Traubel published three volumes of Whitman’s conversation before his own death in 1919. The final two volumes did not appear until 1996, more than a century after Traubel wrote them.

Whitman introduces Thoreau into conversation nine times in Vol. 3, which covers Traubel’s Camden visits between Nov. 1, 1888 and Jan. 20, 1889. Thoreau, who died in 1862, clearly made a lasting impression. This is from Dec. 17, 1888:

“Thoreau, in Brooklyn, that first time he came to see me, referred to my critics as `reprobates.’ I asked him: `Would you apply so severe a word to them?’ He was surprised: `Do you regard that as a severe word? reprobates? what they really deserve is something infinitely stronger, more caustic; I thought I was letting them off easy.’”

Whitman was a self-mythologizer, but this rings true. Despite his reservations about the sexual content of Leaves of Grass, Thoreau celebrates the roughneck from Long Island. The coolness between the men in person warmed to passionate advocacy once they parted. Here’s a portion of Whitman’s conversation on Christmas Eve 1888. A visitor has asked the poet who is “bigger” – Emerson or Thoreau? Whitman answers:

“…my prejudices, if I may call them that, are all with Emerson: but Thoreau was a surprising fellow – he is not easily grasped – is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces – stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force – he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame. One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness – his dissent – his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all its choices.”

Both men speak of the other in oversized, epical terms. For Thoreau, Whitman is “a little more than human.” For Whitman, Thoreau “looms up bigger and bigger.” Genius recognizes genius.