Malcolm Cowley. Introduction

 

 

The first edition of Leaves of Grass, as placed on sale July 4, 1855, bears little outside or inside resemblance to any of the later editions, which kept growing larger as Whitman added new poems. The original work is a thin folio about the size and shape of a block of typewriting paper. The binding is of dark-green pebbled cloth, and the tide is stamped in gold, with the rustic letters sending down roots and sprouting above into leaves. Inside the binding are ninety-five printed pages, numbered iv-xii and 14-95. A prose introduction is set in double columns on the roman-numeraled pages, and the remaining text consists of twelve poems, as compared with 383 in the final or “Deathbed” edition. The first poem, later called “Song of Myself,” is longer than the other eleven together. There is no table of contents, and none of the poems has a title.

Another calculated feature of the first edition is that the names of the author and the publisher—actually the same person—are omitted from the tide page. Instead the opposite page contains a portrait: the engraved daguerreotype of a bearded man in his middle thirties, slouching under a wide-brimmed and high-crowned black felt hat that has “a rakish kind of slant,” as the engraver said later, “like the mast of a schooner.” His right hand is resting nonchalantly on his hip; the left is hidden in the pocket of his coarse-woven trousers. He wears no coat or waistcoat, and his shirt is thrown wide open at the collar to reveal a burly neck and the top of what seems to be a red-flannel undershirt. It is the portrait of a devil-may-care American working-man, one who might be taken as a somewhat idealized figure in almost any crowd.

His full name, though missing on the title page, appears twice in the first edition, but in different forms. On the copyright page we read, “ Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1855, by Walter Whitman …” On page 29, almost in the middle of the long first poem, we are introduced to “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” When a law-abiding citizen, even one of the roughs, changes his name even slightly, it is often because he wishes to assume a new personality. A reader might infer that Walter Whitman is the journeyman printer who had become a hack journalist, then a newspaper editor, before being lost to sight; whereas Walt Whitman is the workingman of the portrait and the putative author—but actual hero—of this extraordinary book.

No other book in the history of American letters was so completely an individual or do-it-yourself project. Not only did Whitman choose his idealized or dramatized self as subject of the book; not only did he create the new style in which it was written (working hard and intelligently to perfect the style over a period of six or seven years), but he also created the new personality of the proletarian bard who was supposed to have done the writing. When a manuscript of the poems was ready in the spring of 1855, Whitman’s work was only beginning. He designed the book and arranged to have it printed at a job-printing shop in Brooklyn. He set some of the type himself, not without making errors. He did his best to get the book distributed, with the lukewarm cooperation of his friends the Fowler brothers, whose specialty was not bookselling but water cures and phrenology. He was his own press agent and even volunteered as critic of the book, writing three—or a majority—of the favorable reviews it received.

In spite of his best efforts not many copies were sold, and the first edition has never been widely read, except in the special world of literary scholars. The author himself might have been forgotten, if it had not been for a single fortunate event. One copy—not in pebbly green cloth, but paper bound—had been sent to Emerson, who was the most widely respected American of letters and the man best qualified to understand what the new poet was saying. Emerson wrote a letter of heartfelt thanks. When the letter was printed in the New York Tribune —without the writer’s permission—it amazed and horrified the little American republic of letters. Nobody agreed with Emerson except a few of the extreme Transcendentalists, notably Thoreau and Alcott. Whitman was almost universally condemned, at least for the next ten years, but he would never again be merely a call in the midst of the crowd.

 

Concord 21 July

Masstts 1855

 

Dear Sir,

 

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

 

Mr. Walter Whitman

 

Emerson was being impulsive for a Concord man, but he was also trying to make his phrases accurate. Later, disapproving of Whitman’s conduct, he would change his mind about the “great career”. He would not and could not feel that most of the poems written after 1855 contained “incomparable things said incomparably well”. But his praise of the first edition was unqualified, and it tempts me to make some unqualified statements of my own, as of simple truths that should have been recognized long ago.

First statement: that the long opening poem, later miscalled “Song of Myself,“ is Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modem times. Second, that the other eleven poems of the first edition are not on the same level of realization, but nevertheless are examples of Whitman’s freshest and boldest style. At least four of them—their titles in the Deathbed edition are “To Think of Time,” “The Sleepers,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” and “There Was a Child Went Forth”—belong in any selection of his best poems. Third, that the text of the first edition is the purest text for “Song of Myself,” since many of the later corrections were also corruptions of the style and concealments of the original meaning. Fourth, that it is likewise the best text for most of the other eleven poems, but especially for “The Sleepers”—that fantasia of the unconscious—and “I Sing the Body Electric.” And a final statement: that the first edition is a unified work, unlike any later edition, that it gives us a different picture of Whitman’s achievement, and that— considering its very small circulation through the years—it might be called the buried masterpiece of American writing.

All that remains is to document some of these statements, not point by point, but chiefly in relation to “Song of Myself.”

 

(2)

 

One reason among others why “Song of Myself” has been widely misprized and misinterpreted, especially by scholars, is that they have paid a disproportionate share of attention to its sources in contemporary culture. Besides noting many parallels with Emerson, they have found that it reflected a number of popular works and spectacles. Among these are Italian opera (notably as sung at the Astor Place Theatre in the great season of 1852-1853, when “Alboni’s great self” paid her long and only visit to New York); George Sand’s novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt, which presented the figure of a wandering bard and prophet (as well as another of her novels, The Journeyman Joiner, in which the hero was a carpenter and a proletarian saint); Frances Wright’s then famous defense of Epicurean philosophy, A Few Days in Athens; the Count de Volney’s Ruins, predicting the final union of all religions; Dr. Abbott’s Egyptian Museum, on Broadway; O. M. Mitchel’s book, A Course of Six Lectures on Astronomy, as well as other writings on the subject; and a number of essays clipped from the English quarterly reviews, of which the poet seems to have been a faithful reader. All these works and shows had a discernible influence on Whitman, but when they are listed with others and discussed at length they lead to one of the misconceptions that are the professional weakness of scholars. They tempt us to conclude that “Song of Myself” was merely a journalist’s report, inspired but uneven, of popular culture in the 1850s. It was something more than that, and something vastly different from any of its literary sources.

