“The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough … probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive … some may but they never can.”
What I began to explore throughout my reading of the preface of “Leaves of Grass” was the idea of deep, sensory experiences during any given moment in a persons life. Not only does Whitman explore these moment, but he discusses how poets or writers try and re-create these moments in their work. It seems that poets so often desire to give these experiences meaning, or describe these experiences in more grandiose terms. Perhaps some of these efforts to write about life prove somewhat successful; however, other times these efforts seem futile because no one can re-create the vastness of human emotion and experience with only words on a page. It seems that experiences are completely subjective and that people come to understand the “themes” of life “well enough…probably as well as he”. Here, perhaps Whitman is suggesting that humans can experience “beauty and dignity” just as well on their own, rather than looking to poetry to describe these experiences or give them a deeper meaning. Instead, the meaning is found in their own personal exposure to life, not the poets understanding OF these experiences. No one can “assist” a person when trying to understand “love”, “passion”, “beauty”, etc. I love the idea that no poet can flush out a universal understanding of life. Rather, their job is to “indicate” these experiences in their works the best they can.
This passage really stood out to me because as someone who loves literature, I often look to poetry or forms of fiction to help ascribe meaning to certain situations in life. I believe people who share this love for literature, or even people who have been inspired by a text, have been able to use literature in their own life. I think people want to know their emotions, their confusions, anxieties, fears, are felt by other people. Literature provides that mutual understanding.
I do really like the way in which this passage sort of tempers what we might think of as the Imperial Self that Whitman at times risks–one that speaks not only to others, but for others. Here, he seems to suggest some grounding integrity in individual experience that must remain in some ways un-sung–or that must be sung, but that must be sung in such a way, as you say, to indicate rather than dictate. I’m interested in the way this argument that he’s building turns quickly to a meditation on metrical laws and the ways in which they are unfit for experience.