Walt Whitman: The Poet Electric

The Electric Whitman
On March 5, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old reporter for the New York Aurora attended Ralph Waldo Emerson's well-traveled lecture, "The Poet." The journalist, Walt Whitman, praised the speech, calling it "one of the richest and most beautiful compositions ... we have heard anywhere, at any time." When Emerson expanded and published the lecture as an essay in 1844, Whitman pored over and digested the new version.

Emerson's essay concluded with a stormy exhortation, a sermon, it seems, that Whitman took to heart:

"Doubt not, O poet, but persist: Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a [poet] is the conductor of the whole river of electricity."


Is it any wonder, then, that electrical imagery crackles and hums throughout even the earliest versions of Leaves of Grass? "Mine is no callous shell," sings Whitman in "Song of Myself," "I have instant conductors all over me" (614-15). And this trope of the electrified poet becomes increasingly explicit as the book evolves, so that in the fourth edition (1867), for example, "The Poem of the Body" gets rewired with a new first line: "I sing the body electric." By 1881, the year of the book's last significant revisions, Whitman has transformed the romanticized notion of poet into a full-blown emblem of the modern. So suggests these lines from "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean Life":

I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems Was seiz'd by the spirit ...

For twenty years the poem read "eternal self" at this juncture. The substitution of "electric" for "eternal," while a small emendation, suggests that Whitman in later years was seeking to make his verse more energetic, as well as up-to-date. "Eternal" does not adequately express the enthusiasm--the ecstasy--of the inspired writer.

We can recognize in these examples an incarnation of Emerson's ideal. It is as if Whitman received an oracle in the lecture hall that day in 1842, as if he took the scroll from the hands of the sage and proclaimed, "Today this prophecy has been fulfilled in your hearing." Clearly, Whitman was prone to viewing himself as just such a messianic figure. He called Leaves of Grass his "Bible," and there are several instances where he appropriated the idiom and authoritative diction of the Gospels. Whitman, of course, was notorious for outbursts of egotism and self-aggrandizement, but in his case, there was substance to his claim. If not a prophet, he did realize the expectations of an American literati who clamored for a charismatic poet they could call their own. Whitman, without a doubt, was obsessed with his poetic destiny. Biographer Justin Kaplan observes that while reading Alexander Smith's A Life Drama, Whitman exclaimed over "one electric passage" where "the announcement is made of a great forthcoming Poet": "The passage was addressed to a character named 'Walter,' who says that these words 'set me on fire.'" Time and again, Whitman chooses the word "electric" to articulate his poetic excitement.

While the adjective "electric" is relatively common in expressions of enthusiasm, the significance of its frequent use in Leaves of Grass is complicated. The title of the book suggests that a field of organic material grows between the covers; how does electricity figure in such a conceit? How does electrical language invigorate these Leaves? And in what ways is Whitman a transformer of Emerson's electrified speech?


Charles Olson once defined the creative process as "energy transferred from where the poet got it ... by way of the poem itself ... all the way over to the reader ... an energy discharge" (1966). He must have been reading his Whitman. In "Song of Myself" the poet insists, "I have instant conductors all over me..../ They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me/ . .. My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from me" (615-16, 612). Emerson's poet-conductor receives a power surge from the imagination and transmits that sensation to the audience; he is first and foremost a dreamer. But for Whitman, the impulse seems to originate directly from the world at large. The poet doesn't invent as much as take in and reroute. With Emerson, the emphasis is on genius; with Whitman, conductivity and exchange. "O the joy of my soul," he exclaims, "receiving identity through materials and loving them .../My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch, reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like" ("A Song of Joys" 98-99). As Whitman presents it, the mind tunes into the universe and hears reverberation, touches the outside world and makes a connection, discerns a likeness in the Other and identifies. The passage also helps explain Whitman's penchant for catalogs and long lists. The inventory soldered onto the page functions like a motherboard of switches and circuits and microchips: You touch the book, the book touches back.

Wherever the poet finds points of contact, there is a mania for intimacy. He is, above all, a communicator. This is why the telegraph holds special significance in Leaves of Grass. With the construction of the first transatlantic cable begun in 1857, geographical distances that once separated nations vanished; messages could be sent and received almost instantaneously. As Kaplan draws out from both the journals and the poetry, Whitman expressed a fascination with the metaphorical possibilities of such an invention: The new technology represents the purpose of his verses--to connect the world. He writes, "See, in my poems .../... the electric telegraph stretching across the continent,/See, through Atlantica's depth pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly returned" ("Starting from Paumanok" 258-60). He envisions here and elsewhere a Western Union, where democracy--energized--is sent back and forth across the ocean, say, from New York to Paris, the birthplace of American liberty. According to Whitman, the democratic notion of universal brotherhood inspires uninhibited exchange. There is intellectual kinship everywhere; and thanks to Yankee engineering, whether in science or poems, discourse travels farther and faster. While the "word Democratic, the word En-Masse" seeks a global communion of the like-minded, foreign ideas are not to be excluded but welcomed into the conversation as well. "Myths Asiatic, the primitive fables" course through the "eloquent gentle wires" of these poems, such that East and West, Old World and New, are "fused together" ("Passage to India" 7-17).

