For Comparison.docx

For Comparison.docx


FOR COMPARISON to CHarlaX Poetry poem

Publication Information

"Walt Whitman: A Dialogue," by George Santayana, first appeared in the Harvard Monthly 10.3 (May 1890): 85-91.

Whitman Archive ID

anc.00253

ed,note.ed condensed

Walt Whitman: A Dialogue

George Santayana

"Better than to stand to sit, better than to sit to lie,

Better than to dream to sleep, better than to sleep to die."

But you can't expect to attain the highest good at one bound from the depths of Philistia. You can't do better for the present than to come in and stretch your energetic self on the other half of the window seat. Isn't it delicious? What better apology for idler? Here you can breath the air and look at the fresh grass, while you read a poet and cut a lecture. He tells you how in another country, perhaps, he felt what you are feeling now, as he watched the spring of another year. that is the best part of the pleasure, to know that it's human, and that all men have had it in common, from Adam down.

"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,

Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum."

But what makes you think the essence poetry distils can't be extracted from every object? Why should one thing leave its type in the world of ideas, and not another! Trust me, beauty is everywhere, if we only had the genius to see it. If a man has the ability to make us feel the fitness, the necessity, the beauty of common things, he is a poet of the highest type. If some objects seem to you poetic rather than others, if Venice can be apostrophised and Oshkosh is unmentionable, it's because habit makes it easier to idealize them. This beauty has been pointed out so often that we know it by heart. But what merit is to repeat the old tricks, and hum the old tunes? You add nothing to the beauty of the world. You see no new vision. You are the author of nothing, but merely an apprentice in the poetic guild, a little poet sucking the honey with which great poets have sweetened words. You are inspired by tradition and judged by convention. Yet this very convention must have been inspired at first. The real objects about a man must have impressed him and he must have found words fit to communicate his impression. These words in that way became poetic, and afterwards any man who used them was an artist.

"I do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,

And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me

And the look of the bay mare shames stillness out of me."

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."