ABSTRACT
Unsigned review, the Critic (London, 1 April 1856).
The singling out of Whitman’s description of himself as ‘a Kosmos’ suggests that this reviewer may have seen the notice by Charles Eliot Norton in Putnam’s Monthly. Evidently this reviewer felt that the most appropriate reaction to what he took to be a display of indecency was a refined form of billingsgate. His abuse at times has a certain vivacity, as in the sentence: ‘Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.’ The passage on p. 79 of the 1855 edition of the Leaves, which the Victorian reviewer alludes to tantalizingly though he does not dare to quote it (contenting himself with the observation that it ‘deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner’s whip’), consists, no doubt, of the following lines: This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, 1 am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor … all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time … the visible and solid earth … the atmosphere and the fringed clouds… what was expected of heaven or feared of hell are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it… the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands—all diffused … mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb … loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous… quivering jelly of love … whiteblow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweetfleshed day.