The "modern wonder" of the telegraph becomes a primary instrument in the unification of the American continent. So joined, the body politic--the United States--buzzes not only with optimism and progress but also with fellowship and camaraderie. "I sing the body electric," rhapsodizes Whitman, because Americans comprise a common citizenry, a society that prospers only when relationships are mutual and symbiotic. The sexual attraction that electrifies human interactions obviously complicates that network. But love, as Whitman construes it, operates on many frequencies simultaneously--erotic, psychic, political. He promises in "For You O Democracy," "I will make divine magnetic lands,/With the love of comrades,/... I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,/... By the manly love of comrades" (3-8). This masculine, homosocial unity proceeds from a "democratic" urge. Yet the political bond never overrides the sexual in these poems; he praises the physical body, in and of itself, and does not depend on allegory to convey his meaning. One need only look at the image of the "swimmers" to perceive Whitman's sometimes blunt, sometimes coy eroticism. As Whitman warns in "O You Whom I Often and Silently Come," "Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me" (3).


Ultimately, a libertine Whitman rebels against New Testament ethics. The lyrical self in "I Sing the Body Electric" jumps between erotic melody and spiritual polemic. "The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,/They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,/And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul" (2-4). The lovers in this passage are decadent and entangled. Elsewhere in the poem, they seem to lack vigor, and as a result, they "conceal" their bodies (5). As "Children of Adam," they have learned that they are naked and ashamed. To "discorrupt them," the singer bombards them with a positive charge. He exalts the male and female in their idealized forms--"clean, strong, firm-fibred"--and declares them "sacred." Rather than condemn his own body, he sees its perfection and "sings" it, pronouncing on it a blessing. In the same way that he loves himself, Whitman loves his multitudes; his eros makes them whole. Arguably, the gesture made in "Body Electric" is a perverse imitation of Christ that takes a swipe at the puritanical.

But more than polemic, Whitman's exhibitionism lays claim to real psychological and political power. Disrobing in public, whether literally or in print, defies nineteenth-century codes of conduct. "Body Electric" suggests that this emancipation is available not only for the poet but for anyone who is similarly exhibited. Even slaves on the auction block are not degraded (95-128). This is because the magnetism of their exposed musculature has the power to captivate the very ones who seek their enslavement. Whitman, as anatomist, peels away not only clothes but skin tone. The revelation of "brain," "tendon," "nerve," and "blood" renders social distinctions of "red, black, or white" superficial. And he suggests, not so subtly, a common ancestor for all races: "(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back/through the centuries?)" (117-18).

In "Body Electric," the poet--once referred to by R. W. B. Lewis as the New American Adam--sanctions physical pleasure, and thereby sanctifies those he loves, "whoever [they] are." His is a prolific and plural intercourse, oblivious to the restrictions imposed by marriage or monogamy. The erratic, spontaneous self goes where attracted. The electric pulse of the soul--sexual, social, poetic--leaps out of bounds to its receptor. This ecstatic Whitman very much resembles Emerson's conductor; he is invested with godlike privileges, for his is "a power transcending all limit and privacy." Shameless, his electrons and ejaculations (in every sense) go forth and seek out a sympathetic audience.

What is this self that enters into relationship with everything that it contacts? The vaunted identity that the poet projects onto the page sometimes is described as a physical Whitman, sometimes as the spirit of Whitman, sometimes as the book of Whitman's verse. In Leaves of Grass, the relationship between body, soul, and text can be frustratingly ambiguous. At most, we can say that these manifestations--constituting the "Form complete"--share an affinity with one another but not a precise equivalence. Generally speaking, wherever you find one in a Whitman poem, the others lurk in the vicinity. The body, however, is most conspicuous. Imagine the material self and, by analogy, you see the soul. Contemplate the body long enough and you understand the earthiness of the poems. The very title of "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand" stipulates this overarching desire for the poet to be perceived wholly in unity with his Leaves. Altogether, the physical, the spiritual, and the textual exist in a trinitarian unity.


With the mention of the theologically loaded word "trinitarian," it is important to reiterate that, for Whitman, divinity is rooted in the physical universe. The divine power to make words is produced by an electric generator deep in the machinery of the kosmos. In one of the later poems, "From Far Dakota's Cañons," we learn: "(The sun there at the centre though conceal'd,/Electric life forever at the centre,)/Breaks forth a lightning flash" (16-18). Electricity becomes Whitman's metaphor of choice because it delivers a living current--magnetic, powerful, unpredictable, revelatory. It is eternal; it cannot be destroyed. It is invisible; it can only be seen in flashes. "The electric all" suffuses both the natural and spiritual realms ("As They Draw to a Close" 8). The poet encounters it everywhere, within and without. His "electric self" is plugged into countless energy fields; he transmits worldwide.

Screaming electric, the atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious envelop'd messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal down in the dirt dropping, Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring. ("So Long!" 36-41)


Whitman believes that in broadcasting the seed that "sparkles hot," he spawns a new generation. His message, he insists, is good news to those who worry about the spiritual state of modern man. In "Years of the Modern" he declares: "Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a god,/Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!" (15-16). Whitman, with characteristic confidence, predicts that America will fulfill its destiny, though he declines to describe exactly how:

Ready, collected here, a freer, vast, electric world, to be constructed here, (The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures to come,) Thou wonder world yet undefined, unform'd, neither do I define thee ................................................................... I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now, I merely thee ejaculate! ("Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood" 67-77)

In "Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics," Paul Gilmore argues that "electricity functioned as a powerful metaphor of emotional connection, bodily excitement, and aesthetic power" for writers in the Romantic tradition on both sides of the Atlantic (2004). The conception of electricity as both material and spiritual force, popularized in the scientific and pseudoscientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made it a dominant trope for writers describing a wide range of human activity but especially artistic creation. Gilmore explains: "Aesthetic experience is the sensual and conscious suspension and ecstatic transcendence of the interested self through an encounter with a stimulus.... As the product of material sensations registered on the individual body that give rise to a sense of the limitations and fluid boundaries of the self, the aesthetic moment is inherently paradoxical, blurring distinctions between self and community, sensual and ideal." Gilmore positions Whitman squarely within this tradition. By resorting to the metaphor of electricity, and more particularly, the telegraph, Whitman's "aesthetic dream becomes rooted in the material and social forces that might actually allow cross-cultural interaction and foster a sense of the self's connection to others."

