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Antietam of the Spirit. The Walt Whitman who emerges from the 381 pages of Dr. Henry Seidel Canby's biography differs from the good grey poet whom Americans have come to know. A competent, exact, professorial volume, in which each of the 31 chapters is neatly wound up and concluded, and the questions of Whitman's career — the irrelevant charges of homosexuality or of American fascism —are answered with the sharpness of a professor putting students in their place, Walt Whitman is a valuable work that primarily lacks the spontaneity and boldness of Whitman himself. The good it does is to rescue Whitman from the vagabonds and literary celebrators of the Common Man, and from the authors of the hard-boiled school who claim him as their parent. He was one of the leading American editors, with a chance of becoming one of the greatest of them, when he turned to the writing of poetry. "He made articulate and gave an enduring life in the imagination to the American dream of a continent where the people should escape from the injustices of the past and establish a new and better life in which every one would share." In the Antietam of the spirit that he fought in Washington, he saw a greater vision. Readers who turn from the close-packed pages of Dr. Canby's biography to Leaves of Grass may find that the poems appear much simpler, and their development mysterious and haunting in its simplicity. Through the early poems Whit man seems to identify himself with the American earth, to which he attributed a value to the world that he could never make clear. As if answering the old question that the Indians asked at boundary disputes —I wonder if the ground has any thing to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? — he made him self the earth's spokesman: who touched a leaf of American grass touched a man.
But even as he celebrated the richness and variety of the American earth—and no one ever spoke for it and its fruits with more passion—he seems to have known that this was not enough."When I see where the East is greater than the West," he wrote, "then I guess I shall see how spirit is greater than matter."; Life & Transfiguration. What was the hidden prophetic intention that lay back of the miseries of men, behind their restless explorations and their never-happy hearts? It seemed to Whitman that his thought had at last spanned the globe, swimming in space and covered all over with visible power and beauty, and yet lying in teeming spiritual darkness beneath the high procession of the sun and moon and the countless stars above. America lay in the path of the circumnavigation of the earth.
In the vision of the future Walt Whitman saw that the true circling of the globe meant to the world far more than the discovery of America meant to Europe. It meant the end of the torment that came because men knew there were terrae incognitae of the heart as there were of the earth. Distance would be brought near, the lands welded together, the races, neighbors, be married and given in marriage, until all affection should be fully responded to, the cleavage between man and nature, spirit and matter, ended, and the cold, impassive, voiceless earth be justified.