I might suggest that the real nature of the poem becomes clearer when it is considered in relation to quite another list of works, even though Whitman had probably read none of them in 1855. Most of them he could not have read, because they were not yet written, or not published, or not translated into English. That other list might include the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, Christopher Smart’s long crazy inspired poem Jubilate Agno, Blake’s prophetic books (not forgetting The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), Rimbaud’s Illuminations, The Chants of Maldoror, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and a compendious handbook, The Philos­ophies of India, by Heinrich Zimmer (New York, 1951). I am offering what might seem to be a curious list of tides, but its double purpose is easy to explain. “Song of Myself” should be judged, I think, as one of the great inspired (and sometimes insane) propheric works that have appeared at intervals in the Western world, like Jubilate Agno (which is written in a biblical style sometimes suggesting Whitman’s), like the Illumination s, like Thus Spake Zaralhustra. But the system of doctrine suggested by the poem is more Eastern than Western, it includes notions like metempsychosis and karma, and it might almost be one of those Philosophies of India that Zimmer expounds at length.

What is extraordinary about this Eastern element is that Whitman, when he was writing the poems of the first edition, seems to have known little or nothing about Indian philosophy. It is more than doubtful that he had even read the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the few Indian works then available in translation. He does not refer to it in his notebooks of the early 1850s, where he mentions most of the books he was poring over. A year after the first edition was published, Thoreau went to see him in Brooklyn and told him that Leaves of Grass was “Wonderfully like the Orientals.” Had Whitman read them? he asked. The poet answered, “No: tell me about them.” He seems to have taken advantage of Thoreau’s reading list, since words from the Sanskrit (notably “Maya” and “sudra”) are used correctly in some of the poems written after 1858. They do not appear in “Song of Myself,” in spite of the recognizably Indian ideas expressed in the poem, and I would hazard the guess that the ideas are not of literary derivation. It is true that they were vaguely in the air of the time and that Whitman may have breathed them in from the Transcendentalists or even from some of the English quarterly reviewers. It also seems possible, however, that he reinvented them for himself, after an experience similar to the one for which the Sanskrit word is samadhi, or absorption.

What it must have been was a mystical experience in the proper sense of the term. Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, the most acute of Whitman’s immediate disciples, believed that it took place on a June morning in 1853 or 1854. He also believed that it was repeated on other occasions, but neither these nor the original experience can be dated from Whitman’s papers. On the other hand, his notebooks and manuscripts of the early 1850s are full of sidelong references to such an experience, and they suggest that it was essentially the same as the illuminations or ecstasies of earlier bards and prophets. Such ecstasies consist in a rapt feeling of union or identity with God (or the Soul, or Mankind, or the Cosmos), a sense of ineffable joy leading to the conviction that the seer has been released from the limitations of space and time and has been granted a direct vision of truths impossible to express. As Whitman says in the famous fifth chant of “Song of Myself”:

 

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and

knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers... and the women my sisters and lovers.

 

It is to be noted that there is no argument about the real occurrence of such ecstasies. They have been reported, sometimes in sharp detail, by men and women of many different nations, at many historical periods, and each report seems to bear a family resemblance to the others. Part of the resemblance is a feeling universally expressed by mystics that they have acquired a special sort of knowledge not learned from others, but directly revealed to the inner eye. This supposed knowledge has given independent rise to many systems of philosophy or cosmology, once again in many different cultures, and once again there is or should be no argument about one feature of almost all the systems or bodies of teaching: that they too have a family resemblance, like the experiences on which they are based. Indeed, they hold so many principles in common that it is possible for Aldous Huxley and others to group them all together as “the perennial philosophy.”

The arguments, which will never end, are first about the nature of the mystical state—is it a form of self-hypnosis, is it a pathological condition to be induced by fasting, vigils, drugs, and other means of abusing the physical organism, or is it, as Whitman believed, the result of superabundant health and energy?—and then about the source and value of the philosophical notions to which it gives rise. Do these merely express the unconscious desires of the individual, and chiefly his sexual desires? Or, as Jungian psychologists like to suggest, are they derived from a racial or universally human unconscious? Are they revelations or hallucinations? Are they supreme doctrines, or are they heretical, false, and even satanic? They belong in the orthodox tradition of Indian philosophy. In Western Christianity, as also in Mohammedanism, the pure and self-consistent forms of mysticism are usually regarded as heresies, with the result that several of the medieval mystics were burned at the stake (though Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross found an orthodox interpretation for their visions and became saints).

Whitman cannot be called a Christian heretic, for the simple reason that he was not a Christian at any stage of his career, early or late. In some of the poems written after the Civil War, and in revisions of older poems made at the same time, he approached the Christian notion of a personal God, whom he invoked as the Elder Brother or the great Camerado. But then he insisted—in another poem of the same period, “Chanting the Square Deific”—that God was not a trinity but a quaternity, and that one of his faces was the “sudra face” of Satan. In “Song of Myself” as originally written, God is neither a person nor, in the strict sense, even a being; God is an abstract principle of energy that is manifested in every living creature, as well as in “the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is.” In some ways this God of the first edition resembles Emerson’s Oversoul, but he seems much closer to the Brahman of the Upanishads, the absolute, unchanging, all-enfolding Consciousness, the Divine Ground from which all things emanate and to which all living things may hope to return. And this Divine Ground is by no means the only conception that Whitman shared with Indian philosophers, in the days when he was writing “Song of Myself.”

