(Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Harold Bloom - Walt Whitman-Chelsea House Pub (L) (2006)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African American G.K. Chesterton John Irving

Poets: Kate Chopin Henry James
Wheatley–Tolson Agatha Christie James Joyce
African American Samuel Taylor Franz Kafka
Poets: Coleridge Jamaica Kincaid
Hayden–Dove Joseph Conrad Stephen King
Edward Albee Contemporary Poets Rudyard Kipling
Dante Alighieri Julio Cortázar Milan Kundera
Isabel Allende Stephen Crane Tony Kushner
American and Daniel Defoe Ursula K. Le Guin
Canadian Women Don DeLillo Doris Lessing
Poets, Charles Dickens C.S. Lewis
1930–present Emily Dickinson Sinclair Lewis
American Women E.L. Doctorow Norman Mailer
Poets, 1650–1950 John Donne and the Bernard Malamud
Hans Christian 17th-Century Poets David Mamet
Andersen Fyodor Dostoevsky Christopher Marlowe
Maya Angelou W.E.B. DuBois Gabriel García
Asian-American George Eliot Márquez
Writers T.S. Eliot Cormac McCarthy
Margaret Atwood Ralph Ellison Carson McCullers
Jane Austen William Faulkner Herman Melville
Paul Auster F. Scott Fitzgerald Arthur Miller
James Baldwin Sigmund Freud John Milton
Honoré de Balzac Robert Frost Molière
Samuel Beckett William Gaddis Toni Morrison
The Bible Johann Wolfgang Native-American
William Blake von Goethe Writers
Jorge Luis Borges George Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates
Ray Bradbury Lord Byron Flannery O’Connor
The Brontës Graham Greene George Orwell
Gwendolyn Brooks Thomas Hardy Octavio Paz
Elizabeth Barrett Nathaniel Hawthorne Sylvia Plath
Browning Robert Hayden Edgar Allan Poe
Robert Browning Ernest Hemingway Katherine Anne
Italo Calvino Hermann Hesse Porter
Albert Camus Hispanic-American Marcel Proust
Truman Capote Writers Thomas Pynchon
Lewis Carroll Langston Hughes Philip Roth
Miguel de Cervantes Zora Neale Hurston Salman Rushdie
Geoffrey Chaucer Aldous Huxley J. D. Salinger
Anton Chekhov Henrik Ibsen José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman
William Shakespeare J.R.R. Tolkien Oscar Wilde
William Shakespeare’s Leo Tolstoy Tennessee Williams
Romances Ivan Turgenev Tom Wolfe
George Bernard Shaw Mark Twain Virginia Woolf
Mary Wollstonecraft John Updike William Wordsworth
Shelley Kurt Vonnegut Jay Wright
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Derek Walcott Richard Wright
John Steinbeck Alice Walker William Butler Yeats
Jonathan Swift Robert Penn Warren Emile Zola
Amy Tan H.G. Wells
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Edith Wharton
WALT WHITMAN
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Walt Whitman, Updated Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction © 2006 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information contact:
Chelsea House
An imprint of Infobase Publishing
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walt Whitman / Harold Bloom, editor.— Updated ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Updated edition of Walt Whitman, in the Modern critical views series,
published in 1985.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9252-6 (hardcover)
1. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,
Harold. II. Series.
PS3238.W365 2006
811’.3—dc22 2005038040
Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities
for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales
Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755.
You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba

Cover design by Keith Trego
Printed in the United States of America
Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of
publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have
changed since publication and may no longer be valid.
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Whitman 13
D. H. Lawrence
Policy Made Personal:

Whitman’s Verse and Prose-Salient Traits 27
Kenneth Burke
Walt Whitman:
Always Going Out and Coming In 61
R.W.B. Lewis
Whitman’s Image of Voice:

To the Tally of My Soul 91
Harold Bloom
Native Models 111

Kerry C. Larson
A Simple Separate Person 139

David Bromwich
Reading 149
Mark Bauerlein
Whitman’s Difficult Availability 177

John Hollander
Poetry and the Mediation

of Value: Whitman on Lincoln 191
Helen Vendler
vi Contents
The Whitman Phrase 207

Angus Fletcher
Afterthought 229
Harold Bloom
Chronology 241
Contributors 245
Bibliography 247
Acknowledgments 253
Index 255
Editor’s Note
This book revises Walt Whitman: Modern Critical Views (1985) which I edited
twenty years ago. The revision is substantial, as only four of the twelve essays
now included were in the earlier volume (Lawrence, Burke, Lewis, Bloom).
My Introduction is the same, but the book closes with a new Afterthought,
which expresses something of my current thinking about the greatest writer
yet to come forth in the four centuries of Western literature composed in the
New World, whether in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.
The Introduction meditates upon Whitman’s original and still
unassimilated psychic cartography. D.H. Lawrence’s prophetic essay, really a
prose poem, ambivalently celebrates the American Bard as the pioneer poet
who broke the new road since followed by so many, Lawrence included.
In Kenneth Burke’s superb evocation, Whitman’s personalization of his
democratic vision is traced throughout his prose and poetry, while R.W.B.
Lewis usefully details the poet’s progress through the major editions of
Leaves of Grass.
My essay studies what Whitman called “the tally” as his central trope
for his own image of voice.
Kerry C. Larson gives us his useful insights into Whitman’s catalogs,
while David Bromwich superbly illuminates what Whitman meant by
“immortality.”
Whitman’s idiom, with its 1855 to 1860 movement from confidence in
language to a wariness of its entrapments, is shrewdly analyzed by Mark
Bauerlein, after which John Hollander gives us the best sustained account we
have of why Whitman’s poetry initially looks easy, but is wonderfully
difficult.
Helen Vendler, our major Formalist critic, masterfully surveys the
vii
viii Editor’s Note
Lincoln elegies of Whitman, whom I would categorize as our greatest

Formalist poet.
The Orphic critical seer, Angus Fletcher, sublimely attempts to
displace Whitman’s High Romanticism into the older Picturesque that
blends into the American environment poem.
My Afterthought presents Whitman as the poet of the American
Religion, who ventured to give us Leaves of Grass as the American Bible.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
As poet and as person, Walt Whitman remains large and evasive. We cannot
know, even now, much that he desired us not to know, despite the best efforts
of many devoted and scholarly biographers. The relation between the life
and the poetry is far more uncertain than most of his readers believe it to be.
Yet Whitman is so important to us, so crucial to an American mythology, so
absolutely central to our literary culture, that we need to go on trying to
bring his life and his work together. Our need might have delighted
Whitman, and might have troubled him also. Like his master, Emerson,
Whitman prophesied an American religion that is post-Christian, but while
Emerson dared to suggest that the Crucifixion was a defeat and that
Americans demand victory, Whitman dared further, and suggested that he
himself had satisfied the demand. Here is Emerson:
The history of Christ is the best document of the power of

character which we have. A youth who owed nothing to fortune
and who was “hanged at Tyburn”—by the pure quality of his
nature has shed this epic splendor around the facts of his death
which has transfigured every particular into a grand universal
symbol for the eyes of all mankind ever since.
He did well. This great Defeat is hitherto the highest fact we
have. But he that shall come shall do better. The mind requires a
far higher exhibition of character, one which shall make itself good
to the senses as well as to the soul; a success to the senses as well as
to the soul. This was a great Defeat; we demand Victory….
Journal, April 1842
1
2 Harold Bloom
This grand journal entry concludes, magnificently: “I am Defeated all

the time; yet to Victory I am born.” And here is Whitman, “he that shall
come,” doing better:
That I could forget the mockers and insults!

That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
bloody crowning.
I remember now,
I resume the overstaid fraction,
The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to
any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.
I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power….

(“Song of Myself,” 963-970)
This is Walt Whitman “singing and chanting the things that are part
of him, / The worlds that were and will be, death and day,” in the words of
his involuntary heir, Wallace Stevens. But which Walt Whitman is it? His
central poem is what he finally entitled “Song of Myself,” rather than, say,
“Song of My Soul.” But which self? There are two in the poem, besides his
soul, and the true difficulties of reading Whitman begin (or ought to begin)
with his unnervingly original psychic cartography, which resists assimilation
to the Freudian maps of the mind. Freud’s later system divides us into the “I”
or ego, the “above-I” or superego, and the “it” or id. Whitman divided
himself (or recognized himself as divided) into my self, my soul, and the “real
Me” or “Me myself,” where the self is a kind of ego, the soul not quite a
superego, and the real Me not at all an id. Or to use a vocabulary known to
Whitman, and still known to us, the self is personality, the soul is character,
and again the real Me is a mystery. Lest these difficulties seem merely my
own, and not truly Whitman’s, I turn to the text of “Song of Myself.” Here
is Walt Whitman, my self, the persona or mask, the personality of the poet:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart
from them,
Introduction 3
No more modest than immodest.

That is Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, but hardly

Walter Whitman, Jr., whose true personality, real Me or Me myself, is
presented in the passage I love best in the poem:
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
This “Me myself” is not exactly “hankering, gross, mystical, nude,” nor is it
quite “turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.” Graceful
and apart, cunningly balanced, charming beyond measure, this curious real
Me is boylike and girl-like, very American yet not one of the roughs,
provocative, at one with itself. Whatever the Whitmanian soul may be, this
Me myself evidently can have no equal relation with it. When the
Whitmanian “I” addresses the soul, we hear a warning:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
The “I” here is the “Myself” of “Song of Myself,” poetic personality,

robust and rough. “The other I am” is the Me myself, in and out of the game,
and clearly not suited for embraces with the soul. Whitman’s wariness, his
fear of abasement, whether of his soul or of his true, inner personality, one
to the other, remains the enigma of his poetry, as of his life, and largely
accounts for his intricate evasions both as poet and as a person.
II
Whitman’s critics thus commence with a formidable disadvantage as they

attempt to receive and comprehend his work. The largest puzzle about the
4 Harold Bloom
continuing reception of Whitman’s poetry is the still prevalent notion that

we ought to take him at his word, whether about his self (or selves) or about
his art. No other poet insists so vehemently and so continuously that he will
tell us all, and tell us all without artifice, and yet tells us so little, and so
cunningly. Except for Dickinson (the only American poet comparable to him
in magnitude), there is no other nineteenth-century poet as difficult and
hermetic as Whitman; not Blake, not Browning, not Mallarmé. Only an elite
can read Whitman, despite the poet’s insistence that he wrote for the people,
for “powerful uneducated persons” as his “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”
proclaims. His more accurate “Poets to Come” is closer to his readers’
experience of him:
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

casual look upon you and then averts his face….
Whitman was surely too sly to deceive himself, or at least both of his
selves, on this matter of his actual poetic evasiveness and esotericism.
Humanly, he had much to evade, in order to keep going, in order to start
writing and then to keep writing. His biographers cannot give us a clear
image of his childhood, which certainly was rather miserable. His numerous
siblings had mostly melancholy life histories: madness, retardation, marriage
to a prostitute, depressiveness, hypochondria figure among their fates. The
extraordinary obsessiveness with health and cleanliness that oddly marks
Whitman’s poetry had a poignant origin in his early circumstances. Of his
uneasy relationship to his father we know a little, but not much. But we know
nothing really of his mother, and how he was toward her. Perhaps the central
fact about Whitman’s psyche we know well enough: he needed, quite early,
to become the true father of all his siblings, and perhaps of his mother, also.
Certainly he fathered and mothered as many of his siblings as he could, even
as he so beautifully became a surrogate father and mother for thousands of
wounded and sick soldiers, Union and Confederate, white and black, in the
hospitals of Washington, DC, throughout the Civil War.
The extraordinary and truthful image of Whitman that haunts our
country, the vision of the compassionate, unpaid, volunteer wound-dresser,
comforting young men in pain, soothing the dying, is the climax of Paul
Zweig’s new book on how the man Walter Whitman, Jr., became the poet
Walt Whitman. This vision informs the finest pages of Zweig’s uneven but
moving study; I cannot recall any previous Whitman biographer or critic so
vividly and humanely portraying Whitman’s hospital service. Searching for
the authentic Whitman, as Zweig shows, is a hopeless quest; our greatest
Introduction 5
poet will always be our most evasive, and perhaps our most self-
contradictory. Whitman, at his strongest, has overwhelming pathos as a poet,
equal I think to any in the language. The Drum-Taps poem called “The
Wound-Dresser” is far from Whitman at his astonishing best, and yet its
concluding lines carry the persuasive force of his poetic and human images
unified for once:
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,

The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips).
Zweig is admirably sensitive in exploring the ambiguities in the

intensities of Whitman’s hospital experience, and more admirable still in his
restraint at not voicing how much all of us are touched by Whitman’s
pragmatic saintliness during those years of service. I cannot think of a
Western writer of anything like Whitman’s achievement who ever gave
himself or herself up so directly to meeting the agonized needs of the most
desperate. There are a handful of American poets comparable to Whitman
in stature: Emily Dickinson certainly, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost
perhaps, and perhaps even one or two others. Our image of them, or of our
greatest novelists, or even of Whitman’s master, Emerson, can move us
sometimes, but not as the image of the wound-dresser Whitman must move
us. Like the Lincoln whom he celebrated and lamented, Whitman is
American legend, a figure who has a kind of religious aura even for secular
intellectuals. If Emerson founded the American literary religion, Whitman
alone permanently holds the place most emblematic of the life of the spirit
in America.
These religious terms are not Zweig’s, yet his book’s enterprise usefully
traces the winding paths that led Whitman on to his apotheosis as healer and
comforter. Whitman’s psychosexuality, labyrinthine in its perplexities, may
be the central drive that bewildered the poet into those ways, but it was not
the solitary, over-whelming determinant that many readers judge it to be.
Zweig refreshingly is not one of these overdetermined readers. He surmises
that Whitman might have experienced little actual homosexual intercourse.
I suspect none, though Whitman evidently was intensely in love with some
unnamed man in 1859, and rather more gently in love again with Peter
Doyle about five years later. Zweig accurately observes: “Few poets have
6 Harold Bloom
written as erotically as Whitman, while having so little to say about sex. For
the most part, his erotic poetry is intransitive, self-delighting.” Indeed, it is
precisely autoerotic, rather more than it is homoerotic; Whitman overtly
celebrates masturbation, and his most authentic sexual passion is always for
himself. One would hardly know this from reading many of Whitman’s
critics, but one certainly knows it by closely reading Whitman’s major
poems. Here is part of a crucial crisis-passage from “Song of Myself,”
resolved through successful masturbation:
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can
stand.
Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly
different from myself….
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.
You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its
throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!

Did it make you ache so, leaving me?
Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,

Rich showering rain, and recom- pense richer afterward.
Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.
(“Song of Myself,” 617-622, 639-647)
I take it that this celebratory mode of masturbation, whether read

metaphorically or literally, remains the genuine scandal of Whitman’s poetry.
This may indeed be one of the kernel passages in Whitman, expanded and
elaborated as it is from an early notebook passage that invented the
remarkable trope of “I went myself first to the headland,” the headland being
Introduction 7
the psychic place of extravagance, of wandering beyond limits, where you

cannot scramble back to the shore, place of the father, and where you may
topple over into the sea, identical with night, death, and the fierce old
mother. “My own hands carried me there,” as they fail to carry Whitman in
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:
O great star disappear’d — O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
These can be only Whitman’s own hands, pragmatically cruel because

they cannot hold him potently, disabled as he is by a return of repressed guilt.
Lincoln’s death sets going memories of filial guilt, the guilt that the mortal
sickness of Walter Whitman, Sr., should have liberated his son into the full
flood of creativity that resulted in the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass (the
father died a week after the book’s publication). What Whitman’s poetry
does not express are any reservations about autoeroticism, which more than
sadomasochism remains the last Western taboo. It is a peculiar paradox that
Whitman, who proclaims his love for all men, women, and children, should
have been profoundly solipsistic, narcissistic, and self-delighting, but that
paradox returns us to the Whitmanian self or rather selves, the cosmological
persona as opposed to the daemonic “real Me.”
III
The most vivid manifestation of the “real Me” in Whitman comes in the
shattering “Sea-Drift” poem, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”:
O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have
written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,
8 Harold Bloom
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart

upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
It is Walt Whitman, kosmos, American, rough, who is mocked here by

his real self, a self that knows itself to be a mystery, because it is neither
mother, nor father, nor child; neither quite female nor quite male; neither
voice nor voicelessness. Whitman’s “real Me” is what is best and oldest in
him, and like the faculty Emerson called “Spontaneity” it is no part of the
creation, meaning both nature’s creation and Whitman’s verbal cosmos. It is
like a surviving fragment of the original Abyss preceding nature, not Adamic
but pre-Adamic. This “real Me” is thus also presexual, and so plays no role
either in the homoerotic “Calamus” poems or in the dubiously heterosexual
“Children of Adam” group. Yet it seems to me pervasive in the six long or
longer poems that indisputably are Whitman’s masterpieces: “The Sleepers,”
“Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Though only the last of these is overtly an elegy, all six are in covert
ways elegies for the real Me, for that Me myself that Whitman could not
hope to celebrate, as a poet, and could not hope to fulfill, as a sexual being.
This “real Me” is not a spirit that denies, but rather one that always remains
out of reach, an autistic spirit. In English Romantic poetry, and in later
nineteenth-century prose romance, there is the parallel being that Shelley
called “the Spirit of Solitude,” the daemon or shadow of the self-destructive
young poet who is the hero of Shelley’s Alastor. But Whitman’s very
American “real Me” is quite unlike the Shelleyan or Blakean Spectre. It does
not quest or desire, and it does not want to be wanted.
Though Zweig hints that Whitman has been a bad influence on
other writers, I suspect that a larger view of influence would reverse this
implicit judgment. Whitman has been an inescapable influence not only
for most significant American poets after him (Frost, indebted directly to
Emerson, is the largest exception) but also for the most gifted writers of
narrative fiction. This influence transcends matters of form, and has
everything to do with the Whitmanian split between the persona of the
rough Walt and the ontological truth of the real Me. Poets as diverse as
Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot have in common perhaps only their
hidden, partly unconscious reliance upon Whitman as their main
precursor. Hemingway’s acknowledged debt to Huckleberry Finn is real
enough, but the deeper legacy came from Whitman. The Hemingway
Introduction 9
protagonist, split between an empirical self of stoic courage and a real Me

endlessly evasive of others while finding its freedom only in an inner
perfection of loneliness, is directly descended from the dual Whitman of
“Song of Myself.” American elegiac writing since Whitman (and how
surprisingly much of it is covertly elegiac) generally revises Whitman’s
elegies for the self. The Waste Land is “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” rewritten, and Stevens’s “The Rock” is not less Whitmanian
than Hart Crane’s The Bridge.
Zweig’s book joins itself to the biographical criticism of Whitman: Bliss
Perry, Gay Wilson Allen, Joseph Jay Rubin, Justin Kaplan, and others, a
useful tradition that illuminates the Americanism of Whitman and yet
cannot do enough with Whitman’s many paradoxes. Of these, I judge the
most crucial to be expressed by this question: How did someone of
Whitman’s extraordinarily idiosyncratic nature become so absolutely central
to nearly all subsequent American literary high culture? This centrality
evidently cannot ebb among us, as can be seen in the most recent poems of
John Ashbery, in his forthcoming book, The Wave, or in the stories of Harold
Brodkey, excerpted from his vast work-in-progress. Whitman’s powerful yet
unstable identities were his own inheritance from the Orphic Emerson, who
proclaimed the central man or poet to come as necessarily metamorphic,
Bacchic, and yet original, and above all American and not British or
European in his cultural vistas. This prescription was and is dangerous,
because it asks for pragmatism, and yet affirms impossible hopes. The rough
Whitman is democratic, the real Me an elitist, but both selves are equally
Emersonian.
Politically, Whitman was a Free-Soil Democrat, who rebelled against
the betrayal by the New York Democratic party of its Jacksonian tradition,
but Zweig rightly emphasizes the survival of Emersonian “Prudence” in
Whitman, which caused him to oppose labor unions. I suspect that
Whitman’s politics paralleled his sexual morality: the rough Walt homoerotic
and radical, the real Me autoerotic and individualistically elitist. The true
importance of this split emerges neither in Whitman’s sexuality nor in his
politics, but in the delicacy and beauty of his strongest poems. Under the
cover of an apparent rebellion against traditional literary form, they extend
the poetic tradition without violating it. Whitman’s elegies for the self have
much in common with Tennyson’s, but are even subtler, more difficult
triumphs of High Romanticism.
Here I dissent wholly from Zweig, who ends his book with a judgment
I find both wrong and puzzling:
10 Harold Bloom
…Leaves of Grass was launched on a collision course with its age.

Whitman’s work assaulted the institution of literature and
language itself and, in so doing, laid the groundwork for the anti-
cultural ambition of much modernist writing. He is the ancestor
not only of Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg but of Kafka,
Beckett, André Breton, Borges—of all who have made of their
writing an attack on the act of writing and on culture itself.
To associate the subtle artistry, delicate and evasive, of Whitman’s

greatest poems with Miller and Ginsberg, rather than with Hemingway and
Stevens and Eliot, is already an error. To say that Kafka, Beckett, Borges
attack, by their writing, the act of writing and culture is to mistake their
assault upon certain interpretative conventions for a war against literary
culture. But the gravest misdirection here is to inform readers that Whitman
truly attacked the institutions of language and literature. Whitman’s real Me
has more to do with the composition of the great poems than the rough Walt
ever did. “Lilacs,” which Zweig does not discuss, is as profoundly traditional
an elegy as In Memoriam or Adonais. Indeed, “Lilacs” echoes Tennyson, while
“As I Ebb’d” echoes Shelley and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” invokes King
Lear. Zweig is taken in by the prose Whitman, who insists he will not employ
allusiveness, but the poet Whitman knew better, and is brilliantly allusive, as
every strong poet is compelled to be, echoing his precursors and rivals but so
stationing the echoes as to triumph with and in some sense even over them.
Zweig’s study is an honorable and useful account of Whitman’s poetic
emergence, but it shares in some of the severe limitations of nearly all
Whitman criticism so far published. More than most of the biographical
critics, Zweig keeps alert to Whitman’s duality, and I am grateful to him for
his eloquent representations of the poet’s war years. Yet Whitman’s subtle
greatness as a poet seems to me not fully confronted, here or elsewhere. The
poetry of the real Me, intricate and forlorn, is addressed to the real Me of the
American reader. That it reached what was best and most deeply rooted in
tradition in Eliot and Stevens is attested to by their finest poetry, in
contradistinction to their prose remarks on Whitman.
Paradoxically, Whitman’s best critic remains, not an American, but
D.H. Lawrence, who lamented: “The Americans are not worthy of their
Whitman.” Lawrence believed that Whitman had gone further, in actual
living expression, than any other poet. The belief was extravagant, certainly,
but again the Whitmanian poems of Lawrence’s superb final phase show us
what Lawrence meant. I give the last word here though, not to Lawrence,
but to Emerson, who wrote the first words about Whitman in his celebrated
Introduction 11
1855 letter to the poet, words that remain true nearly a hundred and thirty
years further on in our literary culture:
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of LEAVES OF

GRASS. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom
that America has yet contributed.
D . H . L AW R E N C E
Whitman
P OST MORTEM, effects?

But what of Walt Whitman?
The “good grey poet.”
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human
parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his
beatitudes.
DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!
ONE IDENTITY!
ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Do you believe me, when I say post mortem effects?
When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat
still fussing in the seas. The Pequod sinks with all her souls, but their bodies
rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners.
Corpses.
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without
souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.
From Studies in Classic American Literature. © 1961 by The Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda
Lawrence.
13
14 D.H. Lawrence
So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical
tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is
sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests,
chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.
What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization.
First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God!
Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS
LOVE!
Think of having that under your skin. All that!
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And
your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you
only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays
outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!
Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They’re the only things
that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty
million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure.
CHUFF!
An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or
the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the
fashion.
It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.
Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that,
he is mechanical.
They talk of his “splendid animality.” Well, he’d got it on the brain, if
that’s the place for animality.
“I am he that aches with amorous love:

Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching,
attract all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know.”
What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter
is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right
away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter,
and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As
Whitman 15
for living creatures all helplessly hurtling together into one great snowball,
why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting
out of the sight, smell or sound of the rest of living creatures. Even bees only
cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white
humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.
No, Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate, helplessly. But
men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways.
Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.
And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you
meet or know, why, something must have gone seriously wrong with you.
You must have broken your mainspring.
You must have fallen also into mechanization.
Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of
the individual you. Dead mentalized.
I only know that my body doesn’t by any means gravitate to all I meet
or know. I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn’t
touch with a long prop.
Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your
own individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with
everything.
You have killed your isolate Moby Dick. You have mentalized your
deep sensual body, and that’s the death of it.
I am everything and everything is me and so we’re all One in One
Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while.
“Whoever you are, to endless announcements—”

“And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”
Do you? Well, then, it just shows you haven’t got any self. It’s a mush,
not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not a tissue. Your self.
Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done
with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all
leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.
Post mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him.
No, no, don’t lay this down to poetry. These are post mortem effects.
And Walt’s great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard
growths.
All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one
pudding-cloth! No, no!
I don’t want all those things inside me, thank you.
16 D.H. Lawrence
“I reject nothing,” says Walt.

If that is so, one must be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs
through.
Post mortem effects.
“I embrace ALL,” says Whitman. “I weave all things into myself.”
Do you really! There can’t be much left of you when you’ve done.
When you’ve cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.
“And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral dressed in his own shroud.”
Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.
This awful Whitman. This post mortem poet. This poet with the
private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a
sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.
Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe,
the whole eternity of time. As far as his rather sketchy knowledge of history
will carry him, that is. Because to be a thing he had to know it. In order to
assume the identity of a thing, he had to know that thing. He was not able to
assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for example, because Walt didn’t
know Charlie. What a pity! He’d have done poems, paeans and what not,
Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.
Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done—”
As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he

knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little
and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak.
Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in
a kyak.
I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather
senile, self-conscious sensuosity.
DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.
The universe, in short, adds up, to ONE.
ONE.
1.
Which is Walt.
His poems, Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in
addition and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.
He reaches the state of ALLNESS.
And what then? It’s all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.
Whitman 17
Walt wasn’t an Eskimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little

Eskimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Eskimoness,
unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more.
Eskimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am not, I
know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Eskimo.
Outside the egg of Whitman’s Allness too.
But Walt wouldn’t have it. He was everything and everything was in
him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of
a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw Everything that
way. Just as a motorist does in the night.
I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake
won’t crawl into my neck, I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce poetic
machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!
ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.
Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention
trackless wildernesses. As anyone will know who cares to come off the road,
even the Open Road.
ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.
ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red
Indian.
ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-
cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.
God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbithole, to get away from all
these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.
“A woman waits for me—”
He might as well have said: “The femaleness waits for my maleness.”

Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function.
“Athletic mothers of these States—” Muscles and wombs. They
needn’t have had faces at all.
“As I see myself reflected in Nature,

As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible com-
pleteness, sanity, beauty,
See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast,
the Female I see.”
Everything was female to him: even himself. Nature just one great function.
18 D.H. Lawrence
“This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman,

man is born of woman,
This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and
large, and the outlet again—”
“The Female I see—”

If I’d been one of his women, I’d have given him Female. With a flea
in his ear.
Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.
“The Female I see—”
Anything, so long as he could merge himself.
Just a horror. A sort of white flux.
Post mortem effects.
He found, like all men find, that you can’t really merge in a woman,
though you may go a long way. You can’t manage the last bit. So you have to
give it up, and try elsewhere. If you insist on merging.
In Calamus he changes his tune. He doesn’t shout and thump and exult
any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.
The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends
up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the
intervention of woman, the female.
So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over
and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of
comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this manly
love will come the inspiration for the future.
Will it though? Will it?
Comradeship! Comrades! This is to be the new Democracy: of
Comrades. This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.
Is it? Are you sure?
It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in Drum Taps.
It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity. And it is
extreme and alone, touching the confines of death. Something terrible to
bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt Whitman felt it. The soul’s last
and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly
love.
“Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots,

you make me think of death.
Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally beau-
tiful except death and love?)
Whitman 19
I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of

lovers, I think it must be for death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the
atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to
prefer
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes
death most)
Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely
the same as you mean—”
This is strange, from the exultant Walt.

Death!
Death is now his chant! Death!
Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge.
The great merge into the womb. Woman.
And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love.
And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death.
There you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers,
woman at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman
is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of man-
for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into death.
David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan.
It always slides into death.
The love of comrades.
Merging.
So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades,
it will be based on death too. It will slip so soon into death.
The last merging. The last Democracy. The last love. The love of
comrades.
Fatality. And fatality.
Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken
the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was
the goal of his manhood.
To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then Death.
“Whereto, answering, the sea

Delaying not, hurrying not
Whispered me through the night, very plainly before
daybreak,
20 D.H. Lawrence
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,

And again death, death, death, death.
Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my
arous’d child’s heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laying me
softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death—”
Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life. A very great post
mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet
of the soul’s last shout and shriek, on the confines of death. Après moi de
déluge.
But we have all got to die, and disintegrate.
We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live.
But even then the goal is not death.
Something else will come.
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.”
We’ve got to die first, anyhow. And disintegrate while we still live.
Only we know this much. Death is not the goal. And Love, and
merging, are now only part of the death-process. Comradeship—part of the
death-process. Democracy—part of the death-process. The new
Democracy—the brink of death. One Identity—death itself.
We have died, and we are still disintegrating.
But IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est.
Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one
man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman.
No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the
would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of
Whitman, nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of
unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the
end of the great high-road. And lots of new little poets camping on
Whitman’s camping ground now. But none going really beyond. Because
Whitman’s camp is at the end of the road, and on the edge of a great
precipice. Over the precipice, blue distances, and the blue hollow of the
future. But there is no way down. It is a dead end.
Whitman 21
Pisgah. Pisgah sights. And Death. Whitman like a strange, modern,

American Moses. Fearfully mistaken. And yet the great leader.
The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative,
not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral.
But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which
changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind
follows later, in the wake.
Now Whitman was a great moralist. He was a great leader. He was a
great changer of the blood in the veins of men.
Surely it is especially true of American art, that it is all essentially
moral. Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral issue
which engages them. They all feel uneasy about the old morality. Sensuously,
passionally, they all attack the old morality. But they know nothing better,
mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all
their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in
them: most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.
Tight mental allegiance given to a morality which the passional self
repudiates.
Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first
to smash the old moral conception, that the soul of man is something
“superior” and “above” the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this
tiresome “superiority” of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it.
Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck
and plant her down among the potsherds.
“There!” he said to the soul. “Stay there!”
Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly.
Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh Soul, where you belong.
Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute.
Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the calamus
grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.
The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not
heaven, not paradise. Not “above.” Not even “within.” The soul is neither
“above” nor “within.” It is a wayfarer down the open road.
Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after
heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not
by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.
Only by taking the open road.
Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love.
Not through good works.
Not through these does the soul accomplish herself.
22 D.H. Lawrence
Only through the journey down the open road.

The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On
two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company
with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no
goal. Always the open road.
Having no known direction, even. Only the soul remaining true to
herself in her going.
Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet
them, and how pass? With sympathy, says Whitman. Sympathy. He does not
say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as they feel with
themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as we pass.
It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A
morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the
morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But
Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no
Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the
soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls
along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As
leave try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along
the incarnate mystery of the open road.
This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent
speaking out in him. He is the first white aboriginal.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
“No,” said Whitman. “Keep out of mansions. A mansion may be
heaven on earth, but you might as well be dead. Strictly avoid mansions. The
soul is herself when she is going on foot down the open road.”
It is the American heroic message. The soul is not to pile up defences
round herself. She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in
mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She
is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping
company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing
nothing save the journey, and the works incident to the journey, in the long
life-travel into the unknown, the soul in her subtle sympathies accomplishing
herself by the way.
This is Whitman’s essential message. The heroic message of the
American future. It is the inspiration of thousands of Americans today, the
best souls of today, men and women. And it is a message that only in America
can be fully understood, finally accepted.
Then Whitman’s mistake. The mistake of his interpretation of his
watchword: Sympathy. The mystery of SYMPATHY. He still confounded it
Whitman 23
with Jesus’ LOVE, and with paul’s CHARITY. Whitman, like all the rest of us,
was at the end of the great emotional highway of Love. And because he
couldn’t help himself, he carried on his Open Road as a prolongation of the
emotional highway of Love, beyond Calvary. The highway of Love ends at
the foot of the Cross. There is no beyond. It was a hopeless attempt, to
prolong the highway of love.
He didn’t follow his Sympathy. Try as he might, he kept on
automatically interpreting it as Love, as Charity. Merging!
This merging, en masse, One Identity, Myself monomania was a carry-
over from the old Love idea. It was carrying the idea of Love to its logical
physical conclusion. Like Flaubert and the leper. The decree of unqualified
Charity, as the soul’s one means of salvation, still in force.
Now Whitman wanted his soul to save itself, he didn’t want to save it.
Therefore he did not need the great Christian receipt for saving the soul. He
needed to supersede the Christian Charity, the Christian Love, within
himself, in order to give his Soul her last freedom. The high-road of Love is
no Open Road. It is a narrow, tight way, where the soul walks hemmed in
between compulsions.
Whitman wanted to take his Soul down the open road. And he failed
in so far as he failed to get out of the old rut of Salvation. He forced his Soul
to the edge of a cliff, and he looked down into death. And there he camped,
powerless. He had carried out his Sympathy as an extension of Love and
Charity. And it had brought him almost to madness and soul-death. It gave
him his forced, unhealthy, post-mortem quality.
His message was really the opposite of Henley’s rant:
“I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.”
Whitman’s essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the
soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the
open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself.
Alas, he didn’t quite carry it out. He couldn’t quite break the old
maddening bond of the love-compulsion, he couldn’t quite get out of the rut
of the charity habit. For Love and Charity have degenerated now into habit:
a bad habit.
Whitman said Sympathy. If only he had stuck to it! Because Sympathy
means feeling with, not feeling for. He kept on having a passionate feeling for
the negro slave, or the prostitute, or the syphilitic—which is merging. A
sinking of Walt Whitman’s soul in the souls of these others.
24 D.H. Lawrence
He wasn’t keeping to his open road. He was forcing his soul down an
old rut. He wasn’t leaving her free. He was forcing her into other peoples’
circumstances.
Supposing he had felt true sympathy with the negro slave? He would
have felt with the negro slave. Sympathy—compassion—which is partaking
of the passion which was in the soul of the negro slave.
What was the feeling in the negro’s soul?
“Ah, I am a slave! Ah, it is bad to be a slave! I must free myself. My soul
will die unless she frees herself. My soul says I must free myself.”
Whitman came along, and saw the slave, and said to himself: “That
negro slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is
bleeding with wounds. Oh, oh, is it not myself who am also bleeding with
wounds?”
This was not sympathy. It was merging and self-sacrifice. “Bear ye one
another’s burdens.” “Love thy neighbour as thyself”: “Whatsoever ye do
unto him, ye do unto me.”
If Whitman had truly sympathised, he would have said: “That negro
slave suffers from slavery. He wants to free himself. His soul wants to free
him. He has wounds, but they are the price of freedom. The soul has a long
journey from slavery to freedom. If I can help him I will: I will not take over
his wounds and his slavery to myself. But I will help him fight the power that
enslaves him when he wants to be free, if he wants my help. Since I see in his
face that be needs to be free. But even when he is free, his soul has many
journeys down the open road, before it is a free soul.”
And of the prostitute Whitman would have said:
Look at that prostitute! Her nature has turned evil under her mental
lust for prostitution. She has lost her soul. She knows it herself. She likes to
make men lose their souls. If she tried to make me lose my soul, I would kill
her. I wish she may die.”
But of another prostitute he would have said:
“Look! She is fascinated by the Priapic mysteries. Look, she will soon
be worn to death by the Priapic usage. It is the way of her soul. She wishes
it so.”
Of the syphilitic he would say:
“Look! She wants to infect all men with syphilis. We ought to kill her.”
And of still another syphilitic:
“Look! She has a horror of her syphilis. If she looks my way I will help
her to get cured.”
This is sympathy. The soul judging for herself, and preserving her own
integrity.
Whitman 25
But when, in Flaubert, the man takes the leper to his naked body; when
Bubi de Montparnasse takes the girl because he knows she’s got syphilis;
when Whitman embraces an evil prostitute: that is not sympathy. The evil
prostitute has no desire to be embraced with love; so if you sympathise with
her, you won’t try to embrace her with love. The leper loathes his leprosy, so
if you sympathise with him, you’ll loathe it too. The evil woman who wishes
to infect all men with her syphilis hates you if you haven’t got syphilis. If you
sympathise, you’ll feel her hatred, and you’ll hate too, you’ll hate her. Her
feeling is hate, and you’ll share it. Only your soul will choose the direction
of its own hatred.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind
doesn’t dictate to her. Because the mind says Charity! Charity! you don’t
have to force your soul into kissing lepers or embracing syphilitics. Your lips
are the lips of your soul, your body is the body of your soul; your own single,
individual soul. That is Whitman’s message. And your soul hates syphilis and
leprosy. Because it is a soul, it hates these things, which are against the soul.
And therefore to force the body of your soul into contact with uncleanness
is a great violation of your soul. The soul wishes to keep clean and whole.
The soul’s deepest will is to preserve its own integrity, against the mind and
the whole mass of disintegrating forces.
Soul sympathises with soul. And that which tries to kill my soul, my
soul hates. My soul and my body are one. Soul and body wish to keep clean
and whole. Only the mind is capable of great perversion. Only the mind tries
to drive my soul and body into uncleanness and unwholesomeness.
What my soul loves, I love.
What my soul hates, I hate.
When my soul is stirred with compassion, I am compassionate.
What my soul turns away from, I turn away from.
That is the true interpretation of Whitman’s creed: the true revelation
of his Sympathy.
And my soul takes the open road. She meets the souls that are passing,
she goes along with the souls that are going her way. And for one and all, she
has sympathy. The sympathy of love, the sympathy of hate, the sympathy of
simple proximity: all the subtle sympathisings of the incalculable soul, from
the bitterest hate to passionate love.
It is not I who guide my soul to heaven. It is I who am guided by my
own soul along the open road, where all men tread. Therefore, I must accept
her deep motions of love, or hate, or compassion, or dislike, or indifference.
And I must go where she takes me. For my feet and my lips and my body are
my soul. It is I who must submit to her.
26 D.H. Lawrence
This is Whitman’s message of American democracy.

The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road.
Democracy. American democracy where all journey down the open road.
And where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or
appearance. Whitman did away with that. Not by its family name. Not even
by its reputation. Whitman and Melville both discounted that. Not by a
progression of piety, or by works of Charity. Not by works at all. Not by
anything but just itself. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot and
being no more than itself. And recognized, and passed by or greeted
according to the soul’s dictate. If it be a great soul, it will be worshipped in
the road.
The love of man and woman: a recognition of souls, and a communion
of worship. The love of comrades: a recognition of souls, and a communion
of worship. Democracy: a recognition of souls, all down the open road, and
a great soul seen in its greatness, as it travels on foot among the rest, down
the common way of the living. A glad recognition of souls, and a gladder
worship of great and greater souls, because they are the only riches.
Love, and Merging, brought Whitman to the Edge of Death! Death!
Death!
But the exultance of his message still remains. Purified of MERGING,
purified of MYSELF, the exultant message of American Democracy, of souls
in the Open Road, full of glad recognition, full of fierce readiness, full of the
joy of worship, when one soul sees a greater soul.
The only riches, the great souls.
KENNETH BURKE
Policy Made Personal:

Whitman’s Verse and Prose-Salient Traits
T he plan here is to consider first Whitman’s statement of policy in

Democratic Vistas. Even there his views of history, society, and nature are
personalized somewhat. But the full job of personalization is done in his Leaves
of Grass, which is to be considered in a second section. And finally, since both
of these sections are general in their approach, a third section will put the main
stress upon one poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Throughout, however, we shall proceed as much as practicable by the
inspection and comparison of contexts. Unless otherwise specified, all words
or expressions in quotation marks are Whitman’s. (Perhaps a better subtitle
would be: On Interrelations Among Key Terms in Whitman’s Language.)
I. VISTAS
The design of Whitman’s essentially idealistic thought is neatly

indicated in the three stages of historical unfolding he assigns to “America,
type of progress.” This alignment seems a handy place to spin from.
The first stage was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and its Amendments. It “was the planning and putting on
record the political foundation rights of immense masses of people ... not for
classes, but for universal man.”
From Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years After, ed. Milton Hindus. © 1955 by the Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
27
28 Kenneth Burke
The second stage is in the “material prosperity” that resulted after the
democratic foundations had been laid: “wealth, labor-saving machines ... a
currency,” etc.
A third stage, still to come but “arising out of the previous ones,” would
bring about the corresponding “spiritualization” of the nation’s sheerly
material development.
The first and third stages are in the realm of idea, or spirit. The second
stage is in the realm of matter. Writing his essay a few years after the close
of the Civil War, he placed himself and his times in stage two, a time marked
by “hollowness at heart,” lack of honest belief in “the underlying principles
of the States,” “depravity of the business classes,” while all politics were
“saturated in corruption” except the judiciary (“and the judiciary is tainted”).
“A mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians ... crude defective
streaks in all the strata of the common people ... the alarming spectacle of
parties usurping the government ... these savage, wolfish parties1 ...
delicatesse ... polite conformity ... exterior appearance and show, mental and
other, built entirely on the idea of caste” ... in sum “Pride, competition,
segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already
upon us.”
One could cite many other statements of like attitude. But the idealistic
design of his thinking permitted him without discouragement to take full
note of such contemporary ills, and perhaps even to intensify them as one
step in his essay. For against the dissatisfactions of the present, he could set
his “planned Idea,” a promise for the future. Since “the fruition of
democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” he
would “presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and travel by
maps yet unmade, and a blank.” Thus, the technically negative nature of the
“fervid and tremendous Idea” is made in effect positive, so far as personal
considerations go. By seeing contemporary conditions in terms of future
possibilities, in “vistas” that stressed “results to come,” he could treat
“America and democracy as convertible terms,” while having high hopes for
both. He says, “It is useless to deny” that “Democracy grows rankly up the
thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all—brings worse and worse
invaders—needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations and
compellers”; but, in line with post-Hegelian promises, he saw in any greater
challenge the possibility of a correspondingly greater response.
In sum, then, as regards the basic design of his thinking, the Vistas
found elation in a project for the “spiritualization of our nation’s wealth.”
(He likes words like “richness” and “luxuriance,” words that readily suggest
both material and spiritual connotations, gaining resonance and
Policy Made Personal: Whitman’s Verse and Prose-Salient Traits 29
persuasiveness from this ambiguity.) “The extreme business energy, and this
almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts
of amelioration and progress,” he says (in terms that, of all things, suggest
Marxist patterns of thought with regard to material development under
capitalism); but a different order of motives is manifest in the statement (he
would probably have said “promulgation”) of his ideal: “Offsetting the
material civilization of our race ... must be its moral civilization.”
If, by very definition, one can view all materially acquisitive behavior in
terms of ideal future fulfillment, it follows that the poet could contemplate
with “joy” the industrious industrial conquest of the continent. Not until late
in life (after his paralytic stroke) does this “ecstatic” champion of the
“athletic” and “electric” body turn from identification with the feller of trees
(as in Song of the Broad-Axe) to identification with the fallen tree itself (as in
Song of the Redwood-Tree), though he always had fervid ways of being
sympathetic to child, adult, and the elderly. Our point is simply that the
zestfulness of the typical Whitman survey could follow logically from his
promissory principle, his idealization of the present in terms of the future.
Halfway between the realm of materials amassed by his countrymen’s
“oceanic, variegated, intense, practical energy” and the realm of spirit, or
idea, we might place his cult of the sturdy human body, its “spinal,”
“athletic,” “magnetic” qualities and the “appetites” that make for “sensuous
luxuriance.” (As the recipe also called for a male type “somewhat flushed,” we
dare wonder ironically whether his notion of the perfect “manly”
temperament also concealed a syndrome of symptoms, an idealistic
recognition, without realistic diagnosis, of the hypertension that must have
preceded his paralysis. Surely, prophesying after the event, we might propose
that Whitman’s headlong style should involve high blood pressure as its
nosological counterpart.)
For an “over-arching” term here, Whitman could speak of “nature” in
ways that, while clearly referring to the materialistic on one side, also have
pontificating aspects leading into a Beyond, along Emersonian lines. (In fact,
toward the close of the Vistas, one is often strongly reminded of Emerson’s
earlier and longer transcendentalist essay, Nature, first published in 1836.)
Democracy was Nature’s “younger brother,” and Science was “twin, in its
field, of Democracy in its.” But such equations were idealistically weighted
to one side: for while “Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is
the mind’s.”
Somewhere between the grounding of his position in time, and its
grounding in eternity, there is its grounding in terms of personality (two of
his special words to this end being “identity” and “nativity”).
30 Kenneth Burke
For grounding in time, one obvious resource is a contrast with some

previous time (antithesis being one of the three major stylistic resources, as
we are informed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric). But though “democracy” is thus
pitted against “feudalism,” Whitman admonishes that “feudalism, caste,
ecclesiastical traditions ... still hold essentially, by their spirit, even in this
country, entire possession of the more important fields.” For “All smells of
princes’ favors.” And “The United States are destined either to surmount the
gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of
time.” Whereas now we tend to think of Shakespeare as poignantly at the
crossing between the feudal and the modern, the antithetical genius of
Whitman’s scheme led him to say: “The great poems, Shakespeare included,
are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people.”
For though Shakespeare was conceded to be “rich,” and “luxuriant as the
sun,” he was the “artist and singer of feudalism in its sunset.” In contrast,
Whitman called: “Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west.” And
being against “parlors, parasols, piano-songs,” he matched his praise of the
“divine average” by words against “the mean flat average.” Declaring, “We
stand, live, move, in the huge flow of our age’s materialism,” he quickly
added, “in its spirituality.” And “to offset chivalry,” he would seek “a
knightlier and more sacred cause today.” In so far as the claims of traditional
culture were effete and pretentious (and “for a single class alone”), he
admonished against “Culture”—and later, apologists of Nazism could take
over the tenor of his slogans by the simple device of but half-hearing him.
As for eternity: His attacks upon traditional ecclesiastical forms were
stated in terms of an “all penetrating Religiousness” that vigorously
proclaimed its scorn of “infidels.” He always identified democracy with what
he called “the religious element,” however that might differ from the norms
of conventional churchgoing (and it differed greatly, as regards its relation to
his cult of the “body electric”).
His notion of “succession” (a eulogistic word that sounds nearly like his
very dyslogistic one, “secession”) we have already touched upon. It is in line
with the typical nineteenth-century doctrine of permanent evolution, into
ever higher forms, a design that falls in the realm of time, so far as the
manifestations of history are concerned, but that would be above time, in so
far as its operation were constant. “The law over all, the law of laws, is the
law of successions; that of the superior law, in time, gradually supplanting
and overwhelming the inferior one.” Fittingly, the essay reverts to this “law”
in the paragraph-long closing sentence, where America, “illumined and
illuming,” is saluted in terms of the ideal future, when she will have “become
a full-formed world, and divine Mother, not only of material but spiritual
worlds, in ceaseless succession, through time—the main thing being the

average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all
the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest.”
The lines succinctly assemble the main components of his Ideal Matrix,
or “divine Mother.” (And what better words for an ending than “permanently
rest”?) But the personalizing of this “Mother” (the democratic creed) will
take on attributes not strictly germane to either the politics of democracy or
the personality of motherhood.
The logic of his terminology centers in his emphasis upon the
individual person (“rich, luxuriant, varied personalism”). In proclaiming that
“the ripeness of religion” is to be sought in the “field of individuality,” and is
“a result that no organization or church can ever achieve,” he automatically
sets up the dialectical conditions for a principle of division matched by a
principle of merger. While his brand of “personalism” will “promulge” the
“precious idiocrasy and special nativity and intention that he is, the man’s
self,” all such individual. selves are to be joined in democratic union, or
“cohesion”; and the result is “ensemble-Individuality,” an “idiocrasy of
universalism,” since the “liberalist of today” seeks “not only to individualize,
but to universalize.” And while the aim is to formulate “one broad, primary,
universal, common platform,” he says, “even for the treatment of the
universal” it is good “to reduce the whole matter to the consideration of a
single self, a man, a woman, on permanent grounds.”
In sum: There is “the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying
idea of eternity” (the poems will speak of “the all-mother,” and the “Mother
of All”). And in silence, in the “solitariness of individuality,” one can “enter
the pure ether of veneration,” to “commune” with the “mysteries” and the
“unutterable.” Or (as regards the timely), “individuality” and its “unimpeded
branchings” will “flourish best under imperial republican forms” (for the
grandeur of spiritualized democratic “expansion” will make for an “empire of
empires”).2
So we have the “idea of perfect individualism,” of “completeness in
separation,” with its dialectical counterpart: “the identity of the Union at all
hazards.” Not only must man become “a law, a series of laws, unto himself”;
also “the great word Solidarity has arisen.” The “individualism, which
isolates” is but “half only,” and has for its other half the “adhesiveness or
love, that fuses.” Thus, both of these trends (contradictory or
complementary?) are “vitalized by religion,” for you in your solitude can
“merge yourself” in the “divine.” (A sheerly politico-economic variant of
this dialectic for fitting the one and the many together is in his statement:
“The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more
32 Kenneth Burke
universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a

vast, inter-twining reticulation of wealth.”)
But if the three stages are handiest as a way into the underlying
idealistic design of Whitman’s thinking, perhaps the most succinct doctrinal
passage is this:
“Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to
fifty States, among them Canada and Cuba. When the present century
closes, our population will be sixty or seventy millions. The Pacific will be
ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric
communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land!
Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then,
as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to
be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest original non-
subordinated Soul, has ever really, gloriously led, or ever can lead.”
Then comes the very important addition, in parentheses: “This
SOUL—its other name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.” Then follows typical
talk of “ideals,” and of a “richness” and “vigor” that will be in letters
“luxuriantly.”
The essay’s opening reference to “lessons” attains its fulfillment in
these views of Whitman on the didactic or moralizing element in his ideal
literature, its social service in the training of personalities. By the “mind,”
which builds “haughtily,” the national literature shall be endowed “with
grand and archetypal models,” as we confront the “momentous spaces”
with a “new and greater personalism,” aided by the “image-making
faculty.”
Here, then, is the grand melange: “Arrived now, definitely, at an apex
for these Vistas,” Whitman sees in dream “a new and greater literatus order,”
its members “always one, compact in soul,” though “separated ... by different
dates or States.” This band would welcome materialistic trends both “for
their oceanic practical grandeur” and “for purposes of spiritualization.” And
by “serving art in its highest,” such a “band of brave and true” would also be
“serving God, and serving humanity.”
Such a literature would affirm the “fervid comradeship,” “adhesive
love,” between man and man that Whitman so strongly associated with his
evangel of democracy. And as for woman, the “prophetic literature of these
States,” inspired by “Idealism,” will train toward “the active redemption of
woman,” and “a race of perfect Mothers.”
He offers four portraits of ideal female types: a servant, a
businesswoman, a housewife, and a fourth that we might call a grand old lady
(“a resplendent person ... known by the name of the Peacemaker”). It is

particularly relevant to look more closely at this fourth figure.
Whitman has just been referring to “that indescribable perfume of
genuine womanhood ... which belongs of right to all the sex, and is, or ought
to be, the invariable atmosphere and common aureola of old as well as
young.” The next paragraph begins: “My dear mother once described to me
...,” etc. Eighty years old, this fourth type of personality that his mother is
said to have described was a kind of grandmotherly Whitman. She had lived
“down on Long Island.” She was called the “Peacemaker” because of her role
as “the reconciler in the land.” She was “of happy and sunny temperament,”
was “very neighborly”; and she “possessed a native dignity.” “She was a sight
to look upon, with her large figure, her profuse snow-white hair (uncoifed by
any head-dress or cap) ... and peculiar personal magnetism”—and when
reading the word on which the recital of his four “portraits” ends, might we
not fittingly recall that Whitman’s poems are dotted with references to the
“electric” and “magnetic”?
We consider this all of a piece: the steps from “the indescribable
perfume of genuine womanhood,” to “My dear mother,” to the
grandmotherly figure in which this entire set of portraits culminates (and
thus toward which the series might be said to have tended from the start).
Frankly, we stress the point for use later, when we shall be considering the
scent of lilacs; “the perfume strong I love,” mentioned in commemoration of
the poet’s great dead democratic hero. Meanwhile, a few more considerations
should be noted, before we turn from his prose statement of policy to its
personalizing in his verse.
We should recall his principle of cultural ascesis (the notion that
“political democracy” is “life’s gymnasium ... fit for freedom’s athletes,” and
that books are “in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle”). It is easy
to see how thought thus of a studious athleticism might, on the one hand,
proclaim “health, pride, acuteness, noble aspirations” as the “motive-
elements of the grandest style”; on the other hand, given the “appetites” that
go with such exercisings and exertions, the poet might find no
embarrassments in equating democracy with the grandeur of ever expanding
empire.
But there is one mild puzzler to be noted with regard to the Whitman
cult of democratic expansionism. When saying that the “spine-character of
the States will probably run along the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi rivers,
and west and north of them, including Canada,” he describes the “giant
growth” thus: “From the north, intellect, the sun of things, also the idea of
unswayable justice, anchor amid the last, the wildest tempests. From the
34 Kenneth Burke
south the living soul, the animus of good and bad, haughtily admitting no
demonstration but its own. While from the west itself comes solid
personality, with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of all-accepting
fusion.”
One automatically waits for some mention of the east here—but there
is none. Interestingly enough, one of the poems (“To the Leaven’d Soil They
Trod”) discusses “vistas” and ends on a similar design
The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.
Presumably, the poet mentions only three points of the compass, since
he was born in the East, and was so tendency-minded. And perhaps, since the
Vistas contain the equation, “the democratic, the west,” the East is, by the
dialectical or rhetorical pressures of antithesis, the vestigially and effetely
“feudal,” except in so far as it is inspirited by the other three sources of
motivation. (South, by the way, is in Whitman’s idiom the place from which
“perfume” comes. As regards North, we must admit to not having fully done
our lessons at this time.)
A few further points, before turning from the Vistas to the Leaves:
In connection with the notion of guidance through literature,
Whitman writes: “A strong mastership of the general inferior self by the
superior self, is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but surely, by the literatus.”
And we might remember this word “mastership,” to puzzle over it, when in
the poem of the “Lilacs” he says: “Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds
me,” even though we may not quite succeed in fitting the passages to each
other.
And we should note Whitman’s words in praise of a strong political
digestion, since they bear so directly upon the relation between his design
and his doctrine: “And as, by virtue of its cosmical, antiseptic power, Nature’s
stomach is fully strong enough not only to digest the morbific matter always
presented ... but even to change such contributions into nutriment for
highest use and life—so American democracy’s.”
Such faith in the virtues of a healthy appetite is doubtless implied
when, on the subject of political corruption, Whitman assures us that “the
average man ... remains immortal owner and boss, deriving good uses,
somehow, out of any sort of servant in office.” (Or, more generally, here is
the encouragement of the sprout-out-of-rot principle.) At every step along
the way, whatever tax is levied by their Lordships, Favoritism and

Dishonesty, it remains a fact that Democracy does build, its roads and
schools and courthouses—and the catalogue of its accumulations, when
listed under one national head, becomes truly “oceanic” and “over-arching.”
But at the mention of catalogues, we might well turn to a survey of the verse.
II. LEAVES
No two opening lines of a poet’s work ever indicated more clearly the
sheer dialectics of a position than in the Inscription” with which Leaves of
Grass begins
One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
For a poet generally so voluble, this entire poem of eight lines is

astoundingly efficient. Note how the second stanza (proclaiming that
“physiology” is equally important with “physiognomy” and “brain,” and that
he sings “The Female equally with the Male”) ambiguously translates his
code into its corresponding sexual terms. Then, in the third stanza, he
merges life, work, God’s laws, song, and his futuristic cult of the present, all,
under the sign of strong motives and hopeful attitudes
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
The main themes that are lacking are: (1) his merging of birth and death in
the allness of the mother, and (2) his stress upon perpetual passage (what
would Whitman do without the word “pass” or its components: “I come and
I depart”?). And, of course, the notable equating of democracy with the love
of male for male is manifest here only if we read as a double-entendre his words
about Male and Female (though most likely they were not so intended).
In his “oceanic” accumulation of details, the catalogues that
characterize most of his longer poems (such as Salut au Monde!), there is
obviously the “spiritualization” of matter. Here is his primary resource for
those loosely yet thematically guided associations of ideas which enable him
to “chant the chant of dilation or pride.” Of such spiritual possessions, he has
“stores and plenty to spare.” Who was more qualified than Whitman to write
a Song of the Exposition with its closing apostrophe to the “universal Muse”
36 Kenneth Burke
and maternal Union: “While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for

thee, dear Mother”? In effect, the Whitman catalogue locates the rhetorical
device of amplification in the very nature of things.
It is possible that, after long inspection, we might find some
“overarching” principle of development that “underlies” his typical lists.
Always, of course, they can be found to embody some principle of repetitive
form, some principle of classification whereby the various items fall under
the same head (as with the third stanza of the Salut, for instance, which races
through a scattering of nationalities, with a scattering of details hastily
allotted to each: the Australians “pursuing the wild horse,” the Spanish
semipleonastically dancing “with castanets in the chestnut shade,” “echoes
from the Thames,” “fierce French liberty songs,” and so on, ending with the
Hindoo “teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars, adages, transmitted
safely from poets who wrote three thousand years ago”). Some critic might
also discern a regular canon of development in such “turbulent” heapings.
Meanwhile, in any case, there are the many variations by internal contrast (as
with varying rhythm and length of line, or as the variations on “out of” that
mark the opening lines of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” out of,
over, down from, up from, out from, from the, from your, from under, from
those, from such, borne hither). And even where epanaphora is extreme,
there are large tidal changes from stanza to stanza, or rhetorical forms that
suggest the shifting of troops in military maneuvers.
“Melange mine own ... Omnes! Omnes! ... the word En-Masse ... the
One formed out of all ... toward all ... made ONE IDENTITY ... they shall flow
and unite ... merge and unite ... to merge all in the travel they tend to ... All,
all, toward the mystic Ocean tending ... Song of the Universal ... O public
road ... to know the universe itself as a road ... along the grand roads of the
universe ... All, all, for immortality ... it makes the whole coincide ... I
become part of that, whatever it is ...”—such lines state the “omnific”
principle behind the aggregates of the catalogues.
To such a cult of the “divine average,” good will and good cheer
sometimes come easy: “I love him, though I do not know him ... I know not
where they go; / But I know they go toward the best ... surely the drift of
them is something grand ... illustrious every one ... Great is Wealth—great is
Poverty ... Flaunt away, flags of all nations! ... I believe materialism is true,
and spiritualism is true—I reject no part ... I do not see one imperfection in
the universe ... the venerealee is invited.”3 He thinks happily of “easily
written, loose-fingered chords,” and “the loose drift of character, the inkling
through random types.” He assures us, in hale and hearty camaraderie: “I
turn the bridegroom out of bed, and stay with the bride myself”—nay more:
“My voice is the wife’s voice.” His gusto suggests something like a
cheerleader’s at a chess tournament when he proclaims: “Hurrah for positive
science! long live exact demonstration!” But the tactics are much subtler
when, addressing a locomotive, he says: “Law of thyself complete, thine own
track firmly holding.”
In a poet capable of maintaining “this is Ocean’s poem,” a poet “aware
of the mighty Niagara,” the principle of joyously infused oneness can be
centered in various terms of high generalization: the “greatness of Religion
... the real and permanent grandeur of These States ... efflux of the Soul ...
great City ... transcendental Union ... teeming Nation of nations ... the
immortal Idea ... Sex” (which “contains all” ... “every hour the semen of
centuries”)—all such subjects serve as variants on his theme of unified
diversity. “Underneath all, Nativity” (“I swear I am charmed with nothing
except nativity, / Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from
nativity”), by which he meant the individual being’s uniqueness of identity
(“singleness and normal simplicity and separation”). When he thinks of
“Death, merged in the thought of materials,” he swears “there is nothing but
immortality!” When he “wander’d, searching among burial places,” he
“found that every place was a burial place.” All “to the Ideal tendest”; “Only
the good is universal”; “All swings around us. / I have the idea of all, and am
all and believe in all”; “He resolves all tongues into his own.”
In his prophetic role as “Chanter of Personality,” he can use the Idea
of Allness as justification for his claim to act as the spokesman for all: “I act
as the tongue of you; / Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosened.”
Corresponding to “the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,”
an idea for which “the bard walks in advance,” there are the many forms of
idealized “appetite.” These range from thoughts of a gallant and adventurous
launching of “all men and women forward with me into the Unknown,” to
the notion of normal physical sensations programmatically made excessive,
an abnormality of super-health: “Urge, and urge, and urge ... complete
abandonment ... scattering it freely ... athletic Democracy ... ecstatic songs ...
the smoke of my own breath ... the boundless impatience of restraint ...
unmitigated adoration ... I inhale great draughts of space ... tumbling on
steadily, nothing dreading ... give me the coarse and rank ... fond of his
sweetheart, relishing well his steak ... aplomb in the midst of irrational things
... turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding.” In earlier
versions of this last set honorifically describing himself, “turbulent” had been
“disorderly.” And we glimpse something of his rhetorical tactics when we
recall that “I am he who goes through the streets” later became “I am he who
walks the States.” He gains concreteness in such inventions as “love-juice,”
38 Kenneth Burke
“limitless limpid jets of love,” and “life-lumps.” Or analogies between the

physical body and what J.C. Ransom has called the world’s body are exploited
in such statements as “Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself”
(elsewhere he similarly speaks of “pent-up, aching rivers”).
When we turn from the physical body and the world’s body to the body
politic, we note how such concretizing of the “democratic” code almost
automatically vows the poet to imagery of a homosexual cast. For if
Democracy is to be equated with “the manly love of comrades,” and if such
love is to be conceived concretely, in terms of bodily intimacy, such social
“adhesiveness” (“the great rondure, the cohesion of all”) that he advocates is
almost necessarily matched by many expressions of “robust love” that would
be alien to the typical heterosexual poet, as conditioned by our mores. And
though the sex of his lover is not specified in the startling section 5 of Song
of Myself, the many similarly motivated poems in Calamus give reason enough
to assume that he is here writing of a male attachment, as with the “hugging
and loving bed-fellow” of section 3 (though this passage may also be
complicated by infantile memories of the mother). In any case, we should
note, for what little it may be worth, that in The Sleepers Whitman associates
the “onanist” with the color “gray,” the same color with which he associates
himself (“gray eyes” and “gray-necked”), while the “hermit thrush” singing
in the “swamps” of the “Lilacs” poem is “gray-brown” (though “smoke” and
“debris” here are also gray; and there are other grays that are still further
afield). The directest association of himself with an onanistic motive is in the
last two lines of “Spontaneous Me.” Also, he uses a spiritual analogue
(frequently encountered in devotional verse) when, concerning his literary
motive, he apostrophizes his tongue: “Still uttering—still ejaculating—canst
never cease this babble?”
As regards the poetic I, who would “promote brave soldiers,” has

