Walt Whitman 1819-1892. Winslow Homer 1836-1910.

Same artist, it sometimes seems, different medium. Leaves of Grass is a vast gallery of scenes – admiring, “poetic,” characteristic, above all, American – which might have been painted or engraved by Winslow Homer. Neither married, each has been dubbed “the father” of his respective American art, each was sensual, each a celebrant of their subjects even if grim, scintillant with optimism, swagger, each wounded (in his psyche) by our Civil War.

Each painted freely in a new confident unapologetic way. Each a journalist, making for the many, no elitist. Whitman’s “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” might serve as motto for both.

Each shadows his American descendants. One shivers a little in their shadow they are so large.

They particularly intimidate because they were not odd in their art. In their person, of course, any artist is, but in their art they were all-American, depicting usual people doing usual things. In Europe, the self-taught artist was condescended to, dismissed with faint praise. The Academy ruled. In mid-nineteenth century America, the Academy had yet to impose its stultifying dominion. Wild men were not wild, but an American type.

In thought, Emerson and Thoreau blazoned a bold new American path but in style they were polite, Harvard men, respectful of “the tradition.” Likewise, the Hudson River painters, showing their art in Europe. Whitman and Homer were both illustrators – for folks – nothing hi-falutin’ or too fine – not hostile to the tradition, ever generous and hospitable, but their own men, small-d democrats, one fella’s no better than the next.

Henry James predictably loathed them both. “We frankly confess,” he wrote of Homer, “that we detest his subjects… he has chosen the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial… and to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.” Whitman’s poetry, a young Henry railed, was “monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.” Henry aspired to be European, revered by the polite.

Born to respectability – to the nth! – I’ve striven to recover from it: to be more an illustrator, worker, guy, not so trained (and tamed) by parental and professorial expectations. Let me write for all! – all who can read. But for me a crude rugged style must be an adaptation – who I might aspire to be but not who I was born. This is observation, not complaint: any art is a lucky mix of unpromising ingredients, its prospects dim till the chef gets busy.

I disown no forebear: Whitman-like I embrace them with a bear (or forebear) hug: they made me what I am! Parents one may quarrel with, to differentiate oneself, but not grandsires. Whitman, Thoreau, Henry James, Winslow Homer, (that most European) John Singer Sargent, Mark Twain, Thomas Eakins, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Sam Barber, Robert Penn Warren are all my grandparents. I need not choose sides with the combatants long underground.

Recently I’ve been rereading Whitman with awe – not to imitate, but to imbibe the optimistic energy of that younger America. Americans are so down-at-the-mouth these days, dragging their weary hulks through a nation incalculably more prosperous and pampered than the one Whitman and Homer knew, pouting like poor little rich kids – it makes me sick.

The challenge for each of us is how to be an American now, how to honor our forebears with what we make yet make it new.