 

(3)

 

The poem is hardly at all concerned with American nationalism, political democracy, contemporary progress, or other social themes that are commonly associated with Whitman’s work. The “incomparable things” that Emerson found in it are philosophical and religious principles. Its subject is a state of illumination induced by two (or three) separate moments of ecstasy. In more or less narrative sequence it describes those moments, their sequels in life, and the doctrines to which they give rise. The doctrines are not expounded by logical steps or supported by arguments; instead they are presented dramatically, that is, as the new convictions of a hero, and they are revealed by successive unfoldings of his states of mind.

The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named “I” or “Walt Whitman” in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul. Thus, he is rough, sunburned, bearded; he cocks his hat as he pleases, indoors or out; but in the text of the first edition he has no local or family background, and he is deprived of strictly individual characteristics, with the exception of curiosity, boastfulness, and an abnormally developed sense of touch. His really distinguishing feature is that he has been granted a vision, as a result of which he has realized the potentialities latent in every American and indeed, he says, in every living person, even “the brutish koboo, called the ordure of humanity.” This dramatization of the hero makes it possible for the living Whitman to exalt him—as he would not have ventured, at the time, to exalt himself—but also to poke mild fun at the hero for his gab and loitering, for his tall talk or “omnivorous words,” and for sounding his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The religious feeling in “Song of Myself” is counterpoised by a humor that takes the form of slangy and mischievous impudence or drawling Yankee self-ridicule.

There has been a good deal of discussion about the structure of the poem. In spite of revealing analyses made by a few Whitman scholars, notably Carl F. Strauch and James E. Miller, Jr., a feeling still seems to prevail that it has no structure properly speaking; that it is inspired but uneven, repetitive, and especially weak in its transitions from one theme to another. I suspect that much of this feeling may be due to Whitman’s later changes in the text, including his arbitrary scheme, first introduced in the 1867 edition, of dividing the poem into fifty-two numbered paragraphs or chants. One is tempted to read the chants as if they were separate poems, thus overlooking the unity and flow of the work as a whole. It may also be, however, that most of the scholars have been looking for a geometrical pattern, such as can be found and diagramed in some of the later poems. If there is no such pattern in “Song of Myself,” that is because the poem was written on a different principle, one much closer to the spirit of the Symbolists or even the Surrealists.

The true structure of the poem is not primarily logical but psychological, and is not a geometrical figure but a musical progression. As music “Song of Myself” is not a symphony with contrasting movements, nor is it an operatic work like “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with an overture, arias, recitatives, and a finale. It comes closer to being a rhapsody or tone poem, one that modulates from theme to theme, often changing in key and tempo, falling into reveries and rising toward moments of climax, but always preserving its unity of feeling as it moves onward in a wavelike flow. It is a poem that bears the marks of having been conceived as a whole and written in one prolonged burst of inspiration, but its unity is also the result of conscious art, as can be seen from Whitman’s corrections in the early manuscripts. He did not recognize all the bad lines, some of which survive in the printed text, but there is no line in the first edition that seems false to a single prevailing tone. There are passages weaker than others, but none without a place in the general scheme. The repetitions are always musical variations and amplifications. Some of the transitions seem abrupt when the poem is read as if it were an essay, but Whitman was not working in terms of “therefore” and “however.” He preferred to let one image suggest another image, which in turn suggests a new statement of mood or doctrine. His themes modulate into one another by pure association, as in a waking dream, with the result that all his transitions seem instinctively right.

In spite of these oneiric elements, the form of the poem is something more than a forward movement in rising and subsiding waves of emotion. There is also a firm narrative structure, one that becomes easier to grasp when we start by dividing the poem into a number of parts or sequences. I think there are nine of these, but the exact number is not important; another critic might say there were seven (as Professor Miller does), or eight or ten. Some of the transitions are gradual, and in such cases it is hard to determine the exact line that ends one sequence and starts another. The essential point is that the parts, however defined, follow one another in irreversible order, like the beginning, middle, and end of any good narrative. My own outline, not necessarily final, would run as follows:

First sequence (chants 1-4): the poet or hero introduced to his audience. Leaning and loafing at his ease, “observing a spear of summer grass,” he presents himself as a man who lives outdoors and worships his own naked body, not the least part of which is vile. He is also in love with his deeper self or soul, but explains that it is not to be confused with his mere personality. His joyful contentment can be shared by you, the listener, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Second sequence (chant 5): the ecstasy. This consists in the rapt union of the poet and his soul, and it is described—figuratively, on the present occasion—in terms of sexual union. The poet now has a sense of loving brotherhood with God and with all mankind. His eyes being truly open for the first time, he sees that even the humblest objects contain the infinite universe—

 

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder

and mullen and pokeweed.

 

Third sequence (chants 6-19): the grass. Chant 6 starts with one of Whitman’s brilliant transitions. A child comes with both hands full of those same leaves from the fields. “What is the grass?” the child asks—and suddenly we are presented with the central image of the poem, that is, the grass as symbolizing the miracle of common things and the divinity (which implies both the equality and the immortality) of ordinary persons. During the remainder of the sequence, the poet observes men and women—and animals too—at their daily occupations. He is part of this life, he says, and even his thoughts are those of all men in all ages and lands. There are two things to be noted about the sequence, which contains some of Whitman’s freshest lyrics. First, the people with a few exceptions (such as the trapper and his bride) are those whom Whitman has known all his life, while the scenes described at length are Manhattan streets and Long Island beaches or countryside. Second, the poet merely roams, watches, and listens, like a sort of Tiresias. The keynote of the sequence—as Professor Strauch was the first to explain—is the two words “I observe.

Fourth sequence (chants 20-25): the poet in person. “Hankering, gross, mystical, nude,” he venerates himself as august and immortal, but so, he says, is everyone else. He is the poet of the body and of the soul, of night, earth, and sea, and of vice and feebleness as well as virtue, so that “many long dumb voices” speak through his lips, including those of slaves, prostitutes, even beetles rolling balls of dung. All life to him is such a miracle of beauty that the sunrise would kill him if he could not find expression for it—“If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.” The sequence ends with a dialogue between the poet and his power of speech, during which the poet insists that his deeper self—“the best I am”—is beyond expression.