Gilmore's analysis of electricity in Leaves of Grass is significant because it portrays Whitman as a product of his times, able to elicit from this trope positive correspondences to "emotional connection, bodily excitement, and aesthetic power." What the argument neglects, however, is Whitman's peculiar appreciation of electricity as a potentially destructive force. Whitman understands, in a way unrealized by his contemporaries, the danger of the conduit. He recognizes that the poet who opens himself up to the stimulating and the spectacular is at times vulnerable to violent and pernicious energies as well. Overwhelmed by negative surges, the singer in "Song of Myself" comes close to despair. "You villain touch! What are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat,/Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me" (640-41). This is not the voice of the optimist or the transcendentalist. Here, the poet, inundated, admits he has blown a fuse.

Whitman's poetics have brought him to such a crisis. He has committed himself to the wide range of human experience and, in so doing, puts himself at risk. Whatever electricity is in the air, he feels compelled to report. By inclination, he is attracted to energies that unite men and women: the forces of democracy, sex, poetry, technology, and the like. War--especially civil war--by its very nature, sets brother against brother. Such hostility is antithetical to his harmonizing instincts, even repulsive. But if Whitman really is the poet of Emerson's prophecy, he will demonstrate that he can conduct "the whole river of electricity," including the rage.

Whitman proves to be disquietingly well suited for martial poetry. The extent to which he surrenders to "war ecstasy" can even at times seem demonic. Consider this invocation in "Spirit Whose Work is Done": "Spirit of ... many a savage scene--electric spirit/ ... you beat and beat the drum/ ... Leave me your pulses of rage/ ... Fill me with currents convulsive/ ... Let them scorch and blister out of my chants." Electricity, primarily in the form of chain lightning, comes to symbolize the firestorm that has roused the nation. The "shock electric" at first produces only an "ominous hum" as the warriors prepare for conflict ("First O Songs For a Prelude" 17-18). But soon the country is swallowed in maelstrom. Writes Whitman, "I have witness'd my cities electric" in "warlike America" ("Rise O Days From Your Fathomless Deep" 45-46). A "barbaric yawp" is heard above the rooftops, and it sounds like the scream of the war hawk.

Yet surprisingly, the poet excited by hostilities also embraces the humanitarian impulse. "The Wound-Dresser," in Whitman's most famous expression of empathy, recalls his intimate experience with casualties dragged from the battlefield. This Whitman nurses the fallen and decries the injuries inflicted upon them. When the speaker describes "the foot with the bullet wound" as "gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive," we are right to recognize his outrage (53-54). On the other hand, we cannot ignore the ebullient flag-waving that encapsulates "Song of the Banner at Daybreak": "Demons and death then I sing,/Put in all, aye all will I, sword-shaped pennant for war,/And a pleasure new and ecstatic" (105-107). It is the "pleasure" Whitman derives from war energy that is particularly troubling, and one wonders how, within this one man, this one book, militancy can coexist with sensitivity. Indeed, what becomes apparent throughout Leaves of Grass is that these war poems convey a perpetually alternating current, both bloodlust and shell-shocked soldier. War is simultaneously the occasion for battle hymn and dirge, drumbeat and tender elegy.


When a writer like Whitman offers lamentation, it seems a humane response to bloodshed. War anthems are more troublesome. What is it about combat that resonates with this poet? Certainly, Whitman enjoys the range of his emotions, including the wild and the furious. His 1855 preface to Leaves prepares the reader accordingly:

What do you think is the grandeur of storms and dismemberments and the deadliest battles and wrecks and the wildest fury of the elements and the power of the sea and the motion of nature and the throes of human desires and dignity and hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says, Rage on, Whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere, Master of the spasms of the sky and the shatter of the sea, Master of nature and passion and death, And of all terror and pain.


On the battlefield, "primal energies" are "satisfied" and the "pent fire" is "glutted" ("Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps"). In these moments, he is indeed a poet possessed by Mars. Elsewhere in Leaves of Grass, Whitman adopts a similarly reckless posture. "I know I am restless and make others so,/I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,/For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them" ("As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado" 3-5). It's hard not to read into these lines a bellicose Whitman, a man itching for a fight.

But the martial bluster recurrent in Leaves of Grass is more than saber rattling fueled by testosterone. Whitman sincerely believed in this war and the justice of northern aggression. For him, the "storm of vengeful democracy" explodes with "true thunder and lightning" From the outset, from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter, he was galvanized into action, willing to take up his verse to prosecute what he considered an essential conflict. Secession threatened the very existence of the Union, and, as a result, Yankee patriots must fire their rifles to hold the country together. This war, though devastating, was justified. These sentiments occasionally surface in Specimen Days (1892; 1963), the collection of Whitman's prose writings. Whitman writes, for example:

But what can I say of that prompt and splendid wrestling with secession slavery, the arch-enemy personified, the instant he unmistakably show'd his face? The volcanic upheaval of the nation, after that firing on the flag at Charleston, proves for certain something which had been previously in great doubt, and at once substantially settled the question of disunion.... Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form'd and harden'd a primal hard-pan of national Union will, determin'd and in the majority.

As Whitman agitates for reprisal, the river of electricity necessarily turns sanguine. War is afoot, and he seems remarkably cavalier about it. Though a reflective Whitman will soberly assess the suffering and humiliation of both Federal and Rebel infantries, nevertheless he is prone to thrill at "the electric tramping of so many horses on the hard road, and the gallant bearing, fine seat, and bright appearance of a thousand ... handsome young American men" when they parade before him (Specimen Days). Whitman's enthusiasm is not confined to the pomp and circumstance of the military show. The correspondent in him is just as eager to report from the battlefield. This is, in part, because he appropriates the classical sensibility about warfare, that the combat zone is a proving ground, where soldiers perform heroically or cowardly and where writers make a name for themselves.

We observe such a perspective early in Leaves of Grass. In the "Inscriptions," the first section of the book, a "Phantom" appears to the poet and asks him what he will sing. "Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?/And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,/The making of perfect soldiers" ("As I Ponder'd in Silence" 9-11). The "theme of War;' then, activates Whitman's ambition and provides him with an immense and tragic subject. The cause is noble, the soldiers brave, and the outcome victorious. As Leaves of Grass develops and the structure solidifies, Whitman increasingly casts his collection as an American epic, chronicling the spirit, if not the events, of the conflict. "My book and the war," he says, "are one" ("To Thee Old Cause" 15).


The friction between the states electrifies Whitman's verse--and the continent--in a way far different from the telegraph. Negative energies divide families and threaten to blow the Union apart, but the net effect is at last positive. The body politic absorbs the pulse and survives. And the warmonger finds himself the mouthpiece of a reconciled nation, "one vast consensus, north, south, east, west" ("A Thought of Columbus" 22). Whitman's martial poetry markedly illustrates that both positive and negative currents run together in Leaves of Grass like the red and black wires in a circuit. The two are responsible for vivifying the pages, though readers--especially twenty-first-century readers--may have difficulty resolving the polarity. Critic Mark Feldman has shown, using Whitman's Memoranda, that Whitman himself was overwhelmed by the conflicting passions of the war years (2005). His challenge as a poet was to recreate on the page an atmosphere that was supercharged and true to both the anguish and the fury. Yet how could he channel that much emotion without himself becoming electrocuted? In one revealing passage from Specimen Days, Whitman uses the word "convulsiveness" to capture "the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times." "Convulsiveness" suggests that the country--and he as its poet--has sustained a near-fatal trauma. Feldman remarks that "even Whitman's own body was driven to convulsions, to seizures and temporary paralysis, in 1863, 1865, and 1873"; and throughout the postwar years he experienced "flashbacks."

All this is to say that the conductivity in Leaves of Grass requires an exceptional personal commitment. It also demands a versification that heretofore had been absent in American letters. To conduct the power of warfare, Whitman eschews the regularity and the grand tradition of the heroic stanza and opts instead for the electric line, the jagged edge of free verse. Hostilities necessitate "bards with songs ... as from lightning's forked stripes"--violent, irregular, and impulsive ("By Blue Ontario's Shores" 333). This innovation is really as ancient as poetry itself, before the line was domesticated by fixed meters, and harks all the way back to the dithyramb. It is a music marked by exuberance and exclamation. Whitman himself terms his lines "trains of a staggering line in many a strange procession" ("Now Precedent Songs, Farewell" 2).

By committing to free verse, Whitman escapes the anxiety of influence exerted by Emerson. He leaves behind the standardized prosody of his contemporaries in favor of the sudden jolt. This transition is reflected in a note he added to the 1876 preface of Leaves, which states:

Then, for enclosing clue of all, it is imperatively and ever to be borne in mind that "Leaves of Grass" entire is not to be construed as an intellectual or scholastic effort or poem mainly, but more as a radical utterance out of the Emotions and the Physique--an utterance adjusted to, perhaps born of, Democracy and the Modern--in its very nature regardless of the old conventions, and, under the great laws, following only its own impulses.

Emerson could describe the ideal poet, but he could not surrender to the ecstasy. "Of power," wrote Whitman of his mentor, "he seems to have a gentleman's admiration--but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of God and Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, conceits, polite kinks, and verbs." This caricature of Emerson reflects the animosity that in later years surfaced between them. Whitman's criticism, however, points both ways. Whitman, who pretends to be spontaneous conductor, relies routinely upon prefab figures of speech to stylize his "utterance." His poems are rife with anaphora, epistrophe, isocolon, polysyndeton, symploce, and other well-established turns of phrase. True, the metrical forms popular among nineteenth-century versifiers are abandoned; nevertheless, the organic material in Leaves of Grass is highly cultivated and pruned. The result of his approach may be that his verses are closer to Nature, more impulsive, but still the art is selective and artificial--"scholastic" and "intellectual." This is not a fault. The "great sympathetic" expresses the energy of a discriminating brain as well as promiscuous body.


Whitman's conception of electricity, inspired by Emerson, anticipates the modern understanding of how the brain communicates with itself and others--electrical interchange--but what is the role of volition in modulating those impulses? Whitman's verse appears ecstatic, and surely it is deeply felt; but, given the thirty years of revisions, not even he can claim that his Leaves are mere automatic writing. The will, or some self-correcting neurological mechanism, was obsessively and extensively at work on his opus. This argues for a complexity that cannot be explained exclusively by the metaphor of passive conductor. And it also suggests that the most radical utterances, negative or positive, persist because Whitman has chosen not to alter or strike them. The poet who edits is ultimately responsible for his words. Perhaps this is why Whitman sublimates war ecstasy to the larger cause of democracy. Drumbeats serve the primitive man and the enlightened one. The editorial transformation of electrified speech does not, from Whitman's perspective, neutralize the intensity, but it does remind us that his project, sometimes touted as spontaneous, is also disciplined and principled. Each of his lightning strikes deviates according to design.

