ABSTRACT
‘Walt Whitman’s Poems’, Contemporary Review, XXVII (1875), 49–69.
The author of this very vigorous assault upon the claims made for Whitman as a poet, Peter Bayne (1830–96), was a Scottish journalist and author who was educated at Edinburgh University. His works include The Christian Life, Social and Individual(1855); Essays, Bibliographical and Critical(1859);Martin Luther, His Life and Work (1887); and The Free Church of Scotland. Bayne notes affinities between Whitman and Rousseau and regards him as an evil portent for the future of the United States and perhaps of the democratic experiment in general. He notes that Whitman’s advice: ‘Resist much; obey little!’ is an invitation to anarchy and licence rather than to a stable and ordered form of liberty, but he failed to notice (as an American perhaps should) the significance of the fact that this bit of advice is proffered by the poet not to the random individual but to the states in their relation presumably to the federal union which they compose. It is ironic, then, but hardly anarchic that Whitman, who was as strong a Unionist as Lincoln during the Civil War, should thus have indicated his sympathetic attitude towards states-rights (when not pushed to an extreme by ‘a conspiracy of slaveholders’) against a national bureaucracy whose increasing weight threatened to crush them.
Concerning this essay, Professor Harold Blodgett (Walt Whitman In England) makes the following interesting observation (p. 199): ‘Edward Dowden, greatly dismayed at this article, called it “very vicious”, but it should not be allowed to die. A very plausible Tory attack, it states with adequacy and vigor the formidable case that all respectable persons have against Leaves of Grass.’