Fifth sequence (chants 26-29): ecstasy through the senses. Beginning with chant 26, the poem sets out in a new direction. The poet decides to be completely passive: “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen.” What he hears at first are quiet familiar sounds like the gossip of flames on the hearth and the bustle of growing wheat; but the sounds rise quickly to a higher pitch, becoming the matchless voice of a trained soprano, and he is plunged into an ecstasy ofhearing, or rather of Being. Then he starts over again, still passively, with the sense of touch, and finds himself rising to the ecstasy of sexual union. This time the union is actual, not figurative, as can be seen from the much longer version of chant 29 preserved in an early notebook.

Sixth sequence (chants 30-38): the power of identification. After his first ecstasy, as presented in chant 5, the poet had acquired a sort of microscopic vision that enabled him to find infinite wonders in the smallest and most familiar things. The second ecstasy (or pair of ecstasies) has an entirely different effect, conferring as it does a sort of vision that is both telescopic and spiritual. The poet sees far into space and time; “afoot with my vision” he ranges over the continent and goes speeding through the heavens among tailed meteors. His secret is the power of identification. Since everything emanates from the universal soul, and since his own soul is of the same essence, he can identify himself with every object and with every person living or dead, heroic or criminal. Thus, he is massacred with the Texans at Goliad, he fights on the Bonhomme Richard, he dies on the cross, and he rises again as “one of an average unending procession.” Whereas the keynote of the third sequence was “I observe,” here it becomes “I am”—“I am a free companion”—“My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs”—“I am the man.... I suffered.... I was there.”

Seventh sequence (chants 39-41): the superman. When Indian sages emerge from the state of samadhi or absorption, they often have the feeling of being omnipotent. It is so with the poet, who now feels gifted with superhuman powers. He is the universally beloved Answerer (chant 39), then the Healer, raising men from their deathbeds (40), and then the Prophet (41) of a new religion that outbids “the old cautious hucksters” by announcing that men are divine and will eventually be gods.

Eighth sequence (chants 42-50): the sermon. “A call in the midst of the crowd” is the poet’s voice, “orotund sweeping and final.” He is about to offer a statement of the doctrines implied by the narrative (but note that his statement comes at the right point psychologically and plays its part in the narrative sequence). As strangers listen, he proclaims that society is full of injustice, but that the reality beneath it is deathless persons (chant 42); that he accepts and practices all religions, but looks beyond them to “what is untried and afterward” (43); that he and his listeners are the fruit of ages, and the seed of untold ages to be (44); that our final goal is appointed: “God will be there and wait til we come” (45); that he tramps a perpetual journey and longs for companions, to whom he will reveal a new world by washing the gum from their eyes—but each must then continue the journey alone (46); that he is the teacher of men who work in the open air (47); that he is not curious about God, but sees God everywhere, at every moment (48); that we shall all be reborn in different forms (“No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before”); and that the evil in the world is like moonlight, a mere reflection of the sun (49). The end of the sermon (chant 50) is the hardest passage to interpret in the whole poem. I think, though I cannot be certain, that the poet is harking back to the period afrer one of his ten thousand deaths, when he slept and slept long before his next awakening. He seems to remember vague shapes, and he beseeches these Outlines, as he calls them, to let him reveal the “word unsaid.” Then turning back to his audience, “It is not chaos or death,” he says. “It is form and union and plan… it is eternal life… it is happiness.”

Ninth sequence (chants 51-52): the poet’s farewell. Having finished his sermon, the poet gets ready to depart, that is, to die and wait for another incarnation or “fold of the future,” while still inviting others to follow. At the beginning of the poem he had been leaning and loafing at ease in the summer grass. Now, having rounded the circle, he bequeaths himself to the dirt “to grow from the grass I love.” I do not see how any careful reader, unless blinded with preconceptions, could overlook the unity of the poem in tone and image and direction.

 

(4)

 

It is in the eighth sequence, which is a sermon, that Whitman gives us most of the doctrines suggested by his mystical experience, but they are also implied in the rest of the poem and indeed in the whole text of the first edition. Almost always he expresses them in the figurative and paradoxical language that prophets have used from the beginning. Now I should like to state them explicitly, even at the cost of some repetition.

Whitman believed when he was writing “Song of Myself”—and at later periods too, but with many changes in emphasis—that there is a distinction between one’s mere personality and the deeper Self (or between ego and soul). He believed that the Self (or atman, to use a Sanskrit word) is of the same essence as the universal spirit (though he did not quite say it is the universal spirit, as Indian philosophers do in the phrase “Atman is Brahman”). He believed that true knowledge is to be acquired not through the senses or the intellect, but through union with the Self. At such moments of union (or “merge,” as Whitman called it) the gum is washed from one’s eyes (that is his own phrase), and one can read an infinite lesson in common things, discovering that a mouse, for example, “is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” This true knowledge is available to every man and woman, since each conceals a divine Self. Moreover, the divinity of all implies the perfect equality of all, the immortality of all, and the universal duty of loving one another.

Immortality for Whitman took the form of metempsychosis, and he believed that every individual will be reborn, usually but not always in a higher form. He had also worked out for himself something approaching the Indian notion of karma, which is the doctrine that actions performed during one incarnation determine the nature and fate of the individual during his next incarnation; the doctrine is emphatically if somewhat unclearly stated in a passage of his prose introduction that was later rewritten as a poem, “Song of Prudence.” By means of metempsychosis and karma, we are all involved in a process of spiritual evolution that might be compared to natural evolution. Even the latter process, however, was not regarded by Whitman as strictly natural or material. He believed that animals have a rudimentary sort of soul (“They bring me tokens of myself”), and he hinted or surmised, without directly saying, that rocks, trees, and planets possess an identity, or “ eidólon,” that persists as they rise to higher states of being. The double process of evolution, natural and spiritual, can be traced for ages into the past, and he believed that it will continue for ages beyond ages. Still, it is not an eternal process, since it has an ultimate goal, which appears to be the reabsorption of all things into the Divine Ground.

Most of Whitman’s doctrines, though by no means all of them, belong to the mainstream of Indian philosophy. In some respects he went against the stream. Unlike most of the Indian sages, for example, he was not a thoroughgoing idealist. He did not believe that the whole world of the senses, of desires, of birth and death, was only maya, illusion, nor did he hold that it was a sort of purgatory; instead he praised the world as real and joyful. He did not despise the body, but proclaimed that it was as miraculous as the soul. He was too good a citizen of the nineteenth century to surrender his faith in material progress as the necessary counterpart of spiritual progress. Although he yearned for ecstatic union with the soul or Oversoul, he did not try to achieve it by subjugating the senses, as advised by yogis and Buddhists alike; on the contrary, he thought the “merge” could also be achieved (as in chants 26-29) by a total surrender to the senses. These are important differences, but it must be remembered that Indian philosophy or theology is not such a unified structure as it appears to us from a distance. Whitman might have found Indian sages or gurus and even whole sects that agreed with one or another of his heterodoxies (perhaps excepting his belief in material progress). One is tempted to say that instead of being a Christian heretic, he was an Indian rebel and sectarian.

Sometimes he seems to be a Mahayana Buddhist, promising nirvana for all after countless reincarnations, and also sharing the belief of some Mahayana sects that the sexual act can serve as one of the sacraments. At other times he might be an older brother of Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), the nineteenth-century apostle of Tantric Brahmanism and of joyous affirmation. Although this priest of Kali, the Mother Goddess, refused to learn English, one finds him delivering some of Whitman’s messages in—what is more surprising— the same tone of voice. Read, for example, this fairly typical passage from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, while remembering that “Consciousness” is to be taken here as a synonym for Divinity:

 

The Divine Mother revealed to me in the Kali temple that it was She who had become everything. She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The Image was Consciousness, the altar was Consciousness, the water-vessels were Consciousness, the door-sill was Consciousness, the marble floor was Consciousness—all was Consciousness… I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple; but in him I saw the Power of the Divine Mother vibrating. That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother.

 

Whitman expresses the same idea at the end of chant 48, and in the same half-playful fashion:

 

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each

moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in

the glass;

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is

signed by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will

punctually come forever and ever.

 

Such parallels—and there are dozens that might be quoted—are more than accidental. They reveal a kinship in thinking and experience that can be of practical value to students of Whitman. Since the Indian mystical philosophies are elaborate structures, based on conceptions that have been shaped and defined by centuries of discussion, they help to explain Whitman’s ideas at points in the first edition where he seems at first glance to be vague or self-contradictory. There is, for example, his unusual combination of realism —sometimes brutal realism—and serene optimism. Today he is usually praised for the first, blamed for the second (optimism being out of fashion), and blamed still more for the inconsistency he showed in denying the existence of evil. The usual jibe is that Whitman thought the universe was perfect and was getting better every day.

It is obvious, however, that he never meant to deny the existence of evil in himself or his era or his nation. He knew that it existed in his own family, where one of his brothers was a congenital idiot, another was a drunkard married to a streetwalker, and still another, who had caught “the bad disorder,” later died of general paresis in an insane asylum. Whitman’s doctrine implied that each of them would have an opportunity to avoid those misfortunes or punishments in another incarnation, where each would be rewarded for his good actions. The universe was an eternal becoming for Whitman, a process not a structure, and it had to be judged from the standpoint of eternity. After his mystical experience, which seemed to offer a vision of eternity, he had become convinced that evil existed only as part of a universally perfect design. That explains his combination of realism and optimism, which seems unusual only in our Western world. In India, Heinrich Zimmer says, “Philosophic theory, religious belief, and intuitive experience support each other... in the basic insight that, fundamentally, all is well. A supreme optimism prevails everywhere, in spite of the unromantic recognition that the universe of man’s affairs is in the most imperfect state imaginable, one amounting practically to chaos.”

Another point explained by Indian conceptions is the sort of democracy Whitman was preaching in “Song of Myself.” There is no doubt that he was always a democrat politically—which is to say a Jacksonian Democrat, a Barnburner writing editorials against the Hunkers, a Free Soiler in sympathy, and then a liberal but not a radical Republican. He remained faithful to what he called “the good old cause” of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and he wrote two moving elegies for the European rebels of 1848. In “Song of Myself,” however, he is not advocating rebellion or even reform. “To a drudge of the cottonfields,” he says, “or emptier of privies I lean… on his right cheek I put the family kiss”; but he offers nothing more than a kiss and an implied promise. What he preaches throughout the poem is not political but religious democracy, such as was practiced by the early Christians. Today it is practiced, at least in theory, by the Tantric sect, and we read in Philosophies of India:

 

All beings and things are members of a single mystic family (kula). There is therefore no thought of caste within the Tantric holy “circles” (cakra)…Women as well as men are eligible not only to receive the highest initiation but also to confer it in the role of guru.

… However, it must not be supposed that this indifference to the rules of caste implies any idea of revolution within the social sphere, as distinguished from the sphere of spiritual progress. The initiate returns to his post in society; for there too is the manifestation of Sakti. The world is affirmed, just as it is—neither renounced, as by an ascetic, nor corrected, as by a social reformer.

 

The promise that Whitman offers to the drudge of the cottonfields, the emptier of privies, and the prostitute draggling her shawl is that they too can set out with him on his perpetual journey—perhaps not in their present incarnations, but at least in some future life. And that leads to another footnote offered by the Indian philosophies: they explain what the poet meant by the Open Road. It starts as an actual road that winds through fields and cities, but Whitman is doing more than inviting us to shoulder our duds and go hiking along it. The real journey is toward spiritual vision, toward reunion with the Divine Ground; and thus the Open Road becomes Whitman’s equivalent for all the other roads and paths and ways that appear in mystical teachings. It reminds us of the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddhists, and the Taoist Way; it suggests both the bhakti-marga or “path of devotion” and the kama-marga or “path of sacrifice”; while it comes closer to being the “big ferry” of the Mahayana sect, in which there is room for every soul to cross to the farther shore. Whitman’s conception, however, was even broader. He said one should know “the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.”

I am not pleading for the acceptance of Whitman’s ideas or for any other form of mysticism, Eastern or Western. I am only suggesting that his ideas as expressed in “Song of Myself” were bolder and more coherent than is generally supposed, and philosophically a great deal more respectable.

 

(5)

 

But there is more to be said in judgment of Whitman and his work. It was a truly extraordinary achievement for him to rediscover the outlines of a whole philosophical system chiefly on the basis of his own mystical experience and with little help from his reading. Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens? Volney’s Ruins? De Rerum Natura? The novels of George Sand? There is hardly a hint of them in Whitman’s fundamental thinking, although there is more than a hint of Emerson’s Neoplatonism. But Emerson, who regarded himself as a teacher not a prophet, had nothing to do with notions like metempsychosis or karma or the universe pictured as a road for traveling souls. His temporary disciple felt that he had gone far beyond the teacher and was venturing into an unexplored continent of the Self. What does it matter that his sense of discovery was largely based on ignorance of the mystical tradition! It could still encourage him to make real discoveries in style and symbol, and it could arouse a feeling of release and exhilaration in his readers.

This aspect of “Song of Myself” becomes clearer when the poem is compared with another long work about the mystical experience, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The works have more in common than Eliot has realized, but there is a fundamental difference that leads to many others. Eliot could never have made the mistake of thinking that his experience was the first of its kind. He knows the tradition thoroughly and can always dignify his personal memories with quotations or half-quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita (which he read long ago in Sanskrit), from John of the Gross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the anchoret Juliana of Norwich. Using craftsmanship as well as learning, he has invented a rich structure for Four Quartets, so that it becomes a magnificent exercise in architectonics. What we miss in the poem may be simply the exhilaration that comes from a sense of discovery. Even in his mystical experience, Eliot cannot forget the lesson of caution he has learned from his studies. He knows that his eternal moment in the rose garden will last for a moment only. He knows that he must go back to his usual state of being, and then—

 

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

 

Disciplined as he is by tradidon, Eliot makes few mistakes of any sort; nor does he encourage his disciples to make them (except sometimes the great mistake of shrinking into dryness and pedantry). Whitman, on the other hand, misleads as much as he inspires, and there is no doubt that he has had a fatal influence on some of his disciples. There is also no doubt that he was the first to be misled, and very soon after writing “Song of Myself." At that point his exhilarating pride of discovery began to change into humorless arrogance. If he had been as familiar with the mystical tradition as Eliot shows himself to be, Whitman would have been warned against the feeling of omnipotence that, as we have seen, often follows a mystical experience. We read in Philosophies of India that the adept reaches a point in his spiritual progress at which he becomes identified with the personal creator of the world illusion. “He feels,” Dr. Zimmer continues, “that he is at one with the Supreme Lord, partaking of His virtues of omniscience and omnipotence. This, however, is a dangerous phase; for if he is to go to Brahman, the goal, he must realize that this inflation is only a subtie form of self-delusion. The candidate must conquer it, press beyond it, so that the anonymity of sheer being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ananda) may break upon him as the transpersonal essence of his actual Self.”

Whitman, of course, had never heard of this pusely anonymous or transpersonal state. Remaining for a long time in the dangerous phase of self-inflation (or “dilation,” as he called it) and regarding himself as a God-inspired prophet, he kept looking about for other new doctrines to prophesy. The first of these he found was a rather bumptious American nationalism, which is already suggested in his prose introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (written after the poems), but which becomes more explicit in the new poems of the second or 1856 edition. Also in the second edition, he announced himself in an open letter to Emerson (“Dear Master”) as the prophet of unashamed sex. In 1857 he determined to become what he called a “wander speaker”—“perhaps launching at the President, leading persons, Congressmen or Judges of the Supreme Court… the greatest champion America ever could know, yet holding no office or emolument whatever—but first in the esteem of men and women.” Soon afterward he dreamed of founding a new religion, for which Leaves of Grass —expanded into 365 chapters or psalms, one to be read on each day of the year—would serve as a holy testament. Preserved among his papers is a note to himself that reads: “The Great Construction of the New Bible. Not to be diverted from the principal object—the main life work—the three hundred and sixty-five. It ought to be ready in 1859.” During those years before the Civil War, Whitman was afflicted with megalomania to such an extent that he was losing touch with the realities, or at least the human possibilities, of American life.

At the same time he was making—if judged by the mystical tradition—another blunder against which the Indians might have warned him. He had once been careful to distinguish the external self or personality from the deeper Self that he was celebrating in his greatest poem. Now he forgot the distinction and began to celebrate “myself” in the guise of a simple separate person—greater than other persons, no longer standing aloof and unperturbed, but greedy for praise and tortured with desires. This person, however, laid claim to all the liberties and powers that Whitman had once ascribed to the transpersonal Self. Anything that the person felt like saying was also the right and inspired thing to say. Composing great poems was a simple matter. All the person had to do was permit Nature— his nature—to speak “without check with original energy.”

While dreaming his crazy dreams, Whitman continued to live with his family in a little frame workingman’s house in Brooklyn, where he shared a bed with his idioy brother. Thoreau on his first visit noted that the bed was unmade and that an unemptied chamber-pot stood beneath it. Other literary men described their meetings with Whitman in a tone of fascinated horror that suggests the accounts of present-day visitors to North Beach or Big Sur or Venice West. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that the Whitman of those days was a predecessor of the beats: he had the beard, the untrimmed hair, and although his costume was different, it might be regarded as the 1860 equivalent of sweatshirt and sandals. Some of his conduct also resembled that of the Beat Generation. He stayed out of the rat race, he avoided the squares (preferring the company of omnibus drivers and deck hands on the ferries); he was “real gone,” he was “far out”; and he was writing poems in what Lawrence Lipton calls “the ‘open, free-swinging style that is prized in Beat Generation literature.” Some of them should be read to loud music as a means of glossing over their faults and holding the listener’s attention—not to the music of a jazz combo, like beatnik poetry, but perhaps to that of a regimental brass band.

A poet’s conduct and his work are two ways of expressing the same habits of thinking. It was during those years just before the Civil War that Whitman first indulged himself in a whole collection of stylistic mannerisms. He had once planned to write in what he called “A perfectly transparent, plate-glassy style, artless, with no ornaments, or attempts at ornaments, for their own sake.” He had planned to use “Common idioms and phrases—Yankeeisms and vulgarisms—cant expressions when very pat only.” The effect he wanted to achieve was one of “Clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences, at all— the most translucid clearness without variations”; and that was one of the effects he did achieve in the first edition, except in a few gangling passages and a few others where he was being deliberately hermetic. It was after 1855 that he began to cultivate his bad habits of speech— such, for example, as unnecessary or “poetic” inversions; as foreign words, often used incorrectly and without good reason (there had been only a few of them in “Song of Myself”); as ugly new words of his own coinage; as the “I” placed obtrusively at the end of a phrase (“No dainty dolce affettuoso I”); as the Quaker names for months and days, such as “Fourth-month” for April and “First-day” for Sunday (which might have been excusable if Whitman had been a Quaker); and as, worst of all, the interminable bald inventories that read like the names of parts and organs in an anatomical chart or like the index to a school geography. In the first edition he had broken most of the nineteenth-century rules for elegant writing, but now he was violating an older literary convention, that of simply being considerate of one’s readers.

Whitman’s beatnik period, however, proved to be only a transitory phase of a life that had several other phases. The best record of his attitude during the period is the greatly expanded text of the third or 1860 edition, which is an engaging and impressive book for all its extravagant gestures, and which, after the first, is the other vintage edition of his poems. Soon after it was published, the Civil War gave a new direction to Whitman’s career. His war poems are disappointing, with three or four exceptions, but his unselfish service in army hospitals helped to establish him in still another personality, one he kept to the end: that of the good gray poet, and it was during the postwar years that he produced some of his most important work. Much of it shows that he was turning back toward the Eastern beliefs expressed in “Song of Myself.” Perhaps the return was caused by another mystical experience, but although the supposition seems a likely one, the only evidence to support it consists of scattered passages in his two prose works of the time, Democratic Vistas and Specimen Days. We know, however, that he planned at the time to make “Passage to India” the title not merely of a long poem about the journey of the soul toward God, but of a whole volume “bridging the way,” as he said, “from life to death.”

The volume would be designed to stand beside Leaves of Grass, which he had come to regard as a finished work. Some of the poems he planned to put into the new book—“Proud Music of the Storm,” “Prayer of Columbus,” and most of all “Passage to India” itself—are truly admirable in conception and in their rich symphonic structure. The language, however, is more abstract and great deal less vivid or Yankee than that of the first edition (besides retaining most of the mannerisms developed in his period of self-inflation). If he did have another mystical experience before writing the poems, it failed to give him the miraculously fresh vision of familiar people and objects that had followed his earlier illumination. As for the creed put forward in “Passage to India” and other poems of the same period, it is no longer purely mystical, being mixed with the ambiguous doctrine of male comradeship or “adhesiveness“ that Whitman had first expressed in the “Calamus“ poems of the 1860 edition, and mixed again with his still more recent doctrine of Personalism. The deeper Self is now identified with the personality (or eidólon, as he was beginning to call it). God Himself becomes personal (or four-personal, in “Chanting the Square Deific“) and is addressed as the Older Brother of the soul.

Soon the notion of publishing a grand new book had to be put aside, as a result of the apoplectic stroke that Whitman suffered in January 1873. He lived nineteen years longer and wrote scores of poems, but most of them were occasional verses bearing a curious resemblance to his newspaper editorials of the 1840s. The only ambitious work he finished was “Dream of Columbus“ (1874), which served as a dignified and moving peroration to his career. He retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived serenely and received a good many visitors, most of them his devoted followers, so that he presented the picture of an Indian guru surrounded by his adhikarin or disciples.

During the first years in Camden Whitman spent a good deal of time revising his early poems, in the hope of reshaping his extremely diversified work into an organic whole. Most of the revisions were designed to make his style more uniform, to bring his teaching up to date, or to gloss over the differences between what he had once said and what he now believed. “Do I contradict myself?“ Once Whitman had asked the question defiantly, but now it worried him. He still regarded himself as a prophet, and a prophet’s duty is to have been always right. It would have been better for his strictly poetic reputation if he had allowed the early illuminated Whitman to speak for himself, the bohemian or inflated Whitman to speak for himself, and the good gray poet to speak for himself, each of his separate fashion.

 

(6)

 

In the collection of variorum readings compiled long ago by Oscar Lovell Triggs, the revision in “Song of Myself” occupy thirty pages. Triggs found that Whitman had changed the wording of all but five of the fifty-two chants into which he had finally divided the poem. In those five—chants 9, 27, 28, 29, and 52—the only changes are in punctuation and spelling. Of course the division into numbered chants is an important change in itself and one that has proved to be conven­ient for students, though it has also proved misleading.

A still more important change is in the title. By virtue of the image that holds the poem together, its title should be “Leaves of Grass,” but Whitman had transferred this phrase to the book as a whole. In the first edition, the frontispiece partly takes the place of a title, since readers are being asked to interpret the poem as the testament of the idealized American workingman whom it portrays. In the second or 1856 edition, there is a title in words: “A Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.” That is an awkward but accurate phrase, if we regard Walt (not Walter) Whitman as the name of the idealized figure. Beginning with the third or 1860 edition, the poem was called simply “Walt Whitman”—not so accurate a title any longer, if we remember that the name was by now completely identified with the living poet. It was not until 1881 that the poem became “Song of Myself,” a phrase that I think is completely false to its original intention. “Myself” is “my personality,” and Whitman had originally been writing about a not-myself, a representative figure who, by achieving union with his transpersonal soul, had realized the possibilities latent in every man and woman.

In the first edition the poet-hero presents himself, as I said, without a hint of his local or family background; he is simply “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” That is exactly how he should be presented, since he is speaking for all American and indeed for all humanity. In later editions he acquires a personal background by virtue of his complete identification with the author. As “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son”, he becomes a strictly localized divinity (while ceasing to imply that each of the roughs contains in himself the entire universe). There are other changes in the same direction. In 1881 Whitman took eight lines from “Starting from Paumanok”, which was written in his beatnik days, and inserted them at the end of the first chant. Four of the new lines are:

 

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

 

He was actually thirty-four or -five when he started to write the poem, and thirty-six when it was published—but what does it matter about his age or health or his determination to cease not till death? The real point is that if he insists on presenting himself as a proud descendant of the early settlers, he can no longer presume to speak for first-generation Americans; nor can he claim to be “Not merely of the New World but of Africa, Europe or Asia… a wandering savage,” as he had done in the original text. He has gained an identity at the cost of ceasing to be universally representative.

There is a significant change in the first line of the poem, the addition (in 1881) of three words I have put in italics: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself. ” At first one feels that “celebrate” and “sing” are synonyms, and that the new phrase has been added partly to balance the line and partly in obedience to Whitman’s old-age habit of never saying in three words what might be said in six. But the truth is that “sing” introduces a new theme into the text. In the first edition the poet-hero had “celebrated” himself by telling what he saw and did and believed. He had spoken compulsively and without self-consciousness. In the late editions, however, he also “sings”—which in Whitman’s jargon means “writes a song about”—himself. When he observes the miraculous world about him, it is no longer for the pure joy of seeing, as in the first edition, but also with the intention of collecting material; he is “Absorbing all to myself and for this song.” This new habit of his becomes particularly obtrusive at the beginning of chant 26. Here, in the original version, the poet-hero had been preparing to demonstrate that by merely listening, in a state of complete passivity, he could be swept forward into an ecstasy of hearing. He had said in the first two lines:

 

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,

And accrue what I hear into myself… and let sounds contribute

towards me.

 

Only four words of the second line were changed in 1881, but they were important for the meaning. The new line reads (with my italics):

 

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute

toward it.

 

“To” implies purpose here: “in order to.” If the poet is consciously trying to hear sounds that will enrich the texture of his song, he is no longer being passive, and the effect on the reader of the passage that follows is seriously weakened.

The good gray poet must have been abashed by many gestures of his earlier myself. “Washes and razors for foofoos.... for me freckles and a bristling beard.” One can be certain that such a line would go; the wonder is that it survived until 1881. “Where the laughing gull scoots by the slappy shore and laughs her near-human laugh.” The word “slappy” gives color to the line, and it was the one word to be omitted, in this case as early as 1856. There is no space to offer more than this bare suggestion of all the gay impudence and vivid Yankeeisms that were

excised from later editions. I am more interested at present in apparently minor revisions that change the meaning of the poem. Among them are the phrases that introduce his accounts of the Goliad massacre in Texas (chant 34) and of the sea fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard (chants 35 and 36). In the first edition these two accounts are offered as further examples of the power of identification. The poet-hero is one of the murdered Texans—perhaps the “youth not seventeen tears old”—and he is one of the sailors on the Bonhomme Richard, just as he had already been the mother condemned for a witch and the hounded slave that flagged in the race. By 1867, however, Whitman felt he should offer explanations. He inserted a line at-the beginning of chant 34, “Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,” thus falsifying his own biography, and he inserted another line at the end of the first stanza of chant 35, besides two words, which I have italicized, in the first line of the following stanza:

 

List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.

Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you (said he,)

 

The result is that these great examples of the poet-hero’s ability to identify himself with all creatures, living or dead, are reduced in one case to a story told long ago in Texas, in the other to an old sailor’s yarn—“said he”—and thereby lose their reason for being part of the poem. Whitman can no longer say about them, “I am the man… I suffered… I was there.” In both cases it would seem, however, that he was not so much concealing what he once meant to say as, on this occasion, honestly forgetting it.

I have been talking about the revisions only in “Song of Myself,” but some of the same statements could be made about the final text of the other eleven poems in the first edition. Since these poems are less important, the revisions in them seem less objectionable. “Song of the Answerer” and “Who Learns My Lesson Complete?” were improved, even greatly improved, by the omission from each of tasteless lines and a feeble ending. “Great Are the Myths,” a still weaker poem, disappeared after 1876 without being missed. On the other hand, two of the best poems suffered most from revision: “The Sleepers” by losing a passage (lines 60-70) that starts with adolescent sex and ends in surrealism, and “I Sing the Body Electric” by the addition of a final section that is not in the least electric, being merely a long anatomical catalogue.

In another sense, however, all the poems have suffered, even those in which the revision was wisely handled. Most of them had been composed at the same time, in the same furious burst of inspiration; the only exceptions seem to be the two political poems, “Europe the 72d and 73d Years of These States,” written in 1850—it was Whitman’s first successful experiment in free verse—and “A Boston Ballad,” written in June 1854. The other poems all have something to do with his state of mystical illumination; they explain one another, strengthen one another, and are further strengthened by being printed after “Song of Myself,” since they amplify some of the same themes. In the text of the Deathbed edition, ten of them are scattered among six of the “clusters” int