The Bookman: Walt Whitman 1919

I am publishing on my website this Walt Whitman centenary edition of The Bookman (May 1919) as a PDF, as I believe it is not otherwise available in the public domain. The Bookman was a literary monthly magazine based in London.

Quotes from the Whitman articles.

“A still quickening pulse beats in his writings, and the mystic charge he gave – “this is not book; who touches this, touches a man” – serves to point to an occult and present survival in his pages of what a Sufist might teach us to call “the liberated essence” of himself.”

“The ideas which lie at its root are not new – they are to be found in all the great religions scriptures of the world – buy they have never before had such wide practical application. They have been coming more and more into expression in Western thought and literature, and in many different societies and organizations. But they receive their fullest exemplification in Walt Whitman. In him the creative Word of Democracy has been “made flesh” as in no other. At the root of Democracy is the fact of our oneness with all our fellows. At an early stage of our development our consciousness of this is latent, though very dimly felt in relation to those we love; but, as evolution proceeds it comes into clearer light and extends its boundaries. At last we have in Walt Whitman (and in Edwards Carpenter, who shares his seership) its sudden emergence into a vivid and all transforming realisation of its truth and universality - the soul bursting its bonds of self and pouring itself out, in joyous freedom and perfect equality, into the great ocean of our common humanity.”