“voyagers’ thoughts,” would “strike up for a New World,” is “he that aches
with amorous love,” would “dilate you with tremendous breath,” or “buoy
you up”: here his motives and motifs get their summarization in his title of
titles, Leaves of Grass. Accordingly, one direct way into his verse is to ask
what associations clearly cluster about these two nouns, “leaves” and
“grass” (which are related to each other as individuals are to the group, thus
being in design like his term in the Vistas, “ensemble-Individuality,” though
in that formula the order is reversed). Here we are at the core of his
personalizing tactics. And, typically, it is in his Song of Myself that he
specifically offers answers to the question, “What is the grass?” (As
indication that he would here be the Answerer to a fundamental question,
he tells us that it has been asked by a child.) In section 6 of this poem, he

offers several definitions
First, he says of grass: “I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out
of hopeful green stuff woven.” Other references to “stuff” in this poem are:
“voices ... of wombs and of the father-stuff”; “This day I am jetting the stuff
of far more arrogant republics”: “I am ... / Maternal as well as paternal, a
child as well as a man, / Stuff ’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with
the stuff that is fine.” Elsewhere we have noted “I pour the stuff to start sons
and daughters fit for these States,” and “these States with veins full of
poetical stuff.” Interestingly enough, all other three references to “flag” in
this poem are in contrast with “hopeful green.” There are “flag-tops ...
draped with black muslin” to “guard some corpse”—and twice the word is
used as a verb, in the sense of “droop”: “Did you fear some scrofula out of
the unflagging pregnancy?” and “The hounded slave that flags in the race.”
(Note that “draped” is an ablaut form of “drooped” and “dropt.”)
Second: “Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, / A scented gift
and remembrancer designedly dropt, / Bearing the owner’s name ...” We
have noted no other references to handkerchiefs in Whitman, though there
is always Othello in the offing! But the verb “dropt” recalls the “drooped” and
“dropt” of the “Lilacs” poem (which also refers to “inlooped flags with the
cities draped in black”) and since the matter of scent also links these two
contexts, we shall wait for further leads here when we specifically deal with
this theme. So far as the internal organization is concerned, by the way, we
might note that the reference to the “owner’s name” attains an enigmatic
fulfillment near the end of the poem, when the poet decides that his motive
is “without name ... a word unsaid,” though “To it the creation is the friend
whose embracing awakes me.”
Other meanings he offers are:
“I guess the grass is itself a child”; ... “Or I guess it is a uniform
hieroglyphic, / ... Growing among black folks as among white.” Again, it
seems like “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”—and as Whitman frequently
shuttles back and forth along the channel of affinity that links love and death
or womb and tomb, his next stanza, beginning “Tenderly will I use you
curling grass,” contrives by quick transitions to go from “the breasts of
young men” to “mothers’ laps.” In the following stanza, grass is related to
both “the white heads of old mothers”. and “the colorless beards of old men,”
while a reference to “the faint red roofs of mouths” leads to the specifically
poetic motive, in the mention of “uttering tongues.”
Near the close of the poem (section 49) the theme of grass as the “hair
of graves” is developed further (“O grass of graves”), while the connotations
40 Kenneth Burke
are generally of a maternal, or even obstetrical sort, in the references to the

“bitter hug of mortality,” the “elder-hand pressing,” and the “accoucheur”
who helps bring about “the relief and escape” through Death.
The scent theme figures here likewise, thanks to a bit of rhetorical
alchemy. For after apostrophizing the “Corpse” as “good manure,” the poet
assures us: “but that does not offend me, / I smell the white roses sweet-scented
and growing,” whereat the associations, taking their lead from the vital
connotations of the participle “growing,” shift into quite a different order: “I
reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.” And do we
not find tonal vestiges of “leafy” in the two similar-sounding words of the next
line: “And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”?
To trail down the various uses of the verb “leave,” in the light of the
possibility that it may secondarily involve motives intrinsic to the noun
“leaves,” would take us on a longer journey than we could manage now. But
let us look at a few. Consider, for instance, in Song of Myself, section 3: “As
the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night ... /
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their
plenty.” In this context for “leaving,” the hug is not overtly maternal, though
the food connotations suggest that it may be secondarily so, quite as the
“baskets” in this passage might correspond food-wise to the “polish’d breasts
of melons” in the other. And similarly, in Song of Myself, section 6, an implicit
food motive seems to guide the steps from “curling grass” to “the breasts of
young men,” and thence finally via “mothers” to “mouths,” with a final turn
from the nutriently oral to the poetically eloquent, in “uttering tongues.”
Yet, as regards “swelling the house with their plenty”: we might recall that in
“I Sing the Body Electric” we find the step from “love-flesh swelling and
deliciously aching” to “jets of love hot and enormous,” and two pages later:
“There swells and jets a heart” (after talk of “blood” that might well bear
study in connection with the talk of blood in the poem beginning “Trickle
drops! my blue veins leaving! / O drops of me! trickle, slow drops, / Candid
from me falling, drip, bleeding drops”). So the “hug” of Death or bed-fellows
seems sometimes maternal, sometimes “democratic,” or indeterminately
something of both.
But our main intention at this point was to consider some more
obvious cases where we might seem justified in adding the verb forms to our
inquiry into the various major meanings of “leaves.” Perhaps the perfect
pontificating case is in Starting from Paumanok, where the line, “Take my
leaves America” suggests something midway between “receive my offerings”
and “put up with my constant departures.” Or in so far as Whitman
sometimes uses “blade” as a synonym for “leaf,” there is another kind of
bridge between noun and verb when, in “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” in

connection with male love, he says: “Emblematic and capricious blades I
leave you.” And before moving on, we’d like to consider one more context
where the verb form seems quite relevant to our concerns. We have in mind
the passage on Death, the “hug of mortality,” the “sweet-scented,” and Life
as “the leavings of many deaths,” a development that is immediately
preceded by the lines (except for fifteen words):
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d
by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are ...
This is in section 48 of Song of Myself. Though this longest poem is

sometimes entitled “Walt Whitman,” we have said that there is in it a problem
of name (that is, a problem of essence, of fundamental motivation; and we would
base our position, naturally, upon the fact that, as the poet nears his windup,
he centers upon the problem of locating a substance “without name”). But,
relevantly reverting to the context where the word “name” first appears, we
find it precisely in that passage (of section 6) where he speaks of the Lord’s
“scented” handkerchief, “bearing the owner’s name,” and “designedly
dropt.”
There are the many obvious places where the leaves are the leaves of
books (a usage that fits well with a pun on utterance, in the notion of a tree’s
“uttering” leaves). A three-line poem in Calamus embodies this usage
incidentally, in the course of a somewhat secretive confession:
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,

Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
The word “calamus” itself is apparently within the same orbit, and even
allows us to watch “flag” for signs of similar meaning, since calamus is “sweet
flag,” of which our dictionary says: “The root has a pungent, aromatic taste,
and is used in medicine as a stomachic; the leaves have an aromatic odor, and
were formerly used instead of rushes to strew on floors.” Thus, we might
assume that “calamus” is one of his “scent” words, though our incomplete
reading has not as yet given us a clear title to this assumption. However, we
can cite a one-page poem (“These I Singing in Spring”) in which the
mention of “calamus-root” accompanies such clearly scent-conscious
references as “smelling the earthy smell,” “lilac, with a branch of pine,” and
42 Kenneth Burke
“aromatic cedar” (calamus-root here being specified as “the token of

comrades”). Since “calamus” is the Latin word for “reed,” we also dare note
inklings of grassiness in the “reedy voice” of the hermit thrush that warbles
through the “Lilacs” poem.
“Herbage” clearly belongs here—as in “Scented Herbage of My
Breast” (though the subsequent references to “tomb-leaves,” “body-leaves,”
“tall leaves,” and “slender leaves ... blossoms of my blood,” while they are
clear as radiations from the leaf motif, are somewhat vague in themselves).
Herbage for grass is matched by feuillage for leaves; and as judged by the
assemblage of details in Our Old Feuillage, leaves can be any item that he
includes in his surveys and poetic catalogues, here called “bouquets”
(“Always ... All sights ... All characters ...”; “Always the free range and
diversity—always the continent of Democracy”; and “Encircling all, vast-
darting up and wide, the American Soul, with equal hemispheres, one Love,
one Dilation or Pride”).
Leaves are sometimes called “blades”; and the blade of the broad-axe is
called a “gray-blue leaf” (thereby adding the gray strand—and since the axe
was “to be leaned and to lean on,” we recall: “I lean and loafe at my ease
observing a spear of summer grass”). Besides adding “spear” to our
radiations, we note that “lean and loafe” are here attitudinally identical. But
further, lo! not only is “loafe” tonally an ablaut form of “leaf”—change the
unvoiced “f” to its voiced cognate, “v,” and you have the close tonal
proximity between “loafe” and “love.”
“Leaves” and “grass” cross over into the scent category, in the
reference to roots and leaves as “perfume,” or in lines such as “The prairie-
grass dividing, its special odor breathing,” and “The sniff of green leaves and
dry leaves ... and of hay in the barn”—or the reference to “words simple as
grass” that are “wafted with the odor of his body or breath.”
Nowhere do we recall encountering such connotations as in the 129th
Psalm, “Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore
it groweth up”; or in Isaiah 40: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.”
We should note two other major principles of unity:

First, there are the references to the “first,” a common poetic and
narrative device for the defining of essence. Perhaps the central example is his
line: “I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy.” The
more familiar we become with Whitman’s vocabulary, the more condensed
this line is felt to be. Identity is proclaimed quasi-temporally, in the word
“primeval.” Such firstness is further established in terms of the poetic I as
spokesman for a public cause. But the more closely one examines the word
“sign” in Whitman, the more one comes to realize that it has a special
significance for him ranging from signs of God (“and every one is sign’d by
God’s name, / And I leave them where they are”) to such signs as figure in a
flirtation. (In “Among the Multitude,” for instance: “I perceive one picking
me out by secret and divine signs / ... that one knows me. / Ah lover and
perfect equal,” as per the ambiguously “democratic” kind of equality
especially celebrated in the Calamus poems.) “Password” is notable for
merging one of his major verbs with the term that sums up his own specialty
(elsewhere he has “passkey”).
When proclaiming “a world primal again,” he characteristically
identifies it with the “new,” the “expanding and swift,” and the “turbulent.”
Another variant of such quasi-temporal firstness is in his term “nativity,” as
with “Underneath all, Nativity.” And often references to the “child” serve the
same reductive function (as with “Years looking backward resuming in
answer to children”).
Lines such as “Unfolded out of the folds of the woman, man comes
unfolded,” and “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking” reveal how readily such
essentializing in terms of the “primal” can lead into the realm of the maternal
(which may range from the sheer abstract principle of Union to the personally
“electric,” “magnetic,” or “athletic”). And we might discern a “democratic”
variant of the attitude implicit in the German epithet wohlgeboren, when he
temporally defines his personal essence thus: “Starting from fish-shape
Paumanok where I was born, / Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother.”
There is a notable variant of the temporal idiom in “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry.” For as the literal crossing of the river becomes symbolically a vision of
crossing into the future, so the poet becomes a kind of essentializing past,
defining the nature of his future readers. In “With Antecedents,” we see how
this temporal or narrative mode of defining essence can fit into the dialectics of
logical priority (priority in the sense that the first premise of a syllogism can be
considered prior to the second premise). For while, as his very title indicates, he
is concerned with the temporally prior, he reduces his temporal sequence in
turn to terms of “all” when he says: “We stand amid time beginningless and
endless, we stand amid evil and good, / All swings around us.”
In his Song of the Open Road, which calls upon us continually to “reach”
and “pass,” and “to merge all in the travel they tend to,” he uses a reverse
kind of temporal priority; namely: seniority. “Old age, calm, expanded, broad
with the haughty breadth of the universe, / Old age, flowing free with the
delicious near-by freedom of death.” (The broad–breadth pair here could
lead us into his notable breast–breath set.) But with the subject of Death, we
44 Kenneth Burke
come upon another kind of summing up, since it names the direction in
which the “ever-tending” is headed. (“Tend” is as typical a Whitman word as
“pass,” though it occurs much less frequently.) So, let us consider Whitman’s
poetizing of Death. But since Death is the Great Positive-Seeming Negative,
perhaps we might best consider it with relation to the poet’s use of the
negative in general.
The incidence of negatives is probably highest in the poems of the

Calamus period; at least, in many places here they come thick and fast. There
is almost an orgy of not’s and nor’s in “Not Heaving from My Ribb’d Breast
Only,” as sixteen of the poem’s seventeen lines so begin, while one line
contains a second. Since the poem is composed of a single periodic sentence
about “adhesiveness” (the “pulse of my life”), we should certainly be justified
in asking whether there may be a substantive relation in these poems
between the negative and the resolve to celebrate democracy with songs of
“manly attachment.” (See also particularly in this same series: “Not Heat
Flames Up and Consumes” “City of Orgies”; “No Labor-Saving Machine”;
or the way in which a flat “no” serves as fulcrum in “What Think You I Take
My Pen in Hand?”)
It might also be worth noting that the Calamus theme of the “subtle
electric fire that for your sake is playing within me” produces two significant
and quite appealing instances of anacoluthon: “City whom that I have lived
and sung in your midst will one day make you illustrious,” and “O you whom
I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you.” (We
mention anacoluthon here because, tentatively, though not for certain, we
incline to believe that the figure indicates a certain deviousness in thinking,
hence may remotely indicate a “problematical” motive.)
A more orthodox strategy of deflection (almost a diplomacy) is to be
seen in another poem of the Calamus series, “Earth, My Likeness.”
Beginning on the theme of the analogy between the poet’s body and the
earth as a body, the poet then avows a questionable motive in himself, after
figuratively attributing a like motive to the earth
I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst

forth,
For an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me
eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.4
In Song of Myself (section 44) there is an absolute negative, identified

with a “first”:
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
Immediately after, the thought is developed in terms of the maternal. For

instance: “Cycles ferried my cradle,” and “Before I was born out of my
mother generations guided me,” lines that overlap upon even the sheer titles
of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The
word “hugg’d” might remind us of the previously quoted reference to “the
hugging and loving bed-fellow ... / Leaving me baskets,” etc. (section 3). Or
there was the “hug of mortality” in section 49, and the death-smell that “does
not offend me” and was quickly replaced by talk of the “sweet-scented.”
Section 12 in Starting from Paumanok has some interesting
involvements with the negative. First the poet addresses his femme,
Democracy. In her name he will make both the “songs of passion” and the
“true poem of riches.” He will “effuse egotism,” and will show that male and
female are equal.
We might note that such equality of sex could mean one thing as
applied to the body politic, but something quite different if applied to the
individual personality. For within the individual personality, an “equality” of
“male” and “female” motives could add up to an ambivalence of the
androgynous sort, as it would not, strictly in the realm of politics. Yet we must
also bear in mind the fact that, however close language may be to the
persuasions and poetics of sexual courtship, language as such is nonsexual;
and in so far as motivational perturbations arising from purely linguistic
sources become personalized in terms of any real or imagined distinctions
between “male” and “female,” such sexual-seeming differentiations should
be inadequate to the case; hence, any purely linguistic situations that
happened to be stated in sexual terms (involving either sexual differentiations
or sexual mergers) should have elements that could be but prophetically
glimpsed beyond a terminology formed by sexual analogies.
For instance, though language necessarily has a realm of dialectical
resources wholly extrinsic to sexuality, there is the ironic linguistic fact that
concrete bisexual imagery may be inevitable, if a poet, let us say, would give
us not at one time the image of mother and at another the image of father, but
46 Kenneth Burke
would rather seek to localize in concrete imagery the idea of parent. At the
very least, thinking of such a linguistic embarrassment along psychoanalytic
lines, we might expect some kind of merger or amalgam like that in
Whitman’s exclamation: “Mother! with subtle sense severe, with the naked
sword in your hand.” (And after the analogy of “spears” of grass, we might
well have swords of grass, too, not forgetting the naked broad-axe. Further,
a poet given to homosexual imagery might well, when writing of his verbal
art, glimpse the wholly nonsexual quandaries that lie in the bed of language,
far beyond any and all sociopolitical relations.)5
But we were on the subject of the negatives in section 12 of Starting
from Paumanok. Immediately after the poet has proclaimed the equality of
male and female, and has vowed that he will prove “sexual organs and acts”
to be “illustrious,” the negatives come piling in. He will show that “there is
no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,” and that
“nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” The next stanza has a
negative in four of its five verses, and the positive line is introduced by a
disjunctive conjunction:
I will not make poems with reference to parts,

But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to
ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference
to all days,
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but
has reference to the soul,
Because having look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there
is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.
Whereas the Whitman negative, at one extreme, seems to involve the

notions of No-No that trouble the scruples of “manly love” (scruples that
somehow connect with thoughts of the maternal and, of course, with the
problem of his identity, or “nativity,” as a poet), in the above quotation we
see how such matters fade into purely technical considerations. For if the
particulars of life are positive, then the “ensemble” or “soul” would be
correspondingly negative; or if you considered the “ensemble” positive, then
the “parts” would be negative (as with Spinoza’s principle: omnis determinatio
est negatio). Or in a fluctuant medium such as Whitman’s, where the issues
need not be strictly drawn, the talk of parts and wholes may merely call forth
a general aura of negativity. However, once we consider this problem from
the standpoint of the distinction between positive and negative, we should
note the dialectical resources whereby, above the catalogues of positive

details that characteristically make up so many of his poems, there should
hover some summarizing principle—and this principle would be “negative,”
at least in the sense that no single detail could be it, though each such
positive detail might partitively stand for it, or be infused with its spirit. (The
problem is analogous to that of negative theology.)
When the technical principles of positive and negative are projected
into their moralistic counterparts (as good and evil), the poet can assert by
the doubling of negatives, as in “I will show that there is no imperfection.”
And if you will agree that death is negative (in so far as it is the privation of
life), then you will note double negativity lurking in the statements that
“nothing can happen more beautiful than death,” or “Copulation is no more
rank to me than death is.”
Sometimes the principle of negativity is present, but in a positive-
seeming statement that is really a denial of a social negative, as with “the
bowels sweet and clean,” or “perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting.”
Or here is a line that runs heretically counter to vast sums expended in the
advertising of deodorants for people who think that their vague sense of
personal guilt is to be eliminated by purely material means: “the scent of these
armpits aroma finer than “prayer.” In keeping with this pattern, he can also
celebrate the “joy of death,” likening it to the discharging of excrement (“My
voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications”). Similarly,
farther afield, as though boasting of virtues, he can tell of the vices that were
“not wanting” in him (“the wolf, the snake, the hog,” among others). For he
“will make the poem of evil also,” for “I am myself just as much evil as good,
and my nation is”—whereat, expanding further, “and I say there is in fact no
evil.” Accordingly, “none can be interdicted, None but are accepted.”
At one point in Song of the Open Road he formulates the principle in
general terms, in ways suggesting Hegel: “It is provided in the essence of
things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth
something to make a greater struggle necessary,” a principle that could
provide good grounds for feeling downcast, if one were so inclined.
Elsewhere, “after reading Hegel,” he avows: “the vast all that is called Evil I
saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.” And in keeping
with the same design, he could praise the earth because “It grows such sweet
things out of such corruptions.”
In sum, Whitman would programmatically make all days into a kind of

permanent Saturnalian revel, though celebrating not a golden age of the past,
but rather the present in terms of an ideal future. And, in poetically
48 Kenneth Burke
personalizing his program, he “promulges” democracy in terms of a maternal

allness or firstness and fraternal universality ambiguously intermingling in a
death hug that presents many central problems for the patient pedestrian
analyzer of The Good Gray Poet’s terminology.
But when we remind ourselves that the Roman Saturnalia traditionally
involved a ritualistic reversal of roles, with the slaves and servants playing as
masters for a day while the masters playfully took orders, we wonder whether
the ironic bitterness of Whitman’s poem, “Respondez! Respondez!” (first
published in 1856 as “Poem of the Proposition of Nakedness”) might be
studied as a kind of Saturnalian-in-reverse.
“Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves!” he exhorts—
but this call to the answerer is phrased rather in the accents of outrage. “Let
the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee—let the mudfish, the lobster,
the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish—let these, and the
like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and woman!”
In this almost splutteringly ferocious poem, the nation is surveyed
wholly without benefit of his normal “spiritualization”
Stifled, O days, O lands! in every public and private corruption

Smothered in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-
high;
Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean’s waves around
and upon you, O my days! my lands! ...
—Let the theory of America still be management, caste, com-
parison! (Say! what other theory would you?)
And so on, and so on. “Let there be money, business, imports, exports,
custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!”
As for this sullen poem in which he stylistically turns his usual
promulgations upside down, we perhaps have here the equivalent of such
reversal as marks the mystic state of “accidie.” In any case, of all his negatives,
this poem would seem to have been one that carried him quite outside his
characteristic literary role. It shows how very harsh things could seem to
him, in those days, when for a moment he let himself look upon the
conditions of his day without the good aid of his futuristic IDEA.
III. LILACS
Having considered Whitman’s political philosophy in general, and the

general way in which he personalized his outlook by translation into the rapt
editorializing of his verse, we would here narrow our concerns to a close look
at one poem, his very moving dirge, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d,” perhaps poem of his in which policies and personalizations came
most nearly perfectly together.
The programmatic zestfulness that marks Whitman’s verse as strongly
as Emerson’s essays encountered two challenges for which it had not been
originally “promulged”: the Civil War, and the valetudinarianism forced
upon him by his partial paralytic stroke in 1873.
Before these developments, his stylistics of “spiritualization” had
provided him with a categorical solution for the problem of evil as he saw it.
Except for the outlaw moment of “Respondez! Respondez!” (or its much
briefer form, “Reversals”) his futuristic idealizing could readily transform all
apprehensions into promises, and could discern a unitary democratic spirit
behind any aggregate of natural or manmade places or things that added up
to national power and prowess. This same principle was embodied in the
random samplings that made up his poetic surveys and catalogues (which do
impart a note of exhilaration to his text, even though one inclines to skim
through them somewhat as when running the eye down the column of a
telephone directory). And whatever guilt was left unresolved by his code
could be canceled by the accents of perfervid evangelism (notably in his
celebrating of “adhesiveness”).
But since the entire scheme was based upon an ideal of all-pervasive
and almost promiscuous Union, the motives of secession that culminated in
the Civil War necessarily filled him with anguish. And even many of the
inferior poems in Drum-Taps become urgent and poignant, if read as the
diary of a man whose views necessarily made him most sensitive to the dread
of national dismemberment. Here, above all, was the development in history
itself which ran harshly counter to the basic promises in which his poetry had
invested. He reproaches not himself but “America”: “Long, too long ... / you
learned from joys and prosperity only.” And, in slightly wavering syntax, he
says the need is henceforth “to learn from crises of anguish.”
Yet in one notable respect, his doctrines had prepared him for this trial.
In contrast with the crudity of mutual revilement and incrimination that
marks so many contemporary battles between the advocates of Rightist and
Leftist politics, Whitman retained some of the spontaneous gallantry toward
the enemy that sometimes (as in Chevy-Chase) gives the old English-Scottish
border ballads their enlightening moral nobility. And whatever problematical
ingredients there may have been in his code of love as celebrated in the
Calamus poems, these motives were sacrificially transformed in his work and
thoughts as wound-dresser (“I have nourished the wounded and soothed
50 Kenneth Burke
many a dying soldier” ... “Upon this breast has many a dying soldier leaned
to breathe his last” ... “Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have
cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips”).
Similarly, when ill health beset him, though it went badly with one who
had made a particular point of celebrating the body at the height of its
physical powers, here too he had a reserve to draw upon. For his cult of death
as a kind of all-mother (like the sea) did allow him a place in his system for
infirmities. Further, since death was that condition toward which all life
tends, he could write of old age, “I see in you the estuary that enlarges and
spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea”—and though this is nearly
his briefest poem, it is surely as expansionist a view as he ever proclaimed in
his times of broad-axe vigor. We have already mentioned his new-found
sympathy with the fallen redwood tree. Other identifications of this sort are
imagined in his lines about an ox tamer, and about a locomotive in winter (he
now wrote “recitatives”).
As for the lament on the death of Lincoln: here surely was a kind of
Grand Resolution, done at the height of his powers. Embodied in it, there is
a notable trinity of sensory images, since the three major interwoven
symbolic elements—evening star, singing bird, and lilac—compose a
threeness of sight, sound, and scent respectively. Also, perhaps they make a
threeness of paternal, filial, and maternal respectively. Clearly, the star stands
for the dead hero; and the “hermit” bird, “warbling a song,” just as clearly
stands for the author’s poetizing self. But whereas vicarious aspects of star
and bird are thus defined within the poem itself, we believe that the role of
the lilac is better understood if approached through an inquiry into the
subject of scent in general, as it figures in Whitman’s idiom.
In the section on Vistas, we put much store by the passage where, after
referring to “that indescribable perfume of genuine womanhood,” Whitman
next speaks of his mother, then proceeds to describe an elderly lady, a
“resplendent person, down on Long Island.” We consider this set of steps
strongly indicative, particularly in so far as many other passages can be
assembled which point in the same direction. And though Whitman’s
associations with scent radiate beyond the orbit of the feminine, maternal,
and grandmotherly, we believe that his terms for scent have their strongest
motivational jurisdiction in this area, with the Calamus motive next.
In this Lincoln poem, the lilac is explicitly called “the perfume strong
I love.” The sprigs from the lilac bushes (“to perfume the grave of him I
love”) are not just for this one coffin, but for “coffins all.” And the Death
figured in such lilac-covered coffins is called a “Dark Mother.” In “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” where there is the same identification of the

maternal and the deathy, the development is built about the account of a
solitary “he-bird ... warbling” for his lost mate, quite as with the mournful
warbling of the hermit thrush—and the incident is said to have taken place
“When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing.”
The cedars and pines in the “recesses” of the swamp where the hermit
thrush is singing are also explicitly included in the realm of scent, as
evidenced by the lines: “From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines”;
“Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume”; “There in the
fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.” See also, in Starting from
Paumanok, that poem of his origins and of his femme Democracy: having
heard “the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars, / Solitary, singing in the
West, I strike up for a New World.” But it is the lilac that holds the poet
“with mastering odor,” as he says in the Lincoln poem.
In another poem, A Broadway Pageant (and one should think also of
broad-axe and broad breast), there is a passage that clearly brings out the
identification between scent and the maternal, though in this case the usage
is somewhat ambiguous in attitude, whereas by far the great majority of
references to scent in Whitman are decidedly on the favorable side: “The
Originatress comes, / The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the
race of eld, / Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with
passion, / Sultry with perfume.” (His word “florid” here could be correlated
with a reference to “Florida perfumes,” in a poem on Columbia, “the
Mother of All.”) In this same poem, near the end, there is a passage about
“the all-mother” and “the long-off mother” which develops from the line:
“The box-lid is but perceptibly open’d, nevertheless the perfume pours
copiously out of the whole box.” Psychoanalytically, the point about
identification here could be buttressed by the standard psychoanalytic
interpretation of “box,” and thus perhaps by extending the same idea to the
coffin—but we would prefer to stress merely the sequence of steps in this
passage itself, while noting that the terms for derivation (“out of”) take us
once again back to the “Cradle” poem. Consider also this passage, near the
windup of Song of Myself:
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listen up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening ...
52 Kenneth Burke
Does not “snuff the sidle” here suggest the picture of a youngster
nosing against the side of the evening, as were the evening an adult, with a
child pressing his face against its breast? In any case, “fold” is a notable word
in Whitman, with its maternal connotations obvious in the line where the
syllable is repeated almost like an idée fixe: “Unfolded out of the folds of the
woman, man comes unfolded,” an expression that also has the “out of”
construction. Another reference, “Endless unfolding of words of ages,” leads
into talk of acceptance (“I accept Reality and dare not question it, /
Materialism first and last imbuing”)—and two lines later he speaks of “cedar
and branches of lilac.” Recall also the traditional association of the feminine
with matter (as in Aristotle). In the “Lilacs” poem, immediately before the
words “dark mother,” death is called “cool-enfolding.”
In one of the Calamus poems, a reference to “perfume” follows
immediately after the line, “Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,” and there
are other lines that extend the area of the perfume beyond the feminine and
maternal to the realm of manly adhesiveness, and to his poetic development
in general, as in “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea”: “Bear forth to them folded my
love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it here in every leaf).”
There are many other references, direct and indirect, which we could
offer to establish the maternal as a major element in the lilac theme. But we
believe that these should be enough to prove the point.
Imagine, then, a situation of this sort:

A poet has worked out a scheme for identifying his art with the ideal of
a democratic “empire” that he thinks of as a matrix, an All-Mother, a
principle of unity bestowing its sanctions upon a strong love of man for man,
an “adhesiveness” generally “spiritual,” but also made concrete in imagery of
“athletic” physical attachment. Quite as God is conceived as both efficient
cause and final cause, so this poet’s unitary principle is identified with both a
source from which he was “unfolded” (the maternal origins “out of” which
his art derived) and an end toward which he “ever-tended” (death, that will
receive him by “enfolding” him, thus completing the state of “manifold
ensemble” through which he had continually “passed,” by repeatedly
“coming” and “departing”). A beloved democratic hero has died—and the
lyric commemoration of this tragic death will be the occasion of the poem.
How then would he proceed, within the regular bounds of his methods
and terminology, to endow this occasion with the personal and impersonal
dimensions that give it scope and resonance? (For a good poem will be not just
one strand, but the interweaving of strands.)
Note, first, that the poem involves several situations. There is the
commemorated situation, the death of the hero, as made specific in the

journey of the coffin on its last journey. There is the immediate situation of
the commemorating poet, among a set of sensory perceptions that he
associates, for us, with the hero’s death. There is the national scene that he
can review, after the fashion of his catalogues, when charting the journey of
the coffin (and when radiating into other details loosely connected with this).
Near the end, a national scene that had preceded the hero’s death will be
recalled (the time of civil war, or intestine strife, that had accounted
historically for the tragic sacrifice). And in the offing, “over-arching” all,
there is the notion of an ultimate scene (life, death, eternity, and a possibility
of interrelationships in terms of which immediate sensory images can seem
to take on an element of the marvelous, or transcendent, through standing
for correspondences beyond their nature as sheerly physical objects). The
reader shifts back and forth spontaneously, almost unawares, among these
different scenes, with their different orders of motivation, the
interpenetration of which adds subtlety and variety to the poem’s easy
simplicity.
The three major sensory images are star, bird, and bush (each with its
own special surroundings: the darkening Western sky for the “drooping”
star, the “recesses” of the swamp for the “hermit” bird, the dooryard for the
lilac, with its loved strong perfume—and for all three, the evening in “ever-
returning spring”). As regards their correspondences with things beyond
their nature as sheerly sensory images: the star stands for the dead loved hero
(in a scheme that, as with so much of the Wagnerian nineteenth century,
readily equates love and death). The bird crosses over, to a realm beyond its
sheerly sensuous self, by standing for the poet who mourns, or celebrates, the
dead hero (while also ambiguously mourning or celebrating himself).
And what of the third image, the scent of lilac? It fits the occasion in
the obvious sense that it blooms in the springtime and is a proper offering
for coffins. And though it is from a realm more material, more earthy, than
sight or sound, it has a strong claim to “spirit” as well, since scent is breathed.
(Passages elsewhere in Whitman, such as “sweet-breathed,” “inhaling the
ripe breath of autumn,” and “the shelves are crowded with perfumes, / I
breathe the fragrance,” remind us that references to breathing can be
secondarily in the scent orbit, and often are in Whitman’s idiom.)
Though, in the lore of the Trinity, the Father is equated with power,
the Son with wisdom, and the Holy Spirit with love, it is also said that these
marks of the three persons overlap. And similarly, in this trinity (of star, bird,
and bush) there are confusions atop the distinctions. In so far as the bird
stands for the poet whose art (according to the Vistas) was to teach us lessons,
54 Kenneth Burke
the bird would correspond to the son, and wisdom. The star, in standing for
the dead Lincoln, would surely be an equivalent of the father, implying
power in so far as Lincoln had been a national democratic leader. Yet the
nearest explicit attribution of power, the adjective “strong,” is applied only in
connection with the lilac, which would be analogous to the third person of
the trinity, the holy spirit (with the notable exception that we would treat it
as maternal, whereas the Sanctus Spiritus is, grammatically at least, imagined
after the analogy of the masculine, though often surrounded by imagery that
suggests maternal, quasi-Mariolatrous connotations).
The relation of lilac to love is in the reference to “heart-shaped leaves.”
Since the evening star is unquestionably Venus, the love theme is implicitly
figured, though ambiguously, in so far as Venus is feminine, but is here the
sign of a dead man. As for the “solitary” thrush, who sings “death’s outlet
song of life,” his “carol of death” is a love song at least secondarily, in so far
as love and death are convertible terms. Also, in so far as the bird song is
explicitly said to be a “tallying chant” that matches the poet’s own “thought
of him I love,” the love motif is connected with it by this route.
But the words, “song of the bleeding throat,” remind us of another
motive here, more autistic, intrinsic to the self, as might be expected of a
“hermit” singer. Implicit in the singing of the thrush, there is the theme most
clearly expressed perhaps in these earlier lines, from Calamus:
Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!

O drops of me I trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth
red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say,
bloody drops,
Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.
Do we not here find the theme of utterance proclaimed in and for

itself, yet after the analogy of violence done upon the self?
Regrettably, we cannot pause to appreciate the “Lilacs” poem in detail.
But a few terministic considerations might be mentioned. There is the
interesting set of modulations, for instance, in the series: night, black murk,
gray debris, dark-brown fields, great cloud darkening the land, draped in black,
crepe-veiled, dim-lit, netherward black of the night, gray smoke, gray-brown
bird out of the dusk, long black trail, swamp in the dimness, shadowy cedars,
dark mother, dusk and dim—all in contrast with the “lustrous” star. (If you will
turn to Song of Myself, section 6, you will find the “dark mother” theme
interestingly foreshadowed in the “dark ... darker ... dark” stanza that serves as
a transition from “mothers’ laps” to “uttering tongues.”) And noting the
absence of Whitman’s distance-blue, we find that he has moved into the more
solemn area of lilac, purple, and violet. Note also the spring–sprig modulation.
There are many devices for merging the components. At times, for
instance, the swampy “recesses” where the bird is singing are described in
terms of scent. Or sight and scent are intermingled when “fragrant cedars”
are matched with “ghostly pines” at one point, and “fragrant pines” are
matched with “cedars dusk and dim” at another. And of course, there is the
notable closing merger, “Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my
soul,” a revision of his “trinity” in the opening stanzas, where the bird does
not figure at all, the third of the three being the poet’s “thought of him I
love.”
Prophesying after the event, of course, we could say that the bird had
figured implicitly from the very first, since the bird duplicates the poet,
though this duplex element will not begin to emerge until section 4, where
the bird is first mentioned. But once the bird has been introduced, much
effectiveness derives from the poem’s return, at intervals, to this theme,
which is thus astutely released and developed. One gets the feel of an almost
frenzied or orgiastic outpouring, that has never stopped for one moment,
and somehow even now goes unendingly on.
One gets no such clear sense of progression in the poem as when, say,
reading Lycidas. But if pressed, we could offer grounds for contending that
section 13 (the mathematical center of the poem) is the point of maximum
internality. For instance, whereas in sections 4 and 9, the thrush is “warbling”
in the swamp, here the song is said to come from the swamps, from the
bushes, out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines (a prepositional form which
we, of course, associate with the maternal connotations it has in the opening
stanzas of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”). Thus, one might argue
that there is a crucial change of direction shaping up here. Also, whereas
section 4 had featured the sound of the bird’s song, and section 9 had added
the star along with talk of the bird’s song, in section 13 we have bird, star, and
lilac, all three (plus a paradox which we may ascribe at least in part to the
accidental limitations of English—for whereas we feel positive in associating
56 Kenneth Burke
lilac with the feminine or maternal, the poet writes of the “mastering” odor
with which the lilac holds him).
We could say that the theme of the cradle song, or “Death Carol” (that
follows, after a brief catalogue passage) had been implicitly introduced in the
“from’s” and “out of’s” that characterize the first stanza of section 13. But in
any case, a clear change of direction follows this movement, with its theme
of death as “dark mother.” And since we would make much of this point, let
us pause to get the steps clear:
As regards the purely sensory imagination, the theme (of the “Death
Carol” as cradle song) is developed in the spirit of such words as soothe,
serenely, undulate, delicate, soft, floating; loved, laved. And whereas there is
no sensory experience suggested in the words “praise! praise! praise!” surely
they belong here wholly because of the poet’s desire to use whatever
associations suggest total relaxation, and because of the perfect freedom that
goes with the act of genuine, unstinted praise, when given without ulterior
purpose, from sheer spontaneous delight.
What next, then, after this moment of farthest yielding? Either the
poem must end there (as it doesn’t), or it must find some proper aftermath.
The remaining stanzas, as we interpret them, have it in their favor that they
offer a solution of this problem.
As we see it, a notable duality of adjustment takes place here (along
lines somewhat analogous to the biologists’ notion of the correspondence
between ontogenetic and phylogenetic evolution, with regard to the stages
that the individual foetus passes through, in the course of its development).
In brief, there are certain matters of recapitulation to be treated, purely
within the conditions of the poem; but if these are to be wholly vital, there
must be a kind of new act here, even thus late in the poem, so far as the
momentum of the poet is concerned. And we believe that something of the
following sort takes place:
In imagining death as maternal, the poet has imagined a state of ideal
infantile or intra-uterine bliss. Hence, anything experienced after that stage
will be like the emergence of the child from its state of Eden into the world
of conflict. Accordingly, after the “Death Carol,” the poet works up, to a
recital in terms of armies, battle flags, the “torn and bloody,” “debris,” etc.
Strictly within the conditions of the poem, all these details figure as
recollections of the Civil War, with its conditions of strife which accounted
historically for the hero’s death. But from the standpoint of this section’s
place after the imagining of infantile contentment, all such imagery of
discord is, in effect, the recapitulation of a human being’s emergence into the
intestine turmoils of childhood and adolescence.
After this review of discord, there is a recapitulation designed to bring

about the final mergings, fittingly introduced by the repetition of Whitman’s
password, “passing.” There had been much merging already. Now, in the
gathering of the clan, there is a final assertion of merger, made as strong and
comprehensive as possible. The “hermit song” is explicitly related to the
“tallying song” of the poet’s “own soul.” The “gray-brown bird” is subtly
matched by the “silver face” of the star. Our previous notion about the
possible pun in “leaves” (as noun and verb) comes as near to substantiation
as could be, in the line “Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves.”
There is a comradely holding of hands.
So, with the thought of the hero’s death, all is joined: “the holders
holding my hand”; “lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul”;
“and this for his dear sake,” a sacrifice that ends on the line, “The fragrant
pines and cedars dusk and dim”—nor should we forget that the sounds
issuing from there came from the “recesses” of the “swamp-perfume.”6
The first line of a Whitman poem is usually quite different

rhythmically from the lines that follow. The first line generally has the
formal rhythm of strict verse, while even as early as the second line he usually
turns to his typical free-verse style. (Song of the Broad-Axe is an exception to
the rule, as it opens with no less than six lines that do not depart far from the
pattern: long-short/long-short/long-short/long, as set by the verse:
“Weapon, shapely, naked, wan.”) We copied out a batch of first lines, just to
see how they would look if assembled all in one place, without reference to
the kind of line that characterizes most notably the poet’s catalogues. When
reading them over, we noted that they are so much of a piece, and gravitate
so constantly about a few themes, one might make up a kind of Whitman
Medley, composed of nothing but first lines, without a single alteration in
their wording. Here is one version of such an arrangement. It is offered as a
kind of critical satyr-play, to lighten things after the tragic burden of our long
analysis
First O Songs for a Prelude
Lo, the unbounded sea!.

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face
In cabined ships at sea,
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Over the Western sea hither from Niphon come
As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
58 Kenneth Burke
Facing west from California’s shore,

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.
O to make the most jubilant song!

A song for occupations
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
These I singing in spring collect for lovers,
Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
America always! Always our old feuillage!
Come, said the Muse,
Come my tan-faced children.
(Now list to my morning’s romanza, I tell the signs of the

Answerer.
An old man bending I come upon new faces,
Spirit whose work is done—spirit of dreadful hours!
Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer
sweep.)
As I pondered in silence,
Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
From pent-up aching rivers;
As I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
Thou who has slept all night upon the storm;
Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,
On the beach at night
By blue Ontario’s shore.
I sing the body electric,

Weapon shapely, naked, wan,
Scented herbage of my breast,
Myself and mine gymnastic ever,
Full of life now, compact visible,
I celebrate myself and sing myself;
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature.
On journeys through the States we start,

Among the men and women, the multitude,
In paths untrodden,
The prairie grass dividing, its special odor breathing—

Not heaving from my ribbed breast only,
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.
You who celebrate bygones,

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams.
Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes;
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon
you.
Respondez! Respondez!
Here, take this gift—
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble.
O take my hand, Walt Whitman!
As Adam early in the morning
To the garden anew ascending.
NOTES
1. Since political parties are themselves a point at which present organization and
future promises meet, we might expect him to waver here, and he does. Thus “I advise you
to enter more strongly yet into politics”—but also “Disengage yourself from parties.” The
wavering even invades his syntax, when he says that he knows “nothing grander, better
exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in
human kind, than a well-contested American national election.”
2. “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 cantankerous imperfection—saying, lo! the roads, the only plans of
development, long and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions.” Might not these lines
serve well as motto for his Song of the Open Road, and as indicating a notable ingredient in
his cult of the roadway generally?
3. But not always. In Song of the Open Road we are told: “No diseas’d person, no rum-
drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.”
4. The lines contain many notable terms. First, since they twice say “eligible,” we
might remember the connotations here when we come upon the word elsewhere. Thus,
when winding up Our Old Feuillage, Whitman writes: “Whoever you are I how can I but
offer you divine leaves, that you also be eligible as I am?” Or in By Blue Ontario’s Shore, see
“All is eligible to all.” And recalling the “lessons” on which Democratic Vistas began, note
in Starting from Paumanok: “I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, / Now if eligible
O that the great masters might return and study me.” The repetition of “fierce” might
recall the “fierce old mother” and “savage old mother” of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking.” Also “liberty songs” were fierce. The poem gives us some specific meanings for
“athlete,” to be remembered even though the word can be extended to an “athletic
matron.” And the movement ends in the negative, with relation to his own verse.
60 Kenneth Burke
5. See Der Monat, Juni 1954, Heft 69: Die Alten Ägypter, by J. A. Wilson, page 277:
Ein anderer, irdischerer Text macht aus der Erschafung von Schu und Tefnut einen Akt der
Selbstbefleckung Atums—ein deutlicher Versuch, mit dem Problem fertig zu werden, wie ein Gott
allein, ohne dazugehörige Göttin, etwas zeugen soll. And on page 280, returning to the theme
of a creation aus einer Selbstbefleckung des Schöpfergottes, a creation made “aus seinem Samen
und seinen Fingern,” the author next says (and we consider this a thoroughly substantial
association): Wir sahen ja schon, urie das Aussprechen eines Namens an sich ein Schöpfungsakt
ist. We have many times been struck by the fact that the creative word could be called
parthenogenesis or Selbstbefleckung, depending on whichever sexual analogies the
analogizer preferred; but this is the first time we ever encountered so heroic a version of
such thinking. And we are particularly struck by the writer’s turn from the subject of this
self-involved physical act on the part of a wholly independent god to the subject of
creation by verbal fiat.
6. Five lines from the end, the expression “Comrades mine and I in the midst,”
restating in slight variation the words of section 14, “I in the middle with companions,”
might be used as an indication of the way in which the poet’s terms radiate. In Calamus
there is a poem that also has the expression, “I in the middle.” One will also find there
“lilac with a branch of pine,” “aromatic cedar,” the themes of singing and plucking (to
match “A sprig with its flower I break”), and a reference to “the spirits of friends dead or
alive.” In A Broadway Pageant, there also appears the expression “in the middle.” But just
as the other usage had been a bridge into the theme of comradely attachment, here the
context is definitely in the maternal orbit. This same stanza contains the reference to the
perfume that “pours copiously out of the whole box,” and “venerable Asia, the all-mother.”
In the “Lilacs” poem, the theme of copious pouring is distributed differently. In section
13, the bird is told to “pour” its song; in section 7, the idea is transferred to the breaking
of the lilac: “Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, / With loaded arms I
come pouring for you”—whereat again we would recall that the first reference to the “shy
and hidden bird,” with its “song of the bleeding throat,” followed the line, “A sprig with
its flower I break.”
R . W. B . L E W I S
Walt Whitman:
Always Going Out and Coming In
W alt Whitman is the most blurred, even contradictory figure in the

classical or mid-nineteenth-century period of American Literature. Recent
scholarship and criticism have been clearing things up a good deal; but both
the poet and his work remain something of a jumble. For a number of
decades, Whitman was the most misrepresented of our major poets; and the
misrepresentation began with Whitman himself, in the last twenty-five years
of his life. It was during those years, from 1867 onward, that Whitman—
initially a very self-exposed and self-absorbed poet—became willfully self-
concealing, while at the same time he asserted in various ways an entity, a
being, a persona radically other than the being that lay at the heart of his best
poetry.
The chief mode of such concealment and assertion was not creative; it
was editorial. Whitman wrote little poetry of lasting value after “Passage to
India” (1871); what he did do in those later years was constantly to reshuffle
the contents of his expanding book: to disperse the poems out of their
original and effective order, to arrange them in new and fundamentally
misleading groups, to suppress some of the more telling and suggestive of the
items, and to revise or delete a series of key passages. The result of this
process was a serious shift of emphasis whereby the authentic Whitman was
gradually dismembered and replaced by a synthetic entity that was more
From Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition. © 1965 by
R.W.B. Lewis.
61
62 R.W.B. Lewis
posture than poet, more mere representative than sovereign person. It, or he,
was the representative—in nearly the conventional political sense—of a
rather shallowly and narrowly conceived democratic culture: a hearty voice
at the center of a bustling and progressive republic, a voice that saluted the
pioneers, echoed the sound of America singing, itself sang songs of joy that
foretold the future union of the nation and the world and the cosmos,
chanted the square deific, and wept over the country’s captain lying cold and
dead on the deck of the ship of state. Other and truer aspects of Whitman
continued to exert an appeal, especially in certain lively corners of Europe.
But in the English-speaking world, it was primarily the bombastic, or, as his
disciples sometimes said, the “cosmic” Whitman that was better known; and
it was this Whitman that was either revered or—in most literary circles after
the advent of T.S. Eliot—dismissed or simply disregarded.
So much needs to be said: for our first task is to disentangle Whitman,
to separate the real from the unpersuasive, to separate the poet from the
posture. To do that, we have, first of all, to put Whitman’s poems back into
their original and chronological order. It might be argued that we have no
right to tamper with the poet’s own editorial judgment; that Leaves of Grass
is, after all, Whitman’s book and that we are bound to take it in the order and
the form he eventually decided on. The answer to this proposition is that
there is no satisfactory way around the critical necessity of discriminating
among Whitman’s successive revisions of his own work, of appealing from
the Whitman of 1867 and 1871 and later to the earlier Whitman of 1855 and
1856 and 1860. The dates just named are all dates of various editions of
Leaves of Grass; and the latter three, the ones we appeal to, are those of the
editions in which most (not all) of the real Whitman is to be found. This
Whitman is a great and unique figure who is also the recognizable ancestor
of many significant poetic developments since his creative prime—from
symboliste poetry to imagism to more recent neoromantic and, less
interestingly, “beat” writing; a chief, though by no means the only, American
begetter of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, to some extent of Ezra Pound
(as he once reluctantly confessed), and to an obscure but genuine degree of
T.S. Eliot.
The importance of chronology, in Whitman’s case, cannot be
exaggerated. Without it, we can have no clear sense of Whitman’s
development as a consciousness and as a craftsman: an affair of far graver
concern with Whitman than with many other poets of his stature. For, as I
shall propose, the development of his consciousness and his craft, from
moment to moment and year to year, is the very root of his poetic subject
matter. It is what his best poems are mainly about, or what they re-enact: the
Walt Whitman: Always Going Out and Coming In 63
thrust and withdrawal, the heightening and declining, the flowing and
ebbing of his psychic and creative energy. Whitman’s poetry has to do with
the drama of the psyche or “self” in its mobile and complex relation to itself,
to the world of nature and human objects, and to the creative act. What is
attempted here, consequently, is a sort of chart of Whitman’s development—
in the belief that such a chart is not simply a required preliminary for getting
at Whitman, but, rather, that it is the proper way to identify the poetic
achievement, and to evaluate it. And in a case like Whitman’s, the chart of
the development is not finally separable from the graph of the life, or
biography; the biographical material, therefore, has likewise been distributed
among the successive commentaries on the editions of Whitman’s single
lifelong book.
I: 1855
When Leaves of Grass was published on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman, now
thirty-six years old, was living in Brooklyn, with his parents and brothers,
earning an occasional dollar by carpentering. Both his family and his
carpentry served as sources of allusion and metaphor in the poetry; but
neither—that is, neither his heredity nor his temporary employment—help
much to explain how a relatively indolent odd-jobber and sometime
journalist named Walter Whitman developed into Walt Whitman the poet.
His mother, whom he salutes in “There Was a Child Went Forth” for having
“conceiv’d him in her womb and birth’d him” (the birthday being the last day
in May 1819; the place, rural Long Island), was of Dutch and Quaker
descent, not especially cultivated, and remembered by her son, in the same
poem of 1855, as quiet and mild and clean. His father was a farmer of
deteriorating fortunes, temper, and health: “manly, mean, anger’d, unjust” in
his son’s account; and it is a psychological curiosity that the father died
within a week of the son’s first public appearance, or birth, as a poet. Other
members of the family were sources of that compassionate intimacy with the
wretched and the depraved reflected, for example; in “Song of Myself”:
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case ...

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy
and pimpled neck ...
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs.
Two of Whitman’s brothers were diseased, one of them dying eventually in

an insane asylum and the other (who was also a drunkard) married to a
64 R.W.B. Lewis
woman who became a prostitute. Yet another brother was a congenital idiot;
and one of Whitman’s sisters suffered from severe nervous melancholy. From
these surroundings emerged the figure who, in the carpentering imagery of
“Song of Myself,” felt “sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights,
well entretied, braced in the beams”; a figure who not only felt like that but
could write like that.
So remarkable and indeed so sudden has the appearance of Whitman
the poet seemed, and out of so unlikely and artistically inhospitable a
background, that literary historians have been driven to making spectacular
guesses about the miraculous cause of it: an intense love affair, for instance,
with a Creole lady of high degree; an intense love affair with an unidentified
young man; a mystical seizure; the explosive impact of Emerson or of Carlyle
or of George Sand. The literary influences can be documented, though they
can scarcely be measured; with the other guesses, evidence is inadequate
either to support or altogether to discount them. But perhaps the problem
itself has not been quite properly shaped. Whitman’s poetic emergence was
remarkable enough; but it was not in fact particularly sudden. Nor was the
career, seen retrospectively, as haphazard and aimless as one might suppose.
Looked at from a sufficient distance, Whitman’s life shows the same pattern
of thrust and withdrawal, advance and retreat, that pulsates so regularly in
the very metrics as well as the emotional attitudes of his verses; and to much
the same effect. Up to about 1850, when he was thirty-one, Whitman—like
the child in the autobiographical poem already quoted—was always going
forth, always brushing up against the numberless persons and things of his
world, and always becoming the elements he touched, as they became part of
him. After 1850, he withdrew for a while into the privacies not only of his
family but, more importantly, of his own imagination, in touch now with
what he called the “Me myself”—his genius, or muse. It was this latter union
between man and muse that, by 1855, produced the most extraordinary first
volume of poems this country has so far seen.
One of the things Whitman did not become was a scholar, or even a
college graduate. His school days, all spent in the Brooklyn to which his
family moved in 1823, ended when he was eleven. Thereafter he was
apprenticed as a typesetter for a Long Island newspaper; and
characteristically, the boy not only worked at the job, he became a typesetter,
and typesetting became a part of his imagination. The look of a printed page
and the rhetoric of punctuation were integral elements in his poetry—the
printing of which he actually set with his own hands or carefully supervised.
Between 1831 and 1836, Whitman occasionally wrote articles as well as set
type for the paper; and he continued to compose fugitive little pieces from
time to time during the five years following, from 1836 to 1841, while he was
teaching in a variety of schools in a variety of Long Island villages. Writing,
too, became part of him; and Whitman became a writer—at least by
intention, announcing very firmly in a newspaper article of 1840, that he
“would compose a wonderful and ponderous book ... [treating] the nature
and peculiarities of men, the diversities of their characters.... Yes: I would
write a book! And who shall say that it might not be a very pretty book?”
In 1841, Whitman moved into New York City, where he was absorbed
especially by what he called “the fascinating chaos” of lower Broadway, and
by the life of saloons and theaters, of operas and art museums.1 Operatic
techniques and museum lore went into his later verses; but what Whitman
became at this stage was that elegant stroller, or boulevardier, known as a
dandy. This role persisted during the five years passed as reporter for a
number of New York newspapers; and even after he returned to Brooklyn in
1846 and became editor of the Eagle, he came back by ferry to stroll
Manhattan on most afternoons. But he was a dandy much caught up in public
and political affairs. Among the personae he took on was that of the political
activist, an ardent Freesoiler in fact, arguing the exclusion of Negro slavery
from the territories with such editorial vehemence that the newspaper’s
owner fired him in February 1848. Within a matter of days, however,
Whitman left for what turned out to be a three-month stay in New Orleans,
where he served its assistant editor to that city’s Crescent. It was there that
rumor once assigned him the affair with the Creole lady, that soul-turning
initiation into love that is said to have made a poet of him. The legend is
almost certainly baseless; but something did happen to Whitman
nonetheless. During the long weeks of travel, passing over the vast stretches
of land and along the great rivers and the lakes (all that “geography and
natural life” he catalogues so lavishly in the 1855 Preface), Whitman had his
first encounter with the national landscape, and became (it may be hazarded)
another of the personalities announced in Leaves of Grass: an American.
Back in Brooklyn, Whitman accepted the post of editor-in-chief on the
liberal Freeman and stayed with it till he resigned in political outrage the
following year. He had clearly “become” a journalist, an uncommonly able
and effective one; his best poetry sprang in good part from a journalistic
imagination—“I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the
pistol has fallen.” At the same time, the forthgoing impulse was nearly—for
the moment—exhausted. After expressing his sense of both national and
personal betrayal by the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Whitman withdrew
from the political arena; withdrew from active or regular journalism, and
from the life of the city. He moved back to his family and commenced a
66 R.W.B. Lewis
leisurely existence in which, according to his brother George, “he would lie
abed late, and after getting up would write a few hours if he took the
notion”—or work at “house-building” for a bit, with his father and brothers,
if he took that notion. Now he became a workman; and it was in the role of
working-class artisan that he presented himself both in the verses of the 1855
Leaves of Grass and in the portrait which appeared as substitute for the
author’s name in the front of the volume.
For Whitman, I am suggesting, the act of becoming a poet was not a
sudden or an unpredictable one. He had always been in process of becoming
a poet, and the figures he successively became, from his school days onward,
were not false starts or diversions, but moments in the major process.
Typesetter, reporter, dandy, stroller in the city, political activist, surveyor of
the national scenery, skilled editor, representative American workman: none
of these was ever fully replaced by any other, nor were all at last replaced by
the poet. They were absorbed into the poet; and if they do not explain the
appearance of genius (nothing can explain that), they explain to some real
degree the kind of writing—observant, ambulatory, varied, politically aware,
job-conscious—in which this particular genius expressed itself.
Signs and symptoms of the poet proper, however, can also be isolated
over a good many years. The determination to write a “wonderful” book, in
1840, has already been mentioned; but that was presumably to be a
philosophical disquisition in prose. In the early 1840s, the writer-in-general
became a writer of fiction, and Whitman contributed a number of moralistic
short stories to different New York periodicals, all signed by “Walter
Whitman” and none worth remembering. Not much later than that,
certainly not later than 1847, Whitman’s aspiration turned toward poetry.
He began to carry a pocket-size notebook about with him; in this he would
jot down topics for poems as they occurred, experimental lines, and trial
workings of new metrical techniques. The process was stepped up from 1850
onward. In June 1850, the New York Tribune published two free-verse poems
by Whitman, the second—later called “Europe: The 72d and 73d Year of
These States,” on the uprisings of 1848—to be included as the eighth item
in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. It was probably in 1852 that he composed, though
he did not publish, a fairly long poem called “Pictures,” which had
everything characteristic of his genuine poetry except its maritime
movement. And in 1854, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the
arrest in Boston of a runaway slave named Anthony Bums, drew from
Whitman a forty-line satiric exclamation that would comprise the ninth
poem in the first edition—later called “A Boston Ballad.”
These creative forays were increasingly stimulated by Whitman’s
reading, which was not only wide but, as evidence shows, surprisingly
careful. He had reviewed works by Carlyle, George Sand, Emerson,
Goethe, and others for the Brooklyn Eagle. He had known Greek and
Roman literature, in translation, for years. “I have wonder’d since,” he
remarked in A Backward Glance (1888), “why I was not overwhelm’d by
these mighty masters. Likely because I read them ... in the full presence of
Nature, under the sun ... [with] the sea rolling in.” (The comment suggests
much of the quality of Whitman’s poetry, wherein a natural atmosphere and
sea rhythms help provide fresh versions of ancient and traditional
archetypes.) It should be stressed that Whitman’s literary education at this
time, though it was by no means skimpy, was fairly conventional. It included
the major English poets, Shakespeare and Milton especially, but it did not
include Oriental writing or the literature of the mystical tradition or that of
German idealism—except as those sources reached him faintly through his
occasional readings in the essays of Emerson. This is probably to be
reckoned fortunate: Whitman’s mystical instinct, during his best creative
years, was held effectively in check by a passion for the concrete, a
commitment to the actual; and discussion of his “mysticism” is well advised
to follow his example. Whitman became acquainted, too, with such
American writers as Longfellow and Bryant, both of whom he came later to
know personally. In addition, he took to making extensive notes and
summaries of a long list of periodical essays, mostly dealing with art and
artists.
“Art and Artists,” in fact, was the title of an essay which Whitman
himself read to the Brooklyn Art Union in 1851. And it was here that he first
developed his large notion of the artist as hero—of the artist, indeed, as
savior or redeemer of the community to which he offers his whole being as
champion (sacrificial, if necessary) of freedom and humanity and spiritual
health. “Read well the death of Socrates,” he said portentously, “and of
greater than Socrates.” The image of the modern poet as godlike—even
Christlike (“greater than Socrates”)—was to run through and beneath
Whitman’s poetry from “Song of Myself” to “Passage to India”; and often,
as here, it drew added intensity from Whitman’s disillusion with other
possible sources for that miraculous national transformation scene he seems
to have waited for during most of his life. It was an extravagant notion; but
it was one that anticipated several not much less extravagant images, in the
twentieth century, of the artist as hero. It was this image, anyhow, that
Whitman sought to bring into play in the whole body of the 1855 Leaves of
Grass and particularly in “Song of Myself.”
68 R.W.B. Lewis
The first edition contained a long Preface introducing the poet-hero,

who is then imaginatively created in the poems that follow. There were
twelve of the latter, unnumbered and untitled and of varying length, with
unconventional but effective typography—for example:
The atmosphere is not a perfume .... it has no taste of the

distillation .... it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever.... I am in love with it.
The first and by far the longest entry was, of course, the poem that in 1881
was labeled “Song of Myself.” It is in part genuine though highly original
autobiography; in part, it is a form of wish projection. We may think of it,
among many other things, as a free-flowing recapitulation of the two
processes I have been describing—the process by which a man of many roles
becomes a poet, and the process by which the poet becomes a sort of god.
There are as many significant aspects to “Song of Myself” as there are
critical discussions and analyses of it; if the comment here is mainly limited
to the enlargement of its central figure—that is, to the question of its
structure—it is because the structure tends to confirm one’s sense of
Whitman’s characteristic movement both in life and in poetry. For if, again,
this strange, sometimes baffling, stream-of-consciousness poem does have a
discernible structure, an “action” with a beginning, middle, and end, it is
almost certainly one that involves the two events or processes just named.
More than one astute reader, while acknowledging a typical pulse or
rhythm in the poem, a tidal ebb and flow, has nonetheless denied to it any
sustained and completed design. But it may be ventured, perhaps, that “Song
of Myself” has not so much a single structure as a number of provisional
structures—partly because Whitman, like Melville, believed in a deliberate
absence of finish in a work of art; more importantly because of what we may
call Whitman’s democratic aesthetic. Just as the political activist was
absorbed into the poet at some time after 1850, so, and at the same moment,
a practical concern with the workings of a democratic society was carried
over into the aesthetic realm and applied to the workings of poetry, to the
writing and the reading of it. The shape of “Song of Myself” depended, in
Whitman’s view, on the creative participation of each reader—“I round and
finish little,” he remarked in A Backward Glance, “the reader will always have
his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine.” In a real sense, the
poem was intended to have as many structures as there were readers; and the
reason was that Whitman aimed not simply to create a poet and then a god,
but to assist at the creation of the poetic and godlike in every reader.
Like Emerson, Whitman was here giving a democratic twist to the

European Romantic notion of the poet as mankind’s loftiest figure. For both
Emerson and Whitman the poet’s superiority lay exactly in his
representativeness. “The poet is representative,” Emerson had said, in his
essay “The Poet.” “He stands among partial men for the complete man, and
apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.” This is what
Whitman meant when he spoke of “the great poet” as “the equable man”;
and it is what he asserted in the opening lines of “Song of Myself”:
I celebrate myself and sing myself

And what I assume you shall assume.
As one or two commentators—notably Roy Harvey Pearce2—have rightly

suggested, “Song of Myself” is the first recognizable American epic; but, if
so, it is an epic of this peculiar and modern sort. It does not celebrate a hero
and an action of ancient days; it creates (and its action is creative) a hero of
future days—trusting thereby to summon the heroism implicit in each
individual.
Considered in these terms, as the epic consequence of a democratic
aesthetic, “Song of Myself” shows a variable number of structural parts. This
reader discovers but does not insist upon the following. The invocation leads,
in Sections 1 and 2, into a transition from the artificial to the natural—from
perfume in houses to the atmosphere of the woods; uncontaminated nature is
the first scene of the drama. Next comes the recollection of the union—
mystical in kind, sexual in idiom—between the two dimensions of the poet’s
being: the limited, conditioned Whitman and the “Me, myself,” his creative
genius, what Emerson might have called the Over-Soul. This was the union
that was consummated somehow and sometime in the early 1850s, and out of
which there issued the poem in which the union was itself reenacted.
There follows a long portion, continuing at least through Section 17,
where—as a result of union—the man becomes a poet, and by the very act of
creation. What is created is a world, an abundant world of persons and places
and things—all sprung into existence by the action of seeing and naming:
The little one sleeps in its cradle,

I lift the gauze and look a long time ...
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair ...
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you.
70 R.W.B. Lewis
The democratic aesthetic is most palpably at work here. What we take at first
to be sheer disorder, what some early reviewers regarded as simple
slovenliness and lack of form, is in fact something rather different. It is the
representation of moral and spiritual and aesthetic equality; of a world
carefully devoid of rank or hierarchy. In “Song of Myself,” this principle of
moral equivalence is not so much stated as “suggested” (one of Whitman’s
favorite words), and suggested by “indirection” (another favorite word)—by
the artfully casual juxtaposition of normally unrelated and unrelatable
elements, a controlled flow of associations.3 Thus:
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy
and pimpled neck ...
The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the
great Secretaries,
On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with
twined arms,
The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in
the hold,
The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his
cattle
and so on. In the 1855 Preface, Whitman was willing to make the case
explicit: “Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits
a beauty.” And he there illustrated the idea in a succession of still more
surprising incongruities: “the multiplication table .... old age .... the
carpenter’s trade .... the grand-opera.”
When, therefore, toward the end of this phase of the poem, the speaker
begins to claim for himself the gradually achieved role of poet, it is as the
poet of every mode of equality that he particularly wishes to be
acknowledged. The announcement runs through Section 25:
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches

for conquer’d and slain persons ...
I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul....
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man ...
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the
poet of wickedness also.
The poet now makes ready for the second great adventure, the long journey,
as we may say, toward godhood. By way of preparation, he undergoes a
second ecstatic experience in Sections 26 and following: an experience of

an almost overpoweringly sensuous kind, with the sense of touch so keen
as to endanger his health or his sanity: “You villain touch! .... you are too
much for me.” The poet survives, and in Section 33 he is “afoot with [his]
vision.” In the visionary flight across the universe that is then recounted,
the poet enlarges into a divine being by becoming each and every element
within the totality that he experiences; while the universe in turn is drawn
together into a single and harmonious whole since each element in it is
invested in common with a portion of the poet’s emergent divinity. It is no
longer the prostitute who draggles her shawl, the President who holds a
cabinet council, the Missourian who crosses the plain: it is “I” who does all
that:
I anchor my ship for a little while only ...

