STYLE AND CONTENT

Nearly everyone who takes up “Leaves of Grass” stops with the style, as if that was all there was to it. The critics are always after the style, damn it. I was born in the vesture of this false notion of literature, and no one so born can entirely escape the taint. I pride myself I have escaped the pollution as much as any.

It is a new style, of course. Is there any other poem of the sort extant—or indeed hitherto attempted? Nature may have given the hint to the author of the “Leaves of Grass,” but there exists no book or fragment of a book which can have given the hint to him. The style of these poems is simply their own style, new-born and red. But that is necessitated by new theories, new themes—or say the new treatment of themes. Every word that falls from my mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of the old theories and forms. Regardless of the old conventions, my form has strictly grown from my purports and facts, and is the analogy of them, under the great laws, following only its own impulses.

I have never given any study merely to expression; it has never appealed to me as a thing valuable or significant in itself. I have been deliberate, careful, even laborious. But the artistic, the formal, the traditional aesthetic—the savor of mere words, jingles, sound—I have always eschewed. I have never looked for finish—never fooled with technique more than enough to provide for simply getting through. After that I would not give a twist of my chair for all the rest.

I have not only not bother’d much about style, form, art, etc., but confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages—that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.

The trick of literary style! I almost wonder if it is not chiefly having no style at all. I don’t want beautiful results—I want results, honest results. First of all comes sincerity, frankness, open-mindedness; the great poets are to be known by perfect personal candor—fear nothing except to overstep the truth.
That is the preliminary: to talk straight out—honest truths. If they are at the roots, there is a live growth; else all is of no avail. I believe in getting rid of all superfluities—penetrating to the root sense of the matter.

The first thing necessary is the thought—the idea must always come first—is indispensable. I have the idea clearly and fully realized before I attempt to express it. Then I let it go. The rest may follow if it chooses—may play its part—but must not be too much sought after. 
I sit down to write—one seemingly simple idea brings into view a dozen others—so my work grows. The idea becomes so important to me I may perhaps underrate the expressional element—that first, last, and all the time emphasis placed by literary men on the mere implement of words instead of upon the work itself.

When you talk to me of style it is as though you had brought me artificial flowers. What’s the use of the wax flowers when you can go out for yourself and pick real flowers? That’s what I think when people talk to me of style, as if style alone and of itself was anything.

The basis of the “Leaves,” differing I suppose from many grandest poets, was and is that I find everything in the common concrete—the flesh, the common passions, the tangible and visible, etc.—and in the average, the common and general road. Rooted in an immediate fact and in eternal soils, I radiate, work from these outward—or rather, hardly wish to leave here, but to remain and celebrate it all, to let sprout the actual fibre of things, whatever they may be. For me it is my necessity—it is all music—the clef of things.

No prepared picture, no elaborated poem, no after-narrative, could be what the thing itself is,
You want to catch its first spirit—to tally its birth.
The secret of it all is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment,
To put things down without deliberation;
By writing at the instant the very heart-beat of life is caught.
To be spontaneous—that is the greatest art—art of arts—
The only art that excites respect;
Deliberate anything—the determined starting out to do a thing—is best calculated for failure.

I always keep to my own method—if you call it that—to write as moved to write, and what depends on the moment. I never start out bent upon doing anything by a particular method but let events grow their own way. The surprise to me is, how much is spontaneously suggested which a man could never have planned for.

Spontaneous me—I have caught much on the fly—things as they come and go, on the spur of the moment. I always took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote.
Essentially all my volumes are doubtless but off-hand utterances from personality, spontaneous, following implicitly the inscrutable command, dominated by that personality, with little or nothing of plan, art, erudition, etc. If I have chosen to hold the reins, the mastery, it has mainly been to give the way, the power, the road, to the invisible steeds. 

“Leaves of Grass” is not spontaneous only—it aims to be, or ought to be, spontaneity itself. Other poets before me have been spontaneous—others nobly spontaneous, simple. But I think the “Leaves” have all that spontaneity—then something deeper still.

Yet my mind is a slow one—it never hustles. My method is to go slow, extra slow; I can never rush. I must proceed in a leisurely manner, as if I have all the time there is. I have never forced my mind, never driven it to work. When it tired, when writing became a task, then I stopped.

So far as I could have any rule (I could have no cast-iron rule) my rule has been to write what I have to say the best way I can, then lay it aside, taking it up again after some time and reading it afresh—the mind new to it. I find myself much better able to appreciate a piece if I put it aside for a time after it is written—for months, even years—returning to it with fresh spirit. If there’s no jar in the new reading, well and good—that’s sufficient for me.
I have never been able to settle it with myself whether a change was an improvement or not—often the first instinct is the best instinct.

NEXT: SIMPLICITY AND CLARITY

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