The Walt Whitman Archive
Complete Prose Works
After the rest is satiated, all interest culminates in the field of persons, and never flags there. Accordingly in this field have the great poets and literatuses signally toil'd. They too, in all ages, all lands, have been creators, fashioning, making types of men and women, as Adam and Eve are made in the divine fable. Behold, shaped, bred by orientalism, feudalism, through their long growth and culmination, and breeding back in return—(when shall we have an equal series, typical of democracy?)—behold, commencing in primal Asia, (apparently formulated, in what beginning we know, in the gods of the mythologies, and coming down thence,) a few samples out of the countless product, bequeath'd to the moderns, bequeath'd to America as studies. For the men, Yudishtura, Rama, Arjuna, Solomon, most of the Old and New Testament characters; Achilles, Ulysses, Theseus, Prometheus, Hercules, 'AEneas, Plutarch's heroes; the Merlin of Celtic bards; the Cid, Arthur and his knights, Siegfried and Hagen in the Nibelungen; Roland and Oliver; Roustam in the Shah-Nemah; and so on to Milton's Satan, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakspere's Hamlet, Richard II., Lear, Marc Antony, &c., and the modern Faust. These, I say, are models, combined, adjusted to other standards than America's, but of priceless value to her and hers.
Among
women, the goddesses of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythologies, certain Bible
characters, especially the Holy Mother; Cleopatra, Penel-
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ope; the
portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.;
the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie and Effie Deans, &c., &c.
( Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at her best, or as perfect human mother, does not
hitherto, it seems to me, fully appear in literature.)