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The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman
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340 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Anne Burrows Gilchrist
23 books1 followerAnne Gilchrist was an English writer, best known for her connection to American poet Walt Whitman.
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April 12, 2020
“GOING SOMEWHERE” in memory of Anne Gilchrist by Walt Whitman
My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend
(Now buried in an English grave—and this a
memory-leaf for her dear sake),
Ended our talk—
“The sum, concluding all we know
of old or modern learning, intuitions deep,
Of all Geologies—Histories—of all Astronomy—of Evolution,
Metaphysics all, Is, that we all are onward, onward,
speeding slowly, surely bettering,
Life, life an endless march, an endless army (no halt, but, it is duly over),
The world, the race, the soul—in space and time the universes,
All bound as is befitting each—all surely going somewhere.”
”Perhaps Walt Whitman has forgotten—or, through some theory in his head, has overridden—the truth that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, as well as our bodies; and that we have a strong instinct of silence about some things.”
“I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these.”
As I read this book of letters, I was overcome with disparate heartbreaks. The first that this excellent writer was never published or perhaps never knew of her talent in a time women had to fight for any seat at the table, and the second was how alive the Civil War was for her as she described Whitman’s experience of it, and how it is mirrored in this divide in my country between Trump supporters who distrust any media source besides Fox News and the ones who have seen his incompetence and potential evil from the beginning and now see it bear out in the coronavirus pandemic. My heart breaks for my country, but in revisiting the Civil War through this book, my heart hopes, because we have been here before, and somehow triumphed, changed, endured. I think of the many elders of our country who will not see us come out this quagmire, because the Supreme Court will outlast Trump’s time, and they are complicit: they remotely voted that Wisconsinites could not remotely vote in the presidential primary, and I imagine the November elections will be plagued by their hypocrisy also.
This book is a nice view of a life well lived (Anne’s) and while most of it is essentially a fan girl letter to Whitman, even calling him godlike at one point, resonates with any of us who have loved someone’s words so much that we were inspired to write our own. She at one point offers to bear his children, and we don’t have many letters in return from Whitman to her, so who knows what he thought of that....most of these quotes is from her “intro” letter to his publisher to try to have him send the letter to Whitman, a powerful tribute to America’s poet.
(Gilchrist)
Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened.
Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, but that all are vital; they grew—they were not made. We criticise a palace or a cathedral; but what is the good of criticising a forest?
“,O the joy of my soul leaning poised on itself,—
receiving identity through materials, and loving them,—
observing characters, and absorbing them!
O my soul vibrated back to me from them!
“O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides!
The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds,
the moist, fresh stillness of the woods,
The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak,
and all through the forenoon. “O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds;
To emerge, and be of the sky—
of the sun and moon and the flying clouds, as one with them.” Whitman
(Gilchrist) But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of “each moment and whatever happens”; to find that one can ride as gay and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumultuous waves of life as on those that glide and glitter under a clear sky; that it is not defeat and wretchedness which come out of the storm of adversity, but strength and calmness.
We only ask to seize and be seized swiftly, over-masteringly, by the great meanings. We see with the eyes of the soul, listen with the ears of the soul; the poor old words that have served so many generations for purposes, good, bad, and indifferent, and become warped and blurred in the process, grow young again, regenerate, translucent.
If now is so great and beautiful, I need no arguments to make me believe that the nows of the past and of the future were and will be great and beautiful, too.
One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.” And that this is an all-embracing truth, including within its scope every created thing, and, with deepest significance, every part, faculty, attribute, healthful impulse, mind, and body of a man (each and all facing towards and related to the Infinite on every side), is what we grown children find it hardest to realize, too.
The man of science furnishes the premises; but it is the poet who draws the final conclusion. Both together are “swiftly and surely preparing a future greater than all the past.”
When I first opened Walt Whitman’s book of poetry. What was the spell? It was that in them humanity has, in a new sense, found itself; for the first time has dared to accept itself without disparagement, without reservation. For the first time an unrestricted faith in all that is and in the issues of all that happens has burst forth triumphantly into song.
For seen and unseen are parts of the Great Whole: all the parts interdependent, closely related; all alike have proceeded from and are manifestations of the Divine Source. Nature is not the barrier between us and the unseen but the link, the communication; she, too, has something behind appearances, has an unseen soul; she, too, is made of “innumerable energies.”
“Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—
each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here as divinely as any are here.” Whitman
“A particle of oxygen,” wrote Faraday, “is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor less.”
(Gilchrist) And if the reader would understand the true causes and nature of that war, ostensibly waged between North and South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy between the good and the evil genius of America (for there were just as many secret sympathizers with the secession-slave-power in the North as in the South) he will find the clue in the pages of Walt Whitman.
Whitman:
“Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer sweep! Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour’d what the earth gave me; Long I roam’d the woods of the north—long I watch’d Niagara pouring; I travel’d the prairies over, and slept on their breast— I cross’d the Nevadas, I cross’d the plateaus; I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail’d out to sea; I sail’d through the storm, I was refresh’d by the storm; I watch’d with joy the threatening maws of the waves; I mark’d the white combs where they career’d so high, curling over; I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds; Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful!)
”Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring; Torrents of men (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you indeed inexhaustible?) What, to pavements and homesteads here—what were those storms of the mountains and sea? What, to passions I witness around me to-day? Was the sea risen? Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds? Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage...
How Democracy, with desperate, vengeful port strides on, shown through the dark by those flashes of lightning!
Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! stride with vengeful stroke! And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O cities! Crash heavier, heavier yet, O storms! you have done me good; My soul, prepared in the mountains, absorbs your
I have witness’d the true lightning—I have witness’d my cities electric; I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise...”
(Gilchrist) It was a beautiful destiny for this lover of men, and a proud triumph for this believer in the People; for it was the People that he beheld, tried by severest tests.
Whitman:
“I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue questioning every one I meet; Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?”
(Gilchrist) He sees clearly as any the incredible flippancy, the blind fury of parties, the lack of great leaders, the plentiful meanness and vulgarity; the labour question beginning to open like a yawning gulf....
Whitman: “We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, all so dark and untried.... It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection saying lo! the roads! The only plans of development, long and varied, with all terrible balks and ebullitions!
You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account—making a new history, a history of democracy ... I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your soul, be it so.
But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages ... must pay for it with proportionate price.
For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men.”
(Gilchrist)
It does not need to be American to love America and to believe in the great future of humanity there; it is curious to be human, still more English to do that. I love & believe in & understand her in & through you: but was always drawn towards her, always a believer, though in a vaguer way, that a new glorious day for men & women was dawning there, and recognized a new, distinctive American quality, very congenial to me, even in American virtues, which you not perhaps rate highly or retard as decisively national, not adequately or commandingly so, at any rate.
My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend
(Now buried in an English grave—and this a
memory-leaf for her dear sake),
Ended our talk—
“The sum, concluding all we know
of old or modern learning, intuitions deep,
Of all Geologies—Histories—of all Astronomy—of Evolution,
Metaphysics all, Is, that we all are onward, onward,
speeding slowly, surely bettering,
Life, life an endless march, an endless army (no halt, but, it is duly over),
The world, the race, the soul—in space and time the universes,
All bound as is befitting each—all surely going somewhere.”
”Perhaps Walt Whitman has forgotten—or, through some theory in his head, has overridden—the truth that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, as well as our bodies; and that we have a strong instinct of silence about some things.”
“I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these.”
As I read this book of letters, I was overcome with disparate heartbreaks. The first that this excellent writer was never published or perhaps never knew of her talent in a time women had to fight for any seat at the table, and the second was how alive the Civil War was for her as she described Whitman’s experience of it, and how it is mirrored in this divide in my country between Trump supporters who distrust any media source besides Fox News and the ones who have seen his incompetence and potential evil from the beginning and now see it bear out in the coronavirus pandemic. My heart breaks for my country, but in revisiting the Civil War through this book, my heart hopes, because we have been here before, and somehow triumphed, changed, endured. I think of the many elders of our country who will not see us come out this quagmire, because the Supreme Court will outlast Trump’s time, and they are complicit: they remotely voted that Wisconsinites could not remotely vote in the presidential primary, and I imagine the November elections will be plagued by their hypocrisy also.
This book is a nice view of a life well lived (Anne’s) and while most of it is essentially a fan girl letter to Whitman, even calling him godlike at one point, resonates with any of us who have loved someone’s words so much that we were inspired to write our own. She at one point offers to bear his children, and we don’t have many letters in return from Whitman to her, so who knows what he thought of that....most of these quotes is from her “intro” letter to his publisher to try to have him send the letter to Whitman, a powerful tribute to America’s poet.
(Gilchrist)
Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened.
Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, but that all are vital; they grew—they were not made. We criticise a palace or a cathedral; but what is the good of criticising a forest?
“,O the joy of my soul leaning poised on itself,—
receiving identity through materials, and loving them,—
observing characters, and absorbing them!
O my soul vibrated back to me from them!
“O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides!
The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds,
the moist, fresh stillness of the woods,
The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak,
and all through the forenoon. “O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all—that there are no bounds;
To emerge, and be of the sky—
of the sun and moon and the flying clouds, as one with them.” Whitman
(Gilchrist) But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of “each moment and whatever happens”; to find that one can ride as gay and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumultuous waves of life as on those that glide and glitter under a clear sky; that it is not defeat and wretchedness which come out of the storm of adversity, but strength and calmness.
We only ask to seize and be seized swiftly, over-masteringly, by the great meanings. We see with the eyes of the soul, listen with the ears of the soul; the poor old words that have served so many generations for purposes, good, bad, and indifferent, and become warped and blurred in the process, grow young again, regenerate, translucent.
If now is so great and beautiful, I need no arguments to make me believe that the nows of the past and of the future were and will be great and beautiful, too.
One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.” And that this is an all-embracing truth, including within its scope every created thing, and, with deepest significance, every part, faculty, attribute, healthful impulse, mind, and body of a man (each and all facing towards and related to the Infinite on every side), is what we grown children find it hardest to realize, too.
The man of science furnishes the premises; but it is the poet who draws the final conclusion. Both together are “swiftly and surely preparing a future greater than all the past.”
When I first opened Walt Whitman’s book of poetry. What was the spell? It was that in them humanity has, in a new sense, found itself; for the first time has dared to accept itself without disparagement, without reservation. For the first time an unrestricted faith in all that is and in the issues of all that happens has burst forth triumphantly into song.
For seen and unseen are parts of the Great Whole: all the parts interdependent, closely related; all alike have proceeded from and are manifestations of the Divine Source. Nature is not the barrier between us and the unseen but the link, the communication; she, too, has something behind appearances, has an unseen soul; she, too, is made of “innumerable energies.”
“Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—
each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here as divinely as any are here.” Whitman
“A particle of oxygen,” wrote Faraday, “is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor less.”
(Gilchrist) And if the reader would understand the true causes and nature of that war, ostensibly waged between North and South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy between the good and the evil genius of America (for there were just as many secret sympathizers with the secession-slave-power in the North as in the South) he will find the clue in the pages of Walt Whitman.
Whitman:
“Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier and fiercer sweep! Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour’d what the earth gave me; Long I roam’d the woods of the north—long I watch’d Niagara pouring; I travel’d the prairies over, and slept on their breast— I cross’d the Nevadas, I cross’d the plateaus; I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail’d out to sea; I sail’d through the storm, I was refresh’d by the storm; I watch’d with joy the threatening maws of the waves; I mark’d the white combs where they career’d so high, curling over; I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds; Saw from below what arose and mounted (O superb! O wild as my heart, and powerful!)
”Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring; Torrents of men (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you indeed inexhaustible?) What, to pavements and homesteads here—what were those storms of the mountains and sea? What, to passions I witness around me to-day? Was the sea risen? Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds? Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage...
How Democracy, with desperate, vengeful port strides on, shown through the dark by those flashes of lightning!
Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! stride with vengeful stroke! And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O cities! Crash heavier, heavier yet, O storms! you have done me good; My soul, prepared in the mountains, absorbs your
I have witness’d the true lightning—I have witness’d my cities electric; I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise...”
(Gilchrist) It was a beautiful destiny for this lover of men, and a proud triumph for this believer in the People; for it was the People that he beheld, tried by severest tests.
Whitman:
“I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue questioning every one I meet; Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?”
(Gilchrist) He sees clearly as any the incredible flippancy, the blind fury of parties, the lack of great leaders, the plentiful meanness and vulgarity; the labour question beginning to open like a yawning gulf....
Whitman: “We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, all so dark and untried.... It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous imperfection saying lo! the roads! The only plans of development, long and varied, with all terrible balks and ebullitions!
You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, behind me as of no account—making a new history, a history of democracy ... I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your soul, be it so.
But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages ... must pay for it with proportionate price.
For you, too, as for all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men.”
(Gilchrist)
It does not need to be American to love America and to believe in the great future of humanity there; it is curious to be human, still more English to do that. I love & believe in & understand her in & through you: but was always drawn towards her, always a believer, though in a vaguer way, that a new glorious day for men & women was dawning there, and recognized a new, distinctive American quality, very congenial to me, even in American virtues, which you not perhaps rate highly or retard as decisively national, not adequately or commandingly so, at any rate.
Read
December 21, 2020Anna Gilchrist was my introduction to Walt Whitman. Her passion for his poetry. And her hope for itself ectopic on culture and the project of democracy, astonished me.
Want to read
March 22, 2023This is a very absorbing book. Putting it on hold until I have time to read it properly. 14 Jan 2022
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews