Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 4

Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 4

by Brett Rutherford

Following is a bibliography of the critical articles which Baker has established as Whitman's writing:

• Egeria (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "Character and Writings of Shelley." The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts. 1:32 (Providence, Sat Jan 11 1834): 252-253. 
• Egeria (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "On the Nature and Attributes of Genius. The Boston Pearl: A Gazette Devoted to Polite Literature. 5:14 (Saturday, Dec 19 1835) pp. 107-108. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Review of 'Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life' translated from the German of Eckermann." Boston Quarterly Review. January 1840. 3:20-57 [By-lined as 'Providence, August 15, 1839']. 
• A Disciple (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "Emerson's Essays, by a Disciple." United States Magazine, and Democratic Review. Vol 16 No 84. June 1845.
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics. 1860. New York: Rudd & Carleton. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Tablets." [Review of Alcott]. Providence Daily Journal. Vol 39 No 261. Friday morning, October 30, 1868. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Byronism." Providence Daily Journal. Vol 41 No 93. October 18, 1869. 

Edgar Poe and His Critics, Whitman's only critical work to appear in book form, has been praised as a great work of literary vindication. Whitman had to wait until her mother's passing to publish her defense of Poe. Moulton, writing at the time of Whitman's death in 1878, noted the little book's continued high place: "a little volume of passionate and superb prose, in defense of the dead man ... remarkable for its self-restraint... criticism, not eulogy"
Whitman's critical appreciation of Shelley, published in 1834, defends genius against religion, yet Whitman's defense is timid, reduced in essence to the argument that kind Christians should have remonstrated gently with the poet and brought him back into the fold, rather than casting him out for his atheism. This alone sufficed to make Whitman an outcast among some families in Benefit Street, and the British blasphemy trial against Shelley's poetry was still to come.
At the time Whitman wrote her appreciation of Goethe in 1840, the second part of Faust was little-known, and only those able to read German could plumb its depths (she and Margaret Fuller were among them). Earlier, Thomas Carlyle had lamented the lack of a worthy Faust translation, thus:

A suitable version of Faust would be a rich addition to our literature; but the difficulties which stand in the way of such an undertaking amount to almost an absolute veto. The merits of a good translation, especially in poetry, always bear some kindred, though humble, relation to those of the original; and in the case before us, that relation approaches more nearly to equality than in any other that we know of. To exhibit in a different tongue any tolerable copy of the external graces of this drama, — the marvelous felicity of its language, and the ever-varying, ever-expressive rhythm of its verse, would demand the exercise of all that is rarest and most valuable in a poet's art; while the requisite familiarity with such thoughts and feelings as it embodies, could not exist but in conjunction with nearly all that is rarest and most valuable in a poet's genius. A person so qualified is much more likely to write tragedies of his own, than to translate those of others: and thus Faust, we are afraid, must ever continue in many respects a sealed book to the mere English reader.

The vigor and philosophical penetration of her thought come through most strikingly in her 1845 explication and defense of Emerson, a work that must have dazzled Poe even if he recoiled from New England Transcendentalism. After a wide-ranging discussion of Emerson's influences and innovations, Whitman closes with a new self-confidence:

In asserting that the fontal idea of Emerson's writings, as of the philosophy of the age, is absolute identity, I have not been careful to avert from them the imputation of Pantheism, Platonism, Spinozism, &c., &c. It matters little how we designate this manner of interpreting the phenomena of being, since it contains an inherent vitality which alike survives neglect and defies ridicule.

Superficial and timid men may decry these ideas as unintelligible or profane; but what rational ground of faith is left to him who doubts that God is over all and in all, that evil is but the absence and privation of good, and that all apparent evil must give way before a fuller development of the life that is within us? Only when the knowledge that the highest dwells ever with us becomes "a sweet enveloping thought," shall we be enabled to lead a single and trustful life, "to live in thoughts and act with energies that are immortal."

Sadly, her literary essays and letters, other than Edgar Poe and His Critics, remained unpublished in book form. Whitman left $1,000 in her estate for the publication of her prose works. Moulton (804) confirmed this in the London Athenaeum obituary. Baker found heavily annotated copies of the reviews prepared by Whitman and/or an amanuensis, so the manuscript was at hand. The prose volume never appeared.
Why did Whitman not publish her non-Poe criticism during her lifetime? The experience of Margaret Fuller might be helpful. Fuller, Whitman's friend and a one-time resident of Providence, had published her own critical essays on literature, Papers on Literature and Art, in 1846, but the timidity of her publishers, Wiley & Putnam, prevented this volume from containing the full range of her controversial political and social thinking. Judith Bean tells us "Her proposed collection was cut in half for publication, obscuring her political critique and the range of her work as a critic." The excisions included a review of Shelley's poetry, and Whitman could have anticipated a similar problem, since her own essays centered on Shelley, Byron and Goethe. A criminal conviction in England charging a publisher with blasphemy for reprinting Shelley's "Queen Mab" is one possible factor in this case of publisher's panic, and in 1844, two Edinburgh booksellers were imprisoned for selling works by Thomas Paine and Shelley.

Subjects: antebellum literature, Edgar Allan Poe, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Percy Shelley, Sarah Helen Whitman.