A LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN

BY THE SAME WRITER
MOODS AND OUTDOOR VERSES
(“Richard Askham”)
FOR THE FELLOWSHIP

Walt Whitman at thirty-five

A LIFE OFWALT WHITMAN

BY
HENRY BRYAN BINNS

WITH THIRTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1905

TO
MY MOTHER
AND
HER MOTHER
THE REPUBLIC

[Pg vii]

PREFACE

To the reader, and especially to the criticalreader, it would seem but courteous to give atthe beginning of my book some indication of itspurpose. It makes no attempt to fill the placeeither of a critical study or a definitive biography.Though Whitman died thirteen yearsago, the time has not yet come for a final andcomplete life to be written; and when the hourshall arrive we must, I think, look to someAmerican interpreter for the volume. For Whitman’slife is of a strongly American flavour.Instead of such a book I offer a biographicalstudy from the point of view of an Englishman,yet of an Englishman who loves the Republic.I have not attempted, except parentheticallyhere and there, to make literary decisions onthe value of Whitman’s work, partly becausehe still remains an innovator upon whose casethe jury of the years must decide—a jury whichis not yet complete; and partly because I amnot myself a literary critic. It is as a manthat I see and have sought to describe Whitman.But as a man of special and exceptionalcharacter, a new type of mystic or seer. And[Pg viii]the conviction that he belongs to the order ofinitiates has dragged me on to confessedlydifficult ground.

Again, while seeking to avoid excursionsinto literary criticism, it has seemed to me tobe impossible to draw a real portrait of theman without attempting some interpretationof his books and the quotation from them ofcharacteristic passages, for they are the recordof his personal attitude towards the problemsmost intimately affecting his life. I trust thatthis part of

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