I go hunting polar furs and the seal ...
I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there ...
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of dogs.
And the “I” is itself no longer the individual man-poet; it is the very force or
élan vital of all humanity.
The journey lasts through Section 33; and in its later moments, as will
be noticed, the traveler associates especially with the defeated, the wretched,
the wicked, the slaughtered. Whitman’s poetic pores were oddly open, as
were Melville’s, to the grand or archetypal patterns common to the human
imagination—so psychologists such as Carl Jung tell us—in all times and
places; and the journey of “Song of Myself” requires, at this point, the
familiar descent into darkness and hell—until (Section 33) “corpses rise,
gashes heal, fastenings roll from me,” and an enormous resurrection is
accomplished. But what gets reborn, what “troop[s] forth” from the grave is
not the poet simply; it is the poet “replenish’d with supreme power,” the poet
become a divine figure. Just as, by the poetic act of creating a world, the man
had previously grown into a poet; so now, by experiencing and, so to speak,
melting into the world’s totality to its furthest width and darkest depth, the
poet expands into a divinity. He has approximated at last that “greater than
Socrates” invoked by Whitman in 1851; he has become that saving force
which Whitman had proposed was to be the true role of the American poet.
It is the divinity who speaks through Sections 39 to 51, proclaiming his
divine inheritance (“Taking to myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,” etc.),
performing as healer and comforter (“Let the physician and the priest go
home”), exhorting every man to his supreme and unique effort. For it is a
72 R.W.B. Lewis
divinity who insists at every turn that he speaks but for the divine potential
of all men. And, having done so, in Section 52 he departs.
Wallace Stevens, the most sophisticated among Whitman’s direct
poetic descendants, once specified his ancestor’s recurrent and dual subject
matter in the course of a resonant salute to him in “Like Decorations in a
Nigger Cemetery”:
Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore

... singing and chanting the things that are part of him
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
“Death and day,” with its corollary “life and night,” is as apt a phrase as one
can think of for the extremes between which Whitman’s poetry habitually
alternates. “Song of Myself ” is Whitman’s masterpiece, and perhaps
America’s, in the poetry of “day”—“the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun”—while “To Think of Time” or “Burial Poem,” as
Whitman once called it, belongs initially to the poetry of “death,” and “the
Sleepers” to the poetry of “night.” But although both the latter, in their very
different ways, explore in depth the dark undergrounds of experience, both
return—as “Song of Myself” does—with the conviction of a sort of absolute
life. “I swear I think there is nothing but immortality”: so ends the
meditation in “To Think of Time.” And such is the determining sense
everywhere in the 1855 edition; we shall shortly have occasion to contrast it
with the sense of things in the edition of 1860. It may be helpful, meanwhile,
to glance at the 1855 poem “There Was a Child Went Forth,” to see how
Whitman’s characteristic psychological movement was reflected in his poetic
technique—how the shifting play of his consciousness was reflected in the
shifting play of his craft.
“There Was a Child Went Forth” is Whitman’s most unequivocal
account of the thrust toward being. It is a poem about growth, about
burgeoning and sprouting; and it grows itself, quite literally, in size and
thickness. The difference in the sheer physical or typographical look of the
first and last stanzas is an immediate clue to the poem’s thematic
development. Yet what the poet enacts, on the technical side, is not an
altogether uninterrupted increase in substance and vitality. The process is
rather one of alternation, of enlarging and retracting, of stretching and
shrinking—in which, however, the impulse toward growth is always
dominant. The quantitatively shrunken fourth stanza, for example, is flanked
by the longer eight-line stanza that precedes it and the longest or eighteen-
line stanza that follows it and completes the poem’s swelling motion: giving
us a process in fact of stretching-shrinking-stretching. The same process is

present more artfully still within the first stanza, with its rhythmic shift from
short line to longer line to still longer and back to shorter once again; but
where the line that contains the quantitative shrink is nonetheless a line
accentuated by the word “stretching”—“Or for many years or stretching
cycles of years.” The psychic stretching is thus quietly affirmed at the instant
of technical shrinking; and it is the stretching impulse that triumphs and
defines the poem.
The same effect is accomplished metrically. “There Was a Child
Went Forth” is what is now called free verse; and no doubt the word “free”
in this context would have had, had Whitman known the whole term, a
political aura, and become a part of his democratic aesthetic. Whitman
was the first American poet to break free from the convention of iambic
pentameter as the principal and most decorous meter for poetry in
English; in so doing he added to the declaration of literary
independence—from England, chiefly—that had been triumphantly
proclaimed for his generation in Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and
was the predictable artistic consequence of the political fact. Whitman’s
was a major gesture of technical liberation, for which every American poet
after him has reason to be grateful; every such poet, as William Carlos
Williams (a manifest heir of Whitman) has said, must show cause why
iambic pentameter is proper for him. But it was not an act of purely
negative liberation; it was emancipation with a purpose. It freed Whitman
to attempt a closer approximation of metrics and the kind of experience he
naturally aimed to express; and it made possible an eventual and occasional
return to older and more orderly metrics—to possess them, to use them
freshly, to turn them to the poet’s established poetic intentions. The long
uneven alternations I have been describing could hardly have been
conveyed by recurring five- and four-stress lines. Whitman instinctively
depended, not on the regular alternating current of the iambic, but on an
irregular alternation of rising and of falling rhythms—which corresponded
happily to the rise and fall of the felt life, to the flowing and ebbing—and
the rising rhythm, once again, is always in command:
——— ˘ ˘ —´— ˘ ——
There was a child went forth.
And in the poem’s conclusion—when a world and a child have been brought
fully to interdependent life—the rhythm settles back in a line that neither
rises nor falls; a line that rests in a sort of permanent stillness; a subdued
iambic of almost perfectly even stress—a convention repossessed in the last
74 R.W.B. Lewis
long slow series of monosyllables broken only and rightly by the key words
“became,” “always,” and “every”:
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and
who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
It is not possible to invoke the imagery of stretching and shrinking

without being reminded of sexual analogies, and thereby of the sexual
element so prevalent in Whitman’s poetry. That element was notably, even
blatantly more central to the 1856 edition—it was about several poems in
this edition that Thoreau, otherwise much taken with Whitman, said that “It
is as if the beasts spoke”—and it operated most tellingly in 1860. Still, it was
evident enough in 1855 to startle sensibilities. “Song of Myself” exhibits a
degree of sexual bravado mixed with a trace of sexual nostalgia. But the sexual
aspect is more apparent in the poem that inhabits the world where Freud and
Jung would look for signs of the sexual impulse—the world of dreams. “The
Sleepers”—or “Sleep-Chasings,” according to its 1860 title—is not only a
poem of night and death—“I wander all night in my visions ... the white
features of corpses”—it is a poem of profound psychic disturbance, as the
speaker makes clear at once in a superb line that gained force from the 1855
typography: “Wandering and confused .... lost to myself .... ill-assorted ....
contradictory.” A portion of sexual shame contributes to the uncertainty and
deepens the sense of tenor—the terror, as Richard Chase has usefully
hazarded, of the ego, or conscious self, confronting the id, or the
unconscious, and being threatened by extinction.4 But, in the manner typical
of the first Leaves of Grass, the poem moves to the discovery of solace amid
fear, of pattern amid the random. Descending through the planes of night,
“The Sleepers” encounters in its own heart of darkness sources of maternal
comfort and spiritual revelation. Guilt is transcended and harmony restored.
The adjectives of the opening stanza—“wandering and confused, lost to
myself, ill-assorted, contradictory”—are matched and overcome by the
adjectives of the poem’s close: “sane,” “relieved,” “resumed,” “free,”
“supple,” “awake.” There has occurred what Jung would call the
“reintegration of the personality”; the ill-assorted psyche has become whole
again after passing through what Jung would also call the “night journey.” In
“The Sleepers,” Whitman displayed once more his remarkable talent for
arriving by intuition at the great archetypes. And the night journey concludes
in that confident recovery of day, that perfect reconciliation with night, that
is the distinctive mark of the edition of 1855.
II: 1856
The second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in June 1856, less than a year
after the first. There had been several more printings of the latter; and,
indeed, during the intervening months Whitman was mainly occupied with
the new printings and with reading—and writing—reviews of his work. He
still lived with his family in Brooklyn, but he had virtually given up any
practical employment. He had “no business,” as his mother told Bronson
Alcott, “but going out and coming in to eat, drink, write and sleep.”5 The
same visitor from Concord quoted Whitman himself as saying that he only
“lived to make pomes.” Over the months he had made twenty new ones, and
included them all in the considerably expanded second edition.
Conventional norms of printing crept back a little into this edition. All
the poems, old and new, were now numbered and given titles, the new poems
always including the word “poem”—a word that obviously had a magical
power for Whitman at the time. Among the poems added were: “Poem of
Wonder at the Resurrection of Wheat” to be known more tamely as “This
Compost”; “Bunch poem”—later “Spontaneous Me”; and “Sundown Poem”
later “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The physical appearance of the poems had
also become a trifle more conventional, as the eccentric but effective use of
multiple dots was abandoned in favor of semicolons and commas. The poetry
lost thereby its vivid impression of sistole and diastole, of speech and silence,
of utterance and pause, always so close to Whitman’s psychic and artistic
intention: for example, “I am the man .... I suffered .... I was there” gets
crowded together by punctuation and contraction into “I am the man, I
suffer’d, I was there.” But the earlier mode of punctuation might well have
become exceedingly tiresome; and Whitman, in any event, had arrived at
that necessary combination of originality and convention by which the most
vigorous of talents always perpetuates itself.
For the rest, the new poems dilate upon the determining theme and
emotion of the first edition. There is still the awareness of evil, both general
and personal: “I am he who knew what it was to be evil / ... Had guile, anger,
lust, hot wishes I dared not speak / ... the wolf, the snake, the hog, not
wanting in me” (an unmistakable and highly suggestive borrowing from King
Lear, III.iv.87 ff.—Whitman drew more on literary sources than he or his
critics have normally admitted). There is even a fleeting doubt of his own
abilities—“The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious”—a note
that would become primary in the 1850 edition. But by and large the
compelling emotion is one of unimpeded creative fertility, of irresistible
forward-thrusting energy. It registers the enormous excitement of the
76 R.W.B. Lewis
discovered vocation and of its miracle-making nature: Whitman’s response

to the experience of having published his first volume and to the headiest of
the reviews of the book. Contrary to some reports, including Whitman’s
forgetful old-age account, the first edition had a reasonably good sale; and
among the many reviews in America and England, some were admiring,
some were acutely perceptive, and one or two were downright reverential
and spoke of Whitman as almost that “greater than Socrates” he had been
hoping to become. Much the most stirring for Whitman, of course, was the
famous letter from Emerson, which found Leaves of Grass “the most
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,”
with “incomparable things said incomparably well in it.” One sentence from
this letter—and without Emerson’s permission—adorned the back cover of
the 1856 edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
The tone of the new poems, consequently, was one of achieved and
boundless fertility. This is the poetry of day and the poetry of unending flow.
The feeling, indeed, is so large and intense as to produce a sense of profound
awe: a sense, almost, of terror. That sense arises from Whitman’s convinced
and total association of his own fecundity (“Spontaneous Me”) with that of
nature at large (“This Compost”), an association itself enough to intoxicate
one. It arises, too, from Whitman’s startling view that the creative
accomplishment—of the man-poet and of nature—issues from something
superficially ugly or shameful or diseased or dead. “Spontaneous Me”
mingles two kinds of poems: those that result from the artistic act and those
that are involved with the physical act. The act of love, the expression of
sexual energy, whether metaphorical or physical, whether heterosexual or
homosexual, carries with it a sweeping sensation of shame (“the young man
all color’d, red, ashamed, angry”). But the experience fulfills itself in triumph
and pride, just as Whitman had deliberately expanded the erotic dimension
of the new volume in triumph and pride; it leads to a great “oath of
procreation,” procreation in every sort; it ends in a full consciousness of
wholesome abundance. In much the same way, nature, in “This Compost,”
reproduces life each spring out of the rotting earth: “Every spear of grass
rises out of what was once a catching disease.” The conduct of nature—
creating life out of death, health out of sickness, beauty out of foulness,
“sweet things out of such corruption”—provided Whitman with an example,
an analogy to his own creative experience, so immense as to terrify him.
The terror, needless to say, did not disempower but electrified him.
The most far-ranging and beautiful of the new poems, “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry,” shows Whitman writing under the full force of his assurance—of his
assured identification with the élan vital of all things. The interplay of the self
and the large world it thrusts forward into is on a scale not unlike that of
“Song of Myself”; the flow of the consciousness merges with the flow of
reality. Every item encountered is a “dumb beautiful minister” to Whitman’s
responsive spirit; all the items in the universe are “glories strung like beads
on my smallest sights and hearings.” The complex of natural and human and
created objects now forms a sort of glowing totality that is always in
movement, always frolicking on. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” presents a
vision of an entirety moving forward: a vision that is mystical in its sense of
oneness but that is rendered in the most palpable and concrete language—
the actual picture of the harbor is astonishingly alive and visible. And the
poem goes beyond its jubilant cry of the soul—“Flow on river!”—to reach a
peace that really does surpass any normal understanding. Whitman was to
write poetry no less consummate; but he was never again to attain so final a
peak of creative and visionary intoxication.
III: 1860
Whitman, as we have heard his mother saying, was always “going out and
coming in.” She meant quite literally that her son would go out of the house
in the morning, often to travel on the ferry to Manhattan and to absorb the
spectacle of life, and would come back into the household to eat and sleep,
perhaps to write. But she unwittingly gave a nice maternal formula to the
larger, recurring pattern in Whitman’s career—the foray into the world and
the retreat back into himself and into a creative communion with his genius.
The poetry he came in to write—through the 1856 edition just examined—
reflected that pattern in content and rhythm, and in a way to celebrate the
commanding power of the outward and forward movement. The early
poetry bore witness as well, to be sure, of the darker mode of withdrawal, the
descent into the abysses of doubt, self-distrust, and the death-consciousness;
but it was invariably overcome in a burst of visionary renewal. The poetry of
1855 and 1856 is the poetry of day, of flood tide.
The 1860 Leaves of Grass, however, gives voice to genuine desolation.
In it, betimes, the self appears as shrunken, indeed as fragmented; the psyche
as dying; the creative vigor as dissipated. The most striking of the new poems
belong to the poetry not of day but of death. A suggestive and immediate
verbal sign of the new atmosphere may be found in the difference of title
between so characteristic a poem of 1855 as “There Was a Child Went
Forth” and perhaps the key 1860 poem, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”
Yet the case must be put delicately and by appeal to paradox. For, in a sense,
the new death poetry represents in fact Whitman’s most remarkable triumph
78 R.W.B. Lewis
over his strongest feelings of personal and artistic defeat. There has been a
scholarly debate over the precise degree of melancholy in the 1860 edition,
one scholar emphasizing the note of dejection and another the occasional
note of cheerfulness; but that debate is really beside the point. What we have
is poetry that expresses the sense of loss so sharply and vividly that
substantive loss is converted into artistic gain.
During the almost four years since June 1856, Whitman had once
again gone out and come back in; but this time the withdrawal was compelled
by suffering and self-distrust. Whitman’s foray into the open world,
beginning in the fall of 1856, took the form, first, of a brief new interest in
the political scene and, second, of a return to journalism, as editor-in-chief
of the Brooklyn Daily Times from May 1857 until June 1859. In the morning,
he busied himself writing editorials and articles for the newspaper; in the
afternoon, he traveled into New York, to saunter along lower Broadway and
to sit watchful and silent near or amid the literati who gathered in Pfaff’s
popular Swiss restaurant in the same neighborhood. In the evening, he
continued to write—prolifically: seventy poems, more or less, in the first year
after the 1856 edition and probably a few more in the months immediately
following. Then there occurred a hiatus: a blank in our knowledge of
Whitman’s life, and apparently a blank in his creative activity. We cannot say
just when the hiatus began—sometime in 1858, one judges. It ended,
anyhow, at some time before the publication in the December 1859 issue of
the New York Saturday Press of a poem called “A Child’s Reminiscence,” its
familiar title being “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
On the political side, Whitman’s disenchantment was even swifter than
usual. The choices offered the American public in the election of 1856—
Buchanan, Frémont, and Fillmore—seemed to him false, debased, and
meaningless; and he called—in an unpublished pamphlet—for a president
who might play the part of “Redeemer.” His disappointment with the actual,
in short, led as before to an appeal for some “greater than Socrates” to arise
in America; and, also as before, Whitman soon turned from the political
figure to the poet, in fact to himself, to perform the sacred function, asserting
in his journal that Leaves of Grass was to be “the New Bible.” (Not until 1866
would the two aspirations fuse in a poem—“When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d”—that found a new idiom of almost biblical sonority to
celebrate death in the person of a Redeemer President, Abraham Lincoln.)
Meanwhile, however, Whitman’s private and inner life was causing him far
more grief and dismay than the public life he had been observing.
A chief cause for Whitman’s season of despair, according to most
Whitman biographers, was a homosexual love affair during the silent
months: an affair that undoubtedly took place, that was the source at once of
profound joy and profound guilt, and that, when it ended, left Whitman with
a desolating sense of loss. Such poems as “A Hand-Mirror” and “Hours
Continuing Long, Sore and Heavy-Hearted” testify with painful clarity both
to the guilt and to the subsequent misery of loneliness. At the same time,
poems such as “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “So Long!” strike a
different and perhaps deeper note of loss: a note, that is, of poetic decline, of
the loss not so much of a human loved one but of creative energy—
accompanied by a loss of confidence in everything that energy had previously
brought into being. There had been a hint of this in “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” in 1856—“The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious”—
but there self-doubt had been washed away in a flood of assurance. Now it
had become central and almost resistant to hope. It may be that the fear of
artistic sterility was caused by the moral guilt; but it seems no less likely that
the artistic apprehension was itself at the root of the despair variously echoed
in 1860. If so, the apprehension was probably due to a certain climacteric in
Whitman’s psychic career—what is called la crise de quarantaine, the
psychological crisis some men pass through when they reach the age of forty.
Whitman was forty in May 1859; and it was in the month after his birthday
that he wrote two aggressive and, one cannot but feel, disturbed articles for
the Brooklyn Daily Times—on prostitution and the right to unmarried sexual
love—that resulted in his dismissal from the paper. Characteristically
dismissed, Whitman characteristically withdrew. But no doubt the safest
guess is that a conjunction of these factors—la quarantaine, the temporary
but fearful exhaustion of talent after so long a period of fertility, the unhappy
love affair—begot the new poems that gave “death and night” their
prominence in the 1860 edition.
The edition of 1860 contained 154 poems: which is to say that 122 had
been composed since 1856, and of these, as has been said, seventy by the
summer of 1857. Most of the other fifty, it can be hazarded, were written late
in 1859 and in the first six months of 1860. It can also be hazarded that
among those latter fifty poems were nearly all the best of the new ones—
those grouped under the title “Calamus,” the name Whitman gave to his
poetry of masculine love. These include “Scented Herbage,” “Hours
Continuing,” “Whoever You Are,” “City of Orgies,” “A Glimpse,” “I Saw in
Louisiana,” “Out of the Cradle,” “As I Ebb’d” (published in the April 1860
issue of the Atlantic Monthly as “Bardic Symbols”), and “So Long!”
“A Hand-Mirror” records a feeling of self-loathing almost unequaled
in English or American poetry. And it is representative of the entire volume
in its emphatic reversal of an earlier work and an earlier course of feeling. In
80 R.W.B. Lewis
“This Compost,” in 1856, Whitman was seized with a wonder verging on

terror at the capacity of nature and of man to produce the beautiful out of
the foul or shameful; here, in 1860, he is smitten with the dreadful conviction
of having, in his own being, produced the foul and the shameful out of the
potentially beautiful. “Hours Continuing Long, Sore and Heavy-Hearted” is
a statement of pain so severe, so unmitigated, that Whitman deleted the
poem from all subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. These poems of pain
are uncommonly painful to read; and yet, in the other major new poems of
1860, we find Whitman executing what might be called the grand Romantic
strategy—the strategy of converting private devastation into artistic
achievement; of composing poetry of high distinction out of a feeling of
personal, spiritual, and almost metaphysical extinction. Keats’s “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” offers an example of the same, at one chronological extreme;
as, at another, does Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower.”
That strategy is, indeed, what the 1860 edition may be said to be about;
for more than the other versions of Leaves of Grass, that of 1860 has a sort of
plot buried in it.6 The plot—in a very reduced summary—consists in the
discovery that “death” is the source and beginning of “poetry”; with “death”
here understood to involve several kinds and sensations of loss, of suffering,
of disempowering guilt, of psychic fragmentation; and “poetry” as the
awakening of the power to catch and to order reality in language. What had
so fundamentally changed since 1855 and 1856 was Whitman’s concept of
reality. In 1855, as we have seen, the thought of death led to a flat denial of
it: “I swear I think there is nothing but immortality.” But in “Scented
Herbage” of 1860 he arrives at an opposite conclusion: “For now,” as he says,
“it is convey’d to me that you [death] are ... the real reality.” If Whitman’s
poetic faculty had formerly been quickened by his sense of the absolute life,
it now finds its inspiration in the adventure of death. In “So Long!”
Whitman confesses to the death of his talent: “It appears to me that I am
dying.... My songs cease, I abandon them.” Yet in “Scented Herbage” poetry
is identified as the very herbage and flower of death, as Baudelaire had a few
years earlier identified poetry as the flower of evil; his new poems, for
Whitman, are “growing up above me above death.” By 1860 Whitman had
reached the perception of Wallace Stevens—in “Sunday Morning” (1923)—
that “death is the mother of beauty.”
Stevens’ phrase might serve as motto for the 1860 edition; as it might
also serve for another of the several titles for the poem that was first called
“A Child’s Reminiscence,” then “A Word Out of the Sea,” and finally (in
1871) “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Whatever else occurs in this
in every sense brilliant poem, there unmistakably occurs the discovery of
poetic power, the magical power of the word, through the experience—here
presented as vicarious—of the departure and loss, perhaps the death, of the
loved one. It is one of the most handsomely made of Whitman’s poems; the
craft is relaxed, firm, and sure. Only an artist in virtuoso control of his
technical resources would attempt a poem with such effortless alternation of
narrative (or recitatif) and impassioned aria, such dazzling metrical shifts,
such hypnotic exactitude of language, not to mention a narrative “point of
view” of almost Jamesian complexity: the man of forty recalling the child of,
say, twelve observing the calamitous love affair of two other beings, and the
same man of forty projecting, one assumes, his own recent and adult
bereavement into the experience of an empathic child. Whitman, by 1860,
was very impressively the poet in that word’s original meaning of “maker,” in
addition to being still the poet as inspired singer; and “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking”—for all its supple play of shadows and glancing light—
will bear the utmost weight of analysis. But it has perhaps been sufficiently
probed elsewhere,7 and I will instead take a longer look at “As I Ebb’d with
the Ocean of Life.”
We will not be far wrong, and in any case it will illuminate the pattern
of Whitman’s career, if we take this poem as an almost systematic inversion
of the 1855 poem “There Was a Child Went Forth,” as well as an inversion
of a key moment—Sections 4 and 5—in the 1855 “Song of Myself.” As
against that younger Whitman of morning and of spring, of the early lilacs
and the red morning-glories, here is the Whitman of the decline of the day
and of the year—a poet now found “musing late in the autumn day” (the
phrase should be read slowly, as though the chief words were, in the older
fashion, divided by dots). All the sprouts and blossoms and fruit of “There
Was a Child Went Forth” are here replaced, in the poetically stunning
second stanza by:
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,

Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left
by the tide;
to which are added, later, “A few sands and dead leaves,” “a trail of drift and
debris,” and finally:
loose windrows, little corpses,

Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last ....)
82 R.W.B. Lewis
The poem’s rhythm, instead of pulsating outward in constantly larger spirals

(though it seems to try to do that occasionally), tends to fall back on itself, to
fall away, almost to disintegrate; no poem of Whitman’s shows a more
cunning fusion of technique and content. It is here, quite properly, the falling
rather than the rising rhythm that catches the ear. As against:
There was a child went forth,
we now hear:
Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways
—a dying fall that conveys the shrinking away, the psychological slide toward
death, the slope into oblivion that the poem is otherwise concerned with.
The major turn in the action appears in the grammatical shift from the
past tense of Section 1 (“As I ebb’d,” etc.) to the present tense of Section 2
(“As I wend,” etc.). It is a shift from the known to the unknown, a shift
indeed not so much from one moment of time to another as from the
temporal to the timeless, and a shift not so much accomplished as desired.
For what produces in the poet his feeling of near-death is just his conviction
that neither he nor his poetry has ever known or ever touched upon the true
and timeless realm of reality. The essential reality from which he now feels
he has forever been cut off is rendered as “the real Me.” To get the full force
of the despondent confession of failure, one should place the lines about
“the real Me” next to those in Sections 4 and 5 in “Song of Myself” where
Whitman had exultantly recalled the exact opposite. There he had
celebrated a perfect union between the actual Me and the real Me: between
the here-and-now Whitman and that timeless being, that Over-Soul or
genius that he addressed as the Me myself. That, I suggest, was Whitman’s
real love affair; that was the union that was consummated in 1855 and that
ended—so Whitman temporarily felt—in disunion three or four years later;
“the real Me” was the loved one that departed. And now, divorced and
disjoined from the real Me, the actual Me threatens to come apart, to
collapse into a trail of drift and debris, with ooze exuding from dead lips.
(So, by analogy, a Puritan might have felt when cut off, through sin, from
the God that created him.)
Still, as Richard Chase has insisted, this poem is saved from any
suggestion of whimpering self-pity by the astonishing and courageous tone
of self-mockery—in the image of the real Me ridiculing the collapsing Me:
before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs
and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have
written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
It is an image of immeasurable effect. And it is, so to speak, a triumph over

its own content. Anyone who could construct an image of the higher
power—the one he aspires toward—standing far off and mocking him with
little satiric bows and gestures, comparing and consigning his verses to the
sandy debris under his feet: such a person has already conquered his sense of
sterility, mastered his fear of spiritual and artistic death, rediscovered his
genius, and returned to the fullest poetic authority. Within the poem,
Whitman identifies the land as his father and the fierce old sea as his mother;
he sees himself as alienated no less from them than from the real Me, and he
prays to both symbolic parents for a rejuvenation of his poetic force, a
resumption of “the secret of the murmuring I envy.” But the prayer is already
answered in the very language in which it is uttered; Whitman never
murmured more beautifully; and this is why, at the depth of his ebbing,
Whitman can say, parenthetically, that the flow will return.
IV: 1867
If Whitman, by the spring of 1860, had not been “rescued” by his own
internal capacity for resurgence, he would, more than likely, have been
rescued anyhow by the enormous public event that began the following April
with the outbreak of a national civil war. During the war years, Whitman
“went forth” more strenuously than in any other period of his life, and he
immersed himself more thoroughly in the activities and sufferings of his
fellows. The immediate poetic fruit of the experience was a small, separately
published volume of fifty-three new poems, in 1865, called Drum-Taps, with
a Sequel to Drum-Taps—containing “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d”—tacked on to the original in 1866. Both titles were added as an
Appendix to the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1867, which otherwise
contained only a handful of new poems. Several of Whitman’s war poems
have a certain lyric strength, either of compassion or of sheer imagistic
precision; and the meditation occasioned by the death of Lincoln is among
his finest artistic achievements. Nonetheless—and however remarkable and
84 R.W.B. Lewis
admirable his human performance was during the war—it was in this same
period that Whitman the poet began to yield to Whitman the prophet, and
what had been most compelling in his poetry to give way to the
misrepresentation and concealment that disfigured Leaves of Grass over the
decades to follow.
Until the last days of 1862, Whitman remained in Brooklyn, formally
unemployed, making what he could out of earnings from Leaves of Grass,
and—once the fighting had started—following the course of the war with the
liveliest concern. He was initially very much on the side of the North, which
he regarded as the side of freedom, justice, and human dignity. But as time
went on, he came to be increasingly on the side of the nation as a whole,
more anxious to heal wounds than to inflict them—and this, of course, is
what he literally turned to doing in 1863. In December of the previous year,
he learned that his younger brother Jeff had been wounded. Whitman
journeyed south at once, found his brother recuperating satisfactorily near
Falmouth, Virginia, and stayed for eight memorable days among the forward
troops in the battle area. It was only eight days, but the spectacle of horror
and gallantry of which he was the closest eyewitness had an enduring, almost
a conversionary effect upon him. He came back north only as far as
Washington; and from that moment until 1867, he spent every free moment
in the military hospitals, ministering to the needs of the wounded. He
became, in fact, a “wound-dresser,” though a dresser primarily of spiritual
wounds, bearing gifts, writing letters, comforting, sustaining, exhorting; he
became, indeed, the physician-priest with whom, in “Song of Myself,” he had
associated the figure of the poet.
He made a living in Washington through a series of governmental jobs:
as assistant to the deputy paymaster for a while; as clerk in the Indian
Bureau—a position from which he was summarily dismissed when the
bureau chief read Leaves of Grass and pronounced it unpardonably obscene;
finally in the office of the Department of Interior. Here he stayed, relatively
prosperous and content, until he suffered a partly paralyzing stroke in 1873.
It was in the same year that, traveling north, ill and exhausted, he settled
almost by accident in Camden, New Jersey, where he lived until his death in
1892.
In short, when Whitman went forth this time, or was drawn forth, into
the American world of war, he was drawn not merely into New York City but
into the center of the country’s national life; to the actual battlefields, to the
seat of the nation’s political power, to the offices of government, to the
hospitals, and into the presence of the men who carried on their bodies the
burden of the nation’s tragedy. It is not surprising that the outer and public
life of the country absorbed most of his energy; it is only regrettable that, as
a result, and in the course of time, the solitary singer disappeared into the
public bard, into the singer of democracy, of companionship, the singer not
of “this compost” but of “these States.” This was the figure celebrated by
William Douglas O’Connor in a book written as an angry and rhapsodic
defense of Whitman at the time of his dismissal from the Indian Bureau; a
book which, in its title, provided the phrase which all but smothered the
genuine Whitman for almost a century: The Good Gray Poet (1866).
There had been a faint but ominous foreshadowing of the good gray
poet in the 1860 edition: in the frontispiece, where Whitman appeared for
the first time as the brooding, far-gazing prophetic figure; in the first
tinkerings with and slight revisions of the earlier poems; and in the group of
poems called “Chants Democratic,” the volume’s major blemish. The 1867
edition had no frontispiece at all; but now the process of revising, deleting,
and rearranging was fully at work. A number of the “Calamus” poems on
manly love, for example, were removed from Leaves of Grass once and for all:
those which acknowledged or deplored his erotic attraction to another
man—including “Hours Continuing.” The sexuality of “Song of Myself”
and “The Sleepers” was toned down by deleting in particular the orgasmic
imagery in both of them. Much of the bizarre and the frantic was taken out
of the 1856 and 1860 poetry, in the interest, as Roger Asselineau has put it,
of placing “the accent on the poet-prophet rather than on the lover.”8 In a
general way, it was the intense and personal self of Whitman that got shaded
over by the new editing that self, in its always rhythmic and sometimes wild
oscillations, that was the true source and subject of the true poetry. The
private self was reshaped into the public person, and the public stage on
which this person chanted and intoned became the major subject of the
would-be national bard. Whitman became less and less the original artist
singing by indirection of his own psychic advances and retreats; he was
becoming and wanted to become the Poet of Democracy. No longer the
watchful solitary, he was changing into the Poet of Comradeship.
It should not be assumed that, because these were postures, they were
necessarily false or worthless; they were simply uncongenial to Whitman’s
kind of poetry. In the same year, 1867, that Leaves of Grass unveiled the
prophet of the democratic culture, Whitman also published in the New
York Galaxy a prose essay called “Democracy,” where he set forth much of
the evidence that, a few years later, went into the longer essay “Democratic
Vistas”—as cogent and searching an account of the conditions of
democracy in America, and of their relation to the life of letters, as any
86 R.W.B. Lewis
American has ever written. But what Whitman could do with this material
in prose, he could not do effectively in verse. The democratic element in
the early poems was, as has been suggested, an aesthetic element. It was
part of the very stress and rhythm of the verse, implicit in the poet’s way of
looking at persons and things, in the principle of equality in his catalogues
and the freedom of his meters, in the dynamic of his relation to his readers.
Tackling democracy head on in poetry, Whitman became unpersuasive,
even boring.
In the same way, Whitman’s poems about the actual war were least
striking when they were least personal. There is critical disagreement on this
point, but in one reader’s opinion, Melville wrote far more authentic war
poetry because he had what Whitman did not—a powerful sense of history
as allegory. In “The Conflict of Convictions,” for example, Melville could
suggest the thrust and scale of the struggle in a frame of grand tragedy and
in a somberly prophetic mode that the aspiring prophet, Whitman, could
never approach. Whitman, the man, had entered the public arena, but his
muse did not follow him there; and the enduring poems culled from the war
are rather of the intimate and lyrical variety—tender reminiscences or crisp
little vignettes like “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” where the image is
everything.
There appears among these poems, however, like an unexpected giant
out of an earlier age, the work that is widely regarded as Whitman’s
supreme accomplishment: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
This poem does not, in fact, have quite the artistic finality of “As I Ebb’d”
or “Out of the Cradle”; or, rather, its finality is more on the surface, where
it is asserted, than in the interior and self-completing pulse of the verses.
But, like the other two poems just named, “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d”—a string of words, D. H. Lawrence once said, that
mysteriously makes the ear tingle—has to do with the relation between
death and poetry. The death of Lincoln provided the occasion, and the
emergent grief of an entire nation served as large but distant background.
What is enacted in the foreground, however, is what so often summoned
up Whitman’s most genuine power: the effort to come to terms with
profound sorrow by converting that sorrow into poetry. By finding the
language of mourning, Whitman found the answer to the challenge of
death. By focusing not on the public event but rather on the vibrations of
that event vibrations converted into symbols within his private self,
Whitman produced one of his masterpieces, and perhaps his last
unmistakable one.
V: 1871 AND L AT E R
The transformation that both Whitman’s figure and his work had slowly
undergone was acknowledged by Whitman himself in his Preface to the fifth
edition of Leaves of Grass, which had two identical printings in 1871 and
1872, while Whitman was still in Washington. The earlier editions, he said,
had dealt with the “Democratic Individual” (the italics are his); in the new
edition, he is concerned instead with the “Vast, composite, electric
Democratic Nationality.” It was never clear just what the latter entity
amounted to; and in any case, Whitman was not able to make it susceptible
to satisfactory poetic expression. It became the subject not of poetry but of
oratory and rant—elements that had always been present in Whitman’s work
but that, for the most part, had hitherto been sweetened by music and, as it
were, liquified by verbal sea-drift.
Oratory and rant were unhappily notable even in the most interesting
of the new poems added to the 1871 edition, “Passage to India.” But the case
of “Passage to India” is peculiar. It was stimulated by several public events
(including, for one, the opening of the Suez Canal), stimuli usually
dangerous for Whitman unless he could instantly personalize them, as here
he could not. The poem not only bespeaks the ultimate union of all times
and places and peoples but finds in that condition a universal reality; and as
Richard Chase has remarked, “Whenever [Whitman] headed for the
universal he was headed for trouble.” The poem moves swiftly away from the
tough entanglements of the concrete that were the vital strength of works as
different as “Song of Myself” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “As I Ebb’d”;
and, arriving at a realm of bodiless vapor, Whitman can only utter such
bodiless lines as: “the past—the infinite greatness of the past!”—which is an
exclamation without content. Yet “Passage to India” is interesting, because,
while providing an example of Whitman’s bombast, it is also technically most
accomplished. It completes a kind of parabola of Whitman’s craftsmanship:
from 1855, where consciousness and craft were discovering each other;
through 1856 and 1860, where power and technique were very closely fused;
to the later sixties, where technique almost superseded content. The
technique in question is primarily a manipulation of sound patterns,
something too involved to be analyzed here in detail: an extremely skillful
distribution of sheer sounds, without any regard for substance. “Passage to
India” is interesting too, by way of historical footnote, for the obsessive effect
it was to have more than fifty years later on Hart Crane. It virtually supplied
the initiating force for The Bridge, especially for the “Atlantis” section, the
first portion of his symbolist epic that Crane composed.
88 R.W.B. Lewis
Whitman spent the last nineteen years of his life in Camden, New
Jersey. He made a partial recovery from the stroke of 1873, but then
suffered further seizures from time to time until the one that carried him
off. In between these bouts, he continued to “go out” as much as he could:
to nearby Philadelphia frequently, to Baltimore and Washington, to New
York, and once—in 1879—to Kansas, Colorado, and Canada. Otherwise he
remained in Camden, writing short and generally trivial poems, a great
amount of prose, and countless letters to friends and admirers all over the
world. His old age was punctuated by a series of controversies about him in
the public press: in 1876, for example, when a clamor from England to raise
a subscription for Whitman was countered by a verbal assault upon him in
the New York Tribune by Bayard Taylor. The charge was almost always
obscenity; in the instance mentioned, the charge only aroused the English
to greater efforts, and Whitman was so encouraged as to feel, in his own
word, “saved” by the contributions then and later—of Rossetti, Tennyson,
Ruskin, Gosse, Saintsbury, and others. Longfellow and Oscar Wilde, old
Dr. Holmes and Henry James, Sr., were among the visitors to his Camden
home. He became the genius of the city; and his birthday became an annual
celebration. It was amid such flurries of support and defamation, idolatry
and contempt, that the old man—cheerful and garrulous to the end—
succumbed at last to a horde of diseases that would have killed most men
many years sooner.
Whitman was, as M. Asselineau says of him, a “heroic invalid.” But it
may be that his physical and psychological heroism as a man was what
produced, by overcompensating for the terrible discomforts he felt, the
relentless optimism of so much of his writing in the last two decades—
optimism not only about himself and his condition, but about America and
about history: for which and in which every disaster, every betrayal was seen
by Whitman as a moment in the irresistible progress of things toward the
better. The “word signs” of his poetry after 1867 became, as Whitman
himself remarked in A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads (1888), “Good
Cheer, Content and Hope,” along with “Comradeship for all lands.” Those
were also the words that fixed and froze the popular understanding of the
poet.
Mention of A Backward Glance, however, reminds one that Whitman’s
most valuable work after 1867 tended to be in prose rather than in verse. The
sixth edition of Leaves of Grass, printed in 1876 and called the “Centennial
Edition” (America’s centennial—America now being Whitman’s subject),
added almost no significant new poetry; but it did include the remarkable
essay “Democratic Vistas.” The latter poises a noble emphasis upon
individual integrity against the moral squalor of a society that was already an
impossible mixture of chaos and conformity; and in its plea for “national
original archetypes in literature” that will truly “put the nation in form,” it
presents one of the great statements about the relation between art and
culture. The next or seventh edition, that of 1881–82, contained the fine
little image of the copulative collision of two eagles—an image based on a
written description of such an event by Whitman’s friend John Burroughs—
and a poem that, with two others, gave cause for the suppression of the entire
volume, following a complaint by the Society for the Prevention of Vice. But
this edition was also characterized by endless revisions and expurgations and,
now especially, regroupings of earlier poems: the process whereby the old
man steadily buried his youth. In the same year, though, Whitman also
published a separate volume of prose: Specimen Days and Collect. In it, along
with Specimen Days and the several indispensable prefaces to Leaves of Grass,
were “Democratic Vistas,” Civil War reminiscences, and Whitman’s annual
lecture on Lincoln. A Backward Glance first appeared in 1888; the following
year it served as the Preface to, and was the one memorable new piece of
writing in, the Leaves of Grass of 1889.
Though it is indeed memorable and even beguiling, A Backward
Glance is also somewhat misleading. The real motivations and the actual
achievement of Leaves of Grass lie half-forgotten behind the comradeship,
good cheer, and democratic enthusiasm of the ailing elderly bard. Like F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Whitman could have said, though one cannot imagine
him doing so, that he had found his proper form at a certain moment in his
career, but that he had then been diverted into other forms, other
endeavors less appropriate to his talent. The fact that it was in these other
forms that Whitman’s reputation got established make the development
more lamentable. At his best, Whitman was not really the bard of the
democratic society at all; nor was he the prophet of the country’s and the
world’s glorious future. He was, perhaps, the poet of an aesthetic and moral
democracy. But he was above all the poet of the self and of the self’s
swaying motion—outward into a teeming world where objects were
“strung like beads of glory” on his sight; backward into private communion
with the “real Me.” He was the poet of the self’s motion downward into the
abysses of darkness and guilt and pain and isolation, and upward to the
creative act in which darkness was transmuted into beauty. When the self
became lost to the world, Whitman was lost for poetry. But before that
happened, Whitman had, in his own example, made poetry possible in
America.
90 R.W.B. Lewis
NOTES
1. Of special importance to Whitman were the Brooklyn Art Union, established by

a group of Brooklyn painters about 1850, and the Egyptian Museum at 629 Broadway, in
Manhattan. Whitman wrote an article about the former for the New York Evening Post in
February 1851; he was personally acquainted with several of the younger painters
involved, and he was particularly observant of their techniques for handling light and
color. Through visits to the Egyptian Museum, meanwhile, and through considerable
study under the supervision of his friend, the Museum’s proprietor, Dr. Abbot, Whitman
became remarkably well versed in Egyptology—allusions drawn from which are frequent
and suggestive in Leaves of Grass.
2. The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J., 1961), especially pp. 59–82.
3. Cf. the essay on Whitman by David Daiches in The Young Rebel in American
Literature, ed. Carl Bode (New York, 1960).
4. Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York, 1955), pp. 54–57.
5. Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (New York, 1960), pp. 92–93.
6. See the Facsimile Edition of the 1860 text, edited with an introduction by Roy
Harvey Pearce (Ithaca, N.Y., 1961).
7. For example, in the four essays by Stephen E. Whicher, Paul Fussell, Jr., Richard
Chase, and Roy Harvey Pearce contained in The Presence of Walt Whitman, ed. R. W. B.
Lewis (New York, 1962).
8. The Evolution of Walt Whitman, p. 196.
HAROLD BLOOM
Whitman’s Image of Voice:

To the Tally of My Soul
W here does the individual accent of an American poetry begin? How,

then and now, do we recognize the distinctive voice that we associate with an
American Muse? Bryant, addressing some admonitory lines, in 1830, To Cole,
the Painter, Departing for Europe, has no doubts as to what marks the
American difference:
Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest—fair,

But different—everywhere the trace of men,
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
Gaze on them, till the tears shall dim thy sight,
But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.
Only the Sublime, from which life shrinks, constitutes a European

escape from the trace of men. Cole will be moved by that Sublime, yet he is
to keep vivid the image of priority, an American image of freedom, for which
Emerson and Thoreau, like Bryant before them, will prefer the trope of
“wildness.” The wildness triumphs throughout Bryant, a superb poet, always
and still undervalued, and one of Hart Crane’s and Wallace Stevens’s
legitimate ancestors. The voice of an American poetry goes back before
Bryant, and can be heard in Bradstreet and Freneau (not so much, I think, in
From Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. © 1982 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
91
92 Harold Bloom
Edward Taylor, who was a good English poet who happened to be living in
America). Perhaps, as with all origins, the American poetic voice cannot be
traced; and so I move from my first to my second opening question: how to
recognize the Muse of America. Here is Bryant, in the strong opening of his
poem The Prairies, in 1833:
These are the gardens of the Desert, these

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The Prairies. I behold them for the first
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness....
Bryant’s ecstatic beholding has little to do with what he sees. His

speech swells most fully as he intones “The Prairies,” following on the
prideful reflection that no English poet could name these grasslands. The
reflection itself is a touch awkward, since the word after all is French, and not
Amerindian, as Bryant knew. No matter; the beholding is still there, and
truly the name is little more important than the sight. What is vital is the
dilation of the sight, an encircling vastness more comprehensive even than
the immensity being taken in, for it is only a New England hop, skip and a
jump from this dilation to the most American passage that will ever be
written, more American even than Huck Finn telling Aunt Polly that he lies
just to keep in practice, or Ahab proclaiming that he would strike the sun if
it insulted him. Reverently I march back to where I and the rest of us have
been before and always must be again, crossing a bare common, in snow
puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, in the company of our benign
father, the Sage of Concord, teacher of that perfect exhilaration, in which,
with him, we are glad to the brink of fear:
... Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe

air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents
of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel
of God....
Why is this, ecstasy followed directly by the assertion: “The name of the
nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental ...”? Why does the dilation
of vision to the outrageous point of becoming a transparent eyeball provoke
a denaturing of even the nearest name? I hasten to enforce the obvious, which
Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul 93
nevertheless is crucial: the name is not forgotten, but loses the sound of
immediacy; it becomes foreign or out-of-doors, rather than domestic; and
accidental, rather than essential. A step beyond this into the American
Sublime, and you do not even forget the name; you never hear it at all:
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains

unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
remembering of the intuition. That thought by what I can now
nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when
you have life in, yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed
way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall
not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—the way,
the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new...
“This subject” is self-reliance, and the highest truth on it would appear

to be voiceless, except that Emerson’s voice does speak out to tell us of the
influx of the Newness, in which no footprints or faces are to be seen; and no
name is to be heard. Unnaming always has been a major mode in poetry, far
more than naming; perhaps there cannot be a poetic naming that is not
founded upon an unnaming. I want to leap from these prose unnamings in
Emerson, so problematic in their possibilities, to the poem in which, more
than any other, I would seek to hear Emerson’s proper voice for once in
verse, a “voice present triumphantly in so many hundreds of passages
throughout his prose:
Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;

Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the love!
Haste to cure the old despair,—
Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
94 Harold Bloom
Upon the tablets blue,

The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.
But why is Bacchus named here, if you shall not hear any name? My
question would be wholly hilarious if we were to literalize Emerson’s splendid
chant. Visualize the Sage of Concord, gaunt and spare, uncorking a bottle in
Dionysiac abandon, before emulating the Pleiads by breaking into a
Nietzschean dance. No, the Bacchus of Ralph Waldo is rather clearly another
unnaming. As for voice, it is palpably absent from this grand passage, its place
taken up not even by writing, but by rewriting, by that revisionary pen which
has priority, and which drew before the tablets darkened and grew small.
I am going to suggest shortly that rewriting is an invariable trope for
voicing, within a poem, and that voicing and reseeing are much the same
poetic process, a process reliant upon unnaming, which rhetorically means
the undoing of a prior metonymy. But first I am going to leap ahead again,
from Emerson to Stevens, which is to pass over the great impasse of
Whitman, with whom I have identified always Hart Crane’s great trope:
“Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping / The impasse high with choir.” Soon
enough this discourse will center upon Whitman, since quite simply he is the
American Sublime, he is voice in our poetry, he is our answer to the
Continent now, precisely as he was a century ago. Yet I am sneaking up on
him, always the best way for any critic to skulk near the Sublime Walt. His
revisionism, of self as of others, is very subtle; his unnamings and his voices
come out of the Great Deep. Stevens’s are more transparent:
Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
* * *
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was

A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is,
There is a project for the sun. The sun

Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.
* * *
This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
What have these three unnaming passages most in common? Well,

what are we doing when we give pet names to those we love, or give no
names to anyone at all, as when we go apart in order to go deep into
ourselves? Stevens’s peculiar horror of the commonplace in names emerges
in his litany of bizarre, fabulistic persons and places, but though that
inventiveness works to break casual continuities, it has little in common with
the true break with continuity in poets like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
Stevens, pace Hugh Kenner, is hardly the culmination of the poetics of Lear.
He may not be the culmination of Whitman’s poetics either, since that begins
to seem the peculiar distinction of John Ashbery. But like Whitman, Stevens
does have a link to the Lucretian Sublime, as Paten the Epicurean did, and
such a Sublime demands a deeper break with commonplace continuities than
is required by the evasions of nonsense and fantasy. The most authentic of
literary Sublimes has the Epicurean purpose of rendering us discontented
with easier pleasures in order to prepare us for the ordeal of more difficult
pleasures, When Stevens unnames he follows, however unknowingly, the
trinity of negative wisdom represented by Emerson, Pater and Nietzsche.
Stevens himself acknowledged only Nietzsche; but the unfashionable
Emerson and Pater were even stronger in him, with Emerson (and
Whitman) repressedly the strongest of strains. Why not, after all, use the
rotted names? If the things were things that never could be named, is not one
name as bad anyway as another? Stevens’s masterpiece is not named The
Somethings of Autumn, and not only because the heroic desperation of the
Emersonian scholar of one candle is not enough. Whether you call the
auroras flames or an Arctic effulgence or call them by the trope now stuck
into dictionaries, auroras, you are giving your momentary consent to one
arbitrary substitution or another. Hence Emerson’s more drastic and Bacchic
ambition; write your old adventures, not just your new, with the Gnostic pen
of our forefather and foremother, the Abyss. I circle again the problematic
American desire to merge voicing and revisionism into a single entity, and
96 Harold Bloom
turn to Whitman for a central text, which will be the supposed elegy for
Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. So drastic is the amalgam
of voicing, unnaming and revisionism here that I take as prelude first
Whitman’s little motto poem, As Adam Early in the Morning, so as to set some
of the ways for approaching what is most problematic in the great elegy, its
images of voice and of voicing.
What can we mean when we speak of the voice of the poet, or the voice
of the critic? is there a pragmatic sense of voice, in discussing poetry and
criticism, that does not depend upon the illusions of metaphysics? When
poetry and criticism speak of “images of voice,” what is being imaged? I think
I can answer these questions usefully in the context of my critical enterprise
from The Anxiety of influence on, but my answers rely upon a post-
philosophical pragmatism which grounds itself upon what has worked to
make up an American tradition. Voice in American poetry always necessarily
must include Whitman’s oratory, and here I quote from it where it is most
economical and persuasive, a five-line poem that centers the canon of our
American verse:
As Adam early in the morning,

Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.
What shall we call this striding stance’ of the perpetually passing Walt,
prophetic of Stevens’s singing girl at Key West, and of Stevens’s own
Whitman walking along a ruddy shore, singing of death and day?
Rhetorically the stance is wholly transumptive, introjecting earliness, but this
is very unlike the Miltonic transuming of tradition. Walt is indeed Emerson’s
new Adam, American and Nietzschean, who can live as if it were morning,
but though he is as the Biblical and Miltonic Adam, that “as” is one of
Stevens’s “intricate evasions of as.” The Old Adam was not a savior, except in
certain Gnostic traditions of Primal Man; the new, Whitmanian Adam
indeed is Whitman himself, more like Christ than like Adam, and more like
the Whitmanian Christ of Lawrence’s The Man Who Died than like the Jesus
of the Gospels.
Reading Whitman’s little poem is necessarily an exercise both in a kind
of repression and in a kind of introjection. To read the poem strongly, to
voice its stance, is to transgress the supposed boundary between reading or
criticism, and writing or poetry. “As” governs the three words of origins—
“Adam,” “early” and “morning”—and also the outgoing movement of

Whitman, walking forth refreshed from a bower (that may be also a tomb),
emerging from a sleep that may have been a kind of good death. Whitman
placed this poem at the close of the Children of Adam division of Leaves of
Grass, thus positioning it between the defeated American pathos of Facing
West from California’s Shores and the poignant In Paths Untrodden that begins
the homoerotic Calamus section. There is a hint, in this contextualization,
that the astonished reader needs to cross a threshold also. Behold Whitman
as Adam; do not merely regard him when he is striding past. The injunctions
build from that “behold” through “hear” and “approach” to “touch,” a touch
then particularized to the palm, as the resurrected Walt passes, no phantom,
but a risen body. “Hear my voice” is the center. As Biblical trope, it invokes
Jehovah walking in Eden in the cool of the day, but in Whitman’s American
context it acquires a local meaning also. Hear my voice, and not just my
words; hear me as voice. Hear me, as in my elegy for President Lincoln, I hear
the hermit thrush.
Though the great elegy finds its overt emblems in the lilac-bush and
the evening star, its more, crucial tropes substitute for those emblems. These
figures are the sprig of lilac. that Whitman places on the hearse and the song
of the thrush that floods the western night. Ultimately these are one trope,
one image of voice, which we can follow Whitman by calling the “tally,”
playing also on a secondary meaning of “tally,” as double or agreement.
“Tally” may be Whitman’s most crucial trope or ultimate image of voice. As
a word, it goes back to the Latin talea for twig or cutting, which appears in
this poem as the sprig of lilac. The word meant originally a cutting or stick
upon which notches are made so as to keep count or score, but first in the
English and then in the American vernacular it inevitably took on the
meaning of a sexual score. The slang words “tallywoman,” meaning a lady in
an illicit relationship, and “tallywhack” or “tallywags,” for the male genitalia,
are still in circulation. “Tally” had a peculiar, composite meaning for
Whitman in his poetry, which has not been noted by his critics. In the odd,
rather luridly impressive death-poem Chanting the Square Deific, an amazing
blend of Emerson and an Americanized Hegel, Whitman identifies himself
with Christ, Hermes and Hercules and then writes: “All sorrow, labor,
suffering, I, tallying it, absorb it in myself.” My comment would be:
“Precisely how does he tally it?” and the answer to that question, grotesque
as initially it must seem, would be: “Why, first by masturbating, and then by
writing poems.” I am being merely accurate, rather than outrageous, and so
I turn to Song of Myself, section 25, as first proof-text:
98 Harold Bloom
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the
daybreak.
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of
worlds.
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,

It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of

articulation,
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of
all things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search
of this day.)
My final merit I refuse, you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me;
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.
Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.
At this, almost the mid-point of his greatest poem, Whitman is sliding

knowingly near crisis, which will come upon him in the crossing between
sections 27 and 28. But here he is too strong, really too strong, and soon will
pay the price of that over-strength, according to the Emersonian iron Law of
Compensation, that nothing is got for nothing. Against the sun’s mocking
taunt: “See then whether you shall be master!” Whitman sends forth his own
sunrise, which is a better, a more Emersonian answer than what Melville’s
Ahab threatens when he cries out, with surpassing Promethean eloquence:

“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” As an alternative dawn, Whitman
crucially identifies himself as a voice, a voice overflowing with presence, a
presence that is a sexual self-knowledge: “My knowledge my live parts, it
keeping tally with the meaning of all things.” His knowledge and sexuality
are one, and we need to ask: how does that sexual self-knowing keep tally
with the meaning of all things? The answer comes in the crisis sequence of
sections 26–39, where Whitman starts with listening and then regresses to
touch, until he achieves both orgasm and poetic release through a Sublime
yet quite literal masturbation. The sequence begins conventionally enough
with bird song and human voice, passes to music, and suddenly becomes very
extraordinary, in a passage critics have admired greatly but have been unable
to expound:
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d
them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the
indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in
fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
This Sublime antithetical flight (or repression) not only takes

Whitman out of nature, but makes him a new kind of god, ever-dying and
ever-living, a god whose touchstone is of course voice. The ardors wrenched
from him are operatic, and the cosmos becomes stage machinery, a context
in which the whirling bard first loses his breath to the envious hail, then
sleeps a drugged illusory death in uncharacteristic silence, and at last is let up
again to sustain the enigma of Being. For this hero of voice, we expect now
a triumphant ordeal by voice, but surprisingly we get an equivocal ordeal by
sexual self-touching. Yet the substitution is only rhetorical, and establishes
the model for the tally in the Lincoln elegy, since the sprig of lilac will
represent Whitman’s live parts, and the voice of the bird will represent those
ardors so intense; so wrenched from Whitman, that he did not know he
possessed them.
After praising his own sensitivity of touch, Whitman concludes
section 27 with the highly equivocal line: “To touch my person to some
100 Harold Bloom
one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” The crisis section proper, 28,
centers upon demonstrating that to touch his own person is also about as
much as Whitman can stand. By the time he cries out: “I went myself
first to the headland, my own hands carried me there,” we can
understand how the whole 1855 Song of Myself may have grown out of an
early notebook jotting on the image of the headland, a threshold stage
between self-excitation and orgasm. Section 28 ends with frankly
portrayed release:
You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight

in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates; you are too much for me.
The return of the image of breath and throat; of voice, is no surprise,

nor will the attentive reader be startled when the lines starting section 29
take a rather more affectionate view of touch, now that the quondam villain
has performed his labor:
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d

touch!
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?
Since Whitman’s “rich showering rain” fructifies into a golden,

masculine landscape, we can call this sequence of Song of Myself the most
productive masturbation since the ancient Egyptian myth of a god who
masturbates the world into being. I suggest now (and no Whitman scholar
will welcome it) that a failed masturbation is the concealed reference in
section 2 of the Lilacs elegy:
O powerful western fallen start

O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the start
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of met
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
The cruel hands are Whitman’s own, as he vainly seeks relief from his
repressed guilt, since the death of Father Abraham has rekindled the death,
a decade before, of the drunken Quaker carpenter-father, Walter Whitman,
Senior. Freud remarks, in Mourning and Melancholia, that
... there is more in the content of melancholia than in that of

normal grief. In melancholia the relation to the object is no
simple one; it is complicated by the conflict of ambivalence. This
latter is either constitutional, i.e. it is an element of every love-
relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds from
precisely those experiences that involved a threat of losing the
object.... Constitutional ambivalence belongs by nature to what is
repressed, while traumatic experiences with the object may have
stirred to activity something else that has been repressed. Thus
everything to do with these conflicts of ambivalence remains
excluded from consciousness, until the outcome characteristic of
melancholia sets in. This, as we know, consists in the libidinal
cathexis that is being menaced at last abandoning the object, only,
however, to resume its occupation of that place in the ego whence
it came. So by taking flight into the ego love escapes
annihilation....
Both conflicts of ambivalence are Whitman’s in the Lilacs elegy, and

we will see love fleeing into Whitman’s image of voice, the bird’s tallying
chant, which is the last stance of his ego. Freud’s ultimate vision of
primal ambivalence emphasized its origin as being the dialectical
fusion/defusion of the two drives, love and death. Whitman seems to me
profounder even than Freud as a student of the interlocking of these
antithetical drives that darkly combine into one. Eros and its shadow of
ruin, to appropriate a phrase from Shelley. Whitman mourns Lincoln,
yes, but pragmatically he mourns even more intensely for the tally, the
image of voice he cannot as yet rekindle into being, concealed as it is by
a “harsh surrounding cloud” of impotence. The miraculous juxtaposition
of the two images of the tally, sprig of lilac and song of the hermit
thrush, in sections 3 and 4 following, points the possible path out of
Whitman’s death-in-life:
3
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the
white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves
of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the
perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
102 Harold Bloom
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of

rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
Whitman breaks the talea, in a context that initially suggests a ritual of

castration, but the image offers more than a voluntary surrender of
manhood. The broken lilac sprig is exactly analogous to the “song of the
bleeding throat,” and indeed the analogy explains the otherwise baffling
“bleeding.” For what has torn the thrush’s throat? The solitary song itself,
image of wounded voice, is the other talea, and has been broken so that the
soul can take count of itself, Yet why must these images, of voice be broken?
Whitman’s answer, a little further on in the poem, evades the “why” much as
he evades the child’s “What is the grass?” in Song of Myself 6, or, the why like
the what is unknowable in the context of the Epicurean-Lucretian
metaphysics that Whitman accepted. Whitman’s answer comes in the
hyperbolic, daemonic, repressive force of his copious over-breaking of the
tallies:
Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you
O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,

O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,

But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
Why should we be moved that Whitman intones: “O sane and sacred

death,” rather than: “O insane and obscene death,” which might seem to be
more humanly accurate? “Death” here is a trope for the sane and sacred
Father Abraham, rather than for the actual father. Whitman’s profuse
breaking of the tallies attempts to extend this trope, so as to make of death
itself an ultimate image of voice or tally of the soul. It is the tally and not
literal death, our death, that is sane and sacred. But that returns us to the
figuration of the tally, which first appears in the poem as a verb, just before
the carol of death:
And the charm of the carol rapt me,

As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
“My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all
things” now transfers its knowledge from the vital order to the death-drive.
I am reminded that I first became aware of Whitman’s crucial trope by
pondering its remarkable use by Hart Crane, when he invokes Whitman
directly in the “Cape Hatteras” section of The Bridge:
O Walt!—Ascensions of thee hover in me now

As thou at junctions elegiac, there; of speed,
With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!
The competent loam, the probable grass, travail
Of tides awash the pedestal of Everest, fail
Not less than thou in pure impulse inbred
To answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead
Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound
Of living brotherhood!
Crane’s allusion is certainly to the Lilacs elegy, but his interpretation of

what it means to bring tally “upward from the dead” may idealize rather too
generously. That Walt’s characteristic movement is ascension cannot be
doubted, but the operative word in this elegy is “passing.” The coffin of the
104 Harold Bloom
martyred leader passes first, but in the sixteenth and final section it is the
bard who passes, still tallying both the song of the bird and his own soul.
That the tally is crucial, Crane was more than justified in emphasizing, but
then Crane was a great reader as well as a great writer of poetry. Flanking the
famous carol of death are two lines of the tally: “And the voice of my spirit
tallied the song of the bird” preceding, and “To the tally of my soul”
following. To tally the hermit thrush’s carol of death is to tally the soul, for
what is measured is the degree of sublimity, the agonistic answer to the triple
question: more? less? equal? And the Sublime answer in death’s carol is
surely “more”:
Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,

Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, .
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come,
come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,

When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing
the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
If this grand carol, as magnificent as the Song of Songs which is

Solomon’s, constitutes the tally or image of voice of the soul, then we ought
now to be able to describe that image. To tally, in Whitman’s sense, is at once
to measure the soul’s actual and potential sublimity, to overcome object-loss
and grief, to gratify one’s self sexually by one’s self, to compose the thousand
songs at random of Leaves of Grass, but above all, as Crane said, to bring a
new covenant of brotherhood, and here that pact is new bound with the voice
of the hermit thrush. The bird’s carol, which invokes the oceanic mother of
Whitman’s Sea-Drift cosmos, is clearly not its tally but Whitman’s own, the
transgressive verbal climax of his own family romance. When, in the elegy’s
final section, Whitman chants himself as “Passing the song of the hermit bird
and the tallying song of my soul,” he prepares himself and us for his
abandonment of the image of the lilac. And, in doing so, he prepares us also
for his overwhelming refusal or inability to yield up similarly the darker
image of the tally:
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,

The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul....
The tally is an echo, as an image of voice must be, yet truly it does not
echo the carol of the hermit thrush. Rather, it echoes the earlier Whitman,
of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and his literary father, the Emerson of
the great Essays. But here I require an excursus into poetic theory in order to
explain image of voice and its relation to echo and allusion, and rather than
rely upon as recondite a theorist as myself, I turn instead to a great explainer,
John Hollander, who seems to me our outstanding authority upon all matters
of lyrical form. Here is Hollander upon images of voice and their relation to
the figurative interplay I have called “transumption,” since that is what I take
“tally” to be: Whitman’s greatest transumption or introjection or Crossing of
Identification, his magnificent overcoming both of his own earlier images of
poetic origins and of Emerson’s story of how poetry comes into being,
particularly American poetry. First Hollander, from his forthcoming book,
The Figure of Echo:
... we deal with diachronic trope all the time, and yet we have no
name for it as a class.... the echoing itself makes a figure, and the
interpretive or revisionary power which raises the echo even
louder than the original voice is that of a trope of diachrony....
I propose that we apply the name of the classical rhetoricians’
trope of transumption (or metalepsis in its Greek form) to these
diachronic, allusive figures....
Proper reading of a metaphor demands a simultaneous
appreciation of the beauty of a vehicle and the importance of its
freight.... But the interpretation of a metalepsis entails the
recovery of the transumed material. A transumptive style is to be
distinguished radically from the kind of conceited one which we
106 Harold Bloom
usually associate with baroque poetic, and with English

seventeenth-century verse in particular. It involves an ellipsis,
rather than a relentless pursuit, of further figuration...
Hollander then names transumption as the proper figure for

interpretive allusion, to which I would add only the description that I gave
before in A Map of Misreading: this is the trope-undoing trope, which seeks
to reverse imagistic priorities. Milton crowds all his poetic precursors
together into the space that intervenes between himself and the truth.
Whitman also crowds poetic anteriority—Emerson and the Whitman of
1855–1860—into a little space between the carol of death and the echo
aroused in the soul of the elegist of Lilacs. Emerson had excluded the
questions of sex and death from his own images-of-voice, whether in a verse
chant like Bacchus or a prose rhapsody like The Poet. The earlier Whitman
had made of the deathly ocean at night his maternal image of voice, and we
have heard the hermit thrush in its culmination of that erotic cry. Whitman’s
tally transumes the ocean’s image, of voice, by means of what Hollander calls
an ellipsis of further figuration. The tally notches a restored Narcissism and
the return to the mode of erotic self-sufficiency. The cost is high as it always
is in transumption. What vanishes here in Whitman is the presence of others
and of otherness, as object-libido is converted into ego-libido again. Father
Abraham, the ocean as dark mother, the love of comrades, and even the
daemonic alter ego of the hermit thrush all fade away together. But what is
left is the authentic American image of voice, as the bard brings tally, alone
there in the night among the fragrant pines except for his remaining
comrades, the knowledge of death and the thought of death.
In 1934 Wallace Stevens, celebrating his emergence from a decade’s
poetic silence, boldly attempted a very different transumption of the
Whitmanian images of voice:
It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang....
The tally, in The Idea of Order at Key West, becomes the “ghostlier
demarcations, keener sounds” ending the poem. A year later, Stevens granted
himself a vision of Whitman as sunset in our evening-land:
In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
It is certainly the passing bard of the end of Lilacs, but did he chant that
nothing is final? Still, this is Walt as Moses and as Aaron, leading the poetic
children of Emerson through the American wilderness, and surely Whitman
was always proudly provisional. Yet, the tally of his soul had to present itself
as a finality, as an image of voice that had achieved a fresh priority and a
perpetually ongoing strength. Was that an American Sublime, or only
another American irony? Later in 1935, Stevens wrote a grim little poem
called The American Sublime that seems to qualify severely his intense images
of voice, of the singing girl and of Whitman:
But how does one feel?

One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,

The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?
The questions return us full circle to Emerson’s Bacchus, nearly a

century before:
We buy ashes for bread;

We buy diluted wine....
This is not transumptive allusion, but a repetition of figurations, the

American baroque defeat. But that is a secondary strain in Stevens, as it was
in Emerson and in Whitman. I leap ahead, past Frost and Pound, Eliot and
Williams, past even Hart Crane, to conclude with a contemporary image-of-
voice that is another strong tally, however ruefully the strength regards itself.
108 Harold Bloom
Here is John Ashbery’s The Other Tradition, the second poem in his 1977
volume, Houseboat Days:
They all came, some wore sentiments

Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness
Of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its rays
Through branches of Norfolk Island pine as though
Politely clearing its throat, and all ideas settled
In a fuzz of dust under trees when it’s drizzling:
The endless games of Scrabble, the boosters,
The celebrated omelette au Cantal, and through it
The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices
Of the days, dragging every sexual moment of it
Past the lenses: the end of something.
Only then did you glance up from your book,
Unable to comprehend what had been taking place, or
Say what you had been reading. More chairs
Were brought, and lamps were lit, but it tells
Nothing of how all this proceeded to materialize
Before you and the people waiting outside and in the next
Street, repeating its name over and over, until silence
Moved halfway up the darkened trunks,
And the meeting was called to order.
I still remember
How they found you, after a dream, in your thimble hat,
Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot.
The road home was nicer then. Dispersing, each of the
Troubadours had something to say about how charity
Had run its race and won, leaving you the ex-president
Of the event, and how, though many of these present
Had wished something to come of it, if only a distant
Wisp of smoke, yet none was so deceived as to hanker
After that cool non-being of just a few minutes before,
Now that the idea of a forest had clamped itself
Over the minutiae of the scene. You found this
Charming, but turned your face fully toward night,
Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing
Or caring, although these still live and are generous
And all ways contained, allowed to come and go
Indefinitely in and out of the stockade
They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting

Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.
I am aware that this charming poem urbanely confronts, absorbs and in

some sense seeks to overthrow a critical theory, almost a critical climate, that
has accorded it a canonical status. Stevens’s Whitman proclaims that nothing
is final and that no man shall see the end. Ashbery, a Whitman somehow
more studiously casual even than Whitman, regards the prophets of
belatedness and cheerfully insists that his forgetting or repression will rescue
us at last, even as the Whitmanian or Stevensian evening star absorbs the
night. But the price paid for this metaleptic reversal of American belatedness
into a fresh earliness is the yielding up of Ashbery’s tally or image of voice to
a deliberate grotesquerie. Sexuality is made totally subservient to time, which
is indeed “the end of something,” and poetic tradition becomes an ill-
organized social meeting of troubadours, leaving the canonical Ashbery as
“ex-president / Of the event.” As for the image of voice proper, the
Whitmanian confrontation of the night now declines into: “You found this /
Charming, but turned your face fully toward night, / Speaking into it like a
megaphone, not hearing / Or caring.” Such a megaphone is an apt image for
Paul de Man’s deconstructionist view of poetic tradition, which undoes
tradition by suggesting that every poem is as much a random and gratuitous
event as any human death is.
Ashbery’s implicit interpretation of what he wants to call The Other
Tradition mediates between this vision of poems as being totally cut off from
one another and the antithetical darkness in which poems carry over-
determined relationships and progress towards a final entropy. Voice in our
poetry now tallies what Ashbery in his Syringa, a major Orphic elegy in
Houseboat Days, calls “a record of pebbles along the way.” Let us grant that
the American Sublime is always also an American irony, and then turn back
to Emerson and hear the voice that is great within us somehow breaking
through again. This is Emerson in his journal for August 1859, on the eve of
being burned out, with all his true achievement well behind him; but he gives
us the true tally of his soul:
Beatitudes of Intellect.—Am I not, one of these days, to write

consecutively of the beatitude of intellect? It is too great for
feeble souls, and they are over-excited. The wineglass shakes, and
the wine is spilled. What then? The joy which will not let me sit
in my chair, which brings me bolt upright to my feet, and sends
me striding around my room, like a tiger in his cage, and I cannot
110 Harold Bloom
have composure and concentration enough even to set down in

English words the thought which thrills me—is not that joy a
certificate of the elevation? What if I never write a book or a line?
for a moment, the eyes of my eyes, were opened, the affirmative
experience remains, and consoles through all suffering.
K E R RY C . L A R S O N
Native Models
“T he newspaper is so fleeting,” Whitman once commented while

musing over his career in journalism, “is so like a thing gone as quick as
come; has no life so to speak; its birth and death coterminous” (WWC 4:2).
While comparisons between Leaves of Grass and journalism abound—
Emerson’s quip about the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Tribune comes to
mind—we have found reason to extend Whitman’s analogy along more
precise lines by noting how this co-presence of birth and death haunts the
language of “Song of Myself,” with its “prophetical screams” working their
way to the surface only to be choked off at the moment of emergence. In
view of this threatened foreclosure of beginning and end we can better
understand why Whitman should be so irresistibly drawn to the
parthenogenesis of self-evolving “truths” and other variants on the myth of
“free growth”: it defines the successful elaboration of a rhetoric which, in
securing immediate conviction through its display of “undeniable growth,”
stands outside the need of argument or persuasive demonstration. In this way
authority for his songs of the earth is, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, not to
be imposed but only discovered. But inasmuch as this notion of a self-willed,
uncoerced genesis that neither hastens nor resists its delivery specifies a
dream that both demands and defies representation, the pursuit of “free
growth” and its self-evident truths seek a context for what cannot be
From Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. © 1988 by The University of Chicago.
111
112 Kerry C. Larson
contextualized, seek to affirm what can only be inferred. What results is a

critical hiatus between the moment of conception and the moment of its
accepted “proof,” a hiatus which is in turn responsible for the nightmare of
the prolifically barren or what section twenty-five reveals to be a condition
of overcharged plenitude which, finding no outlet for its energies, threatens
to degenerate into a poetic that “stagnates in its vitals, cowardly and rotten.”1
It may be that the tensions that accrue from the hiatus between initial
acts of founding and their fully verified legitimacy plague any form of
representative speech seeking public acceptance. Certainly, this predicament
applies to the state of the nation Whitman found himself addressing in 1855,
for when the South did eventually withdraw from the Union, its gesture of
defiance merely brought to a head a crisis in constitutional legitimacy which
had been in evidence long before then. Although legislation from 1820
onward made it possible to sustain and patch together the Union on the basis
of compromise over slavery, it also sustained and perpetuated a rupture in the
social contract which only civil war, as it turned out, could remedy. Over the
course of his presidency Lincoln came to interpret this crisis in legitimacy in
terms of a moral hiatus between 1776 and 1789, between the Declaration of
Independence with its guarantee of equality for “all men” and the
Constitution with its notorious silence concerning this same stipulation.
“Four score and seven years ago,” the year of 1776, marked the true
beginning of nationhood, one whose founding Lincoln likewise evoked as a
virgin birth conceived in liberty and brought forth by the Founders, less the
“fathers” of the new nation than its midwife. In this “recontracting of society
on the basis of the Declaration as [the] fundamental charter,”2 as one analyst
describes this revisionary gesture, Lincoln anticipated the day when “this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom”—a rebirth, in other
words, which would at last close the gap between the original moment of the
nation’s founding and its final, incontestable legitimacy. Needless to say,
executing this goal exacted a staggering price, as the thousands slain on the
fields of Gettysburg attested.
Whitman’s motive, as we have seen, was to settle the matter of
legitimacy itself by cultivating a song where the impasse between creation
and validation would be a nonexistent issue. As the better President, his
would be the naturalized decree of the executive “who judges not as a judge
judges but as the sun falling upon a helpless thing.” From what we have seen
so far of “Song of Myself,” however, it would appear that it is Whitman
himself who is the helpless thing the sun falls upon; and while he does not
enlist the sacrifice of slain soldiers to defend his self-evident truths his own
ordeal with proof does require throttled windpipes and suicidal ventures in
Native Models 113
frantic vindication of his calling. To this extent, both literary and political
institutions share the common plight of devising a vocabulary of justification
which is not revealed to be inadequate or self-incriminating the moment it is
asserted.
While the specter of disunion obviously lent added urgency to
Whitman’s quest, the importance of literary institutions should not be
overlooked, particularly because Whitman’s chosen method for
“recontracting” society relies so heavily on the belief that literature alone is
best qualified to define and vindicate the essential worth of a people and its
culture. As he writes in Democratic Vistas, “the central point in any nation,
and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others,
is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous
lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and
reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance) of American democracy” (PW
2:365–66). In truth, “two or three really original American poets ... would
give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most
needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties”
(PW 2:368). With this appeal for “national expressers” Whitman adds his
voice to a long chorus of pleas for an indigenous literature “fit for native
models” and beyond the reach of the courtly muses of Europe. As various
voices grouped under the rubric of literary nationalism, that chorus reached
its peak in the interval falling between the nation’s founding and the advent
of those writers said to constitute the American Renaissance. Because it
forms something of a hiatus in its own right, this period is by all accounts
held to be among the most dismal in American letters, a cultural wasteland
barren of talent and devoid of genius. This is not only the twentieth-century
view but a contemporaneous assessment, for, as the periodicals, pamphlets,
and fugitive essays of the first half of the nineteenth-century overwhelmingly
attest, glorious predictions on the destined accomplishments of a National
American Literature routinely coincided with the pained recognition, by
turns defiant and apologetic, that It had not yet arrived. As early as the turn
of the century Fisher Ames could in characteristic fashion begin a meditation
on the prospects for “American Literature” by questioning “whether we are
equal to the Europeans or only a race of degenerate creoles,” while one
generation later visitor Harriet Martineau was moved to comment that “if
the American mind be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to
have no mind at all.”3
Thus, over the same period that witnessed disputes concerning the
constitutional legitimacy of the nation there also arose debate regarding its
cultural legitimacy. Criticism today affirms that Whitman and a select
114 Kerry C. Larson
handful of contemporaries were instrumental in laying this second

controversy to rest; in the words of R. W. B. Lewis Leaves of Grass provided
“full poetic realization” to “the stored-up abundance of hope”4 that
accumulated over the decades-long struggle for literary distinction. This of
course is a retrospective judgment which draws implicit support from the still
more widespread belief that Leaves of Grass did not supplement or revise an
established tradition in American poetry so much as single-handedly
invented one. To a large extent, that belief is indisputable: there is no need
to repeat, once again, that Walt Whitman is not Joel Barlow. Even so, there
is perhaps a certain irony in crediting a work like “Song of Myself” with
finally settling the issue of artistic legitimacy in the New World when that is
a question so much at stake within the poem itself. More particularly, the
intrinsically paradoxical act of openly asserting what must by definition be
only inferred (“only what proves itself is so, only what nobody denies is so”)
not only specifies a quandary for Whitman’s text but defines a long-standing
dilemma among the many advocates for an “American Genius” who
preceded him. If they too believed that “democracy can never prove itself
beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art” (PW
2:365), they were also bound, like the author of “Song of Myself,” to come
up against the contradictions involved in mounting an argument for the
virtues of self-evidence. The difficulty we have seen Whitman encounter in
integrating his self-evident truths into “Song of Myself” has, in other words,
a literary history of its own, one that considerably problematizes his hopeful
division between those flawed instruments of sociability (“Constitutions,
legislative and judicial ties”) and the universal politics of “archetypal poems.”
A brief inquiry into the procedures of literary nationalism can usefully
detain us, then, not so much for suggesting a preview of better things to
come but for dramatizing in its own right and on a more extensive scale the
whole awkward business of undertaking to justify “that which has not yet
come into existence.”5 No doubt it is this paradoxical imperative that stands
behind the often circular and seemingly interminable debates that grip what
Edwin Fussell describes, mock-heroically, as “The Age of Growing
Discomfort and Inadequate Remedy”: whether, for example, “Americanness”
is best displayed through the treatment of strictly national subjects or
whether it is best evinced by a thoroughgoing internationalism; whether we
cannot have a genuine American literature until we have a genuine literary
criticism to appraise it or whether that criticism will falter so long as it lacks
models worthy of appraisal; whether genius will not emigrate to the New
World so long as the country’s epoch-making achievements are too imposing
for the imagination or whether genius must surely languish so long as it
Native Models 115
remains bereft of a heritage of tradition rich enough to sustain it. As with any
caricature, this oversimplifies a good deal. Still, it seems safe to generalize
that amid the proliferating assessments of and proposed solutions to the
scandal of “our cultural inferiority” each would-be prophet of the American
genius shared the common plight of “trying to be midwife to the unborn
homunculus.”6 With the onset of the 1840s—coeval with the first stirrings of
Whitman’s literary apprenticeship—such frustrations were becoming
increasingly apparent and the subject was fast acquiring all the hallmarks of
a public cliché: trite but inescapable, something of a bad joke but irresistibly
calling for comment. During the same period it is perhaps inevitable that we
should find a substantial weariness with, if not outright revulsion toward,
“our figure of anticipation,” a backlash illustrated in such works as
Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face,” Poe’s “How To Write A Blackwood
Article,” and Longfellow’s Kavanagh. No doubt the locus classicus of this
antinationalist trend remains James Russell Lowell’s attack on “Nationality
in Literature.” First appearing in the North American Review in 1849,
Lowell’s essay is predominately parodic in spirit, scrupulously taking up so as
to lampoon nationalism’s stock divisions (imitation versus originality;
Anglophilia versus Anglophobia), its stock imagery (the “cultivation” of
culture; the “gestation” of genius), and its stock anxieties (shame,
embarrassment, betrayal). He is as much amused by the craven deference
paid by his countrymen to European reviewers as he is scornful of mindless
demands for instant recognition, “as if [literature] were some school exercise
in composition to be handed in by a certain day.” Observing that “our
criticism has oscillated between the two extremes of depreciation and over-
praise,” Lowell argues that the forty-year campaign for literary
independence has proven to be not only futile but in many respects
pernicious. “Literature survives,” he claims, “not because of its nationality,
but despite it.”7
Yet Lowell’s polemic, while astute in perceiving an ironic complicity
between the widespread belief in the poverty of American letters and the
impoverishing effects of nationalistic discourse, is also naive in assuming that
once this complicity is identified it can be somehow dispensed with. For an
element of antinationalism had always inhered in the balked procedures of a
discourse which, in Hamlet-like distress, could but “make mouths at the
invisible event.” Mounting a critique on literary nationalism, even by 1849,
could only be an anachronistic enterprise, since that is a project carried out,
with varying degrees of explicitness, in the pages of nationalism itself.
Speaking on the “peculiar motives to intellectual exertion in America”
twenty-five years before Lowell, Edward Everett catches himself up in the
116 Kerry C. Larson
midst of his Phi Beta Kappa address with the reminder that “it is impossible
to tell what garments our native muses will wear. To foretell our literature
would be to create it.” With that concession in hand there is little left for the
orator to do but look back with fondness on the revolutionary exploits of the
past and dismiss with contempt those cynical enough to brand his own
prophecy “the chimerical imagination of a future indefinitely removed.”8 But
Everett’s disclaimer serves to project the skeptic within himself. Justification
runs aground here not simply because there is no literature deemed worthy
enough to justify (despite the recent work of Bryant, Cooper, or Irving, no
American authors are cited by Everett); his speech also fights a rearguard
action, defending itself against its own premises. In more explicit fashion E.
T. Channing abjures readers of the North American Review in 1816 to “get out
of the bad habit of dictating to great minds.... Genius is not willing to be
interfered with and told how to work, where to travel and what to admire.
And yet there are men who go so far as to hold up models for imitation and
standards of taste.” No less emphatically than Lowell, Channing suggests
that the greatest obstacle to literary development may be found in the
moment of its advocacy. Not foreign models alone are to be deplored, “we
must also be shy of ourselves.”9 Some, to be sure, would take solace in
affirming the modest proposal that “a national literature uniting all the
requisites of excellence ... has as yet perhaps not existed [and] it may be
impossible to create such a one, but it is not therefore idle to aim at it.”10
Among the more prescient spokesmen, however, the gap between prophecy
and accomplishment was too imposing to ignore. As often as not their
writing stops short at the divide signaled in Nietzsche’s uncompromising
distinction: “of what is great one must either be silent or speak with
greatness.”11 Enjoying neither luxury, they alternately longed for one or the
other. Even so tireless a standard-bearer as William Cullen Bryant is moved
to confess that “were our rewards to be bestowed only on what is intrinsically
meritorious, merit alone would have any apology for appearing before the
public.”12 To the degree that the only possible proof for the cultural
legitimacy of the nation lay in the undeniable evidence of its results,
nationalism confronts a double scandal: not only the mortifying
“delinquency” of American letters but the corollary recognition that to
defend imminence of genius was thereby to register the fact of its absence.
Prophecy, too, required an apology for appearing before the public, since
merely to issue yet another call for a “Majestic Literature, self-reared, self-
sustaining, self-vindicated”13 was from the outset to betray the cause. Or, as
Fisher Ames expresses this predicament with disarming candor in the first
paragraph of his early essay (1802), “it might, indeed, occur to our discretion
Native Models 117
that, as the only admissible proof of literary excellence is the measure of its
effects, our national claims ought to be abandoned as worthless the moment
they are found to need asserting.”14
Against this background there is ushered in the figure of Emerson,
expounding the private infinitude of the Central Man. Coming in the wake
of a generation given to lamenting the folly of holding Homer up against
Joel Barlow or Plato against Thomas Paine, it was of course Emerson’s
vocation to insist that our genius is more native than we think. To the
chronic rejoinder that “a right perception of the genius of others is not
genius,” Emerson would simply strike out the negative, recovering the
usurped “majesty of [his] own rejected thoughts” in “every work of genius.”
This does not mean that Emerson thereby proposes, in one stroke, to
overthrow or transcend the massive inferiority complex known as literary
nationalism. He insists on this impasse with a candor that allows him to
economize on its grievances more effectively. “Self-Reliance” he succinctly
defines as “precisely that secret to make your supposed deficiency
redundancy. If I am true, the theory is, the very want of action, my very
impotency, shall become a greater excellency than all skill and toil.”15
Discovering possibility where Nietzsche would see only impossibility,
Emerson in effect undertakes to speak with greatness and be silent at the
same time. In the very magnitude of individual incapacity he posits individual
power, converting imaginative poverty into imaginative plenitude. One
reason the transparent eyeball epiphany in Nature and the catatonic
breakdown in the opening pages of “Experience” have gained such notoriety
is because they are so rare; it is far more common for Emerson to view
himself “a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator” (W 2:268), one
who surveys “the awful gap” between the “promise of power and the shabby
performance.” Such distancing holds true for even the most ringing of
affirmations. “Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense”
is a sentence that does double duty, obeying even as it thematizes its own
imperative. Emptied of content, the status of Emerson’s “latent conviction”
becomes synonymous with speaking on its behalf, thus precluding the need
for further action. “Act if you like—but you do it at your own peril,” he
writes in Representative Men. “Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show
me a man who has acted, and who has not been a victim of his action” (W
4:266–67).16 Every heart must also vibrate to that iron law: to invest one’s
words with the force of consequence, to shoot the gap from prophetic motive
to living deed is a prelude to self-betrayal. Emersonian discourse, oppositely,
will not fall prey to such betrayals, will not resign itself to the embarrassment
of discovering its claims disproven the moment they are found to need
118 Kerry C. Larson
asserting. Rather, as I suggested previously, he allegorizes this predicament

by seeing it played out in the works of others. In what amounts to a
remarkable transference, betrayal no longer identifies a threat impinging
upon one’s writing but is projected out and fully mastered in the aggressive
act of reappropriation Emerson calls reading. Perusing the past masters, the
self-reliant reader reads a fate which is the reverse of his own. Clinging fast
to his poverty he finds in the deeds of genius a strength that weakens and
finally enslaves. So it is said of Shakespeare that “he carries a wealth that
beggars his own.”
In undertaking to actualize “the great psalm of the Republic”
Whitman, as we know, could rest content only in speaking as, not of, the
Central Man. The poet’s “every word ... must tell in action.” From an
Emersonian standpoint the consequence is as predictable as it is devastating:
a musclebound bard seized with “Buffalo strength [but] choked by Titanic
abdomen.”17 What Emerson glorifies as redundant deficiency Whitman
finds rendered back into the vexations of a deficient redundancy. So section
twenty-five accosts a voice surcharged with a wealth that beggars the poet’s
own. While it would be irresponsible to reduce the complexity of any
author’s work by threading it through the camel’s eye of literary nationalism,
the contrast can certainly be made that most American writers of Whitman’s
generation accommodated the imperative of fame by ironizing it—
Hawthorne’s Ambitious Guest, Melville’s Pierre and such megalomaniacs as
William Wilson are each in their own way grotesque overreachers whose
overblown quest for commemoration merely dooms them to madness,
suicide, or simple oblivion. Whitman, too, had begun his poetic career stuck
head first in this vein, joylessly churning out commentaries on “The
Punishment of Pride,” “Fame’s Vanity,” and, of course, “Ambition.” Yet in
forging an aesthetic “as generous and as worthy” as the country it was to
depict, Whitman came to perceive the need for a rhetoric purified of
“ignominious distinctions.” What remained for him to devise, in turn, was a
structure of expression capable of fending off the disabling interaction
between excess and deficiency as well as the disrelation between demand and
response this interaction suggests.
Before going on to explore the impact of these issues on “Song of
Myself,” it might be useful to stand back and take stock of Whitman’s
affiliations to the background just outlined. Needless to say, he counted
himself a staunch advocate in the drive for cultural independence and from
his editorial post across the East River voiced his support for the Young
America movement sweeping Manhattan in the 1840s. Firmly persuaded that
“the top-most proof of a race is its own born poetry” (PW 2:474), he devoted
Native Models 119
essays to this “sine qua non” throughout the half-century of his writing career.
(As a late as 1891 he was responding to yet another request from the North
American Review for a piece on “American National Literature.”) Yet it is
worth noting that the author of “Song of Myself” was more than aware of
the hopeless impasse that nationalism had turned out to be.
Caution—not to blaart constantly for Native American Models,

literature, etc., and bluster out “nothing foreign.” The best way
to promulge native American models and literature is to supply
such forcible and superb specimens of the same that will, by their
own volition, move to the head of all and put foreign models in
the second class.
I think today it would be best not at all to bother with arguments

against foreign models or to help American models—but just go
on supplying American models. (N&F, p. 30)
“Song of Myself” is scrupulous in honoring the spirit of such an injunction:

it is careful to downplay the long-existent topos of translatio studii or the
“Westering of Genius” (this being reserved for “Facing West from
California’s Shores”); it incorporates tableaux from American history (the
storming of the Alamo; the old sea fight) with enough casualness to distance
it safely from Joel Barlow’s epic disasters; it abandons teleological narratives
of cultural progress for the plotless adventures of a “kosmos”; it rewrites epic
categories by subsuming them under the shared mythology of a celebrating
self.
By 1855, then, Whitman did not need to be reminded that “literature
comes not when it is bidden,” that “you cannot force its growth.” We can
take this to mean something more than the fact that there will be no hailing
of Columbia in Whitman’s song by gaining a clearer sense of his cautious
treatment of apostrophe at large. Few passages in Leaves of Grass succeed
quite so brilliantly in coming to terms with this precaution as the opening
lines of “Song of Myself,” which eschew the ritual of invocation for a simple
performative, “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” The subject/object
dualism conventional to address is here conflated for what appears as an
inextricable fusion between the “I” that speaks and the “I” that is spoken, as
if being claimed no permanence beyond the immediate moment it is uttered
into existence.18 There seems, in addition, no specifiable center or locus for
this singing self, for, in what we can now recognize as a characteristic trait of
Whitman’s “arrivings and partings,” no sooner does voice invest the speaker
120 Kerry C. Larson
than it is dispersed through the landscape as so many “words ... loosed to the
eddies of the wind.” Words evoked in this way become stray interjections
(“the belched words of speech”), passing reverberations (“echoes, ripples,
buzzed whispers”), substances of sound and sight divorced from the
abstractions of meaning and returned to the seductive power of a preverbal
energy called the “lull” or “hum” of the soul’s “valved voice.” Their
significance inheres in the random energies they release. The manner of
speech is more epideitic than prophetic, content to luxuriate in the good
fortune of “my respiration and inspiration ... the play of shine and shade.”
Thus it is worthwhile to note that as section three goes on to draw up a host
of polarities—“beginning and end,” “learned and unlearned,” “I and this
mystery”—these antithetical pairings are not so much subsumed as
suspended. His lines want us to know that they are willing to countenance
difference without wishing to absolve it: “Out of the dimness opposite equals
advance, / Always substance ... always a knit of identity, always distinction,
always a breed of life” (CRE, p. 31). To exclude nothing but exclusion, deny
nothing but denial, allows the poet even to shrug aside, with a kind of
wearied acknowledgment, the world-dividing logic of nationalism; it is
enough for the time being to be told “showing the best and dividing it from
the worst age vexes age.”
The opening lines of “Song of Myself” continue to tantalize their
ablest interpreters; so deeply assimilated have they become into the
American grain that it is difficult now to imagine them as anything but
inevitable. Part of that mystique, as I have intimated, indeed consists in the
power of these lines to foster the impression that the work of prophecy has
already been done. In the leisurely combination of engagement and
withdrawal, liberation and restraint—both in and out of the game, leaning
and loafing—utterance occupies a perspective unqualified by the demand for
justification. His words are willing to risk obscurity in order to savor that
imperturbability, for “to elaborate is no avail ... learned and unlearned feel
that it is so ... while others discuss I am silent ... I have no mockings and
arguments, I witness and wait” (CRE, pp. 31, 32). The point would not be
that words fall short of the experience they seek to capture (for example, the
poet’s experience is “mystical”) but that nothing could be added to a
knowledge (call it “the perfect fitness and equanimity of things”) that is not
already enjoyed. (In this respect, to be told that “Backward I see in my own
days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders” merely
corroborates an inference already induced.) Adding to this sense that “my
acceptation and realization” have been accepted and realized in the moment
of being spoken is Whitman’s use of the time-honored device of the Homeric
Native Models 121
legend or pars epica, by which the God or Numen is made present to the
narrative through a recitation of its genealogical attributes, thus skirting
overt supplication.19 Though dusted off briefly in the opening lines (“My
tongue, every atom of my blood, forma from this soil, this air, / Born here of
parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same”), the
device receives its most extended treatment in the much-acclaimed “spiritual
awakening,” retrospectively told in the fifth section, where the soul’s tongue
is “plung’d to my bare-stript heart”:
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and

knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my
own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my
own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are the leaves stiff or drooping in the
fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones,
elder, mullein, and poke-weed.
(CRE, p. 33)
Though the communion is said to surpass the earth, it seems fitting that we
should be returned to its particularity. Though section five records what
might be called a primal scene of voicing, its effect is not to hasten or
individuate visionary powers but again to diffuse perception through the
random, luminous commonplaces of the world.
“Not prophecy! NOT prophecy!” thunders William Carlos Williams,
“no ideas but in things.” If the verse discussed thus far hardly reaches so shrill
a pitch, it does seek to mute the ambitious sweep of prophetic discourse by
tracing out the metonymic deviations of “indirection.” With respect to the
latter scholarly opinion and the poet are in close agreement, for both see in
the diffusion of Whitman’s “limitless leaves” not only a “theme [which] is
creative and has vista” but the distinguishing feature that sets “Walt
Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” apart from “the empty American
parnassus” of his predecessors. In keeping with the prescription that “the
great psalm of the Republic” is “to be indirect and not direct” most admirers
122 Kerry C. Larson
properly extol “a strain of enthusiastic, receptive, indeterminate openness to

experience which finds expression in a loose, unstructured form.”20 Under the
terms of our discussion we could rephrase this to say, without too much
forcing, that a poetics of indirection must consider itself to be neither a
conversion nor an inversion of past values but something like a convocation
of them. “Not to repel or destroy but to accept, fuse, rehabilitate” (CRE, p.
196) defines the “profound lesson of reception,” an integrative, paratactic
discourse (the rhetoric of “tallying”) which, as we have seen, excludes nothing
but exclusion. “Indirection” finds its calling in suspending evaluative acts
altogether; it manifests its “indeterminate openness to experience” by abiding
in a timeless present, thrusting aside “all talk of the beginning and the end.”
At the same time we have noted how “Song of Myself” ’s “profound lesson of
reception” is predicated on one essential exclusion: it situates the moment of
proof before or beyond the present act of writing, variously thinking of it as
antedating the text (poetic election being recast as a remembered event, the
coupling of body and soul) or postdating it (awaiting future validation, as in
the pledge to “stop this night and day with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems”). Yet what we have come to sense in our reading is the enormous
strain of upholding such mediations, a strain evinced as the present shrinks
into the fusions and confusions of beginning and end.
What is the direction of indirection? In posing this question under the
guise of another (“What is the grass?”), Whitman responds with a series of
propositions designed to show, as might be expected, that no (single) answer
is possible. As with Ishmael’s Leviathan, there are as many significances to
Whitman’s “uniform hieroglyphic” as there are consciousnesses to interpret
it. Electing to “guess at” its multiple connotations, the speaker’s tour de force
combines a number of associations, ranging from the personal (“the flag of
my disposition”), metaphysical (“the handkerchief of the Lord”), political
(“sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones”) to, lastly, a meditation
on death (“the beautiful uncut hair of graves”):
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring
taken soon out of their mothers’ laps.
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of

old mothers,
Native Models 123
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
(CRE, p. 34)
Something of being “both in and out of the game” persists in this delicate
revery, though at least one subtle change in emphasis is worth noting. For
the first time in the poem voice is invested with a signifying force; as the
speaker soon “perceive[s] after all so many uttering tongues” and remarks
that “they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing,” utterance
takes on a prominence that extends beyond the subliminal resonance of a
“lull” or “hum.” Now hoping to “translate the hints” of the grave, the
speaker exchanges the pose of receptivity for hermeneutic appeal. It is as if,
in passing from the autoerotic communion of tongue and heart to the
broader question of genealogy, Whitman is acknowledging that self-creation
is not enough, that legitimation, to be true, requires sources of validation
outside the self. What this source consists of is, unsurprisingly, the principle
of reproduction, the power of his leaves to prevail over closure.
Consequently, as the poet next discovers that the furtive “hints” of his leaves
remain inscrutable, so far from lamenting this he presently launches into
ringing affirmations of life outlasting the grave: “All goes onward and
outward, nothing collapses”:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and
children?
They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does
not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
(CRE, p. 34)
But what materializes out of this ceaseless regeneration of meaning is,

paradoxically, meaning’s fixation. Distinct from the accumulating sprouts of
section twenty-nine, where the temptation to symbolize is carefully resisted,
here we do find the poet editorializing on what “the smallest sprouts show.”
His protests notwithstanding, there is a sudden effort to “translate the hints”
of “so many uttering tongues” and this effort is not without a discernible
strain, as suggested in the tortuous anacoluthon of the last two lines cited
124 Kerry C. Larson
above, whose congested phrasing, syntactical inversions, and confusing shifts

of tense carry the reader anywhere but forward. The vision of unarrested flux
staggers under the weight of sheer assertion.
Viewed from a broader perspective it is clear that the section registers
a split between a mood of random, contented surmise and blunt, contentious
expostulation. In “this inextricable hodge-podge you find at once beautiful
phrases and silly gabble,” charged one commentator eight years after
Whitman’s death in 1892; “tender imagination and insolent commonplace”
collide so as to perpetrate “literary anarchy and a complete confusion of
values.”21 Others have more recently deplored Whitman’s “prophetic
shrillness” at this stage in the poem,22 though we need to go beyond simple
condemnation and ask why such overinsistence occurs. That the section
should be so divided against itself denotes, it might be said, a sudden rift
between a poetry of diffusion whose signifier (the grass) ranges effortlessly
through a field of significances and a poetry of reduction which seeks relief
from such indeterminacy. Yet, as was noted in the discussion of the rivalry
between the silent latency of “folded buds” and the tyrannies of “Speech,”
this view too swiftly polarizes what can be more profitably seen as a dialectic
exchange. For what is striking about the end of section six is the way that it
enacts what it appears to prohibit, the way it protests against reductiveness
in a manifestly reductive fashion. The defiance of death and all terminations
works to overdetermine indeterminacy. His lines, in effect, subvert what they
cannot ultimately condone: a self-evolving chain of correspondences,
“behavior lawless as snowflakes, words simple as grass ... laughter and
naivete.” The wish for this diffusion cannot be sustained any more
comfortably than the drive to uphold its significance can be resisted.
Stranded somewhere between both impulses, the myth of “free growth”
threatens to harden into dogma.
“To impose is not to discover,” Stevens warned. And once the
uncompromising force of that imposition nears consciousness we fend it off
by cleaving all the more adamantly to possibility. Cleave to it, in effect, with
a bitterness that seems to only further drain it of significance: “It is possible,
possible, possible. It must be possible.” The difficulty facing Steven’s
predecessor, more easily resolved in theory than practice, is both obvious and
acute. How does one propound the ideology of “free growth” without
betraying its principles? How does a discourse that forswears the
categorization of all value establish its own? To trace out the evolution of
section six is to witness Whitman’s struggle to accommodate his text to, in
Richard Poirier’s succinct definition, an aesthetic “so devoted to the activity
of creation that it denies finality to the result of that activity, its objects and
Native Models 125
formulations. Art is an action and not the product of an action.”23 As an

attempt to characterize “the place of style in American literature,” this
readily names the central aspiration of indirection: that no element in the
text predetermine the course of its outcome. Yet while Poirier’s
generalization can certainly stand as an accurate paraphrase of Whitman’s
ambition it remains an equivocal account of his achievement. The quest for a
“style continually fluid, leading on to shapes not yet apprehended and never
to be fixed,”24 identifies the project “Song of Myself” is pressed against, here
more prosecuted by than prosecuting. Peering into the ominous richness of
the grave, Whitman sees not only the simulacrum of womb and tomb but
their composite in the macabre figure of “offspring taken soon out of their
mothers’s laps.” What appears to presage the quickening of a new birth
suggests as well its simultaneous demise.25 Halted at a threshold which may
be no threshold at all, the development of Whitman’s conceit, itself
something of a stillbirth, gropes toward an imagined bodily totality but
succeeds in listing the disjecta membra of the grave: breasts, heads, laps,
mouths, and tongues. Swerving from this phantasmagoria the poet concludes
that nothing may conclude, and in the stridency of these assertions we
overhear the anxiety that has set them in motion. The nemesis of
foreclosure—“and did not wait at the end to arrest it and ceas’d the moment
life appear’d”—persists. As we noted in reference to “Scented Herbage of My
Breast,” closure, because it is feared to have come too soon, will therefore
not come at all.
The American writer, observes Leslie Fiedler, “is forever beginning,”
which is of course another way of saying that the American writer neither
begins nor ends but is endlessly doing both at the same time.26 I have been
arguing that the drama of the excluded middle takes on a special urgency in
“Song of Myself” since it marks that moment when Whitman’s text
confronts its “final merit” or “plenum of proof.” Something thought to have
pressed before or beyond the margins of representation breaks back into the
present moment of writing, shutting down the chances for free growth
before they can be set in motion. Proof wreaks havoc on temporality not by
unraveling the continuity between beginning and end (this Whitman has
already claimed to have done) but by condensing these terms with a swiftness
that elides any middle ground capable of sustaining indirection’s
“indeterminate openness to experience.” Time will always be out of joint for
the revelations of proof so far as it underwrites that value which, like the
grave’s “so many uttering tongues,” must and must not be translated.
Representation is not thereby defrauded of its claims to legitimacy so much
as it is preempted by the knowledge that any such claim can have no place in
126 Kerry C. Larson
this song. As discourse falters between the imperative for autochthonous

growth (“just go on supplying native models”) and the prohibition against
coercion (“you cannot force its growth”), prolepsis consumes metonymy,
disclosing the end of every quest in the moment of its inception. Clearly,
there can be little advantage in devising ways to anticipate the onset of this
crisis since anticipation—the specter of foreclosure—itself defines the nature
of that crisis. Looking back on section three, we read:
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;

As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side
through the night, and withdraws at the peep of day
with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling
the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and

scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two,
and which is ahead?
(CRE, pp. 31–32)
Much as this asks to be read as yet another instance of the kind of good-
humored histrionics displayed in Whitman’s expostulation with “Speech,”
there is genuine panic in it as well. We see the cross-purposes at once: value,
to be secured, must be banished; its sanction will be its disappearance—“in
the ground out of sight.” This is not of course the explicit burden of
Whitman’s mocking question, whose satire we may imagine to be leveled at
Lowell’s witless crew of nationalists impatiently clamoring for cultural
vindication, “as if it were some school exercise to be handed in by a certain
day.” And yet, as the fiercely overwrought denunciation called down upon
the eyes attests, Whitman too wants not only proof but ocular proof. The
godly insemination swelling the house with its plenty—perhaps harking back
to the “houses and rooms” of the opening page or ahead to “the faint red
roofs of mouths”—again lays bare the collusion between prolepsis and proof.
Characteristically, postponement is not equated with the mere deferral of
action but a kind of fast-forwarding of vision that prefigures the outcome of
the journey before it has gotten under way. Voice screaming at vision is in
this context scarcely distinguishable from vision berating Speech, each
Native Models 127
gesture standing as a self-reproach against the fetishizing of “proof,” the

overvaluation of “value.
Later editions saw fit to drop the explicit reference to “God” as that
“hugging and loving bed-fellow” who steals away at daybreak, though this
deletion should not entirely obscure awareness of the topos being toyed with
in this vignette. The petition to draw down a God from the heavens so as to
authorize and guide the poet’s calling has a rich heritage in English prophetic
tradition. So Milton calls on his muse (“Descend from Heaven, Urania”) as
another loving bedfellow who “visit’st my slumbers nightly” and who is
requested “still govern thou my song ... when morn purples the east.” This
“harrowing of the skies” persists through various odes of the eighteenth
century and certain Romantic lyrics with enough prominence to be labeled
“the descendental theme” by Geoffrey Hartman.27 It stands behind the
voyeuristic glimpse of the mating of God and the Enthusiast Fancy in
Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” as well as Blake’s striking image of
Milton entering Los’s left foot. Whether Whitman had this cast of allusions
in mind is at best uncertain, though as Abrams has established the topos in
all likelihood reaches back to the apocalyptic marriage of heaven and earth,
a Biblical precedent with which Whitman was certainly familiar.28 Yet
however he chanced upon this conceit it remains paradigmatic of Whitman’s
song that no sooner is this sign of election made manifest than anxiety over
its accreditation takes hold. Because there is little or no interval between the
promise of divine conception and the judgment to be passed upon it, vision
never takes flight but turns back on the text to take stock of a value still in
the throes of development. And in turning back it must be turned aside, as if
there could be no alternative between value as an invisible immanence (“Do
you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?”) and its fate
as redundant energy (“Come now you conceive too much ...”). Thus it is
hard to say whether Whitman’s dalliance with this prophetic theme breaks
off because it has lost its efficacy for him or because he wants too much from
it.29 Preferring description to invocation, the speaker does not of course
petition his god; here as with his duel with the sun he makes good on his
pledge of “not asking the sky to come down to my good-will, / But scattering
it freely forever” (CRE, 41). But that is because the object of his calling is no
more Urania than the “Me Myself.” His true muse is “the value,” the one
element in his discourse which cannot be invoked.
Fetishism, from this standpoint, may be too inexact a term to apply to
the quandary laid open by these ciphering eyes. From the “bard Elect” of The
Prelude we learn of comparable misgivings over the tyranny of sight, “the
most despotic of our senses,” and by this we understand Wordsworth’s need
128 Kerry C. Larson
to coax the growth of his mind beyond a slavish adherence to external

stimuli. To the untrained sensibility the “bodily eye,” abstracted from the
other senses and “thus sitting in judgement,” wields “absolute dominion,”
often resulting in “that false secondary power, by which we create
distinctions, then / Deem that our puny boundaries are things / Which we
perceive, and not which we have made.”30 Fetishism on this showing
involves a solipsism that outwits itself; the mind enthralled in the worship of
“graven images” fails to recognize these as its own invention. A
Wordsworthian poetics aspires to counter this deadening syndrome by
pursuing a declared symbiosis of mind and Nature that “half perceives and
half creates.” As we have learned from Hartman the outer, “bodily eye” must
be harmonized with inner illumination.31 (A roughly analogous partnership
is evoked early on in “Song of Myself” when Whitman, in speaking of “my
soul” and “all that is not my soul”—“I and this mystery”—declares “lacks
one, lacks both, and the unseen is proven by the seen, / Till that becomes
unseen and receives proof in its turn” [(CRE, p. 31].) Yet, leaving aside for the
moment the tendency of objects to surge past the “fluid and attaching
character” with a swiftness that precludes visual fixation, the problem of
perception in Whitman requires different emphasis. To stigmatize “that false
secondary power” of the mind is to entertain, however provisionally, a
detachment sufficient to isolate and analyze its proclivities, to posit a
hierarchy of values serviceable to “this our high argument.” Always sensitive
to the twin threats of a entranced passivity before Nature or an aggrandizing
mastery over it, Wordsworth’s mature verse incorporates a finely wrought
system of checks and balances capable of adjudicating between what may be
credited as authentic vision and what may in turn discredit it. In Whitman
the terms for any such metacommentary undergo a double fate, hardening as
they dissolve. Just as proofs dismissal insures the persistence of its return, so
does this recurrence touch off the panic of further denial. Given the
extraordinary compression of this dialectic and the frightening rapidity with
which it is set in motion, it becomes apparent that the feared reduction of
value (whether through the idolatry of “graven images” or the “bald
literalism” that “forthwith cipher[s] and show[s] me to a cent”) cannot be
attributed solely to the despotism of the eye. Rather, this fear permeates the
world of “Song of Myself” at large; irreducible to any single dramatic
encounter, it is most discernible as a prevenient, prospective energy, if not
quite in the poem then visibly looming before it. Indeed, because no external
image or “companionable form” gets attached to “the value” in the passage
above, fetishism remains a danger in prospect only—not so much the
product of a deluded, erring imagination as it is for Whitman something
Native Models 129
already ingrained in the starved expectations of a culture breathless to

proclaim “An American bard at last!,” the undissuable force of whose “native
models” will “move to the head of all and put foreign models in the second
class.”
“To foretell our literature would be to create it,” Everett had declared,
as if word and deed, wish and fulfillment could be joined together in one
irrevocable stroke. If political independence had been “spoken into
existence,” might not cultural liberty enjoy a similar fate? For, as Everett
goes on to reason, he who could give shape to the anticipation of our literary
destiny would perforce lay that anticipation to rest, just as “the gorgeous
vision of the Iliad” was realized not in “the full detail of circumstance” but
precisely in that moment when its “dim conception ... burst through the soul
of Homer.”32 The instant translation of the “dim conception” into its
finished structure identifies the dream and the peculiar burden of
“indirection,” which takes up the formidable task of conferring instant
credibility for its own dim conceptions while insuring that each fresh “start”
will not be its own “finish.” In later years, once enshrined as the Good Gray
Poet, Whitman would strike a more equable pose on the matter, patiently
reminding his listeners in 1881 that “long, long are the processes of the
development of Nationality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become
the prophecy of the unseen” (PW 2:486). Still, it is measure of the uneasy and
often tortuous alliance between perception and validation in the Leaves that
when the 1855 Preface turns to the visionary powers of the poet emphasis
does not fall on the privileged vastation of the seer. Sight is instead called
forth as that supreme source of acknowledgment, insusceptible to
disconfirmation precisely because it tolerates no gap between what it sees
and what it confirms. Seeing is believing: “Who knows the curious mystery
of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is
removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the
spiritual world” (PW 2:438–39). Broadly speaking, this is the “curious
mystery” that prevails throughout the sections, predominantly visual in
character, that intervene between the encounter with the grave’s “uttering
tongues” in section six and the subsequent encounter with the sun in section
twenty-five. In them Whitman’s “commission,” his “acceptation and
realization,” is to harness the eye’s pre-judicial energy, to get proof out of
sight—in the sense of both deriving immediate confirmation from the eyes
and of thereby removing the question of confirmation altogether. Following
the shrill declamations against the “collapse” of life into death at the end of
section six, section eight starts off by recouping some semblance of narrative
continuity in the triple image of birth (“the little one sleeps in its cradle”),
130 Kerry C. Larson
sex (“the youngster and the red-faced girl”), and death (“the suicide sprawls
on the bloody floor”), each scene registered without comment by the
witnessing “I.” Seemingly everywhere and nowhere, the speaker soon yields
to the vicarious delights of vision, beholding “the marriage of the trapper in
the open air in the far west,” observing a “handsome and richly drest” lady
observing “Twenty-eight young [who] bathe by the shore,” admiring the
“calm and commanding” poise of the Negro drayman. The divide between
perception and cognition is conscientiously maintained; like the “impassive
stones that receive and return so many echoes,” the spectator for the most
part is content to “witness” and “note.” Ciphering eyes have been set aside
for what are called in “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” “interminable
eyes.” In the copious flow of scenes unfolding before it, “not a person or
object missing,” the “I” no more pretends to disappear into these vistas as
omniscient narrator than it aspires to stand beyond them as a “transparent
eyeball.” Identity appears as the interpenetration of all these activities which
“tend inward to me [as] I tend outward to them” (CRE, p. 44). This last quote
rounds of the first of the famed catalogs, whose additive appetite names
whatever it sees, from the “pure contralto in the organ loft” to the “canal boy
on the tow-path”; from the flat-boatman, spinning girl or fare-collector to
the lunatic connoisseur or half-breed. As commentators as diverse in outlook
as de Selincourt, Lynen, and Ziff have helped us to appreciate, these
constructions are not the wild effusions of someone “ranting and frothing in
my insane crisis” but a delicately arrayed stream of associations, with each
description and gesture by turns interlocking with or resonating against the
other.33
The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the

purchaser higgling about the odd cent,)
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute hand
of the clock moves slowly,
The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just
open’d lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs
on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer
and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer at
you;)
The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded
by the great Secretaries,
Native Models 131
On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly

with twined arms,
The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of
halibut in the hold ...
(CRE, p. 43)
With each snapshot flashing momentarily before the eye, action ceases
the moment the line ends even as we are propelled forward by the
paratactical momentum of the syntax. Just so, it is the “law of perfection” in
the organic nature of things that any object’s “finish is to each for itself and
onward from itself.”34 The panoramic realism of the bard’s “interminable
eyes” releases an interminable series of images, separate but equal, which are
as heterogeneous in content as they are undifferentiated in structure. In
bringing America’s “vast, seething mass of materials” to the page, Whitman’s
song of occupations here aims as well to bring the treacherous merger of
scarcity and plentitude into workable form. Rather than the paralyzing
collapse of end into beginning we find a procession of brilliantly etched, end-
stopped lines that provides immediate closure for each utterance as well as
the impetus for a fresh beginning. The effect is a structure that is radically
open (the list being conceivably inexhaustible) and radically closed (each line
being, imagistically speaking, a poem in itself). Excess can never be too much
in such constructions, given their dexterity in harmonizing repetition and
closure.35 Because Whitman’s tallying forbids granting visual salience to any
one scene or individual (not even the “caresser of life” who absorbs and is
absorbed by them), totality is both localized and refused. To the degree that
there is no distinguishable “whole” to which the sum of these parts harkens,
each part takes on the provisional appearance of that whole, though
distributed along a contiguous chain of complementarity. “From the eyesight
proceeds another eyesight, from the hearing proceeds another hearing and
from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of
things.” Value is held to strict account: voice will not go beyond what the
eyes cannot reach; the eyes will not outstrip vision’s advance. In the concordia
discos of the catalog images are thus set forth “with scrupulous exactness,” as
Emily Dickinson wrote in another context, “to hold our senses on.”
Exactness may seem the last word to describe the freewheeling
euphoria of a Proteus, “hankering, gross, mystical, nude” who “can resist
nothing better than [his] own diversity.” The Jamesian injunction that the
true artist is one upon whom nothing is lost takes on near maniacal
proportions in the wake of section fifteen, with the “I” now “of every hue and
caste ... every rank and religion, / A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman,
132 Kerry C. Larson
sailor, quaker, / Prisoner, fancy-man rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest” (CRE,

p. 45). Yet out of this apparent chaos of roles the rule of “opposite equals”
predominates. Pledged as the poet is “not [to] have a single person slighted
or left away,” every thesis is promptly weighed against its antithesis for one
who is not only “the poet of the Body” but “the poet of the Soul,” of the
“woman the same as the man,” of the wicked as well as the good; “who play[s]
not marches for accepted victors only ... [but] for conquer’d and slain”; no
more “modest than immodest”; “stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and
stuff’d with the stuff that is fine.” What seems a random dispersal of the self
is on deeper reflection governed by a thoroughgoing attention to the
apportionment of its energies. Thus while the poet appears to dilate to a
breadth that defies all measurement—“not contain’d between my hat and
boot-soles,” his “orbit cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass”—he is
also quick to insist that this amplitude can have no meaning unless measured
by others, for “all I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, / Else
it were time lost listening to me” (CRE, p. 47). Like the catalogs in their
closed openness, the self is presented as defiantly self-complete (“I know I am
august ... I exist as I am, that is enough”) and infinitely extendable (“In all
people I see myself, not more and not barley-corn less”). The
constitutionalism of the many into one and one into many does not melt the
world, as Lawrence would have it, into “the awful pudding of One
Identity.”36 The more we attend to “the afflatus surging and surging,” the
more we observe that its seemingly boundless lust for possession is marked
off by countervailing impulses. “To see no possession but you may possess it”
(CRE, p. 156) may be an article of faith for Whitman but it has little value
unless the possessions of sight can be released or instantly expressed onto the
page. An implicit economy of exchange applies throughout these sections:
whatever this verse takes in must as readily be “let out,” this being “the
thoughtful merge of myself and outlet again” which “breath[es] the air but
leave[s] plenty after me.” The “kosmos” who commands “unscrew the locks
from the doors, / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs” has
himself become a revolving door, with every fresh “influx” of power
partaking of its “efflux.” This, too, is the fantasy of abundance without
surfeit, of a capaciousness that will not incapacitate itself.
In this way the catalogs aim at a marriage of speaking and seeing which
protects the poet against the perplexing condition of finding either sense
“unequal to measure itself.” Despite their notoriety as a radical innovation,
they carry an essentially conservative appeal in the sense of restraining the
pressure of human demand, of carefully tallying whatever is to be “let in”
with whatever is “let out.” While this particular feature of the catalogs is
Native Models 133
easily overshadowed by the comedic exuberance of a poem like “Song of

Myself,” it comes into sharper focus in a more composed lyric, “There Was
a Child Went Forth,” which offers the best account we have of the cataloging
self and which is for this reason worth pausing over briefly. In its fusion of
perceiver and perceived and in its flawless give and take of response and
counterresponse, the poem unfolds a virtual allegory of consensus where the
spoken and the seen are seamlessly and movingly joined.
There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon that object he
became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a
certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
(CRE, p. 364)
One thinks, momentarily, of Ahab on the quarterdeck, scanning the

Doubloon for images of his omnipotence. But this is not, as it happens, a
lyric about the solipsism of projection and before long we discover that the
“object he became” is in fact simply all the objects that “became part of him.”
The omission of the relative pronoun in Whitman’s Quaker-sounding title
subtly reinforces this discovery by making whatever identity we can attribute
to this child indistinguishable from his act of going forth, so that, in Charles
Feidelson’s graceful phrase, he “speaks the world that he sees and sees the
world that he speaks; and in doing so becomes the reality of his vision.”37 As a
result, the processional litany of sights and sounds, in taking on the
appearance of speaking pictures, suffice in themselves to tell the story of
poetic development, expanding outward from the burgeoning of plant and
animal life, the sphere of primitive social distinctions, familial ambivalence,
metaphysical doubts, to a final, valedictory scene at sunset. Untouched by
nostalgia for a lost harmony that haunts comparable treatments of this
subject by Wordsworth, Blake, or Shelley, Whitman’s psychological idyll
chooses to evoke an endlessly renewable reserve of forms, with objects and
events permeating consciousness “then, now, and always.”38
But even as this portrait recreates an ongoing commerce of “influx” and
“efflux” which we have seen at work in the catalogs, it also hints at a
necessary inhibition governing this poetic of reception. Whitman himself, no
doubt unwittingly, strikes at the heart of the real poignance in the poem
when, years later, he half-jokingly confided to Traubel that “there is really
nothing in it at all—nothing at all.... It is a mere looking about at things”
134 Kerry C. Larson
(WWC 5:310). One could indeed say without prejudice that “There Was a
Child Went Forth” succeeds so well because it asks so little. The reiterated
emphasis on those things that “became part of him”; the peculiar reminder
that the parents who fathered and conceived him “gave the child more of
themselves than that, / They gave him afterward every day”; the hurried
zeugma in a line like “the family usages, the language, the company, the
yearning and swelling heart”; glancing references to the “affection that
cannot be gainsay’d”: these are in reality suppressed apostrophes, petitions so
muted as to suggest apprehension over any mode of address that would too
sharply individuate need against response. What “can be used can be used
up” is how Geoffrey Hartman describes “the anxiety of demand,” an anxiety
“generated by the very pressure of demand we put upon things, and the
resultant fear that they cannot ‘beat’ us.”39 Thus the declared
correspondence between “I” and all the things composing the “I” never
opens out into the glories of the egotistical sublime but functions precisely
as a means of delimiting demand. Critics struck by the tantalizingly brief
family portrait that straddles the middle of the poem have made this the
center of their reading, finding this brevity suggestive of some profound
rupture in emotional development that is quickly diffused into the
generalized “doubts of the daytime and doubts of the nighttime.” This no
doubt is the case, yet the ambivalence observable in this scene is not finally
distinguishable from the treatment of any other in the poem, all of which
share the common trait of not evoking more than can be accounted for. Like
the outpouring of people and places in the catalogs, the metonymic parade
of details, in precluding visual fixation, also works to ensure that
consciousness will not overspecify the objects of its attention any more than
those objects will overextend it.
In the course of reflecting on various “systems of connection” or “types
of union” which philosophy draws upon to structure human experience,
William James hypothesizes that the “lowest grade” of connectedness would
consist in “a world of mere withness, of which the parts were only strung
together by the conjunction ‘and’.”40 This essentially describes the world of
the catalogs, whose components are strung together in the hope of realizing
the lowest common denominator of Union—a world which lays to rest the
dissension of competing values by setting the Secretaries at their cabinet
meeting and the matrons in the piazza on an equal footing. What “There
Was a Child Went Forth” reveals, in turn, is how this “world of mere
withness” serves also to deflect or minimize the pressure of demand, in this
case by diffusing the child’s quest to locate the “affection that will not be
gainsay’d” into a “mere looking about at things.” Ordinarily, the two issues
Native Models 135
isolated here would appear to be unrelated, but only until we recall that an
essential feature of the poet’s demand in “Song of Myself” is to silence the
dissension of value through the self-evident truths of his art. The catalogs
represent one attempt to satisfy this demand, yet we are now in position to
note that in suspending the issue of value and the vexed question of
justification that goes along with it the catalogs do not finally settle these
issues but wind them to a keener pitch. Thus, picking up “Song of Myself”
where we left off, we read in section twenty-four: “By God! I will have
nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms”—an
oath which gives vent to a rage for response so relentless in intensity and so
overmastering in scope as to precipitate one section later the stifled potency
of a voice “unequal to measure itself.” For precisely because Speech is
designated as that principle of excess forever overextending itself, its very
redundancy triggers as well the fear of its own depletion. Held in check by
what we have seen Emerson call a redundant deficiency and by what we can
recognize as the disrelation between demand and response, Speech
incarnates a demand doomed to recoil back upon its owner who, containing
too much, contains not enough.
NOTES
1. See Whitman’s letter to Emerson in 1856, reprinted in CRE, p. 739.

2. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New
York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. xiv. My treatment of Lincoln’s perception of a “moral
hiatus” between Declaration and Constitution is also indebted to Dwight Anderson,
Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality (New York: Knopf, 1982).
3. Fisher Ames, “American Literature,” in The American Literary Revolution:
1787–1837, ed. Robert Spiller (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 86; Harriet
Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 3:206.
4. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 45. On the relation
between the American Renaissance and literary nationalism William Hedges justly notes
that “we are seldom made to feel that there is any vital connection between the great
writers of American literature and the literature of the years that are supposed to have
prepared the way for it” (“The Myth of the Republic and the Theory of American
Literature,” Prospects 4 [1979]: 102).
5. I paraphrase the opening sentence of Margaret Fuller’s “American Literature; Its
Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” reprinted in The American
Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor,
1957), pp. 189–94. Whitman was much taken by Fullers essay, first issued in 1846 among
her Papers on Literature and Art. See his references to her “high-pitched taunt” (PW 2:539,
666–67), as well as William Carlos Williams’s ironic adaptation of it in Paterson (New York:
New Directions, 1969), p. 140.
136 Kerry C. Larson
6. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press,

1969), p. viii.
7. The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature, ed. Richard Ruland (New York:
Dutton, 1972), pp. 313, 310, 312. For a comprehensive account of this period, the reader
is referred to Benjamin Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1957). Robert Weisbuch also provides a lively
and informative overview in Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence
in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
8. The American Literary Revolution, p. 309.
9. The Native Muse, pp. 86, 90.
10. Ibid, p. 143.
11. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 3.
12. The Native Muse, p. 147.
13. See Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Wits and Words in the Era of
Melville and Poe (New York: Harcourt, 1956), p. 207.
15. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William
Gilman and Alfred Ferguson, 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960–), 7:521.
Fisher Ames’s opinions regarding “a right perception of genius” may be found in The
American Literary Revolution, p. 75.
16. Or, as Frank Lentrichhia more bluntly states, “There can be no Emersonian
action.” See his discussion “On the Ideologies of Poetic Modernism, 1890–1913: The
Example of William James,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 241.
17. See n. 2, Part 2.
18. Responding along similar lines, Donald Pease describes “an interlocutive process”
whereby the poet’s presence is not “identified with a psychological identity that existed
before these songs.... Instead ... when Whitman wrote ‘I sing myself’ he literally meant
that his singing brought a self into being” (“Blake, Crane, and Whitman: A Poetics of Pure
Possibility,” PMLA 96 [1981]: 77).
19. For a succinct description of this form see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 294. “Pars epica” I borrow from
Kurt Schulter’s study of Die Englische Ode (Bonn: H. Bouvier u. Co. Verlag, 1964), p. 31.
20. Richard M. Adams, Strains of Discord: Studies in Literary Openness (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1959), p. 181.
21. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of American Literature (New York: Macmillan,
1900), p. 468.
22. Ivan Marki, The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of the First Edition of “Leaves of
Grass” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 137.
23. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966), p. 21.
24. Ibid.
25. Commentators frequently cite the influence of Isaiah (“the son of man is as the
grass”) as standing behind Whitman’s meditation on “the beautiful uncut hair of the
grave.” Yet as this familiar conceit modulates into the “faint red roofs of the mouth,” the
proximate source may be found in the Psalmist’s curse “let them be as the grass on the
Native Models 137
housetops that withereth before it groweth up,” a curse which again plays upon the
proleptic convergence of start and finish that I have been discussing.
26. Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), p. xix.
27. See The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 152.
28. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York:
Norton, 1971), pp. 37–56. We have of course already seen Whitman’s variation on this
“apocalyptic marriage” at the end of the twenty-fourth section of “Song of Myself.”
29. In 1871, Whitman would have his way with the muse of the Old World Epic,
charmingly beseeching her “To cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, /
That matter of Achilles’s wrath ...” But that would come later.
30. The Prelude, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2d ed. revised by Helen Gardner (London:
Oxford University Press, 1959), bk. 2, line 221, passim; bk. 13, lines 199–205. A useful
discussion of Wordsworth’s treatment of this issue and its bearing on subsequent
nineteenth-century literature may be found in David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination:
Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
31. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964).
33. See Basil de Selincourt, Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (1914; reprint, New York:
Russell and Russell, 1965), pp. 124–55, 149–51; Lynen, The Design of the Present: Essays on
Time and Structure in American Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1969), pp. 290–95; and Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence
(New York: Viking, 1981), pp. 233–34.
34. The 1855 Edition of “Leaves of Grass,” ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking
Press, 1959), p. 11.
35. I therefore cannot agree with Quentin Anderson’s contention that the catalogs, “at
their brilliant best, are successful efforts to melt things together, to make the sum of things
ring with one note ... he dowers his world with only so much quiddity as he can dissolve,
or cants each created thing on the slope of process down which it will slide to oblivion.”
Anderson’s “poet of decreation,” whoever it may be, is certainly not Whitman. See The
Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 95, 94.
36. Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 218.
37. Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),
p. 25.
38. David Cavitch points up this aspect of Whitman’s originality in remarking that
“the figure of the child in Whitman’s poetry conveys neither the challenging innocence of
Blake’s radical infants nor the natural piety of Wordsworth’s ‘best philosopher’. Whitman’s
child is not Rousseau’s animal with perfectly balanced instincts.... Whitman is less
sentimental than most writers who participated in the aggrandizement of childhood in the
nineteenth century” (My Soul and I: Whitman’s Inner Mystery [Boston: Beacon Press, 1985],
p. 36).
39. “I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication,” The Fate of Reading, p. 38.
40. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975),
pp. 76–77.
D AV I D B R O M W I C H
A Simple Separate Person
W hen Whitman described himself as a kosmos, he may have meant that

he contained a good deal of prose. But apart from Leaves of Grass, the only
writing he brought to a finish went into two books, Specimen Days and
Democratic Vistas. The first of these is entirely composed of moments: the
vigils that Whitman kept over the dying or the wounded during the Civil
Was; and his intervals of solitary repose in nature. Both kinds of moment
show Whitman’s absorbing concern with sanity—literally, with the
cleanliness of the body and of the soul—and the same concern seems to have
been a leading motive in his defense of American democracy. These works
share a common premise with his poetry as well. They imagine a more than
empirical character, the self, whose existence is prior to the soul’s
aspirations, and whose fate is untouchable by the reverses of daily life. This
self Whitman thought of as the product of American society at a certain
time, the years of the successful fight of the Union against the slaveholding
interests. Personal independence to him was the natural accompaniment of
the self’s assurance of survival, through its union with others; and such
assurance could not be had in all the possible circumstances of a society: it
would be ruled out, for example, in a society moving toward a more rather
than a less restricted franchise. But Whitman had given a social definition
of self-trust which he felt that the war itself vindicated. It proved that all
From A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. © 1989 by
the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
139
140 David Bromwich
inherited goods began in custom but ended in enslavement. This was

another way of saying that the individual self had an exception-making
power to any claim urged by others, a tendency to resist impositions which
derived from its very knowledge of the body. Thus the liberating
recognition of American political life turned out to be the same as that of
American personal experience. All of Whitman’s prose explores what he
called “personalism,” its moments and prospects, and all of it exists to help
readers in bearing out the prophecies of “Song of Myself.”
How far a single purpose animates his works ought to emerge now
more plainly than ever before, with the appearance of his Notebooks and
Unpublished Prose in six volumes edited by Edward Grier, together with the
Library of America edition of his Complete Poetry and Prose.1 Whitman filled
more notebooks than anyone suspected. Apart from the short stories written
in early youth, a temperance novel, and the miscellaneous contents of the
Collect and November Boughs, he kept jottings of his moods, friends, false
starts and late honors, eulogies to himself and paraphrases of other people’s
eulogies. In these pages one may discover him teaching himself the learned
pronunciation of “insouciance” (een-soo-se-áwns); contemplating a Banjo
Poem and a “Poem of Large Personality,” of which he remarks in passing,
“make this poem for women just as much as men”; compiling lists of the men
and women he meets, but the men chiefly, and later the names of the Union
soldiers he has talked to. There are also notes for various prefaces and at least
two drafts of a last will and testament. Some of the most interesting entries
try out versions of lines which one knows from their subsequent life in “Song
of Myself.” Such a detail as, “And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels,” did not come all at once: it took Whitman some time
to arrive at a number with the appropriate weight. But the most susceptibly
erotic passages of the “Song” were still more so in draft:
Fierce Wrestler! do you keep your heaviest grip for the last?
Will you sting me most even at parting?
Will you struggle even at the threshold with spasms more delicious than
all before?
Does it make you ache so to leave me?
Do you wish to show that even what you did before was nothing to what
you can do
Or have you and all the rest combined to see how much I can endure?
Pass as you will; take drops of my life if that is what you are after
Only pass to some one else, for I can contain you no longer.
I held more than I thought
I did not think I was big enough for so much ecstasy

Or that a touch could take it all out of me.2
A few entries like this are enough to justify the publication of the Notebooks;
and the paragraphs that follow will quote many more. But alone, they give a
false impression of the general quality of the material. For these two editions
of Whitman suggest, both as to purpose and utility, opposite approaches to
the experience of reading.
The Notebooks are only the latest of those massive and licensed editions
in which every last scrap of an author (including in this case his games of
animal—vegetable—mineral) is dutifully reproduced and annotated,
everything but (though the omission may be accidental) his contests at tick-
tack-toe. Presumably, if Whitman’s hand could be detected in the noughts
and crosses, these too would appear; along with the entry, occupying a whole
page, which runs in full: “The Daylight? magazine? annual? monthly?
quarterly”—one line of doodling, escorted into posterity by five lines of
notes indicating the paper on which it was written and the date to which
unfortunately it cannot be assigned. The typical page of these volumes is half
empty, and what there is of print has been given over to notes of insertions
and deletions, fourteen such notes to eight lines of print being a not
uncommon proportion. By whom will it be used? The responsible scholar
needs to look at the papers and microfilms anyway, while the interested
reader cares for Whitman’s words and not his subliterary disjecta membra. Of
course, researchers exist who belong to a class between these two: word-
counters and deletion-counters, the behaviorists of the writing process, for
whom rough specimens of their subject will do. Their toil is harmless,
though it ought not to be humored or paid for. And yet, the sheer size of this
edition can only have been determined by a considerate projection of their
needs.
By contrast with the Notebooks, the Library of America Whitman prints
everything of prose as well as poetry that Whitman cared to see survive. It is
meant for the study rather than the vault, and is agreeable to handle besides
being pleasant to read. Since Whitman thought of his words as an almost
physical extension of himself, one can imagine him ranking these merits
high. Two features of the book also make it preferable to any combination of
earlier editions: the inclusion of a complete text of the 1855 Leaves of Grass,
and a section of “Supplementary Prose” with Whitman’s pamphlet on the
eighteenth presidency. In the latter document, as nowhere else in his
writings, one sees with Whitman’s eyes the look of the depraved men from
whom Lincoln redeemed the nation. “WHENCE,” he asks, “DO THESE
142 David Bromwich
NOMINATING DICTATORS OF AMERICA YEAR AFTER YEAR START OUT?” “From

lawyers’ offices,” he replies, “secret lodges, back-yards, bed-houses,
barrooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals’ offices, post-offices, and
gambling-hells.” In answer to the next question—“WHO ARE THEY
PERSONALLY?”—he pictures the nominators of Fillmore and Buchanan
according to their works:
Slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President,

creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, blowers, electioneers,
body-snatchers, bawlers, bribers, compromisers, runaways,
lobbyers, sponges, ruined sports, expelled gamblers, policy
backers, money-dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons,
blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile
disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s
money and harlot’s money twisted together; crawling, serpentine
men, the lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the earth.3
This is done in Cobbett’s style, with as sure a sense as Cobbett’s of the

mutually strengthening effects of the allegorical cartoon and the simple
name. But it is strange to realize that Whitman was here addressing the same
audience he hoped would listen to “Song of Myself”: an audience of the
shockable, haters of the unclean deed and the unclean side.
After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he knew of their existence
as a certainty, because the news brought evidence of their feelings. “As to the
other Presidents,” he writes in a notebook entry, “they have had their due in
formal and respectful treatment, in life & death. But this one alone has
touched the popular heart to its deepest. For this one alone, through every
city, every country farm, the untouch’d meal, the heavy heart & moistened
eye & the sob in private chambers.” The image of Lincoln dying seems to be
associated throughout Whitman’s writings with a more abstract conception:
that of the “sane and sacred death” of a person, in the presence of whose
body the mourners become conscious of their sanity, and of their sacredness
to each other. Social obligations like personal ones thus follow from a
recognition of sacrifice. The master-image for this, in his prose and poetry
alike, is the passage of breath from a father to a son.
Whitman, however, was apt to dwell on one detail of the scene. In the
lecture he used to give about the death of Lincoln, he ended his dramatic
account of the murder by observing how “the life blood from those veins, the
best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and death’s ooze already
begins its little bubbles on the lips.” In the great poem “As I Ebb’d with the
Ocean of Life,” the observer is Whitman himself, but the dead man has
become his father, whose broken career the poet must resume:
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,

Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling).
Here the passage from death to life is marked by a return of all aspirations to
a material trace, the oozing of a spirit into the air. But for Whitman the
consciousness of such a moment exalts rather than degrades. It recalls the
soul to the things it is composed of, and points to their recoverability by
others.
Our usual mistake about immortality, as Whitman sees it, is to imagine
our survival as the extension of a single entity. We can avoid this, he thinks,
by supposing that we continue in time only as an author’s words continue in
the minds of his readers. They create a benefit that is inconceivable to the
benefactor. Our extension in space, through our moral relations with others,
implies continuity of another sort. But to explain it, Whitman suggests that
we can appeal only to what we know of existence (physical existence). This
side of Whitman’s thinking seemed to D. H. Lawrence praiseworthy beyond
all the rest since it released us from the tiresome superiority of the soul.
“Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck
and plant her down among the potsherds. ‘There!’ he said to the soul. ‘Stay
there!’” 4 The soul’s coincidence with the body is announced in a line of
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” which captures all Whitman’s doctrine: “That I
was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my
body.” This belief forms an implicit apology for his verbal innovations as
well. Grammar and habitual usage agree in enforcing a firm, if conventional,
division between verbs and nouns. But in Whitman a redefinition of
language, by which common verbs are shaped into nouns, brings with it a
redefinition of experience, by which the human joins the divine. “Dazzling
and tremendous, how quick the sunrise would kill me, / If I could not now
and always send sunrise out of me.” In any poetry but Whitman’s this would
be an instance of bathos. “Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just
tinged with blue! / Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!”
Again, in any other poetry this would be merely an overconspicuous
metaphor. As one reads “Song of Myself,” however, both gestures seem
accurate representations of the constant and radical connection of soul with
body.
144 David Bromwich
Paul Zweig in a recent and engaging biography, Walt Whitman: The

Making of the Poet, allows his subject a more narrowly literary originality.5
Whitman here is not what Lawrence called him, a great changer of the blood
in the veins of men, but rather a man “genuinely at ease with the moralizing
idiom of Victorian America.” Whitman’s adaptability, as Zweig understands
it, enabled him to act subversively in another way; and on the last page of the
book, Zweig asserts that Whitman “assaulted the institution of literature and
language itself, and, in so doing, laid the groundwork for the anti-cultural
ambition of much modernist writing. He is the ancestor ... of all who have
made of their writing an attack on the act of writing and on culture itself.”
Elsewhere, in a similar vein, Zweig is rather careless of nuance: he sums up
Whitman’s belief that the self responds to experience as a “fundamental
belief in the malleability of human personality.” Still the summary statement,
when placed beside the earlier suggestion about Whitman’s congeniality to
Victorian moralism, does make an interpretation of his career. Zweig invites
us to look at Whitman as a theatrical personality whose bold experiments in
language were aimed at destroying culture for the sake of a religious ideal.
How well does this tally with the things Whitman said or did?
In his personal deportment, he appears not to have sought much
conformity with the practices of his time and place. The sexual emphasis of
the “Children of Adam” and of the “Calamus” poems in particular was
thoroughly remarked by his contemporaries; but he did not follow the
prudential advice to change or suppress them, even when it came from
Emerson. It is true that he shared in a popular opinion whenever he could,
and always avoided insulting a popular favorite. There may be a conventional
ease, too, in his respect for such idols of the day as Longfellow and Whittier.
But was his respect much more than tolerance? Whitman pointed out the
good they did; and in Longfellow’s case it certainly had to do with culture, in
any possible sense of the word. But he never pretended to compare it to his
good. As for Whitman’s general “attack on the act of writing,” what evidence
is there of this? He writes in his notebook, “Make no quotations, and no
reference to any other writers.” But that is less an attack on writing than an
echo of every great writer’s demand to be read for his inventions; in short, a
faithful and literal rendering of Emerson’s admonition: “Meek young men
grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero,
which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and
Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” Such
an attitude may turn to iconoclasm in the end; yet Whitman habitually
instructs himself in a manner that could never be used by an iconoclast of
writing: “In future Leaves of Grass. Be more severe with the final revision of the
poem.... Also no ornaments, especially no ornamental adjectives, unless they

have come molten hot, and imperiously prove themselves. No ornamental
similes at all—not one: perfect transparent clearness sanity and health are
wanted—that is the divine style.”6 Whitman’s hope was that, in America, the
dignity of social life would reach a height at which this style expressed
nothing more than the experience of the “divine average.”
Zweig paraphrases the divine average as “the mystery of the ordinary,”
but they are not the same thing. For Whitman’s idea relates to a godlike self-
sufficiency that may be achieved by each person from his contact with every
other, and from the impalpable modifications of his experience by theirs.
There is nothing mysterious about it; and more than a point about usage is
at stake. Whitman preferred democracy to feudalism (the latter being his
name for everything before America) only on the ground that it promoted
this sort of contact. “We will not,” he says in Specimen Days, “have great
individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly
great.” He naturally admired Carlyle as an unsettler of outworn customs, but
saw that his effect was vitiated by the cult of the hero. Later in the same
book, he puts down the fault to a physical indisposition, “dyspepsia,” from
which Carlyle did in fact suffer, and which has for Whitman the significance
of a bodily lapse from sanity.
For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as

[Carlyle’s], the bearings he persistently ignored were marvelous.
For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic
principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so
much of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the
only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training people
on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves
(the ultimate aim of political and all other development)—to
gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum.7
The personalism, however, which America uniquely fostered, began for

Whitman as an imaginative premise. It would join the practice of democracy
later, with the widening of the franchise in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. In this sense the future proposed
by “Song of Myself”—“I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on
the door-slab”—could not speak for itself without looking back at the war.
Specimen Days carries out the task of retrospect for the author alone.
(One of its provisional titles was Autochthons ... Embryons.) But to the extent
that this, and indeed all of Whitman’s writings, are judged as an estimate of
146 David Bromwich
America, they have to be read in the light of Democratic Vistas. From its
opening allusion to the Areopagitica, the book concerns the possibility of
realizing a “copious, sane, gigantic offspring” among the aggregate persons
in a democracy, though till now that has been an achievement reserved for
nations as a whole. No literature before America’s—which still lay mostly in
the future—had recognized the people as its subject. Even Whitman did not
seethe depth of the error, he admits, before he visited the Civil War
hospitals, and saw the courage of the individuals who suffered the agony of a
nation. Yet the suffering that isolates strength and, in consequence, gives a
first self-image to individualism, is only half of democracy: “There is another
half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the
races comrades, and fraternizing all.” Following the declaration of these two
principles, Whitman asks that we change our idea of culture to bring it into
keeping with both. The attempt will be not to overthrow but to civilize
culture, so that we take “for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical
personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men—and
not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses.” Throughout the
argument Whitman insists on two facts about democracy: that it is an affair
of daily experience and not simply of elections; and that its future is
threatened, but need not be ultimately darkened, by the coming of the
machine. He warns his reader emphatically against the “depravity of the
business classes” whose authority has been tightened by the rationalization of
labor. The weapon that the people can still use to defend themselves comes
from their own sense of “the average, the bodily, the concrete, the
democratic, the popular.” These last, Whitman hopes to have shown, are
different aspects of a single thing.
It has never been clear what it would mean to read Whitman just for
the poetry. Readers who think they are doing so, either are not getting the
poetry, or they are getting something more. Because he writes from a crisis
in the history of American democracy, it may seem odd that he should
implicate those who can take its victories for granted. And yet, because it was
a crisis that defined the character of America, far more than the
Revolutionary War ever did, he still seems to speak to us intimately. “What
thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in
advance.” The attitude in which readers today are likeliest to find him
objectionable is not that of the sage but that of the sympathizer. He cannot,
they feel, sympathize with the runaway slave without reducing him to a
victim, and at this point his sympathy is exposed as pity. But such an
objection misunderstands Whitman’s purpose in the narrative episodes of
“Song of Myself” and elsewhere. These are not exchanges of identity,
followed by a judgment, but experiments in a possible identity, followed by a

Stand back! Even so, the resistance to Whitman’s sympathy betrays the extent
of the accommodation to another of his ideals. His individualism has done so
well that readers want to forestall, as a trespass against themselves, any word
or gesture that wears a momentary look of adhesiveness.
Lawrence said that the compulsion to love was at the bottom of
Whitman’s troubles, and he gave the illustration of the Eskimo in the kayak.
Let Whitman see him sitting there and at once he will become the Eskimo
though he does not know what a kayak is. It is a true picture; and in fact
Whitman is routinely capable of stranger extravagances. In a passage of the
Notebooks which he rephrased, rather obliquely, for “Song of Myself,” he
stands in the way of the man who is about to take his own life: “O despairer!
I tell you, you shall not go down, / Here is my arm, press your whole weight
upon me, / With tremendous breath I force him to dilate.” He does this
while staying quite free of the assumption he is charged with making, that he
supposes the objects of his sympathy to be virtuous or reformable by himself.
He does assume that “the universal and fluid soul impounds within itself not
only all the goad characters and heroes but the distorted characters,
murderers, thieves.” Impoundment is a long way from sympathy as most
people interpret it, just as the divine average was a long way from the mystery
of the ordinary. The most moving thing about Whitman after all is that he
teaches, instead of an absolution from sins, a sort of patience with
deformities from which a human charity might begin. A plausible further
charge, that even acts of charity infringe on the rights of others, he has met
by anticipation in an anecdote:
“Tell them,” said the agent to the interpreter, “that the poet-chief
has come to shake hands with them, as brothers.” A regular round
of introductions and hearty hand-claspings, and “How’s!”
followed. “Tell them, Billy,” continued the agent, “that the poet-
chief says we are all really the same men and brethren together,
at last, however different our places, and dress and language.” An
approving chorus of guttural “Ugh’s!” came from all parts of the
room, and W. W. retired, leaving an evidently captivating
impression.8
He wrote the news story himself; but it is not recorded that any of the Sioux
Indian chiefs afterward complained of this treatment by the poet-chief. As
usual, he had laid in his stores in advance.
148 David Bromwich
NOTES
1. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward Grier, 6
vols. (New York, 1984); Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (Library of America, New York,
1981).
2. Whitman, Notebooks, I, 77.
3. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 1313–14.
4. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1961), pp.
171–172.
5. Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York, 1984).
6. Whitman, Notebooks, I, 385.
7. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 892–893.
8. Whitman, Notebooks, II, 881.
MARK BAUERLEIN
Reading
T he poem immediately following “Song of Myself” in the first edition

(later called “A Song for Occupations”1) begins with a simple, direct
entreaty:
Come closer to me,

Push close my lovers and take the best I possess,
Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess.
This is unfinished business with me .... how is it with you?
I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us.
(ll.1–5)
He “was chilled.” Henceforth, we may dispose of print, paper, and other

“cold” mediations and enjoy the thrilling warmth of emotive bodily contact.
But even though, presumably, writing now is committed to the past—that is,
to the previous poem, which has, through its self-effacing signs, carried poet
and disciple beyond technique and artifice and mediation—still there
remains “unfinished business.” The mutual swapping of “the best,”
occurring only through intimate “contact of bodies and souls” (l. 6, later
deleted), is still pending. Further instruction is required:
From Whitman and the American Idiom. © 1991 by Louisiana University Press.
149
150 Mark Bauerlein
There is something that comes home to one now and perpetually,

It is not what is printed or preached or discussed.... it eludes discussion and
print,
It is not to be put in a book.... it is not in this book,
............................................
You may read in many languages and read nothing about it;
............................................
I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,
And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or
reconnoissance,
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and
without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.
(ll. 44–58)
In both style and subject matter, these didactic lines parallel Section 50
of “Song of Myself,” the uplifting hymnal climax wherein Whitman affirms
“eternal life” and “happiness” for all “brothers and sisters.” But although
both passages eulogize this “perpetual” “home-like” presence in all its
transcendent benevolence, what stands out in each description is its
inaccessibility to language. Appearing in the first edition within a few pages
of one another, both sections speak of the “grand” but unspeakable truth
lying at the base of all metaphysics, deny its representation by “utterance or
symbol” and “discussion and print,” refer to “it” in vague, negative terms—
“There is something,” “I do not know what it is,” “It is not”—and then give
to it the frankly inadequate name “happiness” (or perhaps “happiness” is
merely a signifiable concomitant of “it”). But whereas in “Song of Myself”
Whitman confidently attributes “it” to himself—“There is that in me”—in
“A Song for Occupations,” he regards “happiness” objectively: “something
that comes home to one.” Whereas the first poem emphasizes the poet’s
difficulty in expressing the “happiness” surging within him, the subsequent
poem points out the impossibility of reading it in the word. “It is not what is
printed or preached or discussed”; it is not in any language. Therefore it
cannot be read or communicated in any ordinary sense of the term.
He “knows” it because it affects him. To Whitman, the encounter with
“happiness” is a moment of nonlinguistic seizure by some organic medium
of presence (call it “magnetism,” “vocalism,” “live feeling,” and so on), an
arresting penetration that overrides human will and permeates the soul.
Conversely, reading, in his view, involves a calculated interpretation of
lifeless transmissions no longer continuous with their authoritative
Reading 151
provenance, an attempt to decipher original feelings from their exterior,

errant representations. If those signs turn out to be inadequate to their
source or if the reader lacks the necessary sensitivity and native breadth,
reading will degenerate into critical appropriations more or less responsive
to the poet’s creative impulse, “leaving each reader eligible to form the
resultant-poem for herself or himself” (NUPM, I, 335). Notwithstanding the
language’s magnetic attraction, its intended effect is left to the reader’s
arbitrary choice. In consequence, reading is indeterminate, a matter of
chance, “something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck
must be a failure for us.”
Rather than letting ananke lapse into tyche, rather than offering up his
inviolate, soul-inspired songs to capricious interpretations, Whitman insists
that “the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon-mot or
reconnoissance.” This italicized grouping names three types of reading that do
violence to what is given, what is natural, what lives in the present.
Specifically, “speculation,” financially considered, is a self-serving projection
into an unknown, random future, an investment of the signs of one’s
resources into a fluctuating, ineffable marketplace of percentages and
interest rates and gains and losses, an attempt to take account of innumerable
variables to add to one’s store of possessions. Philosophically considered,
speculation relinquishes concrete reality for the airy heights of abstraction
and pursues absolute knowledge, theory, and proof, not realizing that the
answer lies in the ground below: “I swear there can be no theory of any
account, unless it corroborate the theory of the earth!” (“A Song of the
Rolling Earth,” l. 93).
A “bon-mot”—a literary parody of “the password primeval”—is the
condensed result of “dandified” criticism, a witty epithet encapsulating but
trivializing profound, sublime utterance (for example, Kenneth Burke calling
Emerson’s Nature a “Happiness Pill”). A “bon-mot” converts inspiration into
the pithy phrase admirable more for its nifty sounds or clever ironies than for
its sincere and direct meaningfulness.
And “reconnoissance”—that is, “scouting ahead,” reading beyond the
due confines of poem and poet—forsakes the proper locus of feeling and
truth for pointless, extravagant meanderings into future representations. In
other words, “speculation, or bon-mot or reconnoissance” needlessly supplements
Whitman’s language of the soul and adds to it irrespective of its organic
wholeness. A proper reception of Leaves of Grass pays heed to “the law of
[Whitman’s] own poems” (PW, I, 210) and “tallies” faithfully their emotive
permutations, lives and breathes in harmony with Whitman’s “respiration
and inspiration ... the beating of [his] heart” (“Song of Myself,” l. 23), and
152 Mark Bauerlein
thus incorporates his “meaning” directly, without alteration or

“contingency.” Unlike ordinary discourse, which can be refuted by
arguments, disproved by facts, or qualified by future discourse, Whitman’s
poetry, once circulated, cannot be modified or “retracted” by inhospitable
readers. His words carry feeling vigorously and ineluctably to those whose
hearts are primed for it, those who need not “read” in order to understand.
These are Whitman’s ideal (non-)readers, the “yous” whom he
addresses in so many of the poems following in the wake of “Song of
Myself.” Indeed, apart from the tiresome catalog poems commemorating
democratic life in the New World, the most prevalent motif in the second
and third editions is that of Whitman, with more or less trepidation,
counseling readers in how to interpret his poems. As in “A Song for
Occupations,” he usually expresses his acute consciousness of coming
interpreters, of “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” and then
advises them to turn off their analytic apparatus and free themselves for an
immediate, palpable incursion of emotive magnetism. He admits, “I know
very well these [poems] may have to be searched many times before they
come to you and comply with you. / But what of that? Has not Nature to be
searched many times?” (NUPM, I, 263).
This preoccupation with reading marks a considerable step beyond
the major issue of “Song of Myself”—composition—although both develop
out of Whitman disquiet over the arbitrariness of the sign. Supposedly
having surmounted “writerly” mediations in his preparatory epic, Whitman
considers next the other side of communication—response. “Song of
Myself” initiated Whitman’s flight from the arbitrary sign by exploring the
possibility of writing a natural language of pure sound or physiognomy;
successive poems extend his “language experiment” by attempting to
circumscribe not the inscription itself but its reception. Reading, not
composition, becomes the central concern of Whitman’s poetics, the
dominant anxiety revealed by numerous explicit directives and supplications
to far-off anticipated readers:
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
O I have been dilatory and dumb,
I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
I should have blabbed nothing but you, I should have chanted
nothing but you. (“To You,” ll. 6–11)
Reading 153
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf
unopened! (“Song of the Open Road,” l. 216)
You bards of ages hence! when you refer to me, mind not so much
my poems,
Nor speak of me that I prophesied of The States, and led them
the way of their glories;
But come, I will take you down underneath this impassive
exterior—I will tell you what to say of me:
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
The friend, the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend, his lover was fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of
love within him—and freely poured it forth ... (“Recorders
Ages Hence,” ll. 1–5; the second line was later deleted.)
I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns

a casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you. (“Poets to Come,” ll. 7–9)
See, projected through time,

For me, an audience interminable.
With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop,
Successions of men ...
With faces turned sideways or backward toward me to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me. (“Starting from Paumanok,”
ll. 29–36)
I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,

I reject none, accept all, reproduce all in my own forms. (“By
Blue Ontario’s Shore,” ll. 10–11)
To this list of verse passages dealing with the prospects of reading, one
could add dozens of quotations from Whitman’s various prose writings. For
example, he writes, “I suppose it is hardly necessary to tell you that I have
pitched and keyed my pieces more with reference to fifty years hence, & how
they will stand mellowed and toned then—than to pleasing & tickling the
immediate impressions of the present hour” (Cor. II, 310). This rejection of
“immediate impressions” and admission of rhetorical calculation, written in
1874, shows the extent to which Whitman has modified his poetics.
154 Mark Bauerlein
One recognizes in the lines above several Whitmanian strategies

abounding in the 1856 and 1860 editions. In the first quotation, Whitman,
on the one hand, desires to inseminate readers with his seductive “lispings,”
to make them one with his poems, and, on the other hand, he fears that his
“chant,” too self-centered and peculiar, falls on benumbed ears. In the
second, he tells readers to cast away their books and pens and join the bard
on the open road (theoretically, the last thing Whitman wants readers to do
is produce more writing) and apprehend with him “something better than
any and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the artificial
transcript and portraiture” (NUPM, I, 188). In the third, he sets clear-cut
prescriptions for future poets and critics to consult when memorializing him
and his poems. In the fourth, he places responsibility on readers to complete
his poems, “to prove and define” the inarticulate feelings he has rendered to
them, although he will, in fact, denounce their results, a reaction not merely
whimsical and personal but entirely consistent with his anticritical poetics. In
the fifth, he positions himself at the head of a genealogy of “men-poets” who
maintain a venerating attitude toward their patriarchal origin. And finally, he
casts himself as “the only growth,” the only aesthetic guideline or evaluative
criterion, by which his poems are to be judged.
The various references or intentions here all share a common
provocation—the anxiety of misreading. Because every expression is
complete only after it has made its intended impression, Whitman’s ideal
poetic communication of soul and feeling rests on proper reading just as
much as it does on proper composing. His poetics compasses two sites: the
poet “auto-graphing” the blank paper, inscribing feeling into notation; and
the reader de-inscribing the printed page, lifting the embedded content up
into its ideal emotive sphere. The first scene the poet can moderately
control; the second he cannot. This is especially distressing to Whitman; for,
having burdened the sign with so much “meaning,” having charged his words
not merely with representing other words but with administering the
impenetrable depths of his soul, he thereby implicates not only his poems but
also himself personally in every act of reading. What if his language has too
little poetic-emotive power to override readers’ critical biases and probe
their enclothed souls? What if nineteenth-century American literary culture
proves too canonical and exclusive to tolerate any radical departures from its
stylistic and material norms? What if the sign is such only according to its
interpretation, not its intention?
First, one might ask why reading comes to assume so prominent a place
among Whitman’s concerns, and why writing, which was predominant in
“Song of Myself,” seems to become a secondary issue? Early in 1856, with
Reading 155
his first effort having been printed and distributed and reviewed (with wildly
mixed results), Whitman suddenly finds himself entangled in the vagaries of
reader responses, baffled and dismayed and angered by imputations of
licentiousness, stupidity, and impiety (notwithstanding his liberalism,
Whitman maintained a deep puritanical conviction regarding many moral
and religious questions), and immensely elated by expressions of favor and
thanks (by Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, Moncure Conway, Fanny Fern,
and others). Relishing any praise he received (he carried Emerson’s letter in
his pocket for months), he felt emboldened to even more power over his
audience. In one sense, the huge satisfaction Whitman got from positive
notices made him realize just how important reception was to him. They
caused him almost as much anxiety as the negative responses.
As to the “insults,” Whitman was somewhat at a loss to explain how a
volume overflowing with “happiness” and “love” could evoke abuse. What
knowledge or custom or faculty stood in the way of mutual enjoyment? Why
did readers adopt such fruitless skeptical habits? Where did they learn to
interpret altruism as narcissism, joy as hedonism, and sentiment as
sentimentality? Something unaccountable (and unnatural) must be at work in
certain interpretations—something, he thought, that sympathy and
compassion could not contend with. If so, then more passion poetry, more
democratic celebrations, would only excite more vilification. Hence he
initiates his notorious self-promotions and partisan criticisms, polemical
gestures that engage hostile criticism on its own malevolent terms.
Seeing Whitman placed firmly in the canon, modern scholars regard
his attacks and defenses and inverted plagiarisms (that is, passing his own
evaluative statements off as someone else’s) as an embarrassing and pathetic
spectacle. But to the poet in 1856, ambitious for fame, presuming to be the
voice of America, and obsessed with his reputation, the thought of
misconstruction, of biased judgments of his private merits and unfair
characterizations of his poems, fills him with despair and drives him into
these literary hoaxes.
It is true that, as many point out, praise from Emerson, Alcott,
Thoreau, and others marked a high moment in Whitman’s life and probably
encouraged him to try to master his readers. But still, their responses fell
short of the universal welcome he envisioned. They convinced him he was
“right” and hostile critics were “wrong,” but that only indicated further
cultural division, the very antagonism Whitman wished to end.
For him, then, the question is not one of ethics, but one of rhetoric:
Will his criticism influence his reception any better than his poetry? Will
criticism make future interpretations any more congenial than present ones?
156 Mark Bauerlein
Based upon his first experience of critical reviews, the outlook is uncertain;
for, having endured the fickle assessments of public scrutiny, Whitman can
easily project himself into a distant future in which Leaves of Grass is merely
a pawn in a conflict of interpretations past and present. Then, there will not
even be an author to authorize revision and counterattack and ghostwriting,
no living origin to guarantee the right response to his work. His self-
criticism will stand merely as one interpretation among many others (was
there ever a time when it did not?).
At that point, only his poems will speak for him. To do so effectively,
they must manifest his presence palpably and reliably, magnetically enough
to preclude analysis and silence criticism, vigorously enough to substantiate
Whitman’s claim that “this is no book—but I myself, in loving flesh and
blood” (NUPM, IV, 1465). But, as Whitman realizes in 1856, poetry is not
enough; ultimately, it is the reader who vindicates the poet. No matter how
much his language succeeds in transmigrating his living soul across “vast
trackless spaces ... projected through time” (“Starting from Paumanok,” ll.
25 and 29), if it does not evoke a corresponding feeling or experience in the
reader’s soul, if it is unable to exact an immediate intuitive affirmation of
truth and empathy, the poem has failed.
Although Whitman’s songs come from the heart, readers still may
condemn them as the formless sentiments of an unskilled hack, the bestial
bellowings of an uncultured brute, and banish them from literary discourse.
In other words, culling an array of natural, transparent signs from the
rampant dross of conventional literary language in order to found a natural
poetic language appropriate to the human soul only raises another problem,
one less governable than that of the poet’s choice of words—the possibility
of natural reading. That question forces itself upon Whitman when he turns
his attention to posterity, when he realizes that the future of Leaves of Grass
depends not upon particular truths being discovered and memorialized (who
Walt Whitman was, what was happening in Brooklyn in the 1850s, what
experiences or beliefs motivated this or that poem, and so on), but instead
upon the vicissitudes of interpretation, upon the inconstant and
uncontrollable reception of the sign, upon reading correctly or incorrectly
the scattered traces of Whitman’s being.
A correct reading would, of course, follow the natural guidelines (yet
another oxymoron) Whitman sketches variously in his poetry and prose. He
assumes that “his contempt for the ‘poets’ and ‘poetry’ of the day, his
presentation of thoughts and things at first hand, instead of second or third
hand, his sturdy and old-fashioned earnestness, and his unprecedented
novelty, make him a capitol target for the smart writers and verbal fops
Reading 157
engaged in manufacturing items and ‘criticism’.” So, “like all revolutionists

and founders, he himself will have to create the growth by which he is to be
fully understood and accepted” (NUPM, II, 898–992). Because Whitman
presents “thoughts and things at first hand,” without stock ornamentation,
the “smart writers and verbal fops” who dominate the literary milieu and
believe such adornments to be the essence of poetry can only ridicule him
with “slur, burlesque, and sometimes spiteful innuendo.” Or they
“emasculate” Whitman by turning Leaves of Grass into a mere topic of polite
conversation, a poetic subject to be bandied about: “A talent for
conversation—Have you it? If you have, you have a facile and dangerous
tenant in your soul’s palace” (NUPM, I, 295).
In either case, these glib reviewers degrade inspired poetry, dismissing
it because inspiration is un- or pre-aesthetic. It is up to Whitman to vanquish
readers who praise or blame according to a poet’s skill in handling literary
conventions and who rest content in limiting their analyses to the level of
decorum instead of delving into the underlying feeling. He himself must bear
the responsibility of fostering the “growth” of natural reading and carving
out his own fit audience (although, in the same paragraph, Whitman notes
his own “scornful silence, never explaining anything, nor answering any
attack,” a strategy he scarcely adhered to from 1855 onward).
To promote natural reading, Whitman first must break readers of their
conventional “Book-learning” habits of inquiry and reorient them to the
proper way of reading and experiencing nature. Put simply, a natural reading
of Whitman’s poetry would repeat, on the reader’s part, the same experience
Whitman has when he interacts with nature. His “poems ... [are] to be
perceived with the same perception that enjoys music, flowers, and the beauty
of men and women” (NUPM, IV, 1443). The physical exhilaration he felt
when listening to Alboni sing Verdi (see PW II, 694), the desire to coalesce
with eternity that draws him to the sea, where, he says, “I wended the shores
I know, / As I walked with that eternal self of me, seeking types” (“As I Ebb’d
with the Ocean of Life,” ll. 16–17), the passive inquisitiveness leading him to
bend “with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers” (“The Sleepers,” l. 3) and
enter into their dreams and nightmares—all such natural impulses and
responses should motivate and delimit a proper reading of Leaves of Grass.
Readers should approach Whitman’s poetic language as they do the
sensuous living language of leaves and rivers and sunshine, of human
countenances and slang speech, real-life signs that are reacted to with all
one’s being. The true language of life can be touched, tasted, and smelled, as
well as heard and seen:
158 Mark Bauerlein
Earth round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these

are words,
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances—beings, premonitions,
lispings of the future—these are vast words.
Were you thinking that those were the words—those upright
lines? Those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words—the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,
They are in the air—they are in you.
(“A Song of the Rolling Earth,” ll. 2–4;
the first two lines were deleted after 1871.)
A reading focused upon “curves, angles, dots,” upon print’s uniform black
and white, confines itself to a textual configuration and checks the kind of
feeling interaction Whitman faithfully proposes between author and
reader. Instead of attending to human origins, reading lapses into mere
decoding, into translating prosaically these imageless stick figures back
into their perceptible references and then evaluating the poet’s
“invention,” his poetic translation of certain ideas or truths into verse.
Scholarly or dilettante readers approach poetry by studying linguistic
embellishments of the things themselves and classifying a work, usually
from the perspective of a restrictive literary history, according to its
superficialities (its decorum, poetic diction, obedience to “unities,” and so
on). Instead of incorporating “beings” and “premonitions,” they merely
annotate a text and leave those “substantial words,” the realities,
untouched. Whitman would often righteously point out to his adoring
votaries how far their idle criticism deviates from an honest human
apprehension of nature’s wonders!
He also suggests that these pale men of letters read and write in such
an abstract, irrelevant manner not only because of local socio-historical
factors but because of linguistic conditions as well. Instead of blaming
perverse reading practices simply on arid scholarly influences and the
imaginative defects of routine readers, Whitman also censures the
representational distance between percept and sound and sound and script.
He condemns any sign that makes possible interpretive errancy, which
cushions the immediate sensible impact of natural phenomena and screens
individuals from a direct intuition of feeling. The tenuous progress from
perception to print, from image to sound to letter, is, of course, prone to the
mischievous effects of translation, not only to the translator’s interestedness
and ideological slant but to translation itself, the leap from one sign system
Reading 159
to another, which necessarily works transformative operations upon its

“content.” In simple terms, with every translation, that content is adapted to
a new grammar—that is, a new temporality, spatiality, history, and so on—
undergoing resignification that amounts more to a mutation than an
adaptation.
Only a privileged few have the natural genius and selflessness either to
withstand the seductions that this dangerous substitution offers or at least to
render it innocuous and read the sign aright. They form with Whitman an
inner circle of interpreters, “a conference amid Nature, and in the spirit of
nature’s genesis, and primal sanity. A conference of [their] two Souls
exclusively, as if the rest of the world, with its mocking misconceptions were
for a while left and escaped from” (NUPM, IV, 1452). The stinging
prevalence of “criticism” and “mocking misconceptions” in his social and
literary worlds causes Whitman to demand that readers school themselves in
the language of nature, the “vast ... substantial words” comprising the
universal poem. Though textual—the “Earth; “suns, moons, animals,
“ground and sea, “air,” and “you” are “words”—their meaning is unique and
immanent, unequivocally there for our physical and emotional pleasure, not
for our intellectual wit and discernment. “Words” of/in nature are not traces;
they are unified entities.
Composition reorders and resignifies those self-evident
materializations of truth or spirit, imposing a secondary, man-made
textual machination upon nature’s sensuous presentations. It thus
impoverishes the colorful display of beauty and warmth by submitting it
to a skeletal notation. Too often, instead of rescuing nature and all its
sublime manifestations from composition’s excesses, reading only
produces more outward signs, more camouflaging layers of artifice.
Conventional reading proliferates verbiage and thus fosters the linguistic
departure from nature. Natural reading, however, produces (or, rather,
reproduces) nothing more than what is there. Much like his own restless
attempt to translate the “meanings” of nature (albeit an effort he often
regards as faulty) and opposed to his critics’ arrogant, treacherous attempt
to translate the “meanings” of his poems, natural reading retains an
innocent, subdued receptivity to the pure thing before it. It halts any
modifying tendencies. It constitutes both the poetic language and its
interpretive (non-)methods as transparent—the former a vehicle of
feeling, the latter a passive admittance of feeling. As a result, the poem
remains intact, free to work its emotive power on and in its own terms
without being mutated into an alien language.
This is, for Whitman, the preferred reading situation, the natural
160 Mark Bauerlein
context wherein readers commune with writers and accommodate

themselves to writers’ passionate turns and innovations. The book functions
as a provisional gathering place or scene of reading that suspends
interpretation. Ideally, readers perceive without analyzing, apprehend
without judging, repeat without annotating, experience texts viscerally, and
leave interpretation to critics caught up in the trivial game of classification
and exegesis. As the poet would have it, by its distorting and generally self-
serving actions, interpretation undermines a healthy, rightful appreciation of
life, of the “miracles” of “Seeing hearing and feeling” (“Song of Myself,” l.
523) and the bare “things” in which “All truths wait” (l. 648). When
Whitman stands and faces the sublime limitlessness of earth and sky or the
“democratic average” of American society, the sea off the shores of
Paumanok or Broadway at noon, he simply allows their sights and sounds to
pour into his exposed senses. When recording his impressions, he assumes
the voice of nature and America and merely echoes ingenuously the tangible
“words” they spoke to him before. When readers come upon that voice, they
are to respond in the same noninterpretive, spongelike way that Whitman
did when he sauntered along the beach or down the avenue, except that
instead of becoming another voice of nature, readers are to become the voice
of Leaves of Grass (Whitman would say they are one and the same), sounding
in a unitary paean the natural truths therein.
Presiding over a sensuous, uninterpreted world and an undomesticated
society, addressing a familiar gathering of sympathetic confreres, the poet
serves as “the answerer,” the irrefutable “sayer” who bears the Logos. He is
the purveyor of truth—“He puts things in their attitudes” (“Song of the
Answerer,” l. 18)—and the arbiter of conflict “Him all wait for.... him all
yield up to, ... his word is decisive and final” (l. 8). He gains access to private
passion—“He has the passkey of hearts” (l. 28)—and he levels social rank—
“The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood, / The
insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see themselves in the
ways of him.... he strangely transmutes them” (ll. 50–51). The “answerer”
legislates and inspires, mirrors and “transmutes,” in each case serving to
naturalize relations, to bring the deviant back to purity. His power to compel
an audience to “yield” or “acknowledge” and his capacity to “settle justice,
reality, immortality” (l. 58) lie mainly in his ability to propagate faithfully and
adequately the language of nature:
Every existence has its idiom .... every thing has an idiom and tongue;
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men..
and any man translates.. and any man translates himself also:
Reading 161
One part does not counteract another part.... He is the joiner....

he sees how they join.
(ll. 31–33)
The poet-answerer “resolves” particularized local idioms into the

universal voice of being and “bestows it upon men” who “translate” it back
into a personal, idiosyncratic language. This Babel-like fragmentation,
however, does not dissever the communal bond, for the poet (as “joiner”)
holds individuals together, reminds them of their common cause, and keeps
them unified and compassionate by wielding a vernacular glue. He has “all
lives, all effects, all hidden invisibly in [him]self” (NUPM, I, 239). “Behind
[his] talk stands the real life of all who hear [him] now” (NUPM, IV, 2047),
and so he remains the oracle to whom those who seek truth and comfort
appeal. The mediator and focal point of man and man, and man and nature,
he gives vent to what all feel and touch and see and love, and makes
interpretation and conventional reading an encumbrance.
But what presuppositions does this scheme of pure reading rest upon?
The first presuppositions is that objects or “real life,” whether natural or
invented, can be perceived as extralinguistic givens immediately present to
the senses or as discrete identities manifesting themselves apart from any
system of reference. Second, there is the assumption that voice works no
instrumental changes upon what it describes, and that it represents
adequately and transparently the nonlinguistic reality inspiring it. The third
presupposition is that translation either from sensation to language or from
one language to another occurs without deforming the original referent, that
the substitution of one sign for another may be smooth and innocent. And
fourth, it is assumed that readers will be willing to adopt this reading attitude
against interpretation and welcome Leaves of Grass as they would experience
ordinary natural phenomena. “Song of Myself,” being Whitman’s struggle to
preserve natural expression during the composition process, investigates the
first three issues, resolving them through a metaphysics of perception and
expression. Many later poems, involving his struggle to ensure a natural
perception during the reading process, also ponder the first three, but from
the explicit, anxiety-ridden perspective of the fourth issue, treating it as a
problem of ideology (though this in no way excludes metaphysics).
Given Whitman’s desire to found a natural language of feeling and his
acute understanding of the dangers of reading, his anxiety makes perfect
sense. It also makes more poems. Never one to flee from his distresses
without first writing about them (directly or indirectly), Whitman converts
his anxiety into more poetic material, more ideas and feelings to express,
162 Mark Bauerlein
deny, analyze, metamorphose, subdue, and appease. One could, as some

have, group together Whitman’s polemical utterances against interpretation
and perform a thematic reading of them, paraphrasing his statements in a
critical vocabulary and extrapolating their general content, even though
many of them are already so categorically critical that they baffle any
translation from their putatively creative mode.
But whereas a thematic analysis, be it psychological, political, or
philosophical, might furnish students of Leaves of Grass with certain interests
and ideas preoccupying Whitman during his lifetime, it would not reveal the
textual transfigurations those “real” concerns undergo both during
composition, when they leave the cloudy, ephemeral space of Whitman’s
mind and assume definite shape in the book, and during reading, when the
reverse process takes place. “Song of Myself” probes the former, later poems
the latter, but not only in a thematizing manner. Instead of simply
allegorizing, in the conventional sense, a preexistent content in a narrative or
image, instead of simply constructing a poetic equivalent of truth, “Song of
Myself” and succeeding poems dramatize that construction, recounting the
poet’s search for and readers’ acceptance of natural signs. That is, Whitman
gives his language a performative as well as a cognitive dimension, staging
repeatedly scenes of writing and reading, and these scenes question the very
nature of translation. They pose in a much more forceful and interesting way
than do the abstract statements against active interpretation (which
themselves must be subject to interpretation) the fate of reading, its
inevitable clinamen from authorial intention.
In examining Whitman’s canon, it is easy to find dozens of reading
situations, moments where the poet scans a landscape or physiognomy for its
“meaning,” but such scenes are difficult to analyze because they so often
appear in conjunction with explicit renunciations of reading. In “Song of the
Open Road,” for example, Whitman declares, “You road I travel and look
around! I believe you are not all that is here! / I believe that something
unseen is also here” (ll. 16–17). He goes on to ponder the “objects that call
from diffusion [his] meanings and give them shape!” (l. 26) and to realize that
they “express [him] better than [he] can express [him]self” (l. 47). That is to
say, the “open road” is a numinous text made up of seen and “unseen,”
material sign and spiritual “meaning,” the human truth Whitman treasures
but which, though it dwells in his own soul, he can apprehend only by
reading it through the object. Initiating the coalescence of a subject with an
object and, ultimately, with itself, reading, then, is a fortuitous moment in an
emotive dialectic, a natural step on the “open road” to contentment and
“Happiness.”
Reading 163
In these phrases, there seems to be no worry over any possible missteps

reading might lead one into. And yet, a few lines earlier, Whitman writes, he
is “Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms” (l. 6). But
how else to characterize his approach to nature and its latent “meanings”
than as “querulous” inquisitiveness, his attacks upon “philosophies and
religions” (l. 83) and “the preacher preach[ing] in his pulpit! ... the lawyer
plead[ing] in the court, and the judge expound[ing] the law” (l. 219) as
defensive, contemptuous “criticism”? To save the poet from contradiction
(on this issue Whitman wishes to be decidedly consistent), we must accept
Whitman’s differentiation between the kind of reading that is carried out in
“libraries” from that which he performs in nature. As we have seen, it would
appear that the reading of books, of verbal signs arranged horizontally on
pallid leaves of paper, is to be qualitatively distinguished from the reading of
natural objects, of tangible things that invite participation in their actions.
To understand why Whitman considers such a distinction necessary, we
turn to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (originally entitled “Sun-Down Poem”),
not only the most profound and sustained lyric of the 1856 poems (the one
Thoreau singled out, along with, “Song of Myself,” as Whitman at his best)
but also the poem most clearly about reading.3 With its Heraclitean waters
and Wordsworthian sunsets, its poignant apostrophes to “you who peruse
me” (l. 112) a hundred years hence, and its lament for the “bitter hug of
mortality” (“Song of Myself,” l. 1288)—“myself disintegrated, every one
disintegrated” (“Crossing,” l. 7)—the poem overtly addresses the temporal
human predicament and its tragic effects: aging, loss, death, oblivion.
Yet, what stands out in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are not Whitman’s
ethical or philosophical conclusions regarding the human condition, but
rather his articulation of the question of reading and what role it plays in an
individual’s development and in human history. Specifically, in the hope that
it will assuage the dread of annihilation (as well as the threat of
misinterpretation, which is annihilation for a poet), the poem tries to
establish a comforting, stable identification between the way future
generations, “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence” (l. 5),
perceive the scene and the way Whitman does in the poem:
It avails not, neither time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
I project myself, also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
164 Mark Bauerlein
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river, and the
bright flow, I was refreshed,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood, yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick
stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
(ll. 20–26; the third line was later deleted.)
Through this imaginative amalgam of souls all correspondingly

taking in the landscape, Whitman’s sensations, already fading into
memories that must be recorded in order to endure, are rescued from
mutability and obliteration. If their reading of Brooklyn at twilight, of the
river, the boats and passengers, parallels his own (and if the poem about his
reading is kept in mind), then the poet escapes misinterpretation. His
experiences will become their experiences. The thoughts and feelings he
suffers at the transitory crossing moment from the “tall masts of
Mannahatta!” to “the beautiful hills of Brooklyn!” (l. 105), from day to
night, from “The similitudes of the past [to] those of the future” (l. 8), from
life to death, readers also will suffer. They, too, will see their reflection
flicker, “Diverge,” and be left behind in the “fine spokes of light ... in the
sunlit water” (l. 116).
As others behold the fluctuating landscape while crossing on the ferry
(or reading the poem) and relive sympathetically the poet’s moving
recognition of eternal becoming, a precious continuity of human experience
will be established—what Whitman believes to be the true American history,
he being one of its founding fathers. What sustains this continuity, as the
poem makes clear, is this genealogical interpretive community’s adherence to
natural reading, an implicit agreement among readers to confine
interpretation to the salutary limits set forth in the archetypal reading
experience—Whitman on the ferry.
Whitman solidifies this orthodox chain of interpretation later in the
poem, clarifying in his own mystifying terms how his reading is to be passed
on to his descendants:
Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and

admirable to me than my mast-hemm’d Manhatta, my river
and sun-set, and my scallop edged waves of flood-tide, the
sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay boat in the twilight,
and the belated lighter,
Curious what gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand,
Reading 165
and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my

nighest name as I approach,
Curious what is more subtle than this which ties me to the
woman or man that looks in my face,
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.
We understand, then, do we not?

What I promised without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not
accomplish is accomplished, is it not?
What the push of reading could not start is started by me
personally, is it not?
(ll. 92–100; the last line was deleted after 1871 and
the preceding lines were extensively rearranged.)
These lines turn upon two traditional philosophical oppositions crucial to

Whitman’s metaphysical outlook: the sensible versus the intelligible (in the
first stanza) and what can be intuited versus what can be spoken (in the
second stanza). First, Whitman favorably opposes the vast panorama of
“Manhatta,” the friendly handclasps of comrades, the “vocalization” of his
“nighest name,” and the captivating physiognomic “look” of “the woman or
man,” to whatever transcendent realities may lie beyond his sight, touch, or
hearing.
He wonders contentedly, What need has one of anything more than
what is perceived? Why let a perverse curiosity about the ineffable spoil
delight in the tangible and visible? Although the immediately present
assuredly fills his entire being with warmth and comfort and security, the
unperceivable can only appeal to abstract faith or pure reason, contemplative
faculties assumed to provide wisdom and restrain the senses in their desire
for excitement. But Whitman finds sensation true and sufficient unto itself;
only the pointless supposition of a supersensible reality characterizes
sensation as phenomenal delusion. In fact, he implies, it is conceptualization
that deludes, that uselessly depletes the display of life and robs it of its
energetic particularity in a restless pursuit of abstract, universal knowledge.
In the following stanza, Whitman favorably opposes the unutterable
“meaning” that is “understood” or “accepted” (in other words, assimilated
extralinguistically) to what is “mentioned,” “studied,” “taught,” or
“preached”—all of which necessitate indoctrination. Although the former
achieves in fantasy a semantic copulation as the poet “pours [his] meaning
into you,” the latter amounts to a distanced interaction by means of the
166 Mark Bauerlein
factitious intermediary, an event susceptible to all the deviations and

misappropriations arising from the absence of a naturally grounded medium.
By adhering to the natural conditions required for an ideal communion of
souls instead of resorting to conventional social or intellectual discourses,
and by infusing listeners with his unmediated vision instead of invoking its
arbitrary substitute, Whitman preserves his authority and avoids becoming
merely another one of the scribes. Also, what he feels and what he makes
readers feel need not and cannot be uttered, for any detour of feeling
through the sign inevitably fractures that feeling, de-notes its song, and no
dialectical recuperation or circuitous return can restore it to purity.
Feeling cannot be communicated. Like the “Wisdom” that “cannot be
passed from one having it, to another not having it” (“Song of the Open
Road,” l. 78), feeling can neither be articulated nor read nor interpreted.
Properly secluded in the soul and remaining in its inviolate self-presence
beyond representation, feeling can only be acknowledged and felt by those
who already possess it, who already intuit it and need merely the promptings
of mesmerizing bards to reexperience it. The sign by itself has no power to
awaken feeling in others.
The sign succeeds not simply by its being fortuitously chosen by the
poet and accurately interpreted by the reader, but of more importance, by its
functioning as a familiar token of something mutually recognized by and
already present in both participants. Reading is narcissism, the emancipating
apprehension of one’s own innate but culturally suppressed truth and
pleasure. What saves reading from selfishness and anarchy is the fact that
though each man and woman counts as “a simple, separate person” (“One’s-
Self I Sing,” l. 1), there is a subjective Logos, a “word Democratic, the word
En-Masse” (l. 2), enunciated by Whitman that taps the natural roots
common to all men and women and ensures a constant reception of his
poetry. Reading is corrupted not by readers giving free reign to their
emotions but by their restricting emotion and allowing learned habits of
interpretation to guide their responses.
Herein lies an opposition more relevant to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
and to Whitman’s poetics than the metaphysical oppositions noted above—
reading as a sympathetic fusion of souls versus reading as an active
interpretation of texts. The former signifies an unmediated, living empathy
of “persons,” the latter a detached examination of signs. Whereas criticism
expends itself in detailing the extraneous ornaments of feeling and then
adding further supplementary languages to it, empathy for “adhesiveness;
“comraderie,” “rapport,” and so on), though it must also negotiate signs,
reads them for their proper reference and returns them to their original
Reading 167
emotive content, which lies within themselves as well as in the poet. When
readers assume the correct empathic and auto-pathic posture of being openly
receptive to the poet’s heartfelt tones, semiosis, here a lineal descent of
“meaning,” remains within the purview of its creator. Representation and
interpretation coincide perfectly; and the first signification, which, in
Whitman’s interpretive model, equals inspiration, survives through
successive generations of interpreters (an ideal process that, of course,
contradicts infinite semiosis and pinpoints the behaviorist problematics
inhabiting Whitman’s scene of reading).
But criticism honors no such ancestral regulation. Under criticism’s
arrogant scrutinizing, “adhesiveness” dissolves and, instead of meeting
anticipated reader-disciples, the far-off but beguiled initiates he expects to
“complete” the poem, the poet finds himself pitted against interrogating
judges weighing his thoughts and words against their own capricious beliefs.
Faced with a philistine literary establishment, Whitman is obliged to
reply to with conscientious disdain or to accept with smothered resentment
other people’s interpretations, their manipulation of his works to suit their
convenience. Whitman’s lies and schemes, the arrant manner in which he
anonymously defends himself or uses his disciples to lead the fight against his
“enemies,” are sometimes despicable, sometimes pitiful. But they also
indicate Whitman’s sense of just how much is at stake in the way his poems
are read. Irony would perhaps be a more effective means of coping with his
disfiguration at the hands of shallow, unfeeling critics; but irony would force
Whitman to disjoin himself from what he speaks, to exploit the incongruity
between the language of the heart and the language of society, the very
discrepancy between feeling and sign that set the poet up for
misinterpretation in the first place.
For Whitman to employ the sign fraudulently and break the organic
contiguity of soul and sound would be, of course, to violate his first
commandment—to speak forthrightly, without calculation or imitation. As
he says, “All poems, or any other expressions of literature, that do not tally
with their writers actual life and knowledge, are lies” (NUPM, I, 265; “tally”
here signifies a direct, isomorphic transition from feeling to sign). He prefers
to keep his signs “personal” (although to claim to do so, he must overlook the
fact that many of his writings appear beneath the disguise of another’s
signature), to express himself in a language subjectively especial enough to
retain its unique human origin. If Whitman can adapt a social, democratic
medium of communication to his idiosyncratic feelings, and prevent the
reverse from happening, then reading will be not a disinterested
interpretation situating the text within the main currents of contemporary
168 Mark Bauerlein
literary discourse, but rather a compassionate understanding between

inspired souls, an encounter that secures the unbroken pedigree of “divine
literati” in the American grain.
This raises for Whitman (and for de Tocqueville) the fundamental
dilemma facing the American poet: How can a unique subjective language, a
language with its own personal grammar and history, be a medium of
communication readily understood by others? Only when the “other” is
identical to the poet will such a language have its proper effect; but if this is
the case, then the poet is not a unique individual but rather an anonymous
constituent of the “en masse.” Consequently, the attempt to be a poet and the
raw materials of poetry threaten the very singularity of self-hood that leads
one to be a poet in the first place. When in practice, when trying to share his
experiences and opinions with others, the poet in America always finds
himself seduced into conformity, accommodating his identity to the least
common denominator of democratic intersubjectivity—ordinary language.
What elevates that line of descent above compromise is the enduring
presence of Whitman himself: “I and mine do not convince by arguments,
similes, rhymes / We convince by our presence” (“Song of the Open Road,”
ll. 138–39). His constant nearness, not merely his printed words, keeps
American history universal and uncommon: “What the push of reading
could not start is started by me personally, is it not?” Reading must be
grounded in his “person,” in his soul and voice and flesh, not in the borrowed
language that renders his “person” to absent readers. As Whitman says
midway in Democratic Vistas, “If we think of it, what does civilization itself
rest upon—and what object has it, with its religions, arts, school, &c., but
rich, luxuriant, varied Personalism?” (PW, II, 392). A paragraph earlier, he
writes, “[Personalism] is individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a
human being in himself—,” a “second principle” complementing
“democracy, the leveler, the unyielding principle of the average.”
“Personalism” respects the value and integrity of the individual soul
and, although promoting community, protects the soul from a stifling
submergence in the homogenous mass of democratic society. Under the
humane guidelines of “personalism,” reading regards the book as merely a
preliminary entryway opening into an easeful inner sanctum where more
intimate recognition takes place. It makes a comforting harbor of passion and
truth where “the meal [is] pleasantly set” and the poet “tell[s] things in
confidence” (“Song of Myself,” ll. 372 and 387). This is the rightful setting
of interpretation. Presided over by Whitman’s “person,” his “life’s hot
pulsing blood, / The personal urge and form for [him]—not merely paper,
automatic type and ink...” (“Now Precedent Songs, Farewell,” ll. 9–10),
Reading 169
reading inalterably fixes upon its true subject, the heart and soul, where
falsification and misinterpretation are impossible.
But what if the “Personalism” Whitman extols as the guarantor of
individualism in mass society degenerates into self-absorption and disregard
for the natural covenant of mankind? What if the signs available to statesmen
and orators and poets, those who supply the cohesive validating myths to the
community, prove to have a divisive rather than a unifying effect, leaving
individuals introspective and frustrated, helplessly intent upon their souls’
unrealized evolution? What if the only alternative to interpretation is
noncommunication? Without a natural language, at once both universal and
personal, to sustain a fluid transition from private desire to public good and
to ground individual identity in a collective identity, “Personalism” collapses
into solipsism. Signs and feelings are not exchanged; instead, they are
reflected back to their source. The “Personal” soul, elsewhere a sensitive
interpersonal constancy but here an ego engrossed in its own feelings,
threatens to reduce the democratic community to Narcissus’ clear pool in
which each person makes love to his or her own self-projection.
Showing more critical awareness than many of his early critics,
Whitman blankly confronts this possibility in “A Song of the Rolling Earth”:
Each man to himself, and each woman to herself, is the word of

the past and present, and the true word of immortality,
Not one can acquire it for another—not one!
Not one can grow for another—not one!
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail,
The oration is to the orator, and the acting is to the actor and
actress, not to the audience,
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own,
or the indication of his own.
(ll. 78–89)
The lines leading up to this passage—“The divine ship sails the divine
sea for you” (l. 74); “For none more than you is immortality” (l. 78)—suggest
that Whitman is here celebrating in others the same narcissistic exuberance
that led him earlier to celebrate himself. But whereas in “Song of Myself”
170 Mark Bauerlein
Whitman’s regressive excursions into self-centeredness are generally

preceded or followed by unreserved outbreaks of gregariousness, in these
lines from the next to last poem in the 1856 edition, self-centeredness
continues unabated. Formerly, Whitman’s seclusion was accentuated by a
profound silence that seemed tantalizingly to withhold the truth, but here it
is the attempt to break that silence, to “teach” or “give,” that creates his
seclusion. Even singing and oratory, two of Whitman’s preferred forms of
discourse, only confirm man’s entrapment within either a subjective nutshell
or a prison house of language: “no man understands any greatness or
goodness but his own, or the indication of his own.” The speech or behavior
intended to silence debate, appease dissension, and harmonize opposing
parties into a community of visionaries unconsciously acknowledging the
natural foundations of democratic fellowship no longer has the power to do
so. Indeed, action has fallen into crime—murder, rioting, slavery,
expansionism—and language has only aggravated dispute and made
government a matter of compromise. Because every utterance and every
action returns to its origin without having truly engaged the souls of its
“audience,” communication (in Whitman’s ideal sense) can never take place.
And because the democratic community rests upon a self-projected
communication, the self-interest resulting from this monologic practice
undermines any firm beliefs in American ideals and corrupts American
society.
To appreciate the extent and gravity of this conclusion, we must
remember that it had been Whitman’s proclaimed cardinal purpose to arrest
this decline and reinstitute those natural truths and rights that the New
World experiment properly rested upon. But to rejuvenate the primitive
brotherhood of man required, in Whitman’s eyes, first and foremost the
annunciation of the divine energies of words, of signs and sounds that
possessed a performative capacity to enact the things they represented, to
participate in the evolutionary growth they signified. Only if semiosis were a
progressive unfolding of the innate spirit of humanity, instead of being a
channel of information open to the uses and abuses of rhetoricians and
“contenders,” could nineteenth-century Americans fulfill the promises
afforded by both the founding Fathers and a naked continent.
Believing that the state of the language is both the index and
precondition of the state of the nation, Whitman, at the time he is outlining
his poetics and writing his best poetry (1855–1860), regards a poetic-
linguistic revolution as the best way or at least as the necessary first step to
remedy social inequality and political corruption and general alienation. In
the above passage, however, which Whitman hardly touched in later
Reading 171
editions, language (of all kinds) appears to be more a condition of than an

antidote for alienation.
It is tempting to restrict Whitman’s cynicism about expression to those
usages that debase communication and suppress rather than arouse feeling—
for example, the stale prose of scholars and academicians, the fanciful
conversation of the literary salon, the stern admonishments and irksome
repetitions of teachers and preachers. Obeying this temptation, one can then
turn to Leaves of Grass and relish its corrective and refreshing vernacular
utterance, rejoice in “the dialect of common sense” and “the repartee of
workers” (PK, II, 457, 577). But whereas such recourse is invited by “Song of
Myself,” in “A Song of the Rolling Earth” (and many other poems from 1856
and 1860) any hope that a Whitmanian idiom might overturn the prevailing
“dead” languages is foreclosed. Although Whitman directed the assertions in
the above quotation toward abstract functionaries (the “singer,” the
“teacher,” the “orator,” the “actor and actress”), in the next section he turns
upon himself and draws the same conclusion of impotence regarding his own
expressions:
I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words!

I swear I think that all merges toward the presentation of the unspoken
meanings of the earth!
Toward him who sings of the body, and of the truths of the earth,
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of the words that print
cannot touch.
I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,

It is always to leave the best untold.
When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot,

My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots,
My breath will not be obedient to its organs,
I become a dumb man.
(ll. 98–107)
Whitman becomes a “dumb man,” however, not because he wants the

expressive capability “to tell the best,” but rather because “The best of the
earth cannot be told...” (l. 108). It is the telling itself, not the teller, that
blocks Whitman’s desire. Owing to their ineradicable metaphysical seclusion
beyond the poet’s oracular reach, the “meanings of the earth” will not admit
to representation. The supplementary action of his words prevents them
172 Mark Bauerlein
from broaching the thing itself and unveiling the essential truths of man and
nature (this is the Orphic poet’s calling), leaving those cherished “meanings”
forever “unspoken” and unprinted. As a universal presence felt individually,
a ubiquitous given inaccessible to linguistic reconstruction, “the best” is too
near, too enveloping, too much ourselves to yield to articulation and
cognition.
To recognize and articulate “the best” would require the poet to
assume a reflective distance from his “meanings,” an observant position
mediated by a system of reference that objectifies and thereby perverts
feeling and experience. In their pure state, “the truths of the earth” elude the
signifying grasp of “audible words.” “[T]he common air that bathes the
globe” (“Song of Myself,” l. 360) disdains possession or restriction by man
and his interpretations. When submitted to interpretation, “the best” loses
its self-evidence, its status as “understood,” and becomes the focus of debate,
the subject of predications and attributions to be proved or disproved
depending upon the relative persuasive force of the contestants’ rhetoric.
When “the best” comes to be a tool of sophistry and rhetoric, when nature,
god, the soul, and the body come to be managed and directed by their
representatives, democracy will have abandoned its natural foundations. Man
will have traded his natural energies for their enervating proxies, while the
poet, self-appointed guardian of language, will guiltily discover himself
participating in the perverse substitution of words for things and signs for
feelings, and furthering America’s degeneration.
The only alternative is “to leave the best untold.” With his realization
that language fails to penetrate to the essence of things, Whitman finds
himself paralyzed: “When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot, / My
tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, / My breath will not be obedient to its
organs.” The Orphic mastery he had affirmed in “Song of Myself” and in his
anonymous self-reviews has lapsed into a stifling impotence. The
spontaneous cooperation of “tongue,” “breath,” “organs,” and “the best” has
broken down. Rather than trying to cover over this incapacitating rupture in
expression or making a futile attempt to remedy it through the use of
language, Whitman simply acknowledges the sign’s shortcomings and
reaffirms his faith in a supracontextual, extralinguistic “meaning.” The fact
that Whitman must employ a self-defeating medium, a fabricated language
severed from its transcendental reference, necessitating interpretation, and
generating more language (even a twice-removed critical metalanguage),
only enhances the value and mystery of what lies beyond it and strengthens
Whitman’s confidence in his poetry’s ability to “indicate” reality, if not “tell”
it.
Reading 173
This confidence, however, is short-lived, and poetry is only temporarily

saved from condemnation, for it is inevitable that an elevation of the
inexpressible (as in “A Song of the Rolling Earth”) should soon be followed
by a devaluation of expression. Momentarily, Whitman finds refuge in
“indication”—“Every thing indicates” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”
originally line 7, deleted in later editions)—as a more natural means of
communicating “meaning” than print or “book-words,” a deictic semiotic
gesture founded upon concrete, physical action, not conventional
abstraction. But nevertheless, though not as representational as printed
words (loosely assuming that representation is quantifiable), “indication” still
presupposes a signifying space between sign and referent and between signal
and receiver.
“Indication,” therefore, is prone to become skewed like any other form
of expression, to waver from its destination as it is given up to desire and
interpretation. In other words, putatively natural gestures such as
“indication,” which seemingly achieve unmediated status by virtue of their
independence from the spoken and written sign, are in fact also liable to the
hazards of reading. No matter how transparent or organic or symbolic the
sign may be, its success still must necessarily rest upon interest, ideology,
prejudice, upon the interpretive virtues and vices of willful, desirous readers.
Where is the audience, Whitman asks, who will imbibe his songs like
sunshine after a spring rain? Who has withstood the terminal lessons of “the
head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman” (“A Song for
Occupations,” l. 6) and the “formulas” of “bat-eyed and materialistic priests!”
(“Song of the Open Road,” l. 130)? Who has remained untainted by abstract
thought, analysis, interpretation? They are the fit audience for which Leaves
of Grass was intended, but by the late 1850s Whitman has begun to doubt
their existence, and hence to question his ambitions.
This is not to say that the entire career falls apart, but only that the
unmitigated verve, the self-satisfaction, and the grandiose playfulness have
become somewhat blunted. The public assertiveness has lost its edge, the
reason for that decline lying somehow in problems of audience, publication,
and review. His including positive and negative reviews of the 1855 volume
in the 1856 volume may suggest continued audacity, but it also shows an
increasingly anxious awareness of how others treat his work, of the crucial
importance of response.
Chase writes, “In the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass there is a rather
nervously assertive attempt to put the house in order, to impress upon the
public that the poems are intelligible and have behind them a large-scale
program.” After discussing Whitman’s tactless marketing of Emerson’s
174 Mark Bauerlein
congratulatory letter, Allen tells how, for many months, “he had been
‘promoting’ himself as a uniquely American poet.” Zweig cites his troubles
with Fowler & Wells, his publishers, and says, “The 1856 edition went
almost unnoticed, and apparently he was too caught up in his writings to
campaign for it as he had for the first book a year before.”4 By 1857,
Whitman had written dozens more poems, yet he would not find any
publishing support for three more frustrating years.
Whitman makes a revealing admission along these lines in a letter
dated July 28, 1857: “My immediate acquaintances, even those attached to
me strongly, secretly entertain the idea that I am a great fool not to ‘make
something’ out of my ‘talents’ and out of the general good will with which I
am regarded. Can it be that some such notion is lately infusing itself into me
also?” (Cor. I, 45). That is, is Whitman’s self-definition succumbing to what
others require him to be, what publishers, critics, enemies, and even friends
define him as?
This drift of self-expression into audience-anxiety is what makes poems
like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” according to Larson’s excellent summation
of this reader response issue, “a gesture, summons, or petition.”5 But
although petitioning may work to some readers, to others it only poses the
question of why attempt to do so. Why worry, at this point, so much about
interpretation?
Because now he senses that once interpretation has begun, it gathers
momentum and surreptitiously insinuates itself into human nature as a
second nature (Whitman would appreciate that oxymoron), implacable in its
designs and incorporating all resistances. After interpretation has vitiated the
senses and the soul, every thing, every person, every feeling becomes not a
presence but a sign awaiting exegesis, a ghostly demarcation of some reality
we must remain insensible to. The only way to restore the divided sign to its
monadic preexistence is by resorting, with greater and greater frustration
and nostalgia, to yet more signs. The afflictive fact remains that “no
substantive or noun, no figure or phonograph or image, stands for the
beautiful mystery” (NUPM, I, 191).
So, if the only way to satisfy one’s craving for the infinite is to rely upon
the unsatisfactory finite, if the means of restoration is itself the problem,
what is the poet to do? Is he to persist in his Orphic mission, continue to seek
a language of union, compose a hundred visions and revisions in the hope of
canonizing himself and America, all the while knowing that his life is a
fiction? Or will he simply recall his projections, renounce his ambitions, and
fade into silence and death?
This uninspiring corollary to the previous conclusion is what Whitman
Reading 175
faces after 1856 as he begins occasionally, but with an abruptness and

intensity suggesting a decisive return of the repressed, to focus his
generalized critique of expression upon his own work. Now grimly conscious
of the pitfalls of being read, Whitman loses confidence in words’ power to
bring about an unmediated experience. Regret and resentment arising from
the failure of 1855 to do so takes its place. Language more and more is
regarded as a catastrophe, the cause and instrument of man’s expulsion from
a preinterpretive golden age. Many of the best lyrics of 1860—“Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “Scented
Herbage of My Breast,” to name a few—and parts of several other poems
dwell upon this eventful “mistake” and ponder the implications it has for
Whitman’s career. As Whitman realizes, these poems and what inspired
them tragically signal the end of the project begun five years earlier.
NOTES
1. I quote the first version of every poem noted, but I call them by their final title.
2. Whitman assumes the third person here, even though he is writing about himself,
because these phrases come from notes for one of his anonymous self-promotions. This
particular scrap dates from late 1871 and is intended as a defense of his public reading of
“As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.”
3. For critical readings of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” see Miller, Walt Whitman’s
Poetry, 199–208; Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and
Cultural History (New York, 1971), 119–65; Black, Whitman’s Journeys into Chaos, 157–66;
Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry, 92–116; Hollis, Language and Style in
“Leaves of Grass,” 100–106; Joseph G. Kronick, American Poetics of History: From Emerson to
the Moderns (Baton Rouge, 1984), 106–17; and Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus,
8–13.
4. Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered, 99; Allen, The Solitary Singer, 181; Zweig, Walt
Whitman: The Making of the Poet, 279.
5. Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus, 10.
JOHN HOLLANDER
Whitman’s Difficult Availability
We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew
the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and
materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose
picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in
Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and
unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same
foundations of wonder as the Town of Troy and the temple of Delphi,
and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their
politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men,
the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon,
and Texas, as yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample
geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
—THE POET
I t did not. Eleven years after Emerson concluded his essay “The Poet,”
there appeared a remarkable volume, prefaced with an echoing declaration
that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” and
likening itself and its “forms” to “the stalwart and wellshaped heir” of him
whose corpse has just been carried from the house. Leaves of Grass was
published by the author himself during the week of Independence Day 1855,
From The Work of Poetry. © 1997 by Columbia University Press.
177
178 John Hollander
and a few days later the corpse of his own father, Walter Whitman Sr., left
its house at last. Self-published, self-reviewed (more than once), self-
proclaiming, self-projecting, self-inventing, the corpus, the opera, the body of
work and life of Walt Whitman Jr. gave birth to itself in an astonishing
volume, augmentations, revisions, and rearrangements would occupy the
poet’s creative life.
The 1855 Leaves of Grass comprised twelve long stretches of a new sort
of free verse, untitled, unglossed, and generically unframed, including the
great poems now known as “Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Faces,” “I
Sing the Body Electric,” “A Song for Occupations,” and “There Was a Child
Went Forth.” Its title was—and remains—as deeply problematic as its
appearance. Are the leaves literally the pages of books—not “those barren
leaves” that Wordsworth’s speaker wanted shut up to free the reader for the
texts of nature, but pages that were paradisiacally both green and fruitful? Or
are they rather metaphors for the poems, here not the “flowers” of old
anthologies, but green with newness? Are they the leaves that, broadcast by
the wind, served the Cumaean Sybil for her prophetic pages? Are they
revisions of the oldest poetical leaves of all, those figurations of individual
lives in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shelley, and is the grass likewise
also that of all flesh mown down by death in Isaiah and the Psalmist? Are
they leavings—residues of the act of “singing,” departures for worlds
elsewhere that are always regions of here? And in what way are the leaves-
pages of grass: made of, about, for, authored by? “Leaves of Grass”—hard
words, putting body, life, text, presence, personality, self, and the constant
fiction of some Other, all together.
The poetry, like its title, looks easy and proves hard. Who was this and
to whom was he talking? Was this “you” he invoked variously a version of
himself, a companion, a muse, a reader? Why should a reader care about
“Walt Whitman,” “one of the roughs,” even if he did regard himself as being
“so luscious”? What appeared difficult and problematic immediately
included the centrality of body, the placing of homo urbanus at a visionary
frontier, the homoerotic realm as a token of both independence and
connectedness, the confused addressing of reader, body and soul by a
nonetheless unfractured voice, the innovative formats for the framing of
metaphor. Now, just a hundred years after the poet’s preparation of the
“deathbed” edition of his works, these issues seem virtually classical.
Nevertheless, Whitman’s growing and ongoing book, insisting on its role
and nature as the poem of Democracy and the poem of the great poem of
“these United States,” defies easy characterization the more one reads it. The
poet insists that he stands for all America—that he is America, and lest you
not believe him, he will play out that theme in energetically crowded detail.
It is difficult because of its celebration of self-possession in scattered
multitudes of tropes of self-dispersion, or in confusing images of the
incorporation of wonderful arrays of particulars; it is difficult in its
propounding the song of body, in compounding a body of song. And, as
always, it presents us with the perpetual problem of the Old and the New, the
Early and the Late. When Milton at the beginning of Paradise Lost proposes
that his adventurous song will accomplish “Things unattempted yet in prose
or rhyme,” his very words are those—as I have mentioned in the essay in this
volume called “Originality”—of a successful precursor (Ariosto)
flamboyantly making the same promise. Whitman implicitly allows that
celebrations and singings had indeed gone on in the past (“the talkers were
talking, the talk of the beginning or the end,” by which he means the Bible
was bibling); still, he declares,
There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven and hell than there is now.
He demands to be taken literally and requires to be taken figuratively. (“I and

mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, / We convince by our
presence,” he chants, which has to be either a lie or a metaphor.) What the
poet of “Song of Myself” invokes as “O perpetual transfers and promotions!”
are his tropes and his hyperboles, his profoundly nonliteral tallyings and
ecstatic reportage, his episodic pictures fading in and out of parable. Robert
Frost—that most un-Whitmanian of major twentieth-century American
poets—characterized the essentially poetic as “saying one thing and meaning
another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasures of ulteriority.”
Whitman’s metropolis of ulteriorities hums and buzzes with lives and
busynesses, but below its streets are pulsing countercurrents. His
proclamations of openness (“Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew
the doors themselves from their jambs!”) only concern outer layers of
closure, for the most important matter inside the house remains ever safe, as
he proclaims and concedes in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,”
... before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs
and bows,
180 John Hollander
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I

have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand
beneath.
This “real Me” or “Me myself” is an elusive being. For all the openings and
accessions and outreachings propounded in the poems, it can never really
bear to be touched, save by the mothering presences of night or the sea,
perhaps, and thereby by death. Whitman’s difficult ulteriorities are often
reversals of this sort. When he announces his expansions, containments, and
incorporations, he is frequently enacting a contraction and a withdrawal.
Likewise with Whitman’s varying figures of the filling and emptying of the
Self and the Everything Else, the “I contain the XYZ” and the “I leak out
into the XYZ.” They are as easy to mistake as are his purported
identifications of Self and Other, which D. H. Lawrence shrewdly observed
had nothing to do with feeling and sympathy (“Agonies are one of my
changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself
become the wounded person”).
In “Song of Myself” the singer is very shifty about his mode of standing
for, whether in the relation of the poet’s “I” to the massive particulars he so
ecstatically catalogues and inventories or to the other components of his
being—his soul and his “real Me,” not at all of one substance with the
authorial father. The Personal, the Individual, instead of the Collective—but
so overwhelmingly adduced that it is easy for the dulled reading spirit to glue
all the vibrant particulars into a slab of generality. For enough people to be
able to be in a crowd, each without losing self-identity, self-respect, and
dignified particularity, would be to transform the meaning of “crowd”
utterly. Whitman is a remarkable celebrant of dignity and confounder of
shame; the only shame he feels is, manifestly, the moment at the end of
“Song of Myself” (sect. 37): “Askers embody themselves in me and I am
embodied in them, / I project my hat, sit shamefaced, and beg” where his riot
of inclusions entraps him in the begging that would have been so sinful in his
Quaker upbringing. (But it is this moment that leads to the remarkable self-
recognition and recovery in section 38.) More generally, his implicitly
pronounced shame is at shamefulness itself.
“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself,” he
slantingly avers toward the end of “Song of Myself,” but there is no paradox
of self-reference here, and that is one of the things that makes this poem such
a hard one. Starting out with the work of “loafing,” which is more than the
trivially paradoxical industry of idleness, the speaker poses quirkily, a flâneur,
or dandyish observer of the life of the city street whose sympathies are always
effortlessly outgoing:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable
certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious at what will come
next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering
at it.
Along with Whitman’s celebration of bodily projection comes an

ambivalence about old stories. “As if the beauty and sacredness of the
demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical!” he exclaims in the 1855
preface; but it is just the complex mythopoetic elevation and concentration
of the “demonstrable” that his poetry effects. Wordsworth had, at a crucial
moment in his preface to The Excursion, proclaimed the betrothal of ancient
myth and the quotidian:
Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
On love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
—I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation.
The Excursion, 800–810
Whitman, subsequently but more audaciously, comes “magnifying and

applying” in section 41 of “Song of Myself” as a collector of old images of
“the supremes,” the obsolete gods, buying them up at auction, reproducing
them, “Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more, /
Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days.” He even uses them
for a poetic coloring book: “Accepting the rough sketches deific to fill out
182 John Hollander
better in myself (by myself, with myself), bestowing them freely on each man
and woman I see.... / Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl
of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation.”
By the end of the section’s ode to the Olympus of Everything (“The
supernatural of no account”), the poet himself, “waiting my time to be one
of the supremes,” half-astonished, acknowledges his own role as the sole
originator. In a powerful vision that colors in the rough sketches that both
the first chapter of Genesis and the opening invocation of Paradise Lost have
become for him, he feels his near rape of the primordial darkness and chaos
into which prior myths of the universe have now sunk: “By my life-lumps!
becoming already a creator, / Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d
womb of the shadows.” He can also move from the acutely “demonstrable”—
the detailed vignettes of sections 10 and 12 of “Song of Myself”—to the
puzzlingly “mythical,” as in the beautiful parable of section 11, with its
twenty-eight young men who are also days of the month, and the lunar lady
who comes to join them in the spray.
Oddly enough, a chief difficulty of his poetry for every reader comes
not from his ecstatic vocabulary, his self-descriptive “barbaric yawp” but in
Whitman’s hard ordinary words. These include basic verbs of motion, like
“drift” and “pass,” located somewhere between “sing” and “sally forth.”
There are also complex terms like “vista,” which can mean (1) what is seen,
(2) the point or place from which one sees it, (3) the structure of mediating
or intervening opacity past or through which one does the seeing. There are
rarer but stunning verbs like “project,” which has both physical senses (to
throw or cast out or away, to jut out from, to make something jut out from,
to cast images or patterns onto a surface, etc.) and mental ones (transitively,
to plan, contrive, devise; to put before oneself in thought, to imagine). The
interplay of these senses helps energize that remarkable moment in “Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” when he calls out to the bereft, widowed
mockingbird, “O you solitary singer, singing by yourself, projecting me,” (to
which, darkling, he listens and reciprocates with, “O solitary me listening,
never more shall I cease perpetuating you”).
Most famously problematic has been the matter of Whitman’s free
verse and his formal innovations generally. A map of the “greatest poem,” the
United States themselves, shows us shapes formed by natural contours—
seacoasts and lake shores, demarcating rivers and so forth—and by surveyed
boundary lines, geometric, unyielding, and ignorant of what the eye of the
airborne might perceive. Whitman’s poem of America purported to have
dispensed with all surveyors, with arbitrary strokes of a mental knife that
score out legal fictions like state boundaries or city limits. It declared that all
its component lines, stanzas, and structures would be shaped only by the
natural forms they organically exuded. Which meant, as in every great poet’s
high ulterior mode, that the art that shaped them would teach older formal
paradigms and patterns to dance, rather than negate them utterly. As a poet,
you can only, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “Let nature be your teacher” after
yourself having taught nature how to speak. Very complex are the linear and
strophic patterns in which Whitman would claim to “weave the song of
myself” (“Song of Myself” section 15, where he fuses melodic lines and
horizontal warp threads of a growing fabric), and their formal modes as well
as their complex articulations of those modes are all in themselves subtle and
powerful formal metaphoric versions of more traditional ones.
This revisionary character can be more easily observed at the level of
trope or fiction than at the realm of scheme or formal pattern. Some of his
greatest imaginative figures—leaf, grass, bird, star, sea, flowering branch,
city, river, road, ship, the Wanderer, the Original—have all the freshness and
imaginative power that only come from the revision of traditional
figurations. And often the rhetorical deed of a poem or movement in a poem
will be ceremoniously to enact such a revision, as when, for example, the poet
substitutes his domestic, American, erotic, spring-blooming lilac for the
more traditionally emblematic flowers on the funeral hearse of the Lost
Leader in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: “O death, I cover
you with roses and early lilies, / But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the
first.” He is hereby also substituting his own kind of poetry (text and
bouquet, poesy and posy, having been associated since antiquity); and the
original gesture earns its memory of “Lycidas” and “Adonais” by also
mourning a complex mythological personage on the occasion of the death of
an actual person. Or there is the substitution of the native American
mockingbird for the romantic nightingale and skylark. These are simple and
manifest instances of a phenomenon occurring throughout Whitman’s
poetry.
In its formal aspect, Whitman adopts almost unvaryingly an end-
stopped line, characteristically connected to its near companions by
anaphora (formulaically repeated opening word or phrase) or parallel
syntactic form in a ramified growth of subordinate clauses (the familiar
formats of his fascinating array of modes of cataloguing). In context, his form
is as identifiable as a quantitative or accentual syllabic line would be, not
marked by a tally of its parts but by the way it is shaped to be part of an
epigram, a strophe, an aria, or sonata-form like “movement,” or a block of
stipulations. There are his strophic forms, sometimes, in his later work (as in
“Eidólons” or “Dirge for Two Veterans” or “Darest Thou Now, O Soul”)
184 John Hollander
suggesting in their format classical stanzas, more often some form of ad hoc
rhythm developed by linear groupings, as in the opening of “Song of Myself”
no. 6. (There a pattern of two and then one, three and then one, four and
then one develops in the responsive suppositions rising in answer to the
child’s—and the reader’s—“What is the grass?”)
And always, there is the marvelous deployment, throughout lines and
strophes, of the rhythms of speech as well as the totally unspeakable rhythms
generated only by writing, the cadences of the inventoried, parallel
modifying phrases and dependent clauses (who talks like that?); the
mannered, Frenchified noun–adjective inversions; the rhythmic jolts
provided by intrusions of weird diction. The rhythmic patternings of long
and short lines, aligned, variously interjected, refrained, extended, receding
were not exactly, as Whitman put it to his friend Horace Traubel, analogous
to “the Ocean. Its verses are the liquid, billowy waves, ever rising and falling,
perhaps wild with storm, always moving, always alike in their nature as
rolling waves, but hardly any two exactly alike in size or measure, never
having the sense of something finished and fixed, always suggesting
something beyond.” But the fixer and finisher, the poet himself, is far more
crafty a puller of waves than the coldly regular moon. He might just as well
have likened his long anaphoric catalogues to urban crowds through which
the reader himself will pass, jostling, pushing, sometimes striding, sometimes
pausing.
A word or two about Whitman’s basic form of cataloguing: it exhibits
a variety of structural modes. In the third strophe of “Song of Myself” no.
31, for example, the little list begins with the generality “In vain the speeding
or shyness,” then reiterates the qualifier “In vain” to introduce each item in
the list of ascending entities (in archaeological time and humanly scaled
space—from “plutonic rocks” to the auk). The conclusion is the burden of
this song: “I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure-cliff,” which
itself follows quickly on the last line, as well as on the whole series of
ineffectually evasive beings, all of which the poet “follows quickly.” But it is
as if the particular following—the climb up to the high point to the nest of
the great bird—becomes a momentary archetype of all the others. And one
great function of the list may have been to explore fully the meaning of “the
speeding or shyness.” Without the array of instances, it could not be grasped;
fully informed by the items of the catalogue and the musical patterning in
which they are unrolled, it becomes a unique phrase, Whitman’s—and the
reader’s—own. What is not a central matter is the extent of Whitman’s lists,
but rather their internal structure, the narrative of their development, the
ways in which they are—as in this case—variously framed by enveloping
initial predications or shape their own closures by the framing gesture of the
last entry.
Consider the great catalogue of specifications preceding the “I tread
such roads” in “Song of Myself” no. 33. Starting after the declaration that “I
am afoot with my vision,” there are nearly eighty lines of wheres (“Where the
quail is whistling ... / Where the bat flies ... / Where the great gold-bug drops
... / Where the brook puts out ...” etc.), throughs, upons, pleas’d withs that make
up subsections of their own. Through these and beyond, the whole passage
itself treads roads of country, city, farm, factory, wild and domestic animal,
marine nature and industry, and moves toward a hyperbolic envelopment. Its
electrifying last entry functions like the dancing figures on Achilles’s shield
in The Iliad, which seem to sum up the whole story of the making and
describing of the vision of human life represented on it:
Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the
diameter of eighty thousand miles,
Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the
rest,
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother
in its belly.
The concluding line is packed with complex figuration: the “new moon with
the old moon in its arms” (from “Sir Patrick Spens” and Coleridge) invokes
the barely discernible full sphere shadowed within the bright crescent, being
connected—through the literal Latin sense of “crescent”—to the curved
form of the enwombed fetus. It concludes, sums up, and reaches beyond the
preceding elements in the list with a marvelous image of containment.
From the Homeric list of ships and the biblical genealogies, through
the rhetorically rough inventories of goods; the blazons of erotic details of a
desired body, the stacks of clauses and conditions and contingencies on a
contract or lease; the inventories of rescued necessities by a Crusoe or Swiss
Family Robinson or of what Tom Sawyer received in barter for the
whitewashing; the wondrously detailed names of those who came to Gatsby’s
parties—the rhetoric of cataloguing in our literature has encompassed
everything from the high heroic to the low quotidian. Whitman’s catalogues
often consist of lists of ramified predications. Sometimes their litanies of
specimen instances are his sort of chanting of the laws—as only in biblical
times and rituals—of the Great Poem of America as a self-acknowledged
legislator of the world. Generally they are transcendental: they include and
metaphorically revise these and other nonliterary modes of inventorying.
186 John Hollander
With Whitman, lists become basic topoi, places in, by, and through which
his poems develop themselves. Through their internal structures and
rhythms of syntactic and semantic grouping, they articulate their own
boundaries and purposes.
Not only is Whitman the poet “afoot with his vision” in the poem, but
throughout his life, in his constant textual revisions as well. The nine
subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass after 1855 not only rearrange material
in the preceding ones but add many new poems, subtract a good many,
sometimes reinsert a previous subtraction. The leaves of the book remain
green and growing throughout his life. There is an academic industry of
interpreting the continual changes Whitman made in his work from 1855 to
1891, with a number of different interpretive agendas, each running
roughshod over the partial applicability of the others. There is the school
whose central agenda is the matter of varying explicitness about
homosexuality; another of developing explicitness about poetic intention;
those who see greater obliqueness, increased second-guessing of a growing
audience, and so forth. Such impulses can indeed all seem to be at work
differently, at different times and places in the text. Whitman’s evolving
thoughts on formal structures are reflected in his renumbering—and thereby
reconstituting—of strophes and sections (“Song of Myself,” unnumbered
and unnamed in 1855, falls into 372 numbered strophes—ranging from
couplets to full odes—in 1860 but does not acquire its calendrical division
into 52 sections until 1867.) Likewise interesting in this regard are the
opening and form of “Out of the Cradle”: the sheer play of retitling
generally, sometimes reframing, sometimes clarifying an intention,
sometimes obscuring or transforming one; the addition of clusters in later
editions; the segmentation, in 1856, into genres of poems, and so forth.
The history of Whitman’s reputation seems to me to be less interesting
than the history of any reader’s reaction to the poetry. But generally one may
say that the Poem gets reinterpreted into the Works of the Bard. “Song of
Myself,” with, again, the ambiguous resonances of the grammatical
construction (composed of, by, to, about, for, myself? “of myself” as it might
be “of itself?” etc.) starts out untitled in 1855, becomes “Poem of Walt
Whitman, an American” (which introduces the ambiguous “of”), and “Walt
Whitman” thereafter until 1881, when it assumes its familiar title. New leaf-
forms—asides, communiqués from Parnassus, blurbs for the universe,
position papers, self-commissioned laureate verses, ghosts of leaves that are
really only Albumblätter, etc., start filling up the pages. They work their way
into thematized sections—he calls them “clusters” from 1860 on—as part of
a program to extend his formal metaphor of organic structure from line to
strophe to poem to poem-group to the ever-growing oeuvre itself. “Chants

Democratic,” “Leaves of Grass” (a synecdochal subtitle), “Enfans D’Adam,”
“Calamus” (again, like “leaves,” a complex figure, blending the stiff phallic
rush or cane, the musically tuned pipe cut from a reed, the writing-reed, the
green, growing, and emphatically fragrant plant, into an object of erotic,
musicopoetic instrumentality), “Messenger Leaves,” these appear in the
1860 text. Some fall off and die in later editions, others continue to flourish
and are joined by newer ones, often when entire books, like the volume of
Civil War poems, Drum Taps and Sequel of 1865, are subsequently “annexed”
to later editions.
Sometimes putting a previously published poem into a new cluster in a
later version of the book amounts to a gloss on that poem. So with, for
example, the gnomic “Chanting the Square Deific” with its four strophes
erecting a weird pantheon composed of (1) Jehovah-Brahma-Saturn-Kronos,
(2) Christ-Hermes-Hercules, (3) Satan, and (4) a subsuming Santa Spirita
identified with the bard himself, who ultimately squares the circle of “the
great round world” itself. It first appeared, along with the beautiful little “I
Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ” in the Sequel to Drum-Taps
(1865–66), but by 1871 it had been gathered into the cluster entitled, from
the second poem in it, “Whispers of Heavenly Death,” as if implicitly
perhaps to avow its cold agenda. “As Adam Early in the Morning” originally
appeared in 1860 as the last poem (15) in the “Calamus” cluster, but without
the first two words; the added simile may only make manifest what was latent
in the original use of the word “bower,” but it certainly brings to the little
poem an additional assertion of Originality—it is as if Whitman were now
off to name all the animals for the first time. Sometimes it is only a privileged
glance at a manuscript that reveals some of the heart of Whitman’s
revisionary process. That traditionally formed emblematic poem “A
Noiseless Patient Spider” emerged from a passing simile in a meditation on
unexpressed love on an occasion of unseized erotic opportunity; in the
published poem, the matter of a street pickup is put through what Hart
Crane called “the silken skilled transmemberment of song” and becomes a
greater matter of the soul’s far-flung “gossamer thread” catching somewhere,
of the song being heard.
There is also the effect, noted earlier, of the many retitlings. In some
of his notebooks, Whitman projects poems with titles like “Poem of Kisses”
or “Poem of the Black Person,” where, as in his overall title, the of is fruitfully
ambiguous. Most original with him is the simple compound form, for
example, “Sundown Poem” (the original title of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”;
canceling it dims the prominence of the westwardness of the crossing from
188 John Hollander
Brooklyn to Manhattan underlined by the occasion and allows the alternative

directions of so many trips and crossings to emerge) or “Banjo Poem” (one
of these projected—what would that have been like?). The two great shore
poems—odes of the figurative littoral—“Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” that dominate the “Sea-
Drift” cluster were differently titled. The first was originally published as “A
Child’s Reminiscence,” then “A Word out of the Sea” (with the subtitle
“Reminiscence” at the start of the second strophe, and with an additional line
before the present third one: “Out of the boy’s mother’s womb, and from the
nipples of her breasts,” thus giving Whitman’s familiar Quaker designation
of September, “the Ninth Month midnight” an additional significance). The
second was initially “Bardic Symbols,” then no. 1 of the cluster entitled
“Leaves of Grass” in 1860 (again, with the added opening “Elemental drifts!
/ O I wish I could impress others as you and the waves have been impressing
me”), then “Elemental Drifts,” and finally, when those two lines were
canceled, the present incipit title it now bears.
But we also sort through Whitman’s leaves and form our own readers’
clusters, generic groupings that seem to emerge among the finished poems
as if from unstated or unavowed intentions. Walk Poems; Panoramic Poems;
Talk Poems; Optative Exhortations (including the brilliant and sardonic
“Respondez!” an ironic inversion of that mode originally entitled “Poem of
the Propositions of Nakedness,” and dropped after the 1876 edition); Poems
of Pictures—following the fragmentation of that never-printed early
manuscript poem “Pictures” (it survives both as the tiny “My Picture-
Gallery” and, more importantly, throughout all the poems, starting with the
well-known vignettes of sections 9 and 10 of “Song of Myself”).
Then there are the musical odes, such as the midpoint chant of “Song
of Myself” (section 26), “Italian Music in Dakota,” the splendid “Proud
Music of the Storm,” “That Music Always Round Me,” “I Heard You,
Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ,” section 5 of “A Song for Occupations,”
section 3 of “Salut au Monde!” and of course, “I Hear America Singing.”
These tend to use Whitman’s catalogue format in a unique way; their
prototype is a pattern of layered lines of verse each embodying a polyphonic
voice, instrumental, vocal, or “natural” (the wind in the trees, birdsong,
sounds of moving water, etc., to which Whitman adds the noises of human
work and enterprise, constructive, destructive, or whatever). This is a device
that persists from Spenser through the romantic poets. Whitman employs it
in a poetic revision of musical polyphony, even extending the symphonic
format beyond phonetic materials to include specimens of all human activity.
Section 15 of “Song of Myself,” for example, opens with a Whitmanian duet:
“The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, / The carpenter dresses his
plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp” (and how
Homeric this last half-line!), but then continues with about sixty varied
glimpses of What Is and of What Is Done, musical relations between parts
having been only an introductory paradigm for a more general organic
assemblage of “the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable.”
Here and there throughout the poetry lurks a notion that the Poem of
America—whether in the notion of the United States as “greatest poem” or
in Leaves of Grass itself—had already been written by Walt Whitman in some
earlier phase of consciousness and self-projection. It is not only among the
animals, in whose selectively described moral condition (“Not one kneels to
another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, / Not one is
respectable or unhappy over the whole earth”) the poet finds “tokens of
myself.” (It might nevertheless be added that Walt Whitman did not eat his
young, or remain incapable of knowledge of death or acknowledgment of
anything.) It is rather about all his inventoried and chanted phenomena that
he surmises, “I wonder where they get those tokens, / Did I pass that way
huge times ago and negligently drop them?” Still, his continuous “transfers
and promotions” remain his greatest generosities and sympathies, his widest-
and farthest-reaching hands or filaments: “And there is no object so soft but
it makes a hub for the universe” means, of course, that the imaginative
faculty that can construe as a hub a caterpillar, or a drop of sweat, or a hair
on the back of a hand—and can construct the right concentric circles
radiating from it—is the breath of Democratic life itself.
Democracy, for Whitman’s poetry, begins with questions of
“representation”—that is, of metaphor. His literal is elusively figurative, and
his favorite figure—synecdoche, the part for the whole, the whole for the
part, the container and the things contained variously figuring one another—
is itself metaphoric, and even more ulterior. American democracy entails a
representative government and a deference toward a body of opinion with a
propensity to slacken toward self-identifications of the synecdochal sort. We
clamor for public officials who are members of whatever group of which we
constitute ourselves; we want to be represented by a lump of our region,
district, race, sect, caste, or ethnic strain (but seldom of our intelligence, our
moral nature, our imagination, our prudence, our regard for others). A
system of metaphoric representation (and British Parliament, or perhaps our
Senate—rather than our House of Representatives—has been more like this)
would have us wish the best and most skilled advocate to argue and negotiate
for us (which is a different business from singing), even if he or she were
nothing like a neighbor, a workmate, a cousin, or a fellow congregant who
190 John Hollander
would know our song by heart. Such a representative would stand for us in
another way.
Whitman’s affirmations thus always engage our Democratic paradoxes:
that if there is to be no selfishness there must be true self-containment.
Responsibility starts with the mutual obligations among the components of
one’s own identity; acknowledging the dignity of things and beings requires
a zoom lens to home in on the minute and otherwise help get by the false
worth of mere magnitude. Self-respect, as Whitman liked to say, mocks and
dissolves aristocracies. American Democracy is both uniquely equipped for,
and uniquely in need of, interpreting itself. Its own bodily and empirical
constitution is framed anew in all the languages of many sorts of lives—from
“the blab of the pave” to the complex poem of celebration that takes back
with one hand what it gives with another, perpetually claiming that reading
it poses no problems and thereby generating a multitude of them, yet always
extending the ultimate perpetuating connection of poet and reader,
interpreter and reinterpreter, citizen and citizen. Like his own great poem of
poems, “Democracy” said Whitman in Democratic Vistas is “a word the real
gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakn’d.”
HELEN VENDLER
Poetry and the Mediation of Value:

Whitman on Lincoln
T he Tanner lectures, as you know, is asked to consider questions of human

value. I take as my texts today, to reflect on how the art of mediates value,
Walt Whitman’s four poems on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was
shot by John Wilkes Booth, in conspiracy with others, on April 14, 1865,
while the Civil War was still ongoing. In the twenty days between the
assassination and Lincoln’s May 4 burial in Springfield, Illinois, many events
occurred. There was first the shocked five-day interim following the
assassination; then the thronged April 19 state funeral for Lincoln in
Washington; then the seventeen-hundred-mile ceremonial journey of the
funeral train bearing Lincoln’s coffin through Baltimore, Harrisburg,
Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus,
Indianapolis, Michigan City, and Chicago. On April 26 Booth had been
apprehended and shot, and by April 27 eight conspirators were in jail
(awaiting the trial that would end in the hanging of four of them on July 7).
All of these events were available to Whitman as he wrote his four poems, as
was the fact that the body of Lincoln’s son Willie (who had died three years
earlier) was exhumed from its grave in Washington and reburied in the
Lincoln tomb at Springfield.
In order of composition, Whitman’s poems on Lincoln are the following:
the short occasional poem “Hush’d Be the Camps Today” (dated April 19,
From Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (Winter 2000): 1-18. © 2000 by The University of
Michigan.
191
192 Helen Vendler
1865, the day of Lincoln’s funeral service in Washington, and printed in the
May 1865 edition of Drum-Taps); the formally rhymed poem “O Captain, My
Captain” and the free-verse elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” (both added to the second edition of Drum-Taps, September 1865);
and the later epitaph “This Dust Was Once the Man” (1871). The
assassination of Lincoln of course provoked a flood of writing—journalistic,
biographical, poetic. Of the many poems then written, Whitman’s memorials
have lasted the best; and in considering what values they select, enact, and
perpetuate, I want to ask by what aesthetic means they make those values last
beyond the momentary topical excitement of Lincoln’s death.
Most poetry mediates values differently from prose. In prose, values are
usually directly stated, illustrated, clarified, and repeated. One has only to
think of the classical form of the oration—and its descendants the sermon,
the stump speech, and the university lecture—to see the importance placed,
in an oral form, on reduplication of matter. Whitman’s poetry retains many
vestiges of the oration; and we can see such vestiges in “Lilacs.” But most
lyric poetry, being short, cannot avail itself of the ample terrain of oratory; it
has consequently had to find extremely compressed ways by which to convey
value. Readers of poetry not only become adept in unfolding the implications
of a poetic language; they also learn to see—by exercising historical
knowledge—what is being left out that might well have been present. In
respect to the conveying of value, what is left out is always as important as
what is put in. Let me give one quick example: Lincoln was assassinated on
Good Friday, and commentary on his death quickly attached to him—
probably for that reason—the word “martyr” with its overtones of Christ’s
sacrifice. Whitman offers no word placing Lincoln in the context of Christ’s
passion, Good Friday, or Easter Sunday. He does not put Lincoln in a Judeo-
Christian frame at all—even though contemporary commentators such as
Bishop Matthew Simpson at the Washington funeral compared Lincoln to
Moses.
I will come back to what is left out by Whitman, but I want to return
now to the main question—how we can examine poetry’s mediation of value.
To relate what is left out to what is put in is a task relatively easier with
respect to narration than with respect to lyric. One can see that a novelist
(say, Herman Melville in Moby-Dick) has included no female characters and
suggest what effects and values are enabled by, and also prohibited by, this
stratagem. But in lyric, there is no such obvious norm. A symphony score
employing no violins would be visibly anomalous; but nobody noticed at first
when Georges Perec wrote a novel (The Void) without the letter e because
letters—and words—are less visible than women or violins.
Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln 193
It is imagination, then, that is our first recourse in thinking about

poetry and value—the imagination of what is left out. This imagination
operates not simply on the grosser level of images (such as the Judeo-
Christian ones of Moses or Christ that I have mentioned) but also on the
level of syntax in what other manner could this sentence have been
framed?—and of diction—what words might have occurred by contrast to
the ones we have? The critical imagination must operate even in the realm
of sound, especially at crucial poetic moments, asking what alternative
phonetic effects might have been used instead of the given ones.
It is generally agreed that images and the semantic content of words
mediate value, but syntax and sound are rarely conceded that potential. In
prose, syntax and sound are generally less powerful than in poetry; in poetry
they provide a crucial ground to the assertions of value carried by images and
words. And, since a short poem is in fact a single complex word in which all
individual components are bound together in an inalterable relational syntax,
there is, strictly speaking, nothing that does not become a carrier of value in
poetry (even such harmless-looking particles as the indefinite and the
definite article).
Every lyric belongs to one or more anterior theoretical paradigms of
genre. The paradigm may be a formal verse-whole, such as the sonnet, which
brings with it certain values—those of courtly life—and general expectations
(that it might concern, for instance, love or politics). Or the paradigm may
be a formal stanza, such as terza rima, which brings with it overtones of
Dante, the afterlife, and the value of spiritual self-scrutiny. Or the paradigm
may be that of a genre that has no formal shape: the English elegy, for
instance, can take any verse shape, but must reflect the death of one or more
persons and must meditate on the value of a given sort of human life. Or the
paradigm may be that of a genre which, while having no prescribed shape,
does have a prescribed length and tone: an epitaph, for instance, must be
short and impersonally phrased, and it must assert a final judgment. Or the
anterior paradigm may prescribe only one part of the stanza: the presence of
a refrain at the end of each stanza, for instance, suggests the value of folk-
motifs and of incremental intensification of emotion. A poem can ally itself
with the first-person singular paradigm (which is the most common lyric
self-presentation, valuing individual experience), or it may depart from that
norm by choosing a first-person plural paradigm, in order to claim collective
utterance and, with it, collective value.
A poem is expected not only to inscribe itself within the subject-matter
and values implied by its paradigms, but also to extend, reverse, or otherwise
be original in respect to those very paradigms. It is in the use and critique of
194 Helen Vendler
its own antecedent paradigms that a poem most fully reveals its own value-
system. It is this that I hope to show in reflecting on Whitman’s poems
concerning Lincoln. The value-system of an original poet—and therefore of
his or her poems—will be in part consonant with, in part in dispute with, the
contemporary values of the society from which he, and they, issue. Were the
poetry not intelligible with respect to those social values, it could not be read;
were it not at a distance from them in some way, it would not be original. The
most disturbing lyrics are those, such as Whitman’s, in which so many shared
social values appear that one is surprised when interior divergence manifests
itself. Whitman’s memorials of Lincoln are patriotic ones, devoted to the
image of Lincoln, voiced in solidarity with the Union army, sharing the
nation’s grief at Lincoln’s death and at the carnage of the Civil War, and (in
“Lilacs”) proud of the much-celebrated beauty of the American landscape.
What is it, then, that makes them original? And what values does that
originality consecrate? And why is “Lilacs”—the longest of Whitman’s poems
about Lincoln—also the best? What does it allow that the others do not?
“To have great poems, there must be great audiences, too,” Whitman
had declared in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. His poetic depended on
a close connection, even an erotic one, with his imagined listeners: he not
only wished to be their spokesman, he wanted them to call out to him to be
their spokesman, thereby legitimating his writing. It is not surprising, then,
that Whitman’s first literary response to Lincoln’s death—after the wordless
silence that followed the shocking news of the assassination—was to speak in
the collective voice of the Union army, as soldiers call on the poet to “sing ...
in our name ... one verse.” They ask that the subject-matter of this verse
should be “the love we bore him.”
Hush’d be the camps to-day,

And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.
No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,

Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,

Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps,
know it truly.
As they invault the coffin there,

Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
For the heavy heart of soldiers
What the soldiers want is not a eulogy of Lincoln’s personal life and actions,
of the sort pronounced from the pulpit in Washington, but rather an
articulation of their mourning. It is the soldiers themselves, as the poem
opens, who devise the liturgy appropriate to the death of their commander-
in-chief: “Let the camps be hushed, let the weapons be draped, and let us
each retire”—to do what? to mourn, to muse, yes, but above all to
“celebrate”—in the liturgical, not the festive sense—“our dear commander’s
death.” Any human being can perform these personal acts of silence,
weapon-draping, and musing, just as any human being can voice the
consolation of the second stanza, as the soldiers say that Lincoln has escaped
“time’s dark events, / Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.”
Only after they have invented a collective ritual, and offered a
collective consolation, do the soldiers feel the absence of something
necessary to their ceremony—an elevated, that is, sung form of utterance
offered in their name. It is significant to them that it should be sung by one
who, because he has been a “dweller in camps,” knows the particular
heaviness of soldiers’ hearts. This short poem values collectivity in the voice
it adopts, in the rituals it devises. It not only values—more than all pomp-
filled state memorials—the love borne by the common soldiers, but it also
views poetry as merely one ingredient in an indigenous ritual, devised by the
people for the people. Why, then, do the soldiers need a verse at all? The
poem answers by showing the omnimobility of words. The soldiers remain
bound in their camps, but the poet’s invisible verse, as the syntax shows, can
insert itself into the very circumstance and moment of far-off burial: “As they
invault the coffin there, / Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—
one verse.” Lincoln is valued in this collectively voiced poem less as president
of a country than as beloved commander of a brave army, themselves
accustomed to “time’s dark events, / Charging” at them. Yet the view of
Lincoln is still a hierarchical one—not in a feudal, but in a military, sense. He
is not king or president, but he is the commander. It is not surprising that the
democratic Whitman will eventually turn to valuing Lincoln outside a
military hierarchy.
Now that he has written the collective call beckoning him to sing,
Whitman can compose the verse that will show, from the inside, the army’s
love and their heavy hearts. “O Captain, My Captain” is sung in the voice of
a Union recruit. He is a young boy; he has sailed on the ship of state with his
196 Helen Vendler
captain, whom he calls, Oedipally, “dear father”; the tide of war has now
turned and victory is in sight, as cheering crowds welcome the victorious
ship. At this very moment the captain is shot, and dies. The moving turn of
the poem comes two-thirds of the way through the poem. In the first two
stanzas the boy addresses the captain as someone still living, a “you” who,
cradled in the boy’s arm, can hear the words directed to him. But in the third
stanza the young sailor unwillingly resorts to third-person reference,
marking his captain as dead: “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale
and still.” The hierarchy of commander—remote from his troops—has been
lessened to the hierarchy of captain—sharing a ship with his men—and then
lessened to the familial hierarchy of father and son, as Lincoln’s relation to
others becomes ever more democratic, even intimate.
Two stylistic features—its meter and its use of refrain—mark “O
Captain” as a designedly democratic and populist poem. In each stanza, four
seven-beat lines (each the equivalent of two standard ballad lines of
tetrameter and trimeter) are followed by a slightly changing ballad refrain.
The refrain—after two trimeters—returns to the tetrameter/trimeter ballad
beat. The poem, by its form, implies that soldiers and sailors have a right to
verse written for them in the sort of regularly rhyming stanzas that they like
best. And because Whitman has chosen to speak now as a sailor-boy, the
diction of the poem offers the clichés of victory that such a boy might use:
“Our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we
sought is won, / The port is near.” Everything on shore adheres to the
expected conventions of popular celebration—“For you the flag is flung—for
you the bugle trills, / For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths.” Even “the
bleeding drops of red,” the “mournful tread” of the sailor, and the captain
“fallen cold and dead” come from the clichés of war-journalism.
Whitman was not, I think, hypocritical in writing such a poem; he
was answering his first poem with the second poem that he thought the
first had called for. But in adopting the voice of the young boy mourning
his “father,” Whitman had sacrificed his own voice entirely. Because he
valued, and validated, the claim of his audience that he represent their
heavy hearts, Whitman thought to do so by becoming one of them.
Wanting to value democracy, he thought he had to exemplify it by
submitting to the rhythms and rhymes and clichés of the popular verse
prized by the soldiers, rather than inventing a democratic form of his own.
Because he was bent on registering individual response as well as the
collective wish expressed in “Hush’d Be the Camps,” he took on the voice
of a single representative sailor, silencing his own idiosyncratic voice. And
wanting to show the sailor and his father-captain as participants in a
national endeavor, he adopted the allegorical cliché of the Ship of State as

the ruling metaphor of his poem.
Though we do not know, factually, that “O Captain” was composed
before “Lilacs,” it seems to me that the sailor-boy’s dirge must have been the
direct response to the call in “Hush’d Be the Camps.” “Lilacs” is, by contrast,
the outburst of individual voice following on Whitman’s attempt to honor
collectivity by writing in the voice of the heavy-hearted soldiers and to
defend representativeness in verse by writing in the voice of the mourning
sailor. He was valuing Lincoln as commander in the one and captain-father
in the other; he was valuing poetry as a contributor to collective ritual in the
one and as a form of populist expression in the other. When we come to
“Lilacs,” all the values change.
“Lilacs” is written not collectively, and not representatively, but in
Whitman’s own original lyric voice. In it, Lincoln is not placed in a vertical
social hierarchy as president, commander-in-chief, captain, or even father,
but is rather placed horizontally, as a fellow-man, even if one distinguished
by superlative wisdom and sweetness. There is ritual in the poem—even
received ritual, carried out by other mourners but even by the poet, as he lays
conventional bouquets of lilies and roses on the coffins of the dead; but there
are also strange new rituals, to which I will come, outnumbering the
conventional ones. And—most striking of all—there is a suppression of the
coincidence of the day of the assassination with Good Friday, as well as a
refusal to echo the Christian rituals of services and sermons and hymns that
pervaded the twenty days preceding Lincoln’s burial.
In “Lilacs,” the coffin-train indeed makes its long and mournful
journey—in a funereal ritual unprecedented in American history, and
therefore attractive to Whitman as an original event—but aside from the
mentions of the mourning ceremonies attending the train at each of its stops,
nothing in the poem depends on historical fact. The poem never mentions
the assassination, the assassin, or the jailed and executed conspirators; the
Emancipation Proclamation and other acts of Lincoln’s presidency are
passed over in silence. Even the startling fact of the reburial of Lincoln’s son
is omitted. We are given, instead of facts, three symbols—the lilac of this
earth, the star of the evening sky, and the hermit-thrush of the dark swamp.
By apportioning his poem among the classic three realms of upper-world,
middle-world, and underworld, Whitman gives cosmic importance—rather
than the political importance ascribed to it by historians—to Lincoln’s death.
The poem does not value facts: it does not value politics; it does not value
Christianity; it does not value speaking in a voice other than one’s own. It is
written in free verse of the most original sort; it does not value debased
198 Helen Vendler
popular taste in poetry. Has Whitman repudiated “Hush’d Be the Camps”

and “O Captain”? Or does something of them linger in “Lilacs”?
What does “Lilacs” value? And how are its valuings enacted? And what
aesthetic value do they exhibit? These questions have answers too complex
to be fully enunciated here, but let me give some brief observations. “Lilacs”
is a sequence constructed of sixteen cantos ranging in length from five to
fifty-three lines. It builds up to its longest and most lyrical moment in canto
14, achieves its moral climax in canto 15, and ends with a coda of
“retrievements out of the night” in canto 16. The nonreligious “trinity” that
opens the poem (perennial lilac, Lincoln-star, and the “thought of him I
love”) will become, by the end, the trinity of “lilac and star and bird”: that is,
the bird and its carol become the equivalent of the opening “thought” of the
poet. It is unusual for Whitman to establish such a firm symbolic
constellation; his secular trinity is set as a memorable elegiac emblem of the
formality that is one of the poem’s values. This is not an intimate elegy:
Lincoln is named a “friend,” but he is also the “powerful western fallen star”
who is due formal honor as a symbol of the ideal. That honor is given
character in the symbolic trinity dedicated to his memory.
The first act of the speaker—after he has initially lamented his
helplessness in the grasp of the “harsh surrounding cloud that will not free
my soul”—is to break off (in line 17) a sprig of lilac from the lilac-bush
growing in the dooryard. No explanation is given for this act; it is not until
line 45 that we learn why he took the sprig. It is to have a flower to lay on
Lincoln’s coffin: “Here, coffin that slowly passes, / I give you my sprig of
lilac.” This is not the conventional sort of floral offering; it has passed
through no florist’s hands. The speaker knows the conventions of arranged
“bouquets” made of the rarer “roses and early lilies” and indeed later
observes these conventions, as his mourning becomes generalized to “the
coffins all of you.” Still, he prefers his roughly torn and unarranged lilacs:
All over bouquets of roses,

O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.
The poem dismisses the idea of personal immortality; when the star sinks, it
is gone forever:
... I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward
black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
What the poet can confirm, as a principle of hope, is the natural vegetative
resurrection from which Christ took the metaphor of the risen wheat: the
funeral train, he says, passes “the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its
shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen.” And in the old woods, “lately
violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris.”
The chief stylistic trait of this first part of the poem is the long-
withheld subject of its sentences. The run of sentences with postponed
subjects begins in the one-sentence, six-lined canto 3: “In the dooryard ...
/ Stands the lilac-bush ... / With many a pointed blossom ... / With every
leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard ... / With delicate-
color’d blossoms ... / A sprig with its flower I break.” In canto 5, with its
seven-line sentence, the continuo is carried by a series of adverbs and
participial adjectives—“Over ... / Amid ... / Amid ... / Passing ... / Passing
... / Carrying ... / Night and day journeys a coffin.” We can see that this
sentence-form imitates the long passage of the train across the eastern
third of the North American continent. It is important to Whitman to ally
his single tributary sprig of lilac with all the preceding civil and religious
ceremonies honoring the dead man; and canto 6 is the poem’s chief
concession to factual reporting; but this canto is staged so that the public
observances lead up to the poet’s anomalous, solitary, and unarranged
sprig:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the
land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in
black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women
standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the
night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and
the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre
faces,
200 Helen Vendler
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising
strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the
coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid
these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
The poem here gives what all the contemporary photographs of the journey
cannot: movement, silence, sound, tonality, atmosphere. While other poems
about Lincoln’s death mostly contented themselves with abstractions of
praise and grief, Whitman renders the very scenes of mourning in present-
participial form, making them unroll before our eyes in what seems real time.
The journey comes to a telling climax—after all the elaborate tributes of the
cities—in the single lilac-sprig. The poem, it is evident, values showing over
telling, and the senses over abstraction; it emphasizes the contribution of
each individual act to the tally of mourning gestures. It also values drama—
not only in the changing chiaroscuro tableaux of homage presented here, but
also in the narrative syntactic drama of the sentence that presses toward the
gift of the dooryard lilac.
One could think that the poem could end here. The poet has
contributed his flower: is that not enough? We soon learn that it is not: he
puts aside the summons of the bird heard in canto 9 to ask the three
questions of canto 10: “How shall I warble? ... / how shall I deck my song?
... / what shall my perfume be for the grave?” The last problem is easily
solved: the perfume will be the sea-winds and the breath of the poet’s
chant. But the first two are less rapidly answered. In fact, the first—“How
shall I warble?” is not at this point replied to at all, while “How shall I
deck my song?” mutates into the specific question, “What shall the
pictures be that I hang on the walls, / To adorn the burial-house of him I
love?” This question originates from Whitman’s knowledge of Egyptian
tombs, decorated on the interior with idyllic pictures of daily life. He will
renew this convention in canto 11, making resonant pictures of American
landscapes and action: “Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes
... / And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen
homeward returning.” He includes no religious iconography on the walls
of the tomb; he employs only the iconography of the land, catalogued in
terms redolent of aesthetic bliss: “With floods of the yellow gold of the
gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air ... / In the
distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here
and there.” The praise of the beauty of America and its “gentle soft-born
measureless light” almost distracts the poet from the still-unanswered
question “How shall I warble?”; and though he once again turns toward
the chant of the bird, “limitless out of the dusk,” and calls it, unexpectedly,
a “Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe,” he represents himself
as still held back from “the swamps, the recesses,” by the star above, and
the lilac beside him.
He is really held back by his prolonged cataloguing of beauty, which
spills over into the beginning of canto 14, as the poet glosses “the large
unconscious scenery of my land.” Whitman values very highly, as a poetic
structure, the accumulation of sentences of inventory. Beyond the formal
triad of his symbols, beyond the conferring of cosmic significance on
Lincoln’s death by showing its consequence to upper and lower and middle
worlds, beyond the drama of the periodic sentence pressing toward its
climax, beyond the rendition of theatrically lit atmospheres, he valued the
multiplicity and beauty of the world’s objects, landscapes, and inhabitants,
even in the moment of mourning. Inventories fill most of the poems of
Leaves of Grass (and all parodies of Whitman begin with a swell of egotism
followed by unbridled lists of categories).
But the beautiful categories of canto 13, though they overflow into
canto 14, continue under a shadow. While the poet, ravished by the
“heavenly aerial beauty ... / and the summer approaching with richness,”
watches the ample scene, “—lo, then and there, Falling upon them all and
among them all, enveloping me with the rest, / Appear’d the cloud.” The
poet finds “the knowledge of death” walking on one side of him and “the
thought of death” walking on the other side, “and I in the middle as with
companions, and holding the hands of companions.” He finally flees to the
swamp, which is then revealed as an underworld of “shores of... water” and
“solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.” This is not the Christian
afterlife, but the underworld of shades and ghosts in the midst of the waters
of Lethe and the Styx that we know from Greek myth. By annexing the
afterworld of classical Greece to the tomb-decorations of Egypt, Whitman
tells us that he prefers these ways of knowing and encountering death to
those offered by the Christianity in which he had been raised. In 1891, the
last year of his life, after he had suffered strokes and other disabling illnesses,
he wrote: “The philosophy of Greece taught normality and the beauty of life.
Christianity teaches how to endure illness and death. I have wonder’d
whether a third philosophy fusing both, and doing full justice to both, might
202 Helen Vendler
not be outlined” [Collected Writings II, Collect and Other Prose, ed. Floyd
Stovall (New York: NYU Press, 1964), p. 708]. But when he was writing
“Lilacs,” it was the “normality” of Egypt and Greece, rather than Christian
patience, that Whitman valued.
We have reached, in the second half of canto 14, the lyric center of
“Lilacs,” the song of the hermit-thrush, where one supreme aesthetic value
of the poem—the value of free musical language—resides. Though this is the
poetic center of the elegy, it is not its moral climax, which will come in canto
15, when the poet fully accedes to vision. However, we must ask ourselves
first about this lyric center. “And the charm of the carol rapt me,” says the
poet: what is that charm? The “carol” is a hymn to a female deity, Death, and
is therefore allied to the earliest lyrics we have, the Orphic hymns to
abstractions such as Death and the Homeric hymns to the gods and
goddesses such as the maternal goddess Demeter, mother of the lost
Persephone in Hades. The song of the thrush, beginning in invocation
(“Come lovely and soothing death”), and becoming a song of praise (“praise!
praise! praise! / For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death”),
invents a celebratory ritual (“Dances for thee I propose saluting thee,
adornments and feastings for thee”) to replace the mourning ritual of somber
dirges and tolling bells and shuddering organs invented by Christianity. Yet
the repudiation of Christian melancholy, forceful as it is, is less memorable
than the seductive oceanic rhythms of lyric loosed to be itself. Whitman
“overwrites,” with this rhythm, the dragging journey of the train. As the train
moved across the land, we heard it go “Over the breast of the spring, the
land, amid cities”: now we hear the carol float above the train, over the same
landscape:
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and
the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and
ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
As the song of blissful death “overwrites” the journey of melancholy death,

lyric claims its right to the joy that resides in art, even in art of tragic import.
As the bird sings the acceptance of death, the poet, tallying the song in
his soul, finds that as he lets go of his former fear and denial, his vision
awakes: “My sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, / As to long
panoramas of visions.” The painful silent moral visions, gifts of memory,
replace, with a wrench, the aesthetic sights of the earth seen earlier by the
eye of sense. Whitman first admits to a “screen vision” of mutilated battle-

flags (“pierc’d with missiles / ... and torn and bloody, ... And the staffs all
splinter’d and broken”). As he persists in his resolve to remember all, the
splintered flags of the “screen vision” give way to the greater mutilations of
flesh they were hiding:
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war.
At this point the elegy for Lincoln resumes in an explicit way its earlier
guarded gesture (“For you and the coffins all of you O death”) toward all
those ordinary soldiers who have died in the war. This is the moment of
highest moral value in the poem, as the poet allows himself to see all that the
war has cost. At the same time, by resurrecting a word used earlier,
apparently casually, in the mention of the violets that peeped from the
ground, “spotting the gray debris,” Whitman reminds us that debris is the
compost of new growth. It was the Union that was to grow strong from the
battle-corpses.
The drama of canto 15 is enacted in the style of a chronicler of
apocalypse. I quote first the Book of Revelation:
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a
book.... And I saw a strong angel proclaiming.... And I beheld,
and to.... And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals....
And I saw, and behold a white horse. [Revelation 5, 6]
And now Whitman:
And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags ....
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war.
This style boldly claims, if implicitly, that Whitman expects his vision to be
granted the same credence as that granted the Book of Revelation; the passage
is his most blasphemous transvaluation of Christian value.
In the coda of canto 16, the poet resumes his earlier themes, and finds
his trinity complete—“Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my
204 Helen Vendler
soul”—but unexpectedly is not permitted to leave, in memory, the

underworld. Though in real life the lilac is “there in the door-yard,
blooming, returning with spring,” the poet finds “Lilac and star and bird
twined with the chant of my soul, / There in the fragrant pines and the cedars
dusk and dim.” Because the underworld is “there,” the poet is by implication
“here” in the normal world—but the poem cannot enact the “here” in which
he finds himself. The living part of his soul is still there in the dusk and the
dimness of Hades, twined with his trinity.
If we seek out the originality of “Lilacs”—beginning with its refusal to
name Lincoln and its suppression of his civic and military roles—we can see
that though it indeed obeys many paradigms of its genre, the English elegy,
it wears its rue with a difference, subduing Christian symbols to those of
Egypt and Greece, celebrating the natural beauty of life rather than the
prospective beauties of heaven, finding its consolation in new joyous rituals
of death, and asserting that its revelation of corpses and skeletons is as
prophetically binding as St. John’s revelation of heaven. Its style asserts the
value of showing rather than telling, the value of the idiosyncratic voice over
the collective or representative voice, and—in its journeying sentences that
climax in a definite halt the value of acceptance, rather than denial, of the full
stop of death. Its other striking sentences, phrased not in the progressive
pressure to end, but rather in arias ebbing and flowing without resolution,
assert the fluctuating harmonies and contrasts of the expansive but
inconclusive rhythms of experience:
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering

song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flood-
ing the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven....
After “Lilacs,” Whitman wrote one other poem concerning Lincoln—

the only one left to write, Lincoln’s epitaph. It was published in 1871, six
years after Lincoln’s death. Lincoln is no longer friend or wise and sweet
soul; he is reduced to dust. The poet grasps the dust to himself. “This dust,”
he says. He does not point to the grave, saying “That dust.” This is not a
poem gesturing outward toward the “there” of the lilac or the “there” of the
underworld:
This dust was once the man

Gentle, plain, just resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
The epitaph is massively imbalanced: a mere two words “This dust” make up
the left half of the copula, while the right half requires thirty words. The
proportion is therefore appropriate to the light dust versus the complex
description of the consequential man. Lincoln, in becoming dust, becomes
historical, “the man who guided the preservation of the Union.” The initial
adjectives are themselves complex, as the initial personal “gentle” is played
off against the final official “resolute,” while in between we see the “plain” of
Lincoln’s upbringing set against the “just” character of his legal profession. I
hear the line with the emphasis on “and”: “Gentle, plain, just—and—[when
the hour came] resolute.” The next adjective, applied not to Lincoln but to
his guiding hand, is “cautious”—this speaks to his wisdom. What is most
surprising about the epitaph is that it, unlike most such honorific
inscriptions, gives no active verb to its subject. Lincoln is not said to be “the
man ... Who saved the Union of these states.” That would give him the
power of a monarch. It was the thousands of soldiers, alive and dead, who
saved the Union; the president, primus inter pares, was merely their
supervising fellow-participant. But the soldiers are left unmentioned as such:
they exist only subsumed within the passive verb. Yet they are the saviors, and
as such they are the ultimate repository of individual value, even in an
epitaph praising their leader. The very peculiar syntax of this epitaph
reserves the main subject and verb of the subsidiary adjective clause—“The
Union of these States was saved”—to the very end and inverts the normal
word order to “Was saved the Union of these States,” thereby putting the
Union in the climactic syntactic position of national value, placed even above
the actions taken to save it. Tucked in between the presiding cautious hand
and its salvific agents is the averted horror: the continuation of slavery.
Slavery is here named by euphemism, as though its proper name should
never again be uttered in human hearing. It becomes, superlatively, “the
foulest crime,” and it is placed in a cosmic spatio-temporal field: it is “the
foulest crime known in any land or age.”
What makes this epitaph a poem? Above all, its tortured syntax, which
tries to tuck into thirty words the personal, professional, ethical, and
prudential qualities of a single historical personage; his relation to the Union
Army; the soldiers’ relation to the winning of the war; the chief result of that
victory; and a description of the ancient, widespread, and evil crime against
206 Helen Vendler
which both president and soldiers opposed their lives. Syntax, when tortured,
becomes a sign of a complexity too great to be naturally contained within a
single sentence and yet bent on being thus contained because all the
elements of that given complexity are inextricable one from another and
must therefore be named in the same breath. Whitman’s last word on
Lincoln emphasizes his historical greatness, based on greatness of character,
while reserving to him merely a guiding role in the ultimate value, the
salvation of the Union. This is a poem of Roman succinctness and
taciturnity, betraying its depth of feeling chiefly in the implicit figure of the
scales—in which a handful of dust is equal in weight to the salvation of the
Union, with the copula serving as the needle of equilibrium. In it the poet
speaks not collectively, not representatively, and not idiosyncratically and
lyrically; he speaks impersonally, as the recording angel. This poem places
value on the voice of history in final judgment. Walt Whitman, the man, is
sublimed away; this poem is—to use Elizabeth Bishop’s words—one of those
“admirable scriptures of stone on stone.” One can see its words chased on a
tablet: it is itself a tombstone. But did any tombstone ever carry such an
epitaph?
There is more to say about the values imaged and implied by these four
poems. In attempting the subject of Lincoln from four different perspectives,
Whitman (who had often seen Lincoln and had described him in prose of a
journalistic and mimetic nature) turns away from personal and historic
mimesis of the man and president to symbolic mimesis, framed for the
conveying of value. In each case the aesthetic vehicle—the collective voice of
the soldiers in the camps, the single voice of the grieving novice-sailor, the
idiosyncratic voice of the poet coming to know death, and the impersonal
voice of historic judgment—offers a different possibility of expression. The
shorter poems show us, by contrast, how and why “Lilacs” reaches its heights
and its amplitudes. All of the poems show us Whitman debating what stance
the American poet should adopt when speaking of important national events.
If each stance—collective, representative, idiosyncratic, impersonal—has
something to be said for it, then we are shown that value can be mediated by
poetry in any number of ways and that both the poet and his audience are
modeled differently in each. We are warned, by the greater success of the
most original of the four poems, of the dangers to the poet in attempting to
speak collectively or within the bounds of popular taste—or even with the
impersonal voice of historiography. It is chiefly when a public crisis evokes
some crisis in the soul of the poet—here, Whitman’s crisis in judging what
could be truly said of human mortality—that a public poem takes on lasting
aesthetic value.
ANGUS FLETCHER
The Whitman Phrase
“N otwithstanding the beauty and expressiveness of his eyes, I

occasionally see something in them as he bends them upon me, that almost
makes me draw back. I cannot explain it whether it is more, or less, than
human. It is as if the earth looked at me—dumb, yearning, relentless,
immodest, inhuman. If the impersonal elements and forces were
concentrated in an eye, that would be it. It is not piercing, but absorbing and
devouring—the pupil expanded, the lid slightly drooping, and the eye set and
fixed.1
When John Burroughs in 1863 wrote about the experience of being
looked at, in this case by Walt Whitman, he was indirectly drawing our
attention to “something” we notice in the poetry as well, its scarcely
definable close-up distance, its power to radiate an absorption. We need to
be reminded, many times, that Whitman was one of the great gazers. He
studies the vista, not just when he writes about the promises and
corruptions of democracy. His work contains a complete philosophy of
seeing and looking, extending all aspects of the sense of sight while
maintaining the power to absorb. Like a Stoic, Whitman sees into things,
although often he may appear merely to notice them in passing. Some have
wished to say that he stares like a man cruising the streets, looking for a sex
partner. That might be, but I would rather explore Whitman’s sight in
From A New Theory for American Poetry. © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
207
208 Angus Fletcher
terms of his wish for theory, a desire which historians would normally treat
under the heading, “The Defence of Poetry.” One cannot help feeling the
influence or the affinity with Shelley’s Defence, for example. Whitman,
however, does not think poetry needs defending so much as expounding in
the first place; he is very American. He knows what it is, and he is going to
tell you. He believes poetry needs no defense as long as its visionary
function is made clear. He reminds me of John Donne preaching a sermon
on the text: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face;
Now I know in part, but then I shall know, even as I am known.” Clarity
on earth comes from a way of thinking in vistas, including analogues to
vista. Thinking in vistas is a general sight. As Donne says: “All the senses
are called Seeing.”2 In his famed prose introduction to the 1855 Leaves of
Grass, Whitman proclaimed the American bard would be a seer: “the
expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new,” and when
in the next sentence he rejects what he calls the “direct or descriptive or
epic,” he is imagining a new role for these traditional poetic impulses.
Specifically, as we shall see, he loosens the idea of the descriptive, as Clare
had done and Ashbery was later to do. A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d
Roads (1888) celebrated the poet’s sixty-ninth year by announcing the time
had arrived “for democratic America’s sake, if for no other, there must
imperatively come a readjustment of the whole theory and nature of
poetry.”3 In fact he had already achieved this readjustment, which
depended upon his assumption of the role of prophet.
When the poem “Salut au Monde” (Sec. 4) begins line after line with
the phrase “I see,” the meaning clearly is “I imagine, I envision, I perceive in
my memory, or finally, I behold,” and this parallels a similar use of the
formula, “I hear.”4 Such invocations of the senses are just that, invocations of
the powers of prophecy. Invocation is then what the poet means to be doing,
and after a while the “I see” formula ceases to strongly suggest the visual. In
an unusual perception, like Galileo’s father, Whitman grasped the
importance of opera as another mode of seeing, seeing through sound.5
Whitman is sharply concerned to show that he is actually looking at things
in order to see them; he hears things because, in fact, he is listening to them.
As a poet inventing his own tonalities, he is paying a special kind of close
attention. A bird song, heard as aria in a lament, is something he might
actually listen to, though it is hard to distinguish that warbling from his
imaginary version of Rossini or Donizetti played by a brass band in South
Dakota.6 There is a problem, fundamentally, regarding imagination, which I
note because of the status of the detached image in Whitman. In a purely
hallucinatory way the imagery in Leaves of Grass recalls the definition of a
thought in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27: “Like a jewel hung in ghastly night.”

How un-actual, one asks with Whitman generally, is any sense perception?
He seems often to be wondering at what he sees and hears and touches,
perhaps like a doctor diagnosing a patient’s symptoms. The wonderment is
critical, the experience of actually having the percepts always being felt to be
the “main event.” The idea of vista therefore remains curiously teasing; in
John Burroughs’ description of Whitman’s eyes, his look, it is not easy to tell
which of the two is Tantalus—Burroughs the new friend (it was 1863), or
Whitman himself, gazing like earth as to a sky promising rain, desiring to
absorb.
If such a sojourning sensibility is to issue in poetry, it will have to find
a language of absorption to create poems of our climate. Climates, in fact,
absorb us. The problem of climate and also of environment is that they
resemble the galaxy: they are a soup of sameness and difference. In them,
differences are absorbed by the recurring samenesses. To express these
relations, Whitman shifts vista into vision. All the things he “sees” come to
him then as what he calls “thoughts.” Given this remarkable range of
sculptural plasticity, and his meandering vision, we ask: what is their
principle of order?—for poets as authors are so called because they seek to
increase order in the universe. In this light, the following is the outline of
theory for discussion.
Three initial points need to be made. First, when Whitman speaks of
poetry and its theory, he means the theory of the making of poems, which are
made symbolic objects, poemata. He does not mean interpretation, that is, he
does not mean anything like what scholars have been calling “theory” ever
since about 1965 or so. His concern is poetics, and neither rhetoric nor any
sort of hermeneutics, immediately making it remarkable that he includes in
his poetics the idea that “these United States are the greatest poem,” hence
raising the question: what is the poetic theory of this political union? We are
left holding a most bizarre hybrid—unless we know Vico’s work7—namely
that the USA and “Song of Myself” are equally “poems.”
The second point concerns politics, very broadly understood, namely,
the assertion that Whitman’s political vision was formed on the model, under
the influence, within the culture, of Jacksonian democracy as it evolved
during Andrew Jackson’s two terms (1829–37). This claim should occasion
no surprise. The Jacksonian model is obviously complex, the subject of
numerous distinguished historical studies. I have only one thing to say about
it. With Jackson, American politics changed from the end of the Federalist
period in one major direction that surely no historian would ever think to
identify as such: the politics and political order defining the country shifted
210 Angus Fletcher
from a hierarchical top–down structuring, with many natural chains of

descending authority, to an utterly different model.
The third point is that this new model gives the picture or conceptual
scheme of what I have been calling an environment. As soon as Jackson
effectively established the full force and credit of universal suffrage—despite
its restrictions as to race or gender—politics in America became, as a
unifying fact, the ordering of a vast social environment. The implications of
this fact, including its special pressure upon the Union of free and slave-
holding states, will become clear as we proceed. The key question then
becomes: what is the coherence principle for this or any other environment?
What is post-Jacksonian coherence? John Quincy Adams was the last
American president to wear knee-breeches, I have been told8—how could
those breeches survive in the new environment fashioned by Old Hickory?
Whitman’s call for theory takes a critical turn, of course, after Darwin.
Our culture and politics must now, to quote the poet, “conform with and
build on the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnish’d by
science, and [science is] henceforth the only irrefragable basis for anything,
verse included.”9 My argument may not seem to value Whitman’s serious
commitment to science as expressed in 1861. Darwin had understood his
own theory of evolution already in the 1840s, but did not publish The Origin
of the Species until 1859. The implication is clear, though I will not develop it
here: an active interest in science and its methods would be ongoing for
Whitman during all his years as a journalist, so that he did not suddenly
become a poetical scientist in the early 1850s. To Thoreau or Muir or
Burroughs, one would never ascribe a sudden scientific conversion, and so
equally with Whitman. He was converted to the attitudes and to the
observational methods of science, but not suddenly; always he remained true
to his calling, to be the great Bard, the new poet of Democracy.
D E M O C R AT I C V I S TA S
Whitman’s poem-en-masse cannot be a matter of conventional structures; this

is not a matter of whim. According to Vistas, the old feudal order had used
superior force as “the only security against chaos,” whereas in Whitman’s
poetic view democracy embraced “many transmigrations, and endless
ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures” such that democratic man “may
and must become a law and a series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and
providing for, not only for his own personal control, but all his relations to
other individuals, and to the State.”10 Whitman would like to see poetry take
its part in promoting his idea that American democracy is “life’s
gymnasium.”11 He most often promotes the metaphor of the healthy body,

but also uses the Enlightenment image of the machine. To express the
balancing of the individual with the demands of the mass, he speaks of a
“compensating balance-wheel of the successful working machinery of the
aggregate American.”12 He knows that money and money-making will not
preserve balance, for they are based on raw acquisition. If the larger aim is
“preserving cohesion, ensemble of Individuality,” then the only answer will
be to “vitalize man’s free play of special personalism.” Like a Miltonic tract,
the Vistas finally launch a violent attack upon “savage, wolfish parties.”13
Yet the poet wonders at his own degree of balance. He asks himself if
his thought is simply “the splendid figment of some dream,” and he answers
No: “we stand, live, move, in the huge flow of our age’s materialism—in its
spirituality.”14 The criterion for the poem must be a “scientific estimate.”
Whitman wants to make of politics a natural phenomenon, as opposed to a
law-driven social conventionality. He wants citizens to be good steersmen,
letting each soul voyage “with the accompanying idea of eternity, and of
itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every
region, as a ship the sea.” This voyager is to discover “the pulsations in all
matter, all spirit, throbbing forever—the eternal beats, eternal systole and
diastole of life in all things—wherefrom I feel and know that death is not the
ending, as was thought, but rather the real beginning—and that nothing
ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.” Thus among us
“must arise poets immenser far”15 who make great poems of death, for “we
sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and undercurrents,
vortices”—and what are these false tides, if not demagoguery and greed. He
castigates the “blind fury of the parties” battening on “scrofulous wealth,
the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed”—excesses hardly to be
redeemed by “new projections and invigorations of ideas and men.”16 His
final focus is on the political sickness and disease caused by “the depraving
influences of riches just as much as poverty.” It is in this context of a mingled
personal and political health that he invoked theory: “In fact, a new theory
of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and
especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States.”17 This
medical doctor is discovering a new doctrine, “the average, the bodily, the
concrete, the democratic, the popular,” notions providing the base for a
good future. If we imagine the largest bound of such a medicinal art, it
would have to be ecology, as studied and practiced by our environmental
guardians of natural systems. What Whitman means by “adhesion” and
“cohesion” comes finally to be what such scientists mean by ecological
balance, what the Ancients meant by philia, the precondition of any working
212 Angus Fletcher
state, what Lucretius meant by saying that in the nature of things amor had
to command the cosmos.
In the mid nineteenth century it was hard to imagine the laws of such
outlooks, and we are not at all surprised that Charles Eliot Norton wrote
thoughtfully of Leaves that it was a “curious and lawless collection of
poems.”18 Thoreau wrote to a friend about “a great primitive poem,” the
verse “rude and sometimes ineffectual,” while William Dean Howells equally
discovered this lawlessness in Drum Taps. “The thought is as intangible as
aroma; it is not more put up than the atmosphere.”19 Howells could not have
been more percipient, for what he calls aroma and atmosphere are perhaps
the defining cases of environment. He noticed subtle indeterminacies in the
poetry: “memories and yearnings come to you folded, mute, and motionless
in his verse, as they come in the breath of a familiar perfume. They give a
strange, shadowy sort of pleasure.” Unlike young Henry James,20 Howells
knew, of course, that Whitman had rougher democratic interests in mind,
attenuated, he thought, by a delicate willingness to pull back from “spoken
ideas.”
In that age of Jacksonian influences there was more than ever a need to
consider the Founders’ distrust of natural acquisitive and aggressive drives,
along with the constitutional balancing of powers designed to divert
predatory political desires into channels of rational benefit. It is odd that as
machines were rising in physical importance, the machine metaphor of the
balance wheel of the clock was diminishing in political force. All through
Edward Pessen’s important study of the period runs the thread of a
contradiction, as epitomized in his remark that “neither in word nor action
did Jackson reveal a consistent interest in, let alone sympathy for, democracy
and democratic social change, during the first 62 years of his life.”21 Yet
Jackson presides over the massive change in our politics that occurred
through the widening of the suffrage, although the right of the individual to
vote was still radically curtailed—excluding women and blacks, for a start. A
widened political place for the individual, even if only theoretical, was bound
to destabilize. The historian Robert Remini tells us that “Madison regarded
democracy as an ‘unstable’ effort to include every citizen in the operation of
government.” Chief among the consequences of polity would be the use of
majority rule, which, Madison thought, could only “jeopardize the personal
and property rights of the minority”—an established, often wealthy minority,
the class and the culture represented by the Founders. In true Lockean
fashion a validated identity, a proper governmental role for the individual,
was to be defined in terms of property, a basis thought to be the guarantor of
underlying political stability. The virtual opposite of this system would be
the shift to an unpropertied individuality, and from the poet’s vantage point
this would require a new poetic expressive language whose grammar would
reflect the different basis of speech and communication in the new political
climate—a new grammar of status relations. Grammar implies the concept of
the social mechanism. The American sentence will actually have to change.
It would not be until the 1890s that a knowledgeable English novelist,
George Gissing, would find himself “insisting on the degree to which people
have become machines, in harmony with the machinery amid which they
spend their lives.”22 Gissing was going to call his book Gods of Iron, “meaning
machinery, which is no longer a servant but a tyrannous oppressor of
mankind. One way or another this frantic social struggle must be eased.” In
America, the changes marking the mechanistic assault upon the individual
craftsman belong initially to the Jacksonian era, but for Americans they were
masked by westward expansion, over which Jackson presided in no small
measure. Industrial changes would accelerate vastly during the Civil War, but
the link between “this frantic social struggle” and Jacksonian democracy can
hardly be doubted.
Whitman in his formative years had occasion to learn all about many
aspects of the complexities of a great age of personal independence. New
York City, as Sean Wilentz has shown in great detail, long retained a variety
of shops making endless arrays of different things; and although I myself
remember remnants of this old New York in Manhattan, where we lived,
today this individual entrepreneurial activity is almost unimaginable.
Wilentz states that by mid-century New York’s manufacturing cityscape
demonstrated “immense diversity of scale and its complex range of
journeymen, contractors, small masters, and independent producers bridging
the gap between the largest manufacturer and the lowliest outwork hand. It
was not, contrary to the most cataclysmic images of the early industrial
revolution, a setting where all opportunity had been destroyed by invading
merchant capitalists—where all artisans were plunged into the ranks of
proletarianized wage labor.23 On the other hand, the individual New York
craftsman slowly came to participate in an incorporation of working men
into large self-representing groups, encouraged by speakers and leaders like
Fanny Wright or Robert Owen. Furthermore, as Wilentz and David
Reynolds have also shown, the Jacksonian influence in New York had the
effect of radically stimulating party politics, so that although a poet or a
journalist like Whitman might see deep into the fate of the individual
working man, the major shift gave power to organizations of political power
groups, that is, to the parties dedicated to the game of colliding with each
other, as groups. “Song of Occupations” reflects the legacy of craft and the
214 Angus Fletcher
small manufacturing businesses; meanwhile, when politics was imagined as

craft, it remained an intensely local affair and hence occupied a middle
ground between massive financial powers and the abject personal isolation of
the poor. With the construction of the Whitman grammar, which was the
chief artistic novelty of his 1855 Leaves of Grass and all his ensuing poems, we
reach the area that chiefly concerns us, the imaginative vision that enabled
him to become the poet of all these instabilities and changes.
THE WHITMAN PHRASE
The conditions and consequences, social and linguistic, of this new poetry
may now be summarized under three headings:
I. Whitman, known for inventing free verse, even more radically

invented a new kind of poem, which we must call the environment
poem. His poems are not about the environment, whether natural
or social. They are environments. This generic invention, though
not entirely without precedent, and not without affinities in
certain nature writings, is a strange idea. Stranger than one might
at first imagine.
II. The principle of order, form, expressive energy, and finally of

coherence for such environment-poems is the phrase, which I
mean in a grammatical and in an extended gestural sense. The
paramount use of phrase accounts for the Whitman style, and
more important for his poetics, for the way he arranges the
boundaries and the innards of his poems.
III. The phrase, as it controls the shaping of the environment-

poems that are required if he is to express any truths about a
Jacksonian world—whether pragmatic, political, mystical,
aesthetic, or otherwise—takes its physical correlate and its
metaphysical function from Whitman’s obsessive analysis of wave
motions. To put it iconically: when John Ashbery wishes to
overgo his own Whitmanian prose-poem, “The System,” or his
vastly complex Flowchart, he simply writes “A Wave.”
A few ideas for Whitman have thus emerged and are worth repeating:
(a) that for theory we must deal with poetics and not much with rhetoric; (b)
that the world in which these poetics evolve is a Jacksonian world; (c) that
Whitman invents a new poetic form, the environment-poem; (d) that the
chief method of such poems is the eccentric deployment of phrase-units, an
extreme grammatical endeavor; (e) and finally, that the Whitman phrase is
itself modeled on the virtually infinite translation of the wave—in nature, art,
thought, and human experience. If one keeps these five avenues or vistas in
mind, which are drawn from theory, politics, poetics, grammar, and physics,
then one will begin to see what Whitman meant when he spoke of “a
complete readjustment of the whole theory and nature of poetry.”
Let us begin then with grammar in the poetic line. Virtually every
single poem in his original manner is structured out of a single stylistic
process: the phrase, but the phrase inflected in a particular way. Most readers
of Whitman have seen his obvious discontinuities, but it seems no one has
asked what larger structural principle is implied, in a formal sense, by the
union of these discontinuities? It is as if readers delighted in saying Walt is
just chockfull of colorful phrases, but they never ask what poetic principles
of formation would allow the plethora to work. They do not ask how the
coherence of the plethora is maintained. They do not seem to remember that
Whitman writes poems which seem unbounded, but are in fact enclosures.
The theory of poetry demands that we ask always what forming principles
conspire to make the work into a poem, rather than a casual discourse or
rhetorical exercise. The issue finally has to do with Union and Civil War. In
a strict sense, every poem is a state. Leaving grammar aside for the moment,
theorists should pay attention precisely to what Emerson may have meant by
his colloquial expression, “part and particle,”24 especially since for him, as for
Whitman, states live only when they are always changing shape.
Theory demands that we isolate the phrase as the minimal life-unit of
coherent expression. Hence, to construct modern literature’s largest poetic
environment, Proust built Remembrance of Things Past around the dynamics
of the (musical) phrase, epitomized in la petite phrase de Vinteuil.25 Broadly,
by aggregating his own identity into an ensemble of parceled phrases,
Whitman is able to insert his own personality into the drifting climate he
invents, for ensemble is context in motion. Through the phrase and its
clausal surrogates, the poetry gains particular control over the drift, the
ensemble, the en masse, the average. Without subliming the grammar—a
dangerous game, as Wittgenstein observed—let us consider more deeply
what phrase does for Whitman.
Originally, the word comes from Greek phrasis and phrazein, to tell. A
phrase is a short pithy expression, the shortest of telling expressions. In
dance, it is a series of movements comprising a pattern. In Western music,
Webster tells us a phrase is a short musical thought at least two, but typically
216 Angus Fletcher
four measures in length, closing with a cadence. A cadenced thought, coming

through inflected cadenced melody. Most important of all, in grammar, it is
any group of two or more words that form a sense-unit, either expressing a
thought fragmentarily or as a sentence element not containing a predication
but having the force of a single part of speech—hence we have prepositional
phrases (west through the night), or participial, infinitive or gerundive phrases.
The key idea here is that without predication the phrase expresses a thought,
with the effect of the thought always being a fragment or part of a larger
union.
My sail-ships threading the archipelagoes,

My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind,
Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work,
races reborn, refresh’d,
Lives, works resum’d—
When phrases like these pile up in “A Broadway Pageant,” they are

employed in chanting a plethora of gifts, where number is the chief
metaphor—the metaphor of metonymy.26 Classic philological skill and a
deep study of stimmung enabled Leo Spitzer to reach into the inner form of
the Whitman list, to show he is never simply itemizing things.27 He is
itemizing things which occur to him, which is different. Spitzer called the
technique “chaotic enumeration,” which he found also in the poetry of Paul
Claudel, Blaise Cendrars, Aimé Césaire, and Rubén Darío, and we might add
Pablo Neruda. He went on to show that instead of narrated events expressed
in conventional syntax, we find on the contrary that the poet’s “nominal
style” employs a “coupling of nouns with adjectives or participles, without
benefit of finite verbs or copulas.” In a way this yields an impressionist effect
because the style uses unconnected ingredients, touches of color, a general
suppression of superordinate control. Explicating “Out of the cradle
endlessly rocking,” Spitzer wrote, “I see in these participles nervous
notations of the moment which serve not to re-enact actions, but to
perpetuate the momentary impressions which these have made on the boy
when he was perceiving them.” Spitzer identified the present participial
ending, repeated over and over, with the rocking motion of the sea. Perhaps,
ironically, this undulant numerous lapping is also a harbinger of death, the
final message from the sea, a message borne upwards by the aria anchoring
the elegy. The sense of rocking has many dimensions, like the rolling of
images in Stevens’s early homage to Whitman, “Sea Surface Full of
Clouds.”28 The undulant in that poem initiated a perpetual prelude, holding
and holding, while as the ocean imagined an end, “the water-glooms / In an

enormous undulation fled.”
With Whitman and his theory of poetry, however, Spitzer’s chaotic
enumeration is a thinking which expresses “the complexity of the modern
world.” Such thinking seems mainly a matter of individual consciousness,
hence nonpolitical. But this is only an appearance; the politics run deep, right
into the heart of grammar. Historical awareness underwrites an interrogation
of the poet’s “I,” but simultaneously asks, purely pragmatically: what lies
beyond the self? The limits of the present tense are obvious, in this historical
perspective. A mindless favoring of the present tense (like the television
commentator’s use of the historical present) is bound to dissolve the sense of
history, the sense of hierarchical concatenation or indeed any logically
enlinked furthering of probable steps in a development—none of the
hierarchical orders are supported any more, they dissolve, they liquefy, while
complex enumerations in parallel quasi-biblical rhythms are allowed to verge
on chaos. But, with Whitman, they do so in the interest of presenting a
drama of the poet’s own thinking, that is, the drama of his having what he
called, systematically, his “thoughts.”29 It is apparent that among the few
central theoretical questions to be raised regarding Whitman, none is more
important than his paradoxical, elusive, and doubtless evasive relation to the
problem of history.
Whitman seems early on to have found his phrasal method, not without
influence from journalistic prose, and he clearly thought this linguistic
method would neutralize interpretive problems of the relation between
American and European history. Virtually unstructured sequences of phrase
would allow for translation from the one conceptual scheme, to the other. A
similar quest occurs with the fiction of Henry James, where a questioning
recursive style betokens a pragmatic skepticism, whether about Europe or
about American origins. Whitman seems to believe that these United States
are engaged in a great transition, separate and yet not entirely detached from
European custom, and therefore his poetry specializes in all forms of
intransitivity. To “see” is his main occupation (and then to sing), and this
means in general that his expression of what he sees almost never rests on
transitive verb action. There is almost never any strong sense of subject, verb,
and object, although transitivity is always a further implication on some level
of interest, as we shall see in our discussion of the middle voice. Whitman’s
hammer never hits the nail. Instead, he catches, as in a snapshot, the hand
holding the hammer in midair in all its intrinsic hammerness. The Zenonian
trajectory is what counts, or if you wish, an arrested liminal passage between
and between and between. The lack of transitivity is staggering in its
218 Angus Fletcher
consistency. On reflection, of course, this persistently intransitive manner

would necessarily have to be the Whitman method, given that vision and the
full range of sense perceptions is archetypally his mode of response to the
world. Perception and the naming of percepts, as with the Wordsworth
poems on the “naming of places,” are not material action.
To say that Whitman thinks intransitively, veering always toward the
middle voice, is to claim that he sees rather than narrates, taking the word see
in its prophetic sense. It is also to claim that he finds this seeing a sufficient
index to a possible action implied in the gesture, a Neapolitan gesture,
caught by the instant photo of what is seen. We do not forget that when he
put his own engraved photograph opposite the 1855 title page of his book,
he meant to suggest to the readers to read his book in a new way. Besides the
wide format permitting the long lines to remain long on the page, he meant
us to follow those lines as a picture-taker follows a subject. Everything is a
brilliant sketch, almost a cartoon (and again his journalism is an influence).
We are invited to catch glimpses of outlines, and that requires us not to be
trammeled by ideas of logical or material concatenation. To read Whitman
aright, we have to remain perpetually intransitive, like the vast majority of his
middle-voicing verbs, his verbs of sensation, perception, and cognition.
Wishing to intensify the phrasal unit, he insists on the phrase of the
pure verb, the verb before it is locked down into predication. Whitman’s
favorite and most effective phrase is crafted from the present participle. Take
one example, out of thousands, a fragment found among his uncollected
manuscripts. As so often, the piece has no title and is unfinished—or is it
unfinished? The method prohibits a definite answer. Whitman’s usual title
for two lines like these would have been, simply, “A Thought.”30
Undulating, swiftly merging from womb to birth, from

birth to fullness and transmission, quickly transpiring—
Conveying the sentiment of the mad, whirling, fallout
speed of the stars, in their circular orbits.
Here the effect of the floating present participles is to enhance an unusually

cosmic sense of activity, as Ezra Greenspan has argued, and yet also this is
personally felt by the poet.31 He wants to be able to express his belief, “I
know that Personality is divine,” hence must intensify his verbs of mental
activity. He also wants these devices of presence to express ideas about the
land and country where he lives, and we are surprised to discover that the
phrase is a device of political implication as well as personal expression.
PHRASING JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY
The “buried past” with all its power over the evolution of custom and
government has somehow to find its language in Whitman’s verse. Our
theory must now widen its perspective, for it is not enough that the phrase
permit a wondrous play of the present participle. In a more general way the
phrase also allows ideas, images, and thoughts to be distributed across and
within the boundaries of each environment being described, and since each
phrase is such an elemental part of the grammar, composing whole poems
out of each description, it plays a central part in the idea that for Whitman
each poem constitutes a state.
Note then what follows. The chief rivals the phrase contends with are
clauses. (“When it rains, I carry an umbrella.”) As every schoolboy knows, or
used to know, this sentence is composed of two clauses, and in English these
are the main building blocks of predication. In grammar we call these the
main clause and the subordinate clause. Our language is completely
controlled and expressively driven by the chief property of these clausal
forms, namely, that they express superordinate and subordinate relationships
between the main parts of the predication. A language of this type is
constantly seeking to affirm a system of subordination, that is, what we may
call a top–down hierarchical order, which was the order for America the
Founders believed to be best for the country.
The only way for a Jacksonian democracy and its refusal of
subordination to thrive, in symbolic terms, would be to get rid of the clauses
of sentences as much as possible. This excision of the clause is only partly
possible. Whitman carries it as far as he can by assimilating clausal forms in
phrasal gesture, thereby weakening the hierarchical stranglehold of
traditional English literary grammar. If you read William Cullen Bryant’s
nature poems along side Whitman’s lyrics, you will see that Bryant is
virtually locked up inside the traps of clausal grammatical units. Whitman
uses the phrase as if he were a student of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis—in
Colors of the Mind, I showed that Edward Sapir regarded Whitman as an
extreme case of idiosyncratic expression, the master “of a larger, more
intuitive linguistic medium than any particular language” (263). We know to
what lengths the poet studied and noted down his language experiments.
The phrase provides the fundamental technique Whitman uses to become
the poet of democracy. No phrase is ever grammatically superordinate,
superior to, any other phrase, although vocal intonation may confer greater
importance on this phrase rather than that phrase. Examples of this ordering
by intonation abound in paratactic poetic languages, such as Old English,
220 Angus Fletcher
where we see that anarchy does not follow from the abandonment of the
grammar of subordination. Through powers of intonation poetry thus may
need to learn how to inflect complex relations without resorting to the
hierarchical top–down structure, and probably the best model for such
intonation is the wave. By empowering the phrase Whitman averts a secret
vice foreseen by Proust. In a passage of The Guermantes Way about the
survival of etiquette in a decadent aristocratic milieu and in “an egalitarian
society,” he asks, “Would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it
became outwardly more democratic?” “Very possibly,” he answers.32
We have to imagine the rhythms produced by a phrasal style, undulant
rhythms. The wave and the participle are not things; they are virtually
agencies of thought, like waves of reminiscence. Whitman composes so as to
assimilate all his units of expression, no matter how clausal and hypotactic
they appear, to the participial idea, to the phrase. Throughout Leaves of Grass
one notices a resistance to poetic argument, which, on a local level, would
require controlled predications along with their extension into further
sequences of predication, leading in logical fashion to clear conclusions. The
example of Christian epics such as The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost tells
us that logical consequence is not alien to poetry on a large scale, but in fact
may severely control the fable through the argument. Whitman’s desire for
a phrasally expressed chorographic vision of himself and of America leads
him away from argument toward a visionary simultaneity without progress
toward an end. His conclusions are deliberately expectant, suspended in
liminal space before any arrival at a permanently defining closure. Such
closure as he achieves is given by the anthropologist’s model of ritual ending
to initiations, that is, the stage known technically as aggregation. If we
imagine a poetry dedicated to the idea that life is primarily a passage from
birth to death, anthropologists will teach us the precise structure of this
conception, namely, that the passage has three phases—separation, liminal
passage, and aggregation—where the final stage marks the arrival of the
initiate at a completely new status. The initiate is aggregated into a higher
group within the society, and by analogy the poem following this plan would
reach closure and climax when the protagonist reaches a higher level of
insight, status, or home and belonging. When this last stage is reached, the
protagonist is free to move around within a new language of equality, no
longer disturbed with doubts about his or her own subordinate position.
These anthropological facts of social ordering are one of the ways in which
any “social environment” comes to possess its structure.
Aggregation and the forming of the ensemble allow the phrase to
become the centrally natural linguistic expression of democracy, for good or
ill. The phrase bespeaks thought in its most immediate, unreticulated, even
fragmentary form, which in a later chapter I will identify with Whitman’s use
of waves deriving from particles. When he entitles poems simply
“Thoughts,” he names his general procedure, almost as if he were Amy
Lowell calling her famous imagist poem “Patterns.” The Whitman
procedure is to vary the shapes of the poems—the complete poetic
enclosures—so changingly, with such architectonic variety, that he can find
places for a seemingly infinite number and variety of previously unreticulated
thoughts. A prior reticulation would have occurred only if the present
thoughts had been shown to follow from a series of previous continuous
predications from which the present thought logically derived. Participial
thinking in Whitman’s manner holds the grammar of his ideas in a
continuous present, which frustrates all sense of historical continuations. At
the same time, it enhances the orbital vision the poet wants, displaying him,
in Emerson’s words, as the “man behind the poem.”
Such thoughts can only be spoken in the present tense, as thinkings,
equivalent to collisions between Emerson’s “atoms and their elective
affinities,” as Emerson alludes to Goethe’s novel.33 This allusion is packed
with a revolutionary change in ideas about the forces binding or dispersing
adjacent persons, whether in a love story or the founding of a nation. The
ideal Goethean democracy would have to be a nationally constituted elective
affinity. The landscape of wildness described initially in some of Thoreau’s
nature writing and most recently used as a model for preserving the
environment could only suggest a parallel wilderness in politics. There was
thus no conflict in Whitman’s mind when he related his politically grounded
poetry to the wildness of the Rocky Mountains, which he saw for the first
time from the seat of a railroad train:
“I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but
more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour
after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon—this
plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of
primitive Nature—the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain
stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles—the broad handling
and absolute uncrampedness—the fantastic forms, bathed in
transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a
thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high—at their
tops now and then huge masses pois’d, and mixing with the
clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible.34
222 Angus Fletcher
The above passage could almost be notes for a version of Shelley’s Mont
Blanc. Along with the artless wild plenitude goes a sense of the mathematical
sublime. Whitman seems most himself when he notes not simply the
numbers, but more important, the “uncrampedness.” He assimilates the
mountain scene to pulsations of free movements, breathings of rock and
gorge. Such wild is the external terrain of a vast natural heartbeat pulsing in
the world’s body—a thought from Wordsworth perhaps, but more closely
tied to the thought that in nature one finds the “law” of an art. To a degree,
this is High Romantic doctrine, employing Bloom’s American sublime.35
Since the Renaissance, it had been customary to believe that art would tell
nature what it was to be natural, but now in Colorado nature will tell art what
it is to be artistic, so that a complete art/nature reversal has occurred.
Whereas the English Romantics would still have to subordinate their interest
in nature to a higher concern for hierarchical political order, Whitman’s new
world dream of America would permit him to fuse ideas of nature’s sublime
external power with the genuinely wild forms and actions of the new and
often adolescent American polity. He admitted liking the society of roughs,
but only on condition that they would not descend into “the herd of
independent minds,” as Harold Rosenberg ironically labeled the new fakery
of yuppie freedom.36 Abraham Davidson’s book, The Eccentrics and other
American Visionary Painters, shows what real artistic independence looked
like during Whitman’s lifetime; notably, the artists in question all looked for
new “light” in the wilderness of nature.37 Description here demands
luminism.
It was left for Whitman to discover the wildness of the city. His early
manhood was spent in a jungle of personality, his newspaper world, and
democratically he made a theory of poetry centered on the idea that if the
poet could only express his thoughts so as to insert them into a larger vision
without claiming logical necessity for the insertion, the result would be a new
social coherence, which I have identified with the coherence of a living
environment. Man was to him a sublime animal, whose society could only be
understood in the ecological terms of a grand scale, whose terror was
essential.
In Democratic Vistas, Whitman spoke up against the mainly urban
commerce in shams and simulacra. In “Our Real Culmination,” a final story
in Notes Left Over, the poet makes a plea for “comfortable city homesteads
and moderate-sized farms, healthy and independent, single separate
ownership, fee simple, life in them complete but cheap, within reach of
all.”38 He attacks excessive wealth and its “anti-democratic disease and
monstrosity.” Late in life, Whitman has had his fill of “immense capital and
capitalists, the five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill’d, artificial improvements,

even books, colleges, and the suffrage.” Behind his acute dismay and outrage
at the side-effects of Jacksonian democracy, one perceives an older or more
radical thought. His love of the machine had always been keen, but one hears
another understanding here when he tells us “there is a subtle something in
the common earth, crops, cattle, air, trees, &c., and in having to do at first
hand with them.” His feeling for the diurnal could not be more powerful.
This may be a utopian version of agriculture, “the only purifying and
perennial element for individuals and for society,” but he is not wrong to
glamorize this laboring utopia. Remembering he is a city dweller, one has to
include in this cultural account an awareness that one of the most popular
American poems ever written was Edwin Markham’s dismal elegy, “The Man
with the Hoe.”39 Yet Whitman at least asks the right question: “What
fortune else—what dollar—does not stand for, and come from, more or less
imposition, lying, unnaturalness?” He finally had to worry about the decline
of craft in the Jacksonian legacy. He had always been a more serious thinker
than his idling manner suggested, and when the Civil War left him shocked
and saddened by a carnage that reached its tragic scene in the death of
Lincoln, he could only accept the dark side of his initial optimism. Three
years before the poet died, Oscar Wilde wrote a review, “The Gospel
according to Walt Whitman,” where he commented, “If Poetry has passed
him by, Philosophy will take note of him.”40 This was often a primitive
natural philosophy, of the kind I associate with the Presocratics. “He has
begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he
is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual
evolution of the human being.” This makes the poet a virtual demiurge.
Although Whitman discovers how his poetry could fit democracy, he
never writes as if the two institutions were all there is. That was much of his
message, his continuously praising the things humans do, in all walks of life.
When, as I claim, he invented the poem-as-environment, he never believed
this was a literal fact. The environment-poem is, as any good poet would
know, an imaginative discovery and an imaginative product. Given the form
invented, that would be enough. But what a strange belief it involved, this
belief in the mystery of the vastness of our ecological home, as if the earth
momentarily looked at us!
NOTES
1. From The Life and Letters of John Burroughs. The naturalist wrote two books about
Whitman, and knew him well. My citation comes from Burroughs’ notebook used in
224 Angus Fletcher
compiling Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867)—from Whitman in His Own
Time, ed. Joel Myerson (Iowa City, 1991), 311–12.
2. John Donne: Sermons, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley,
1956), vol. VIII, 221. This Easter sermon of 1628 was preached on the text of I Corinthians
13.12, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” “Then” is a day of
resurrection.
3. I have generally used, for Whitman prose texts, Walt Whitman, ed. Justin Kaplan
(New York: Library of America, 1982) (henceforth LA). As here, 662. For the verse I have
mainly used the Norton Critical Edition (henceforth NTN) of Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley
Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York, 1973). This edition uses the editors’ 1965
New York University Edition.
4. Whitman, “Salut au Monde,” NTN, 137. The order counts: in line forty-one
Whitman asks, “What do you see Walt Whitman?” and in line forty-three answers,
proceeding for another fifteen consecutive anaphoric lines, with “I see.” His method is
established subtly in Section One, but directly in Section Two, which begins, “What do
you hear Walt Whitman,” and builds eighteen subsequent lines, all beginning, “I hear.”
The question for poetic history is simple-seeming in theory: how does the Whitman line,
based on his phrase, lead as model to the loosened line-shapes of later poets such as
Ashbery (and he belongs in a virtual galaxy of American poets)? My view, as detailed in
later chapters, is that by metonymic détente such later poets substitute their merely
accumulated, i.e., not anaphorically linked, image-clusters in sequent lines and paragraphs.
E.g., in “Grand Galop,” in John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York,
1975), the poem opens by announcing a potential catalogue, which it then loosely, but not
anaphorically, provides: “All things seem mention of themselves / And the names which
stem from them branch out to other referents.”
5. See Robert Faner, Walt Whitman and the Opera (Carbondale, 1951), esp. ch. 5. On
the Galilei and opera, see Fred Kersten, Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera: A Study in the
Phenomenology of Consciousness (Dordrecht, 1997). Kersten is writing in difficult Husserlian
terms, but his book is important because it gives a formal basis for understanding opera as
Gesamtkunstwerk—the composite of many dimensions of aesthetic effect—and hence a
formal basis of explaining Whitman’s feeling for the operatic aggregate form. I am grateful
to Christine Skarda for drawing my attention to Kersten. One could easily show that opera
is the most experimental of all Western art forms.
6. Walt Whitman, “Italian Music in Dakota,” Autumn Rivulets, NTN, 400.
Composers here are Bellini (Somnambula and Norma) and Donizetti (Poliuto), masters of
bel canto, notable for its fioritura style, from which Whitman gets some of his ideas about
his poetic of the aria and the recitative.
7. A central passage in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. Thomas Bergin and
Max Fisch, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, 1968), book two. Numerous articles in New Vico Studies, ed. by
Donald Verene, and formerly by the late, much beloved, now greatly missed Giorgio
Tagliacozzo, will indicate the scope of application for Vico’s concept of a general poetics.
My own contribution is “Dipintura: The Visual Icon of Historicism in Vico,” in Colors of
the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 147–65.
8. I owe this point to my learned friend Mitchell Meltzer, who is generally interested
in more theoretical or visionary matters.
9. Whitman, A Backward Glance, LA, 662. Pragmatism is here too broad a reading of
“science,” since Whitman clearly explored the latter in what for him were the available
avenues of “popular science.” The topic calls for further research as to the paradox of any
modern science becoming a “popular” interest, for this means much to American
expansion as a function of engineering skills. The United States is the only country to have
literally grown up along with the development of modern technology—Britain, by
contrast, was already full grown by the seventeenth century, despite all sorts of internal
political strife. Imperialism plays a central role in the resourcing of this technological
development, but the United States is unusual in that technology has molded our whole
way of life, from the beginning—just consider Mark Twain’s riverboats, or the new
agricultural machinery and its relation to very large plowed and harvested lands, or the
cotton gin, not to mention the engineered machines of electronic power. The main point
is the coterminous character of these advances. In American history they are not overlays;
they are the armatures, to use Ashbery’s word.
10. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, LA, 942.
11. Ibid., LA, 952.
12. Ibid., LA, 958.
13. Whitman (ibid., LA, 990–91) castigates “the blind fury of parties, infidelity, entire
lack of first-class captains and leaders, added to the meanness and vulgarity of the
ostensible masses.” Alluding here to Lycidas, he is yet entirely modern, aligning the
vulgarity of the new masses with their industrial condition—this is 1871—“the labor
question, beginning to open like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year.” What
would he say today, thinking of what he calls “scrofulous wealth?” Not to mention the
“wily person in office?” This is a dubious time, and he would have hated the moneyed
hypocrisy of it, as subversive and treasonous.
14. Ibid., LA, 956 ff.; he also says that the machinery of modern society “can no more
be stopp’d than the tides, or the earth in its orbit.”
15. Ibid., LA, 988.
16. Ibid., LA, 991.
17. Ibid., LA, 992.
18. Charles Eliot Norton, review of Leaves, Sept. 1855, in A Century of Whitman
Criticism, ed. E. H. Miller (Bloomington, 1969), 2.
19. William Dean Howells, review of Leaves, Nov. 1855, in ibid., 7.
20. See A Century, 13–18, for Henry James’s review of Drum Taps, Nov. 1865. The
review reveals more about its author than about its subject, as contrasted with the Howells
piece, which is a remarkable evocation of Whitman’s art. Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The
Imagination of Genius (New York, 1992), 498–99, tells the moving story of James in later
years reading Whitman’s poems aloud to the company at Edith Wharton’s house: “his
voice filled the room like an organ adagio,” she said. He crooned “Out of the Cradle” “in
a mood of subdued ecstasy.” Hearing James read aloud “from his soul,” Wharton was less
surprised to hear him also say that he considered Whitman “the greatest of American
poets.
21. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America, rev. ed. (Urbana, Il., 1985), 194. An essential
condition of historical understanding is thus stated by Pessen: “The complexity of truth
suggests that at times in history, personality prevails over ideology, petty and subjective
motives account for the behavior of mighty men, entire nations are turned this way or that
by actions more accidental than designed. Significant issues were touched on by every act
of the Jackson administration. But they are not exclusively the great issues of class,
property, distribution of wealth, or social status” (290). The remarks immediately
226 Angus Fletcher
following in my own text are taken from another expert work on the Jacksonian era, by
Robert V. Remini. See his lectures, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy,
Indian Removal and Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1988), 24. Few presidents have aroused more
heated opinions, and I focus deliberately on Jackson’s part in the legacy of universal
suffrage. An equal voting right is more often an ideal than a fact, but as I develop the
grammar of the Whitman phrase, I insist that the idea of universal suffrage makes all the
difference to the way Whitman wrote.
22. Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz, ed. A. C. Young (London, 1961), 163.
23. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 115–16.
24. By altering “parcel” to “particle,” Emerson gives to his Nature, ch. I the note of
science, all the brighter since this belongs to a nature “uplifted into infinite space.” At this
moment Emerson is an astronomer, but as scientist, despite his enthusiasm over the
modern Jardin des Plantes, he rather resembles a Presocratic cosmologist.
25. See Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. I, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleurs (Paris, Pléiade ed.), 529, 531, 536; vol. II, 47, 584; vol. III, passim, as indexed under
“Noms de Personnes,” 1279. In C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Remembrance of Things Past, tr., ed.,
and retranslated by Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor (New York, 1981), vol. III, 242,
256, 260, 262–63, 380–82, and throughout Time Regained, e.g., 899–903, where the power
of the musical phrase (and its visual equivalents in painting and the novel) is explored as
the stimulus to memory.
26. Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant,” sec. 2., lines 61–65, NTN, 245.
27. Leo Spitzer, “Explication de Texte Applied to Walt Whitman’s Poem ‘Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking’” (1949), in A Century of Whitman Criticism, ed. E. H. Miller
(Bloomington, 1969), 273–84. Paul Claudel’s method of “chaotic enumeration” accords
with Spitzer’s study of environing context in Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony:
Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung,” ed. Anna G. Hatcher (Baltimore,
1963), and is specified in “Interpretation of an Ode by Paul Claudel,” in Linguistics and
Literary History (Princeton, 1948), 193–236; reptd. in Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, ed.
A. K. Forcione et al. (Stanford, 1988), 273–326.
28. “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York, 1964),
100. “The macabre of the water glooms / In an enormous undulation fled,” comes at the
end of sec. II.
29. I link environmental thought with a paradox of Walden, discovered there by
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco, 1981), 54: “that what is most intimate
is furthest away.” See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, parts II and IV. Also, In Quest of the
Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, 1988), especially the Tanner
Lecture (1986) on “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 153–80, and “Postscript A.
Skepticism and a Word Concerning Deconstruction,” 130–36, with Postscripts B and C
also concerning metaphoric usage in relation to the “unnatural” (146–47). Emerson’s essay
on Montaigne is subtitled, “Or, Skeptic.”
30. Whitman, “A Thought,” NTN, 704.
31. Ezra Greenspan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (Cambridge,
1995), “Some Remarks on the Poetics of ‘Participle-loving Whitman,’” 92–109. See the
sensitive reading of “When lilacs last,” by Helen Vendler, in Textual Analysis Some Readers
Reading, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York, 1986), 132–43, especially 142: “The rhythm of
the death carol is not periodic. Rather, like the waves of the ocean or the verses of poetry,
it is recursive, recurrent, undulant, self-reflexive, self-perpetuating.” See above in my

Chapter 12, “Waves and the Troping of Poetic Form.”
32. Proust, The Guermantes Ways, tr. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 472.
33. Emerson, Essays: First Series, “Circles,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures,
ed. Joel Porte (LA, 1983), 410. See Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (London, 1999),
76–98 (“Electric Cosmos”), and 70–75, on “Emerson’s Hermeticism.” Wilson shows that
the influence of Goethe’s nature philosophy upon Emerson had a strong hermetic tinge,
which of course marks all Romantic literature insofar as it dwells, in the tradition of
Renaissance alchemy, upon “affinities” between elements and different levels of natural
being. Such is very much the general tenor of Emerson’s Oration for the Society of the
Adelphi (1841), “The Method of Nature,” where he speaks of “elective attractions” (LA,
118), but the Goethean notion of elective affinities runs all through the Essays. Electricity
in this discourse is always elective; there is a general fascination, as evidenced by the
popular lectures of Faraday, with the mutual attraction of positive and negative charges, a
fascination that rewrites the dialectic notions of logical polarities and their interaction in
Hegelian terms. The North and South Poles are now electrified.
34. Whitman, Specimen Days, LA, 850–68, under the title “An Egotistical ‘Find,’”
855–56. See W. C. Harris on Whitman and the stress of Union: Arizona Quarterly, 56, no.
1 (2000), 29–61.
35. The reader should consult Bloom’s essay, “Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally
of My Soul,” in Walt Whitman, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1985), 127–42; also, Bloom,
“Freud and the Poetic Sublime,” in Poetics of Influence, ed. John Hollander (New Haven,
1988), for background to the Longinean tradition as it relates to Bloom’s Freudian,
Kabbalistic, and Gnostic theory of the American Sublime.
36. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York, 1961), part 4, “The Herd
of Independent Minds.” (A parallel work would be J. L. Borges’ satire, The Chronicles of
Bustos Domecq.) Rosenberg’s 1969 Artworks and Packages (Chicago, 1982), “Lights! Lights!”
discusses the shift from Happenings to Environments in modern art. See also the notice
(133) of Louise Nevelson’s work, “Atmosphere and Environment I.”
37. Abraham Davidson, The Eccentrics and Other American Visionary Painters (New
York, 1978), 134. In this important passage Davidson distinguishes between the “normal”
visionaries among his painters and those sharing Whitman’s “cosmic” vision as it
establishes an American scale of “vista,” the sense of extending chora shared by painters like
Ryder and especially Blakelock, who go out into the study of light itself, thus avoiding the
“spookiness” of the normalizing of vision.
38. “Our Real Culmination,” in Whitman, Complete Prose Works, LA, 1074.
39. Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (New York, 1899). The
eloquence of this ekphrastic poem is unexpected, but then we encounter a similar
expressive power in other poems, such as “The Whirlwind Road,”—I felt the Mystery the
Muses fear” (line 8). In the 1899 Doubleday and McClure edition, Markham shared
copyright with his original publisher and employer/distributor; the co-holder was the San
Francisco Examiner. The volume’s frontispiece was an engraving of its original, and the title
poem was “Written after Seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting.” “World-Famous” is P.
T. Barnum talk, and it fits Markham’s generally middle-brow sublimity.
40. Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New
York, 1969), 125.
HAROLD BLOOM
Afterthought
T here are three crucial components in Emerson’s American religion: the

God within; solitude; the best and oldest part of the self, which goes back
before creation. What will the poems of that religion have in common with
Dante or with the holy George Herbert?
Let me juxtapose Walt Whitman with his contemporary, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, who admired the little of the American bard he had read,
but declined to read any more because he feared the identity he sensed
between Whitman and himself, a bond both homoerotic and rhythmic.
Writing to the poet Robert Bridges on 18 October 1882, Hopkins seeks to
deny Whitman’s influence (rather weakly) and then declares:
I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like

my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great
scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes
me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that
I will not.
To characterize the ministering angel of the Washington D.C.

hospitals during the Civil War as “a very great scoundrel” is sublimely
229
230 Harold Bloom
absurd, even if you are a Jesuit priest and an Oxford gentleman. Our father
the old man Walt Whitman was a greater poet than Father Hopkins, and of
a religion beyond Hopkins’s understanding. G.K. Chesterton, before he
converted to the Church of Rome, gave a more accurate sense of the poet of
the American religion: “... we have not yet begun to get to the beginning of
Whitman. The egoism of which men accuse him is that sense of human
divinity which no one has felt since Christ.”
Hopkins, I suspect, read more widely in Whitman than he cared to
admit. “That Nature Is a Heracletian Fire and of the Comfort of the
Resurrection,” written in 1888, echoes “The Sleepers,” with “heaven-
roysterers, in gay-gangs” taking me back to “Onward we move! a gay gang
of blackguards,” as though the Jesuit renders tribute to the very great
scoundrel who was certainly one of his forerunners. After the birth of the
United States, we produced no devotional poets of high merit. Emerson’s
briefly inspired disciple Jones Very celebrates only the God within, and while
Eliot, Auden, and Robert Lowell are included in this book because of their
confessional stances of devotion, they do not, in my own critical judgment,
equal Hopkins and Christina Rossetti, let alone John Donne, George
Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw.
So implicit and universal is the American religion, that some of its

poets can be unaware that they incarnate and celebrate it. Setting aside
Emerson himself and our two grandest voices, Whitman and Dickinson, why
should poems by such skeptics as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, John
Wheelwright, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson be regarded as religious?
Hart Crane, who professed no Christian doctrine, became the American
equivalent of St. John of the Cross in the Proem, “To Brooklyn Bridge.” A.
R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and James Merrill, the strongest poets in my
generation, have nothing conventional in their respective spiritualities, but
Ammons and Ashbery bring us back to Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson,
while Merrill transmutes Yeats, Stevens and Auden into creatures largely his
own.
Any distinction between sacred and secular literature is finally a
political judgment, and therefore irrelevant in the realms of the aesthetic.
The United States, already a plutocracy, flickers these days towards
theocracy. A theocratic America doubtless will distinguish between sacred
and secular utterances, but Whitmanian democracy fuses them in the
divinity of the self, which is our native understanding of the Resurrection as
Afterthought 231
an escape from history, that is to say, from European time. The Resurrection
is not a mediated event for American Religionists, whether they be
Independent Baptists, Mormons, or Emersonians. The ancient Gnostics said
that first Jesus resurrected, and then he died. Our singer of Song of Myself
records a similar career. William James became the psychologist of the
American Religion, and found in Whitman the archetype of healthy-
mindedness. To recover the Whitman of William James, and of Henry James
after he had weathered his early savagery against the divine Walt, is to
recover not only the greatest American poet but the grandest of American
personae, “Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American.”
To recover that Whitman, we need to break down forever that useless
distinction between sacred and secular literature, a distinction purely political.
By vote of Congress, L. Ron Hubbard, a bad science-fiction writer, composed
a sacred text in his Dianetics, the tax-exempt Scientology’s scripture, fit
inspiration for such visionaries as John Travolta and Tom Cruise. We need not
await any Congressional acclaim of Leaves of Grass. The thrice-blesséd Trent
Lott of Mississippi has proclaimed that homoeroticism is indistinguishable
from kleptomania. Walt Whitman must be spied upon lest he run off with the
senatorial spoons, or the Congressional tarts. D. H. Lawrence told us that the
Americans were not worthy of their Whitman, but that was before the Sage of
Nottingham was chased out of the canon by the heroic feminista Kate Millett,
who assured us that Lawrence would deny human females their orgasms. A
brief textual comparison of Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent with Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics should persuade even the most militant of feministas that no one
had taught Millett how to read. Rather clearly, the Lawrence-like Mexican
general Cipriano is attempting to teach his bride, the Frieda-like Kate, the
pragmatics of tantric mutual coitus reservatus, rather than a Fascistic technique
in which he comes and she does not.
It ought not to be need saying, but in this age of politically correct “sex
workers” and of “animal companions,” I am now obliged to defend the poet
Walt Whitman from accusations of “racism” made against the man Walt
Whitman in his long decline, after his great poetic decade of 1855-1865.
There is a precise analogue in William Wordsworth, who declined from his
great decade of 1797-1807 into a Tory government official composing
sonnet-sequences in favor of capital punishment, thus fitting himself to be
poet laureate of our grand state of Texas, which exults in its non-stop
executions, a useful supplement to the pious Tom DeLay’s agile
gerrymanderings. After 1865, the sane and sacred Whitman burned out. He
had nursed one too many dying young soldier, and had discovered that in
elegizing Lincoln he had elegized his own poetic vocation. The stroke-
232 Harold Bloom
ridden Good Gray Poet began to fear labor unions and emancipated blacks,
but what has that to do with the poet of 1855-1865?
Walt Whitman, in that decade, wrote the authentic literature for the
New World. I do not fear being called hyperbolical, since the Critical
Sublime is precisely that. How great a writer was Whitman? No one since
Whitman, not Henry James nor Marcel Proust, not James Joyce nor Jorge
Luis Borges, nor anyone you can hope to name, is nearly as vital and as
vitalizing as the visionary poet of Leaves of Grass. D. H. Lawrence was fiercely
ambivalent towards his crucial precursor, but he at last got it right in the final
version of Studies in Classical American Literature. Feeling himself to be more
Whitman than Whitman himself could be, Lawrence thus took on the role
of Christ to Walt’s John the Baptist, but actually became St. Paul to
Whitman’s Christ. Here though is the best and most poignant prose tribute
yet made to the artist-seer of Leaves of Grass:
Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me.

Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one
pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French.
No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers
are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman,
nothing. Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of
unopened life, Whitman. Beyond him, none. His wide, strange
camp at the end of the great high-road. And lots of new little
poets camping on Whitman’s camping ground now. But none
going really beyond. Because Whitman’s camp is at the end of the
road, and on the edge of the precipice. Over the precipice, blue
distances, and the blue hollow of the future. But there is no way
down. It is a dead end.
Pisgah. Pisgah sights. And Death. Whitman like a strange,
modern, American Moses. Fearfully mistaken. And yet the great
leader.
The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not
decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential
function of art is moral.
But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality
which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the
blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.
Now Whitman was the great moralist. He was a great leader.
He was a great changer of the blood in the veins of men.
Afterthought 233
Matching Lawrence’s praise of the sublime Walt in eloquence, Stevens

actually was more accurate in giving us Whitman as precisely anti-
apocalyptic, rather than Lawrence’s proclaimer of finalities:
In the far South the sun autumn is passing

Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
Our prime shaman of the American Religion affirms the Blessing of more
life. Death, for Walt Whitman, was an innocence of the earth, and no false
sign or symbol of malice.
I do not find it useful to define Whitman’s religion apart from his

poetry, anymore than I trust any social pronouncements in his prose,
whether published or not. His sexual orientation, in the poetry, seems to me
more Onanistic than homoerotic. It is a paradox that Henry James, massively
reticent in his novels, stories, and other writings, particularly in regard to his
own homosexuality, may have experienced more actual erotic fulfillment
than did the personally shy prophet of “adhesiveness.” Still, shamans
traditionally have been androgynous, and of Whitman’s poetic mastery of
archaic techniques of ecstasy I entertain no doubts.
To discover an American achievement equal to Whitman’s, I judge you
need to fuse two brothers of absolute genius, William and Henry James.
Since William composed Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to
Believe, no one would dispute his eminence as the prime philosopher-
psychologist of our very original national religion. Our greatest American
novelist scarcely seems a religious writer, let alone an occultist like the Balzac
whom he so vastly admired. Yet the ghostly tales perpetually remind us that
the Master excelled at speculative connections, even in his major fictions.
Relations, as Frances Wilson has noted, stop nowhere for the James family,
who were occultly linked, as befitted the children of a Swedenborgian father.
The idea of death is as richly ordered by the James brothers as by Whitman,
yet they evade his baroque elaborations, though both of them loved his Lilacs
elegy for Lincoln.
William James had a less dialectical relation to Emerson than Henry
234 Harold Bloom
enjoyed, while Whitman’s debt to Emerson was so vast that he tried

eventually to deny it. Henry James’ American heroines are Emersonians, but
oddly that was true also in The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. T.S. Eliot
happily praised Henry James for possessing a Vision of Evil that Emerson
refused to honor, but Eliot was mistaken in his Christianization of James, just
as Eliot’s disciple Cleanth Brooks erred in baptizing the fictions of William
Faulkner. Eliot’s Vision of Evil was gratified best by Christopher Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta. I wish Eliot had left some comments on Henry James’
keenly appreciative account of the Yiddish old East Side in the superb
American Scene, the Master’s return to what had been his New York City. In
his own way Henry James, like Whitman, contained multitudes.
Again like Whitman, the Master of American prose fiction had a
visionary sense of the uncertain borders between the living and the dead, just
as both apprehended the wavering line between maleness and femaleness.
Emerson had no interest in either demarcation; you can name this healthy-
mindedness, though part of my statement is now so politically incorrect as to
seem outrageous. Clearly (I would hope) I intend no offence, since Whitman
and Henry James merely remain much our greatest imaginative writers.
William James, like his father and brother, had something to intimate about
a possible life-after-death, but as a psychologist ventured no particular
insights into homoeroticism.
Sinuously, Henry did, particularly in The Sacred Fount, which shows an
affinity with Whitman’s distrust of heterosexual marriage. Shamanistic
spirituality has little to do with healing marriages, and the author of the
grandest American novels and tales was hardly a shaman. Walt Whitman, in
an original way, was precisely that during his great decade of 1855 through
1865. He came as medicine, and found himself most truly and most strange
in the Civil War hospitals of Washington D.C. Henry James, consciously
imitating Whitman, visited the British wounded of World War I, during his
closing years, but not very effectively. We cannot think of the Master as the
Good Gray Novelist.
Books have been written on Whitman’s relation to various nineteenth-

century American quackeries, but throughout my more than a half-century
as a literary critic I have rejected all historicisms, Old or New. No one has
ventured to answer my persistent question: “How can any societal over-
determination account for the phenomenon of any solitary genius?”
Emerson memorably addressed himself to the Question of Genius; all a New
Afterthought 235
Historicist can do is shrug and label Genius a High Romantic myth. In my

old age, I refuse to be bored, and what now passes for ongoing scholarly
criticism of Walt Whitman is sublimely tiresome. When I teach Robert
Browning, a great poet now absurdly neglected, I would feel absurd were I
to begin by telling my students that this wonderful dramatic monologist was
fiercely heterosexual. What does it matter that Henry James and Walt
Whitman were homoerotic, or to use the going lingo, gay or queer? I begin
to lose any last shreds of toleration for anyone who believes that aesthetic
splendor, wisdom, and cognitive power cannot be recognized except by
criteria of gender, social class, skin pigmentation, ethnic origin, and sexual
orientation. The divine Oscar Wilde, who as Borges observed was always
right, told us: “All bad poetry is sincere.”
Walt Whitman wrote six major great poems, the crown of American
literature: Song of Myself, “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “As I
Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” There are about twenty
other shorter poems or fragments of roughly equal eminence, but only three
or four of these were composed after 1865, and Whitman died in 1892.
In his strongest poems, Whitman is a new kind of religious bard,
virtually indescribable even in his own terms. Discursive contradictions
between creeds and creedlessness, God and man, oblivion and immortality
melt away in Walt’s creative furnace, as they did in William Blake’s or Victor
Hugo’s. I begin to feel that Gershom Scholem was accurate when he told me
that Whitman, who certainly never heard of the Kabbalah, conceived of the
Divine Reality as the later Kabbalists did. Like the Ein-Sof, the Kabbalah’s
revision of Yahweh, Whitman creates and ruins worlds even as he draws in
his breath. John Hollander, describing Whitman’s rhetoric, pragmatically
invokes Lurianic Kabbalah while perhaps being unaware of the invocation:
“When he announces his experiences, containments, and incorporations, he
is frequently enacting a contraction and withdrawal.” I would add that Walt
is most like Yahweh when in effect he warns: “I will be absent wherever and
whenever I will be absent.” Our great American master of his own real
presence, Whitman is endlessly elusive and evasive. Yahweh is not there
when you need him, and so I do not trust him or like him, and I wish he
would go away, though he won’t. Whitman is there on the page, or in my
chanting memory, and yet is not his highest art the real absence?
These days we live not in the great poem of Whitmanian democracy,
but in an America that fuses plutocracy and theocracy. Tocqueville toured the
United States in the 1830s, a generation before Leaves of Grass, and
concluded that American Christianity, while more democratic than not,
236 Harold Bloom
nevertheless restrained the national imagination. He could not have

anticipated Emerson and Whitman, who freed imagination and discarded
Christianity. This American Renaissance, participated in also by Hawthorne,
Melville, and Thoreau, flourished from 1850 to 1860, and then yielded to the
Civil War, which seems to me is still being fought against the rest of us by
the old Confederacy, now the solid Republican South of Reagan and the
Bushes. Tocqueville could not have anticipated the Christian Right, whose
alliance with Wall Street may be permanent in this ongoing age of worldwide
religious warfare. In his cosmic optimism, Whitman also could not foresee
our bad time, though he rightly feared that the Union had survived at too
high a cost.
What is the center of Whitmanian religion? Clearly, it is Walt
Whitman himself as the Divine, post-Christian yet a messiah, another son of
a carpenter who also is a son of God. There actually was a rather literal-
minded Whitman cult, which fortunately ebbed and vanished with the end
of World War I in 1919. Though the enterprise was absurd and useless, it
serves as another reminder that the reader never can really know what is
literal and what is figurative in Whitman. Perhaps nothing, including Walt
himself, was literal, though I suspect they were only sparsely literalized, if at
all. You can call Whitman a mythmaker, or merely a liar, but a great poet
creates permanent fictions, and “Walt Whitman” remains the largest literary
fact we have, reducing to pigmies such fictive entities as “Norman Mailer”
and that Dr. Doolittle-like pushme-pullyou, the “Ginsberg-Kerouac.”
Usurpation rarely can be duplicated in a nation’s literary history. Like
Goethe, Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer, Whitman has a way
of occupying all of imaginative space. These half-dozen writers are mortal
gods, though only Goethe, Hugo, and Whitman seem to have asserted such
status.
5
Being a god is rather hard work, though Goethe and Hugo never
waned, while Whitman did, but Goethe sensibly did not fight against
Napoleon. Victor Hugo gallantly raised the morale of the Paris Commune,
particularly devoting himself, despite his advanced years, to gratifying the
female communards. Whitman, too middle-aged to fight for the Union,
became the heroic ministering angel of the Washington hospitals. By then
his divinity had left him, and his magnificent elegy for President Lincoln
became implicitly an elegy for his ebbing Incarnation, as poet and as God. I
go on judging this as the greatest of American poems, but Whitman himself
was irritated whenever anyone called it his best. William and Henry James
Afterthought 237
loved it in part because their preternaturally shared consciousness is echoed

by the poem’s fusion of Lincoln and Whitman. I suggest that Walt’s divine
apotheosis lasted five years, from 1854 through 1859, when it attained a
crescendo in “Sun-Down Poem,” later retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
In the winter of 1859-60, Whitman evidently suffered a homoerotic crisis,
perhaps akin to T. S. Eliot’s brief moment with Jean Verdenal: “The awful
daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never
retract.” The Whitmanian debacle gave him the two superb Sea-Drift
elegies, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking “ and “As I Ebb’d with the
Ocean of Life,” but to find the Divine Walt, we need to center upon Song of
Myself, the American epic proper, in which the God of the United States
achieved decisive self-recognition.
Late in life, Whitman set down in prose notes his recollections of the
great Quaker preacher Elias Hicks, who broke with the Philadelphia
Quakers in 1829, and led his followers back to the Inner Light vision of
George Fox. Walt’s paternal grandfather and Walter Whitman Sr. were
among these followers, and so in a sense was the American Bard himself, who
fused his Emersonian revelations of the God within into an amalgam of
Concord Gnosticism with Hicksite Quakerism. Of Hicks, Whitman
observed: “He is the most democratic of the religionists—the prophets.”
Partly Native American, partly African American, Hicks, like the Whitmans,
was working-class and devoted his life to dissident Quaker circuit-riding.
Taken first at the age of ten to hear Hicks preach, Walt revived the spirit of
Elias in the final passage of Song of Myself, section 5:
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the
women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein
and poke-weed.
The directness of this testimony is Hicksite Quakerian, but the final

three lines are the purest Whitman, who refuses any hierarchy of being, and
who celebrates weeds as though they were flowers. His central metaphor
238 Harold Bloom
necessarily is “leaves of grass.” John Hollander deftly indicated the multiple

ambiguities of that “of”: are the “leaves” pages of books? Are they
figurations for the fresh green of Whitmanian poems? Or are they Sibylline
leaves, wind-blown oracles? Primarily they must refer to what Wallace
Stevens, with highly conscious belatedness termed “the fiction of the leaves,”
sad emblems for the ends of particular human lives in Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Milton, Shelley and Whitman himself. The “grass” then would be that of all
flesh harvested by death in the prophet Isaiah, the Psalms of David, and the
New Testament. Hollander adds “leavings,” departures in song for other
realms. I myself suspect, since Whitman learned the printer’s trade in a
newspaper office, that the leaves are also printer’s sheets and the grass throw-
away-stuff employed to fill up blank pages. This vertigo of metaphor is
central to Whitman as the American bardic Christ, self-anointed to strike up
the cognitive and spiritual music for the New World.
Walt Whitman wrote the poems of our climate, as Wallace Stevens

ruefully (in certain moods) concluded. How could it have been otherwise?
Here was the American Adam, early in the morning, fusing Man, god, and
the Gnostic and Hermetic Angel Christ, as he is called by the Sufis. As this
amalgam, Walt is like the auroras or Northern Lights described by
Wordsworth as “here, there, and everywhere at once.” When the daunting
illuminations flash upon the beach-walking Stevens in The Auroras of
Autumn, the aging poet attempts to defend his waning autonomy by
unnaming the lights, but they will not be destroyed: “he opens the door of
his house / On flames.” Whitman, strongest of American bards, met the
challenge of dazzling and tremendous sunrise by affirming that, now and
always, he could send forth sunrise from himself. There are multitudes of
poets contained in the large Walt, and one of them refuses to be subdued by
natural appearances.
Angus Fletcher recently has found in Whitman the master of the
Environment Poem, an American version of the Picturesque. I would prefer
to call Song of Myself precisely the Anti-Environment Poem, despite
Thoreau’s enthusiasm for what in 1856 he knew as the “Sun-Down Poem,”
later renamed as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” What is urgent for Walt is the
crossing, Emerson’s metaphor for darting to a new aim. The shores of
America matter most to Whitman as points-of-departure for the outward
voyage. But to where? There is only the grand fourfold: night, death, the
mother, and the sea. All of these constitute the unknown nature of which
Afterthought 239
Walt’s soul is composed. What the Gnostics called the spark or pneuma, the
breath of being, Whitman terms the me myself or the real me. That leaves
only his supreme fiction, “Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American,”
the prime subject throughout Song of Myself.
This psychic cartography is so original that we as yet have not
assimilated it, but the study of Whitman’s great decade of poetry scarcely has
begun, and indeed goes backwards at this moment, when even professional
scholars of literature have never learned how to read a poem. Whitman
hoped to give us chants democratic, but at his strongest he composed chants
elitist: esoteric, difficult, evasive, profoundly poignant, and immersed in a
new spirituality we only start to notice. He dared to write a New Bible for
Americans, who remain obsessed with the old one, though they cannot read
it.
Chronology
1819 Born Walter Whitman on May 31 near Huntington, Long

Island to Louisa Van Velsor and Walter Whitman, a
carpenter and house-builder; both parents follow the
radical Quaker, Elias Hicks.
1823 Family moves to Brooklyn, where Whitman attends public
school until 1830.
1830 Works as office boy to lawyers and to a doctor.
1831 Apprenticed as printer’s devil to the Patriot, a Democratic
newspaper, and then to the Star.
1835 Works as a printer in New York City.
1836 Teaches in various Long Island schools.
1838 Publishes and edits a new weekly, the Long-Islander, from
Huntington, then works on the Jamaica-based Democrat.
Writes early poems and sketches.
1840 Helps campaign for Martin Van Buren, then returns to
teaching.
1841 Works as compositor for the New World in New York City,
and as a Democratic activist.
1842 Works for several newspapers in New York City and
publishes stories, sketches, and Franklin Evans, a
temperance novel.
1845 Returns to Brooklyn to work for the Star, and then moves
on to the Daily Eagle.
241
242 Chronology
1848 Moves briefly to New Orleans to work as a newspaper

editor. Returns to New York to edit the Brooklyn Freeman.
Actively supports the Free Soil Movement.
1853 Writes notebooks that will form the embryo of Leaves of
Grass.
1855 Self-publishes Leaves of Grass in early July; the book is
comprised of twelve untitled poems, including “Song of
Myself” and “The Sleepers.” Father dies on July 11. Ralph
Waldo Emerson writes to Whitman hailing Leaves of Grass
as the “most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom
America has yet contributed” on July 21.
1856 Publishes second edition of Leaves of Grass, to which he
adds “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The second edition
includes Emerson’s letter and Whitman’s extraordinary
reply to it. Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visit
Whitman in Brooklyn.
1857 Edits Brooklyn Times.
1858 Undergoes period of depression lasting from late 1858 well
into 1859.
1860 Publishes third edition of Leaves of Grass in Boston with the
publishing house of Thayer and Eldridge, adding
“Calamus” poems and poems later titled “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life.” Visits Emerson while in Boston to read proofs.
1861 Returns to journalism while visiting the sick and war-
wounded at New York Hospital.
1862 Departs for Virginia battle front in December to find
wounded brother George.
1863 Visits wounded soldiers in military hospitals in and around
Washington, D.C.
1865 Dismissed from clerkship at Department of the Interior,
perhaps because of the scandal of the third edition of Leaves
of Grass. Writes “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” during the summer, in reaction to the death of
Abraham Lincoln, and publishes it in October in Drum-
Taps and Sequel. Meets Peter Doyle, then aged eighteen.
1867 Publishes fourth edition of Leaves of Grass.
1870 Publishes fifth edition of Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas.
Chronology 243
1873 Suffers paralytic stroke in January. Mother dies in May.

Moves to brother George’s house in Camden, New Jersey,
in June.
1879 Travels in American West.
1880 Travels in Canada.
1881 Meets with Emerson for the last time in Concord,
Massachusetts.
1882 Receives Oscar Wilde in Camden. Leaves of Grass is banned
in Boston, but is reprinted in Philadelphia, where Specimen
Days and Collect is published.
1884 Moves out of brother’s house and into one of his own in
Camden.
1888 Suffers severe paralytic stroke.
1891 Publishes Goodbye My Fancy and final “deathbed” edition of
Leaves of Grass.
1892 Dies on March 26 in Camden.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale

University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking
(1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970),
A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a
Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon
(1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and
Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor
Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great
writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How
to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom be Found
(2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor
Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of
Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian
Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
D.H. LAWRENCE was equally powerful as novelist, poet, and visionary

polemicist. His poetry, at its later best, is profoundly Whitmanian, as are his
greatest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love.
245
246 Contributors
KENNETH BURKE was among the most eminent American literary

theorists and critics of the twentieth century. His crucial books are A
Grammar of Motives and The Rhetoric of Religion.
R.W.B. LEWIS taught English at Yale University. His books include The
American Adam and distinguished studies of Hart Crane and Edith Wharton.
KERRY C. LARSON is Senior Associate Dean of the Rackham Graduate

School at the University of Michigan, where he also teaches in the English
Department. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on American
literature and also Whitman’s Drama of Consensus.
DAVID BROMWICH is Housum Professor of English at Yale University.

His books include Hazlitt: The Mind of the Critic, Disowned by Memory:
Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790’s, and Skeptical Music.
MARK BAUERLEIN is Professor of English at Emory University. His

publications include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, The Pragmatic Mind:
Explorations in the Psychology of Belief, and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta,
1906.
JOHN HOLLANDER teaches in the English Department at Yale

University. America’s preeminent poet-critic, Hollander is the author of The
Figure of Echo, Rhyme’s Reason, Melodious Guile, and The Gazer’s Spirit.
HELEN VENDLER teaches English at Harvard University. Her many

distinguished works of criticism include Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Coming of Age
as a Poet, The Breaking of Style, and studies of Herbert, Keats, Yeats, and
Stevens.
ANGUS FLETCHER is a distinguished professor emeritus at the City

University of New York Graduate School. He is the author of The Prophetic
Moment: An Essay on Spenser, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, and
Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature.
Bibliography
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer. New York: New York University
Press, 1967.
———. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. New Yori: New York University
Press, 1975.
Altieri, Charles. “Spectacular Antispectacle: Ecstasy and Nationality in
Whitman and His Heirs.” American Literary History 11 (Spring 1999):
34–62.
Arvin, Newton. Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1980.
Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman. 2 vols. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960 and1962.
Auclair, Tracy. “The Language of Drug-Use in Whitman’s ‘Calamus’
Poems.” Papers on Language and Literature 40 (Summer 2004): 227–59.
Bauerlein, Mark. Whitman and the American Idiom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
University Press, 1991.
Beach, Christopher. “Walt Whitman, Literary Culture, and the Discourse of
Distinction.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12 (Fall 1992): 73–85.
Black, Stephen. Whitman’s Journey into Chaos. Princeton: Princeton
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
247
248 Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Agon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

———. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
———. Poetry and Repression. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
———, ed. Walt Whitman: Selected Poems. New York: Library of America, 2003.
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. “Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman’s
Poetry.” Arizona Quarterly 58 (Autumn 2002): 33–56.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Achievements of Walt Whitman.” Texas Quarterly
5 (1962): 43–48.
Bromwich, David. “A Simple Separate Person” in A Choice of Inheritance: Self
and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Harvard
Carlisle, E.G. The Uncertain Self: Whitman’s Drama of Identity. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1973.
Caviello, Peter. “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in
Whitman.” American Literature 73 (March 2001): 85–119.
Chase, Richard. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. New York: William Sloane
Associates, 1955.
Clarke, Graham. Walt Whitman: The Poem as Private History New York:
Vision Press, 1991.
Crawley, Thomas. The Structure of Leaves of Grass. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1970.
Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981.
Donoghue, Denis. “Leaves of Grass and American Culture.” Sewanee Review
(Summer 2003): 347–374.
Duffey, Bernard. Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of
Bryant, Whitman, and Pound. Durham: Duke University Press, 1978.
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard
Hindus, Milton, ed. Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1955.
———, ed. Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1971.
Hollis, C Carroll. “Whitman and the American Idiom.” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 43 (1957): 408–20.
Bibliography 249
Hollander, John. The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press,
1997.
Hutchinson, George B. The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the
Crisis of the Union. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.
Irwin, John T. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in
the American Renaissance New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and
the Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Kuebrich, David. Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Larson, Kerry C. Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988.
Lawson, Andrew. “‘Spending for Vast Returns’: Sex, Class, and Commerce
in the First Leaves of Grass.” American Literature 75 (June 2003):
335–365.
Lewis, R.W.B., ed. The Presence of Walt Whitman. New York: Columbia
———. Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic
Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.
Lipking, Lawrence. The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman and the American Muse. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Marki, Ivan. The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of the First Edition of Leaves
of Grass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
Maslan, Mark. “Whitman, Sexuality, and Poetic Authority.” Raritan 17
(Spring 1998): 98–119.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New
York: New York University Press, 1969.
———, ed. A Century of Whitman Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana
Miller, James E., Jr. The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s
Legacy in the Personal Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
———. A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957.
250 Bibliography
———. Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: Origin, Growth, Meaning. New York:

Dodd, Mead, 1964.
Molesworth, Charles. “Whitman’s Political Vision.” Raritan 12 (Summer
1992): 98–112.
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of
Grass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Mulcaire, Terry. “Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass.” English Literary
History 60 (Summer 1993): 471–501.
Murphy, Francis, ed. Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Newfield, Christopher. “Democracy and Male Homoeroticism.” The Yale
Journal of Criticism 6 (Fall 1993): 29–62.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton
Pease, Donald. “Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure
Possibility.” PMLA 96 (1981): 64–85.
——— and Walter Benn Michaels. The American Renaissance Reconsidered.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Price, Kenneth. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990.
Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State
Stovall, Floyd. The Foreground of Leaves of Grass. Charlottsville: University
Press of Virginia, 1974.
Strom, Susan. “‘Face to Face’: Whitman’s Biblical References in ‘Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry.’” Walt Whitman Review 24 (1978): 7–16.
Symonds, John Addington. Walt Whitman: A Study. New York: AMS Press,
1968.
Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar light of Whitman’s Poetry. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987.
Trilling, Lionel. “Sermon on a Text from Whitman.” Nation 160 (1945):
215–40.
Vendler, Helen. “Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln.”
Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (Winter 2000): 1–18.
———. “Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,’” in Mary
Ann Caws, ed. Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading. New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 1986.
Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poets and Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Bibliography 251
Waskow, Howard. Whitman: Explorations in Form. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1966.
Wilhite, Keith. “His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman and the Scene of
Writing.” English Literary History 71 (Winter 2004): 921–48.
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic, 1984.
Acknowledgments
“Whitman” by D.H. Lawrence. From Studies in Classic American Literature.

© 1923 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc., renewed 1950 by Frieda Lawrence. © 1961
by The Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda Lawrence. Used by permission of
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
“Policy Made Personal” by Kenneth Burke. From Leaves of Grass, One

Hundred Years After, Milton Hiindus, ed. pp. 74–108. © 1955 by the Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, renewed 1983. All rights
reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press,
www.sup.org.
“Walt Whitman: Always Going Out & Coming In” by R.W.B. Lewis. From
Trials of the Wod: Essays in American Literature & The Humanistic Tradition. pp.
3–35. © 1965 by Yale University Press. Originally published in Major Writers
of America, Perry Miller, ed. © 1962 Harcourt.
“Whitmen’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul” by Harold Bloom.

From Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. © 1983 by Oxford University
Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
“Native Models” by K.C. Larson. From Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. pp.

106–131. © The University of Chicago Press.
253
254 Acknowledgments
“A Simple Separate Person” by David Bromwich. From A Choice of

Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. pp.
160–169. © 1989 by the President and Fellow of Harvard College.
Reprinted by permission.
“Reading” reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from

Whitman & the American Idiom by Mark Bauerlein. © 1991 by Louisiana
State University Press.
“Whitman’s Difficult Availability” by John Hollander. From The Work of

Poetry. Pp. 177–189. © 1997 by Columbia University Press.
“Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln” by Helen

Vendler. From Michigan Quarterly Review 39, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–18. ©
Helen Vendler.
“The Whitman Phrase” by Angus Fletcher. From A New Theory of American

Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. pp. 94–116.
© 2004 by the President and Fellow of Harvard College. Reprinted by
permission.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material
and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally
appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no
editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find
bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections
of this volume.
Index
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The “As Adam Early in the Morning”

(Twain), 8–9 (Whitman), 187
“Age of Growing Discomfort and images of voice, 96–97
Inadequate Remedy, The” Ashbery, John, 95, 208, 230
(Fussell), 114 Houseboat Days, 108–9
Alastor (Shelley), 8 The Wave, 9
Alcott, Bronson, 75, 155 “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
American Religion and poetry Life” (Whitman), 86–87, 235,
and Emerson, 1, 8, 21, 91, 93, 237
229–31, 233, 236 death theme in, 77, 79, 81–83,
and Leaves of Grass, 229–39 142–43
and the sublime, 91–96, 99, 104, reading of, 157, 175
107, 109, 160, 222, 232–33 “real me” in, 7–8, 10, 179–80
and Whitman, 1–3, 5, 8–11, structure of, 188
21–23, 26, 37, 42, 61–62, 65, Auroras of Autumn, The (Stevens),
69, 71, 79, 89, 96–97, 238
113–15, 118, 120, 125, 129,
131, 139–40, 144–45, “Bacchus” (Emerson), 107
154–55, 168, 170, 174, Backward Glance O’er Travel’d
177–79, 182–83, 185–86, Roads, A (Whitman), 208
189–90, 206, 208, 223, influences on, 67–68
229–39 on word signs, 88–89
American Scene (James, H.), 234 “Banjo Poem” (Whitman), 188
“American Scholar, The” Barlow, Joel, 114, 117, 119
(Emerson), 73 Bauerlein, Mark, 246
American Sublime, The (Stevens), on Whitman’s idiom, 149–75
107 Blake, William, 4, 8, 127, 133, 235
Aristotle, 52 Bloom, Harold, 222, 245
Rhetoric, 30 afterthought, 229–39
“Art and Artists” (Whitman), 67 introduction, 1–11
255
256 Index
A Map of Misreading, 106 Chase, Richard, 74, 87

on Whitman the great “Children of Adam” (Whitman),
writer, 229–39 144
on Whitman’s psychic “City of Orgies” (Whitman)
cartography, 1–11 death theme in, 44, 79
on Whitman’s tally of his voice, Civil War
91–110 in literature, 4, 28, 49, 56,
Borges, Jorge Luis, 232, 235 83–86, 89, 139, 146, 187, 194,
“Boston Ballad” (Whitman), 66 213, 215, 223, 229, 234, 236
Bridge, The (Crane), 9, 87, 103–4 Colors of the Mind (Fletcher), 219
Bridges, Robert, 229 Complete Poetry and Prose
“Broadway Pageant, A” (Whitman), 140
(Whitman), 51 “Conflict of Convictions, The”
“Broken Tower, The” (Crane), 80 (Melville), 86
Bromwich, David, 246 Crane, Hart, 62, 91, 94, 107, 187
on Whitman’s meaning of The Bridge, 9, 87, 103–4
immortality, 139–48 “The Broken Tower,” 80
Browning, Robert, 4, 235 “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,”
Bryant, William Cullen, 67, 116, 230
219 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
To Cole, the Painter, Departing for (Whitman), 8, 75, 87, 235,
Europe, 91 238
The Prairies, 92 feminine and maternal themes
“Burial Poem” (Whitman), 72 in, 45
Burke, Kenneth, 151, 245 loss theme in, 79, 163
on Whitman’s democratic reading of, 163–66, 173–74
vision, 27–60 “real me” in, 10, 76–77
Burroughs, John, 89, 207, 209–10 soul and body connection in,
“By Blue Ontario’s Shore” 143, 237
(Whitman), 4, 153 structure of, 187–88
temporal idiom in, 43
Calamus poems (Whitman), 41–43
death theme in, 44, 52, 54–55, Dante, Alighieri, 178, 193, 229,
79 236, 238
democracy in, 18, 49 The Divine Comedy, 220
homoerotic in, 8, 38, 85, 97, “Darest Thou Now, O Soul”
144, 187 (Whitman), 183
Carlyle, Thomas, 64, 67, 145 Darwin, Charles
“Chanting the Square Deific” The Origin of the Species, 210
(Whitman), 97, 187 Davidson, Abraham
“Chants Democratic” (Whitman), The Eccentrics and other American
187 Visionary Painters, 222
Index 257
“Death Carol” (Whitman) 91, 93, 229–31, 233, 236

death theme in, 56 “The American Scholar,” 73
maternal theme in, 56 “Bacchus,” 32
Democracy themes “Experience,” 117
in Whitman’s poetry, 18–20, influence on Whitman, 1, 5,
26–35, 37–38, 42, 45, 49, 51, 9–10, 21, 29, 64, 67, 96–97,
68–70, 73, 85–89, 139, 145–46, 105, 107, 144, 173–74, 234
152, 166–68, 170, 172, 178, law of compensation, 98
189–90, 207–8, 210, 219–23, Nature; Addresses, Lectures, 117,
230, 235 151
Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 53, “The Poet,” 69, 106, 177
88–89 “Self-reliance,” 93–94, 117–18
feminine and maternal themes tally of his soul, 109–10
in, 31–33, 50 and transcendentalism, 29
spirituality and soul in, 30, 32 “Enfans D’Adam” (Whitman), 187
statement of policy in, 27–29, Everett, Edward, 115–16, 129
85, 113, 139, 146, 168, 190, “Excursion, The” (Whitman), 181
210–14, 222 “Experience” (Emerson), 117
Dickinson, Emily, 4–5, 131, 230
“Dirge for Two Veterans” “Faces” (Whitman), 178
(Whitman), 183 “Facing West from California’s
Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 220 Shores” (Whitman), 97
Donne, John, 208, 230 Figures of Echo, The (Hollander),
Drum Taps and Sequel (Whitman), 105–6
49, 83 First O Songs for a Prelude
comradeship in, 18–20 (Whitman), 57–59
lawlessness in, 212 Fletcher, Angus, 238, 246
poems in, 5, 187, 192 Colors of the Mind, 219
on Whitman’s picturesque
“Earth, My Likeness” (Whitman), poetry, 207–27
44 Freud, Sigmund
Eccentrics and other American maps of the mind, 2
Visionary Painters (Davidson), Mourning and Melancholia,
222 100–1
“Eidólons” (Whitman), 183 sexual theories of, 74
Eliot, T.S., 107, 230, 234, 237 Frost, Robert, 5, 8, 107, 230
The Waste Land, 9 Fussell, Edwin
Whitman’s influence on, 8, 10, “The Age of Growing
62 Discomfort and Inadequate
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 76, 95, Remedy,” 114
135, 155, 215, 221
and American religion, 1, 8, 21, Ginsberg, Allen, 10
258 Index
“Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” (Stevens), 106–7

(Whitman), 130–31 “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea”
“Glimpse, A” (Whitman), 79 (Whitman), 52
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 67, “I Hear America Singing”
221, 236 (Whitman), 188
Good Gray Poet, The (O’Connor), “I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes
85 of the Organ” (Whitman),
“Great Stone Face, The” 187–88
(Hawthorne), 115 “In Paths Untrodden” (Whitman),
Guermantes Way, The (Proust), 220 97
“I Saw in Louisiana” (Whitman),
“Hand-Mirror, A” (Whitman), 79 79
Hartman, Geoffrey, 127–28, 134 “I Sing the Body Electric”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 118, 236 (Whitman), 40, 178
“The Great Stone Face,” 115 “Italian Music in Dakota”
The Marble Faun, 234 (Whitman), 188
The Scarlet Letter, 21, 234
Hemingway, Ernest, 8–10 Jackson, Andrew, 213–14
Herbert, George, 229–30 democracy, 219–23
High Romanticism, 9, 207–27 James, Henry Jr., 212, 217,
Hollander, John, 235, 246 231–33, 236
on the difficulty of Whitman’s American Scene, 234
poetry, 177–90, 238 The Sacred Fount, 234
The Figures of Echo, 105–6 sexuality, 235
Homer, 117, 120, 129, 178, 185, James, William, 134, 231, 234, 236
236, 238 Varieties of Religious Experience,
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 229–30 233
“Hours Continuing Long, Sore, The Will to Believe, 233
and Heavy-Hearted” (Whitman) Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 234
loss theme in, 79–80 Jung, Carl, 71, 74
sexuality in, 85
Houseboat Days (Ashbery), 108–9 Kafka, Franz, 10
“How To Write A Blackwood Kavanagh (Longfellow), 115
Article” (Poe), 115 Keats, John
Hugo, Victor, 235–36 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 80
“Hush’d Be the Camps Today”
(Whitman) Larson, Kerry, C., 174, 246
collective voice of the Union in, on Whitman’s catalogs, 111–37
194–97 Lawrence, D.H., 10, 132, 245
Lincoln in, 192–98 “The Man Who Died,” 96
The Plumed Serpent, 231
Idea of Order at Key West, The Studies in Classical American
Index 259
Literature, 232 Lowell, James Russell, 126

on Whitman as a pioneer poet, “Nationality in Literature,” 115
13–26, 143–44, 147, 180, 231
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 34, 119 “Man with the Hoe, The”
and American religion, 37, (Markham), 223
229–39 “Man Who Died, The”
death themes in, 77–83, 104, (Lawrence), 96
111 Map of Misreading, A (Bloom), 106
editions of, 61–90, 114, 141, Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne),
144, 149–52, 154, 156–75, 234
177–78, 181, 186, 188–89, Markham, Edwin
194, 201 “The Man with the Hoe,” 223
imagery in, 208, 214 Marlowe, Christopher
lawlessness in, 212 The Jew of Malta, 234
national landscape in, 65, 220 Melville, Herman, 21, 26, 68, 71,
personalization in, 27, 37–38, 118, 236
139 “The Conflict of Convictions,”
poet as hero in, 67–71 86
scent theme in, 40 Moby-Dick, 192
sexuality in, 35, 38, 231 voice of, 98–99
symbols in, 39–43 “Messenger Leaves” (Whitman),
“real me” in, 7, 10, 63 187
unity in, 42–43 Miller, Henry, 10
voice in, 97 Millet, Kate
Lewis, R.W.B., 114, 246 Sexual Politics, 231
on Whitman’s progress through Milton, John, 67, 96, 127, 178,
Leaves of Grass editions, 211, 238
61–90 Paradise Lost, 179, 182, 220
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Moby-Dick (Melville), 192
Cemetery” (Stevens), 72 Mont Blanc (Shelley), 222
Lincoln, Abraham, 112 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud),
death, 7, 50, 78, 86, 142, 100–1
191–92, 194, 197–98, 200–1 “My Picture Gallery” (Whitman),
presidency, 197 188
Whitman’s elegies, 5, 33, 50–54,
78, 86, 89, 96–97, 99, 101, “Nationality in Literature”
141, 191–206, 231, 233, (Lowell), 115
236–37 Nature; Addresses, Lectures
Locke, John, 144, 212 (Emerson), 117, 151
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 67, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95, 116
88, 144 “Noiseless Patient Spider, A”
Kavanagh, 115 (Whitman), 187
260 Index
“No Labor-Saving Machine” The Void, 192

(Whitman), 44 “Pictures” (Whitman), 66
Norton, Charles Eliot, 155, 212 Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence),
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose 231
(Whitman), 147 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21
publication, 140–41 “How To Write A Blackwood
“Not Heat Flames Up and Article,” 115
Consumes” (Whitman), 44 “Poet, The” (Emerson), 69, 106,
“Not Heaving from My Ribb’d 177
Breast Only” (Whitman), 44 “Poets to Come” (Whitman), 4
“Now Precedent Songs, Farewell” Poirier, Richard
(Whitman), 168–69 on Whitman, 124–25
Pound, Ezra, 62, 107
“O Captain, My Captain” Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 127–28
(Whitman) “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge”
Lincoln in, 192, 195–98 (Crane), 230
soldiers mourning in, 195–98 “Proud Music of the Storm”
O’Connor, William Douglas (Whitman), 188
The Good Gray Poet, 85 Proust, Marcel, 232
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), The Guermantes Way, 220
80 Remembrance of Things Past, 215
“One’s Self I Sing” (Whitman),
166 “Recorders Ages Hence”
Origin of the Species, The (Darwin), (Whitman)
210 reading of, 153
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Remembrance of Things Past
Rocking” (Whitman), 8, 86, (Proust), 215
175, 235, 237 “Respondez! Respondez!”
death theme in, 50–51, 55–56, (Whitman)
78–81 spirituality in, 48
feminine and maternal themes structure, 188
in, 45, 50–51 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 30
identity in, 36–37 “Rock, The” (Stevens), 9
senses in, 182 Romanticism, 8, 80, 222
structure of, 186, 188 Rossetti, Christina, 88, 230
voice in, 105
Sacred Fount, The (James, H.), 234
Paradise Lost (Milton), 179, 182, “Salut au Monde!” (Whitman),
220 188, 208
“Passage to India” (Whitman), 61, Sand, George, 64, 67
87 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 21,
Perec, Georges 234
Index 261
“Scented Herbage of My Breast” carpentering imagery of, 64

(Whitman), 125 criticism, 68
death theme in, 41, 51, 79–80 death theme in, 45, 55, 71–72,
leaf motive in, 42 81–82, 102, 111, 142–43
male love in, 41 elegies for self in, 8–9, 38, 69,
reading of, 175 77, 82, 145
“Sea Surface Full of Clouds” family in, 63
(Stevens), 216–17 feminine and maternal theme in,
“Self-reliance” (Emerson), 93–94, 51, 55
117–18 food motive in, 40
Sequel to Drum-Taps (Whitman), masturbation in, 6–7, 97–100
83, 187 musical ode in, 188
Sexual Politics (Millet), 231 poet as hero in, 67–71, 183
Shakespeare, William, 30, 67, 209, reading of, 149–52, 154,
236 160–63, 168–72
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 101, religion in, 2–3, 84
133, 178, 208, 238 scent theme in, 40–41
Alastor, 8 self-evident truths in, 112, 114,
Mont Blanc, 222 118–25, 128, 133, 135, 140,
“Sleepers, The” (Whitman), 8, 146–47, 172, 180–83
178, 235 sexuality in, 38, 74, 85, 99, 231,
death theme in, 72 237
himself in, 38 structure of, 68, 150, 152, 179,
maternal themes in, 74 182–86, 188, 209
reading of, 157 “Song of the Open Road”
sexuality in, 85, 230 (Whitman), 43, 47
Socrates, 71, 76, 78 reading of, 153, 162, 166, 168,
“So Long!” (Whitman), 79–80 173
“Song for Occupations, A” “Song of the Rolling Earth”
(Whitman), 178 (Whitman)
happiness in, 150 reading of, 151, 158, 169, 171,
musical ode in, 188 173
reading of, 149–50, 152, 173, Specimen Days and Collect
213 (Whitman), 89, 139
“Song of the Answerer” politics in, 145
(Whitman), 160–61 “Spontaneous Me” (Whitman),
“Song of the Broad-Axe” 75–76
(Whitman), 57 Spitzer Leo, 216–17
“Song of Exposition” (Whitman), “Starting for Paumanok”
35 (Whitman)
“Song of Myself” (Whitman), 87, death theme in, 45, 47
178, 235, 239 feminine and maternal themes
262 Index
in, 45 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 235–36

homosexual imagery in, 46–47 “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod”
reading of, 153, 156 (Whitman)
Stevens, Wallace, 91, 94–95 vistas in, 34
The American Sublime, 107 “To Think of Time” (Whitman)
The Auroras of Autumn, 238 death theme in, 72
The Idea of Order at Key West, “To You” (Whitman)
106–7 reading of, 152
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Twain, Mark
Cemetery,” 72 The Adventures of Huckleberry
“The Rock,” 9 Finn, 8–9
“Sea Surface Full of Clouds,”
216–17 Varieties of Religious Experience
“Sunday Morning,” 80 (James, W.), 233
Whitman’s influence on, 2, 5, 8, Vendler, Helen, 246
10, 62, 80, 96, 109, 111, 230, on Whitman’s Lincoln elegies,
233, 238 191–206
Studies in Classical American Virgil, 178, 238
Literature (Lawrence), 232 Void, The (Perec), 192
“Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 80
Sympathy and soul themes Walt Whitman: The Making of the
in Whitman’s poetry, 22–26, 32, Poet (Zweig), 144–45
143, 159–60, 164, 166, 180 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 9
Wave, The (Ashbery), 9
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 9–10, 88 “What Think You I Take My Pen
“That Music Always Round Me” in Hand” (Whitman)
(Whitman), 188 death theme in, 44
“There Was a Child Went Forth” “When Lilacs Last in the
(Whitman), 133–34, 178 Dooryard Bloom’d”
growth in, 72–73, 81 (Whitman), 7, 27, 34, 83, 235
mother in, 63 Christian theme in, 199, 201–4
“These I Singing in Spring” death theme in, 52–54, 78, 86,
(Whitman), 41–42 101, 103, 183, 194, 197, 199,
“This Compost” (Whitman), 201–3
75–77, 80 elegies for Lincoln in, 5, 33,
“This Dust Was Once the Man” 50–52, 54, 78, 86, 96–97, 99,
(Whitman) 101, 191–206, 233
Lincoln in, 192, 204–6 elegies for self in, 8–10, 106–7
tortured syntax in, 205–6 feminine and maternal themes
Thoreau, Henry David, 91, 155, in, 51–52
163, 210, 236 scent theme in, 39–40, 50–51
“Thought, A” (Whitman), 218 sensory images in, 53–57
Index 263
sexuality in, 100 picturesque poetry, 207–27

spirituality in, 49 politics, 4–5, 9, 27–31, 34, 45,
“Whispers of Heavenly Death” 48–49, 65–66, 68, 78, 83–89,
(Whitman), 187 113, 118–19, 122, 140–41,
Whitman, Louisa Van Velsor 145–46, 197, 207–23,
(mother), 75, 77 229–31, 235–37
in literature, 33, 63 psychic cartography, 1–11, 239
relationship with, 4 and sexuality, 6–8, 35, 74, 76,
Whitman, Walt 78–79, 82, 85, 98–100, 144,
catalogs, 111–37, 185, 201 207, 231, 233, 235, 237
childhood, 4, 180 on his tally of voice, 91–110
chronology, 241–43 teacher, 65
criticism, 3, 6, 9–10, 13–26, 61, Whitman, Walter (father)
68, 75–76, 86, 96, 99, 113, Death of, 7, 63, 178
126, 134, 155–60, 166–67, relationship with, 4
169, 174–75, 235 “Whoever You Are Holding Me
death, 124, 235 Now in Hand” (Whitman), 79,
democratic vision of, 9, 27–60, 152
68–70, 73 Wilde, Oscar, 88, 223, 235
development of, 61–90, 153–55, Williams, William Carlos, 73, 121
157 Will to Believe, The (James, W.),
education, 64, 66–67 233
idiom, 149–75 “With Antecedents” (Whitman),
illnesses, 4, 78–79, 84, 88 43
on immortality, 139–48 Wordsworth, William, 133, 163,
influences of, 2, 5, 8, 10, 13–26, 218, 222, 231
62, 72–73, 96, 109, 111, The Prelude, 127–28
216–17, 229–30, 233, 238 “Wound-Dresser, The”
influences on, 1, 5, 9–10, 21, 29, (Whitman), 5
64, 67–69, 96–97, 105, 107,
144–45, 173–74, 234, 238 Zweig, Paul
newspaper man, 63–67, 78, 111, biographer of Whitman, 4–5,
147, 213 8–10, 144–45, 174
paradoxes, 9–10 Walt Whitman: The Making of
phrase, 214–18 the Poet, 144–45

(Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Harold Bloom - Walt Whitman-Chelsea House Pub (L) (2006)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Harold Bloom - Walt Whitman-Chelsea House Pub (L) (2006)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Harold Bloom - Walt Whitman-Chelsea House Pub (L) (2006)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

African American G.K. Chesterton John Irving

Edited and with an introduction by

Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editor’s Note vii

Policy Made Personal:

Whitman’s Image of Voice:

Native Models 111

A Simple Separate Person 139

Whitman’s Difficult Availability 177

Poetry and the Mediation

The Whitman Phrase 207

Lincoln elegies of Whitman, whom I would categorize as our greatest

The history of Christ is the best document of the power of

This grand journal entry concludes, magniﬁcently: “I am Defeated all

That I could forget the mockers and insults!

I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power….

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

No more modest than immodest.

That is Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, but hardly

These come to me days and nights and go from me again,

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

The “I” here is the “Myself” of “Song of Myself,” poetic personality,

Whitman’s critics thus commence with a formidable disadvantage as they

continuing reception of Whitman’s poetry is the still prevalent notion that

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,

Zweig is admirably sensitive in exploring the ambiguities in the

I merely stir, press, feel with my ﬁngers, and am happy,

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,

I went myself ﬁrst to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!

Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,

I take it that this celebratory mode of masturbation, whether read

the psychic place of extravagance, of wandering beyond limits, where you

These can be only Whitman’s own hands, pragmatically cruel because

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart

It is Walt Whitman, kosmos, American, rough, who is mocked here by

protagonist, split between an empirical self of stoic courage and a real Me

…Leaves of Grass was launched on a collision course with its age.

To associate the subtle artistry, delicate and evasive, of Whitman’s

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of LEAVES OF

P OST MORTEM, effects?

“I am he that aches with amorous love:

“Whoever you are, to endless announcements—”

“I reject nothing,” says Walt.

Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another ﬁlm is done—”

As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he

Walt wasn’t an Eskimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little

“A woman waits for me—”

He might as well have said: “The femaleness waits for my maleness.”

“As I see myself reﬂected in Nature,

“This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman,

“The Female I see—”

“Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots,