WALT WHITMAN. POET OF DEMOCRACY—Hugh l'Anson Faussef—Yale ($3).
This compact, brilliant critical biography is 1) an excellent life of Walt Whitman, 2) a just, if merciless, evaluation of him as poet, mystic and prophet of democracy, 3) an arduous, provocative sermon on the nature and responsibility of democracy and of art. Unlike most Whitman critics, Author Fausset avoids the extremes of most books about Whitman. He neither damns nor admires Whitman for being a homosexual. He does not claim that Whitman's poetry is as great as Homer's or merely a free verse Sears, Roebuck catalogue. He simply tries to explain what Whitman achieved in poetry and mysticism, what he failed to achieve—and why.
Critic Fausset's thesis is simple: if Whitman was a great poet, it was his business to fulfill the responsibilities of one. If he was the evangelist of democracy, it was his business to write a true, not a heretical, gospel. In Fausset's opinion, Whitman never quite succeeded in being either poet or evangelist. He wrote some great poetry and some amazingly energetic verse. But on the whole, he shrank even from such responsibilities as he was equipped to recognize. He perceived a great number of democratic half-truths. He lacked the intellectual equipment or spiritual stamina to make the half-truth whole. Reason: Whitman, the man, was never really whole.
Bisexual. All human beings, Critic Fausset observes, are to some extent bisexual. But Whitman had a great deal more of the woman in him than men normally have. This schism in his nature, Fausset believes, was in part the source of such greatness as he had. It was also the chief source of his failures. Whitman's femininity gave him his tremendous powers for the passive absorption of experience, for sympathy, for the almost bottomless endurance (as in the Civil War hospitals) of massive suffering. But it also accounts for the sentimentality, effusiveness, extreme over-assertiveness, pseudo-masculinity and egoism of many of his poems.
Because he feared and never quite understood himself, because, in all probability, he never felt normal sexual desire in his life, his hunger for the easy comradeship of simple men developed. "More intent on excluding none than on wholely finding one," it was inevitable that he should remain innocent to the end of his days of psychology, character, the true nature of individualism, personality, tragedy, evil—all of which considerably complicate the problems of the poet and of the democratic theorist.