Credits: Klatt, L.S. "The Electric Whitman." The Southern Review. 44.2 (Spring 2008): p321.

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Walt Whitman: Science and Mysticism

Walt Whitman was the first important American poet to extol science. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass, his epochal volume, came out, the Romantic aversion to science still chafed poetic sensibilities. Through its invasive procedures, the standard indictment read, science violated Nature's pristine wholeness, disfiguring the beauty of natural forms. "We murder to dissect," carped Wordsworth. Edgar Allan Poe depicted science as a vulture preying on the heart and the imagination. Such people believed that science with its voracious appetite for analysis was opposed to myth, wonder, spontaneity, reverie, and awe.

Whitman dismissed the charges as anachronistic poppycock. He raised a toast: "Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!" Geologist, chemist, surgeon, mathematician, cartographer, lexicographer, the whole menagerie of exact demonstrators were welcome in his poetic parlor: "Gentlemen, I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you. Your facts are useful and real." Useful, we shall see, was the operative word. Whitman unlike other mystics saw no conflict between his mystical beliefs and science rather he saw both of them complimenting each other. He celebrated the creation of Suez Canal, Transatlantic cable system and the railroad link between the East and the West coast:

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,
The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;

He believed that scientists must be lauded for their extraordinary achievements but their discoveries don't undermine or negate God rather all scientific inventions point to God's grace and divine will. Actually, scientists discover and invent what God, the Master Creator intends them to do. Whitman believes that it is God's will that man should prove and assert his worth and genius as His best creation by rediscovering the scientific facts that God has built in the universe as a master Creator:

Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
Your engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
You, not for trade or transportation only,
But in God's name, and for thy sake O soul.

Though short on expertise, Whitman had a wide-ranging interest in contemporary science--astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, including evolution. He was an avid, if unsystematic, reader of popular books and magazine articles on science. As newspaper editor in the 1840s and 1850s, he supported scientific enterprises. Later, when The Origin of Species had become a cause célèbre, the Good Grey Poet plumped for Darwinism: "It is needed as a counterpoise to widely prevailing and unspeakably tenacious, enfeebling superstitions. With its advent, the world of erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually bettered and broadened in its speculations."

These superstitions were nourished by ecclesiastical institutions, for which the poet had meager respect. From his father, an admirer of Thomas Paine, Whitman had imbibed anti-clerical sentiments. He scoffed at the disparate creeds of religions, each claiming to see the truth through the colored lenses of its own dogmatism. Though scarcely an agnostic, he liked the brash way Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Huxley twitted the religious establishment: "It does seem," he remarked, "as if Ingersoll and Huxley without any others could unhorse the whole Christian giant." As prophet of pantheistic mysticism, Whitman may have harbored similar aspirations even though he sometimes sounds like a boisterous Jesus: "O despairer, here is my neck, / By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight on me." Whitman thought science could clear the way for spiritual regeneration by softening hidebound creeds, fables, and traditions.

Leaves of Grass bristles with allusions to science. Now, meteorology ("I" is the rain):

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and bottomless sea,

Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed,

And yet the same,

I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust layers of the globe.

Now, conservation of energy:

Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned,

Or rendered to powder, or buried.

My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications,

Further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

And stellar life cycles:

The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,

Swelling, collapsing, ending

serving their longer, shorter use.

These lyrical evocations of natural processes show that a scientific outlook needn't stifle the imagination nor swaddle the spirit.

Had Whitman been content to infuse the formulations of scientific discourse with the finer breath of poetry, he would have merited the epithet Poet of Science, the tide of a study by Whitmanite Joseph Beaver. With a different temperament and background, he might have been a modern Lucretius, the great Roman poet of materialism. As it stands, Beaver's laudatory epithet is deceptive. Despite the hurrahs, Whitman relegated science to the role of data collector for a higher muse. While science was a useful antidote to superstition, it couldn't penetrate the spiritual substratum of reality. Scientific facts, Whitman believed, had esoteric ramifications best elucidated by sages, seers, and philosopher-poets: "The highest and subtlest and broadest truths of modern science wait for their true assignment and last vivid flashes of light through metaphysicians. The poets of the cosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and stratagems to first principles."

Properly illuminated, the lore of science corroborated Whitman's eclectic mysticism, grounded, he thought, in the first principles. Scientists may have been bemused by his metaphysical extrapolations. Evolution, both, cosmic and Darwinian, was constrained by an idiosyncratic anthropic principle:

My embryo has never been torpid, Nothing could overlay it;

For it the nebula cohered to an orb, the long slow strata piled to rest it on, vast vegetables gave it sustenance,

Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me.

Evolution also ratified a quasi-Hegelian dialectic of inexorable spiritual progress, the whole creation spiraling toward an Absolute Idea of immortal love:

All, all for immortality,

Love like the light silently wrapping all,

Nature's amelioration blessing all,

The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,

Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.

The ceaseless permutations of "atomies" warranted belief in transmigration of souls: "No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. Whatever I do or say, I also return." The First Law of Thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, certified personal immortality. After the final transmigration--"promotion and transfer," Whitman termed the process--the soul both merged with the cosmos and retained individual identity. Though he offered no details, he "had no doubt of it."

Scientific concepts were a portal to Whitman's true abode: "I enter by them," he said, "to an area of my dwelling." This mental domicile was furnished with a potpourri of notions derived directly or indirectly from a long succession of philosophers, sages, and seers East and West. Like Pythagoras, Plato, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and other philosophical idealists, Whitman believed the sensory world is but the shadow of reality. "Real reality," as he called it, was an immaterial mind, soul, or spirit (the terms were interchangeable) that filters, interprets, and even creates the data of sensation. The objects of thought had more reality than the objects of sense. Unlike sullied and corruptible matter, mind was eternal, unfettered by time or space, its own constructions. Whitman's idealism was tricked out with a mishmash of moral assumptions culled from American transcendentalism, Quakerism (his mother was a Quaker), enlightenment optimism, and Eastern mysticism.

The idealism, in its unadulterated form, arrived late. In his early thirties, still brimming with animal vitality, Whitman had dubbed himself "the poet of the body and the poet of the soul." Unlike the mystics of the Orient, Whitman doesn't consider the body as an impediment in the realization of God or salvation nor does he consider it inferior to soul in any way. He feels the same senses that enjoy sex get transfigured to experience the ecstasy of spiritual bliss. Hence, his mysticism is unique in the sense that it gives flesh and spirit equal billing. "There is that lot of me, and all so luscious," he exulted. Such scrumptiousness merited dispersion in the gene pool: "On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes, / This day I am jetting the stuff of more arrogant republics." He reveled in his own anatomy, lovingly itemizing its sundry delights. No part was excepted. The scent of his armpits was "aroma finer than prayer," the fat on his bones incomparably sweet, his "firm masculine coulter" miracle enough to "stagger an infidel." His tactile sensations gave him an electric thrill:

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

To touch my person to someone else is about as much as I can stand.

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

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins.

By forty, his senses dulling, he no longer vaunted in his youthful sap. He abandoned dualism for a monism of soul. He was explicit: "I affirm now that the mind governs--and that all depends on the mind." Matter was now a mask that disguised reality. Whitman's demotion of matter coincided with a diminution in his poetic powers. He was more the poet of the body than he knew.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, his proximate mentor, Whitman considered material phenomena cryptic symbols for spiritual truths: "The kernel of every object that can be seen, felt, or thought of has its relations to the soul, and is significant of something there." Everywhere he turned, he found "letters from God" waiting to be deciphered:

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

Decoded by the Intuition, the letters revealed a suprasensible world infused with forces, purposes, designs, and patterns emancipated from mundane causality, coherence, logic, consistency, and probability. This ethereal wonderland obeyed a motto enunciated by the mystic poet William Blake: "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." Truth needn't be verifiable or amenable to falsification. It was circumscribed only by the limits of imagination. Afoot with his vision, Whitman saw as a mystic:

• Life is indestructible

There is no stoppage, and can never be stoppage;

If I and you and the worlds all beneath or upon their surfaces, and all the palpable life, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,

We should surely bring up again where we now stand.

• Death is illusory

All goes onward and outward and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

• God is immanent in the creation

I hear and behold God in every object,

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.

• Love unites all

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 my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.

• Evil is part of the good

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?

Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent.

My gait is no faultfinder's or rejector's gait,

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

• Truth comes by intuition, not analysis

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,

I have no mockings or arguments. I witness and wait.

• Truth is ineffable

Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face,

With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.

Whitman's mysticism and transcendentalism poses insuperable barriers for the rational mind. Since he treats intuition as a higher mode of cognition than reason, logic, and science, his claims can't be tested by his own criterion for truth. Everything he says could be true, just as humanity could have been created five seconds ago with stocked memories of a long past. Where reason must pander to imagination, anything goes. Submitted to vulgar analysis, the claims emerge as semantic vacuums, devoid of intelligible propositions. They have only psychological, metaphorical, or emotional import. Two examples should suffice.

Without a clear definition of "God," we can't know whether God is "in every object." Even if it could be shown "he" isn't, Whitman might still see and hear him there. Perceptions can be delusive, especially when core beliefs are at stake. In his poem "The Snow Man," Wallace Stevens notes that few people can survey nature and "behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

If truth is ineffable, beyond words, we can't determine whether it can be intuited. We don't know what to test for. No one can tell us. Whitman doesn't help: "There is that in me, I do not know what it is, but I know it is in me." To elaborate is futile: "I do not know it, it is without name, it is a word unsaid."

At first blush, modern physics seems to bulwark Whitman's claim that ultimate reality is ineffable and immaterial. The quantum world exhibits eerie properties that challenge verbal formulation and basic notions of materiality. Niels Bohr is reported to have said that anyone not confused by quantum mechanics doesn't understand it. Subatomic particles, the substratum of all reality, have been stripped of the irreducible thingness associated with matter. They are now treated as the bunching of force fields, best understood as mathematical constructs of human observers. Were Whitman alive, he might offer a triumphant toast.

While "Science Proves Mystics Right" might fly in a tabloid, it misses the point. The uncertainties of science don't validate the certitudes of mysticism. Mysticism offers an immutable prescription of how the universe must be. Science offers provisional descriptions of how it is thought to be. Science remains in constant flux as it assimilates new data. New theories could render quantum mechanics obsolescent (though the prospect is unlikely). The spirit of science is one of Olympian disinterest, unsullied by emotional bias. Mysticism plucks from the "incorporeal air" a host of moral tenets that cater to human desire.

Rather than science preying on him, Whitman preyed on science. That it might feed his cosmic affirmations, he mutilated its spirit. He wanted a universe suffused with love, goodness, joy, equality, and justice, not one pervaded by Herman Melville's inscrutable malice or Robert Frost's desert places. Hence, in his Weltanschauung, love becomes a cosmic force, evil a virtue, death an illusion, truth an intuition, etc. He pertinaciously denied metaphysical clout to pessimism. At times, his incorrigible yeasaying flirts with smugness:

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you my brother or my sister?

I am sorry for you. They are not murderous or jealous upon me;

All has been gentle with me. I keep no count with lamentation;

What have I to do with lamentation?

Notwithstanding his "defense" of science, Whitman was imbued with a Romantic mentality. Like Pascal, he thought everyone had an innate truth detector, the heart, which knew more than the head. Earnest feelings were an entrée to cosmic truths. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell spells out the problem with elevating one's own emotions to universal ordinances:

There are two objections to the practice of basing beliefs as to objective fact upon the emotions of the heart. One is that there is no reason whatever to suppose that such beliefs will be true; the other is, that the resulting beliefs will be private, since the heart says different things to different people.

Whitman thought all hearts spoke a common tongue because they had been instructed by the same cosmic tutor. What seemed true to him must be true for everyone. Had his mind been of a scientific cast, his reading of Ingersoll and Huxley would have raised a suspicion that hearts are multilingual. Fortunately for Walt Whitman, poetic license covers a multitude of dubious assumptions when the proponent is a great poet.

Credits: Sloan, Gary. "Walt Whitman: When Science and Mysticism Collide." Skeptical Inquirer. 27.2 ( 2003): 51-54.

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An Analysis of Whitman as a Poet

Somewhere in the beginning of our histories of Philosophy, a thinker had announced that the World was a 'Becoming'. That intuition was left to the philosophers until Walt Whitman arrived. And with Whitman the 'Becoming' seems not only to be realized, but to be participated in. All is urge in his poetry. His rhythms flow and break like waves. His stanza have not the measure that belongs to the poets of a world that is established—poets like Dante and Spenser, for instance—but the balances that are seen in nature—one living member balancing another living member, as in a branching tree.

His verse not merely departs from traditional forms. It creates a new and special norm.

Whitman is a master of language as well as a master of his special verse-form. His is one of the greatest vocabularies of any poet who has written in English. What an array of words is in his volume! squatter's words; hobo's words; drummer's words; foreign phrases; words out of scientific and philosophic texts, with all the words of literary and journalistic English. And he uses all these words with such precision and vigor that he stamps them anew. He glorified in the great language that he had mastered.

The whole of his work has an epic multiplicity and an epic majesty. Because he he created an epic in our time poets and critics have hailed him as the foremost modern poet.In the epics of the old world there is, first of all, a people (“great men, and heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; further still I find a people,” Nietzsche says, speaking of a sacred epic, the Old Testament). In Whitman's epic we do not find a people. He shows us America, but it is America in vista, and it is filled not with people, but with processions. The scope of this epic is not the fate of a people, but the life of a man—of a man whose soul, like the typical American whom he projects, has two hemispheres—“one of Love, the other of Dilation or Pride,” Man in his assertiveness and his amativeness; man in his day of action; man turning from life to death—these are the episodes in the epic that is called Leaves of Grass. The test of fine poetry is: Can we live with it? The test of great poetry is: Can we live by it? The poetry that is in this epic meets the last test.

Whitman is a rhapsodist with vision and inspiration, and, added to that, a poet with the clearest and most touching poetry.Then he goes on with his astonishing theme, and every line in his verse is so vividly felt and so powerfully realized that it stands as solid as a bar of iron. All that vigor would be nothing to us if there was not an assurance of spiritual vigor behind it. We are assured of that spiritual vigor by the wisdom that breaks through the lines like light; by the sense of the rhapsodist's own liberation; by the rhythm that establishes itself in the mind as one reads on. The power of visualizing that is revealed is amazing. Thousands of objects are shown, and each object is clear and in its own atmosphere. “Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself.”

Then there is in Whitman the clear and tender-toned poet. The themes of the poet are affection, reconciliation, death. When he sings of death he he a strangely beautiful accent. It is as if all the things that had kept him company—those tremendous shows and processions that his will and his vision bound him to—were folded away from him. He is as Ruth to the Universe's Naomi. “Whither thou goest I will go,” he says, and his trust makes beautiful his most haunting poems—“Passage to India,” the lovely “Death Carol” beginning “Come, Lovely and Soothing Death,” “Whispers of Heavenly Death;” “Darest Thou Now, O Soul;” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “The Last Invocation” with its hushed lyricism. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” the bird that sings of separation is named demon by him on purpose. Whitman surely was aware when he gave that strange name to the bird that the demon in tradition is the spiritual power beyond our own soul that prompts to extraordinary manifestations:

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)

Is it indeed towards your mate you sing? Or is it mostly to me?

For I was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you,

Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake,

And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,

A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

There are the noble poems of reconciliation in which the theme of death is blended—“Camps of Green,” “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “Reconciliation,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” John Addington Symonds has compared these poems with a Chorus in the Agamemmon of Aeschylus. “The pathos which unites these poets, otherwise so different in aim and sentiment, is deep as nature, real as life; but from this common root of feeling springs in one verse a spotless lily of pure Hellenic form, in the other a mystical thick growth of fancy, where thoughts brood and nestle amid tufted branches; for the powers of classic and modern singers upon the same substance of humanity are diverse.”

What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it; Not as a poet, but as a prophet. He occupies a curious and prominent position with power to greatly influence the future and present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard to find his parallel.

Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was a theorizer about society before he was a poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the wanted or lacking. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favorite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation of some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints.

His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order, the materials of their existence. He is "The Answerer;" he is to find some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.

Whitman's attitude is to give a certain unity of ideal to the average population of America—to gather their activities about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if only for the moment—the poet must portray that population as it is. Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not."

Whitman sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." He has had no difficulty in introducing his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living.

Whitman tries to reinforce his cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read "among the cooling influences of external nature;" and this recommendation is in itself a character of the work. It is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. And this spirit is the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straight-forward, something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge and thoughtful night."

In his character of idealist all impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Buddha, God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average man.

Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one than oneself is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight; but, like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. For he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security: "No array of terms," quotes he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above the highest human doubts and trepidations.

Whitman hates doubt, deprecates discussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present Christianized. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is one of encouragement all round.

So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a picture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, although eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself!" with this addition, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "I am large—I contain multitudes." Yet however wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his conscience; no one, however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting welcome.

Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence of thinking. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected principally because it was easy to write, although not without recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in English Old Testament.

He calls his verses "recitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form. "Easily-written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum of your climax and close." Too often, he is the only one who can perceive the rhythm; a great part of his work considered as verse is poor bald stuff: Considered, not as verse, but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant, is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being ridiculous. The result at times is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur and sentimental affectation or even downright nonsense.

One thing is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant production.

What are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no more color of coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary? He is a great critic. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from so healthy a book as the Leaves of Grass.

No poet was more consciously a national poet than was Walt Whitman. He insisted upon being the mandatory for America in the world of intuitions of forms. His poetry was to give a psychic unity to the States. It was to hold for the generations “the Stock Personalities,” exemplars in conduct and personality that would stand as archetypal figures. He celebrated a Democracy, but a Democracy that would never be the imposition of a majority-weight. Always there was to be the individual assertion, and the watchword, “Resist much, obey little,” was to be common. The flag—“the fanged and warlike mistress”—was to be the symbol, not so much if the country, as of the great Idea that was to realize itself. “For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals, for that idea the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders.” The Democracy of his songs can never become fixed into a system, for it is only for the rare souls that are susceptible of receiving a personal message. In politics it would always be futuristic. It is not a program, but a prophecy—a prophecy of the time when individualism and fellowship will be reconciled.

Whitman has left to America “the heroic landscape,” and “that rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart.” For America and for the world his poetry has been like a secret deposit of loadstone in some sea-neighboring mountain, deflecting the courses of voyagers and making them take thought of new ways of navigation.

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"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": A Critical Appreciation and Analysis

First published as “A Word Out of the Sea” in the 1860 edition of his collection Leaves of Grass and later published in the 1871 version using the final title. This long poem, one of the most powerful in the collection, is written in lyrical free verse. A boy stands by the seashore at night listening to the song of a mockingbird mourning for his mate; at the same time he listens to the death song of the sea and realizes that “my own songs awaked from that hour.” The mockingbird, singing to relieve his solitude, is a metaphor for the poetic spirit, while the sea is a symbol of the spiritual world to which poetry is witness.

"A Word Out of the Sea" ("Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"), which was initially published as "A Child's Reminiscence" in the Christmas issue of the New York Evening Post on December 24,1859.

The 1860 version of the poem begins abruptly: "Out of the rocked cradle." Whitman has frequently been praised for improving these lines to read in the final version: "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking." Their present-participial form and the rhythmic progression of dactyl-trochee are reminiscent of the regular and continuous rocking of the sea/cradle that is part of the poem's overall message of faith. But this message is implied rather than stated. The past tense and jolting rhythm of the initial lines, along with the third line that Whitman later deleted--"Out of the boy's mother's womb, and from the nipples of her breast"--are closer to the experience of discord, fracture, and separation that informed the 1860 version of the poem.

In seeking to improve his poems artistically, Whitman frequently eliminated or toned down passages of crisis, anxiety, and doubt, giving a smoother line to the arc of his own and the nation's development than had in fact been the case. The line "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," which became the title of the poem in 1871, is at odds with the demonic rumblings of the sea throughout the poem, whereas the 1860 title "A Word Out of the Sea" retains some of the ambiguity and dark mystery of the word that the poet receives from the sea: "Death, Death, Death, Death, Death."

"Once, Paumanok," Whitman says at the outset of his "Reminiscence," giving an American folk quality to his tale of love and loss:

When the snows had melted, and the Fifth Month
grass was growing,
Up this sea-shore, on some briers,
Two guests from Alabama--two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs, spotted with
brown,
And every day the he-bird, to and fro, near at hand,
And every day the she-bird, crouched on her nest,
silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

'I'he he-bird and she-bird exist in a fecund, sun-drenched, and seemingly timeless landscape of love, where they celebrate the union that sustains them against potentially divisive elements:

Shine! Shine!
Put down your warmth, great Sun!
While we bask--we two together.

Two together!
Winds blow South, or
winds blow North,
Day come white, or
night come
black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing
all time, minding no time,
If we two but
keep together.

This harmonious union is broken when "May-be killed, unknown to her mate," the she-bird disappears one day, never to return.

This story of love and loss has usually been treated as a dramatization of a personal experience.' In image and tone, the story seems to relate in particular to the Calamus poems and the homosexual love crisis that Whitman records in this sequence. If, however, we read the poem in the specificity of its historical context, we find a democratic elegy written at a time of national crisis that unites all the elements, psychosexual and political. To read the poem in relation to the division of the American Union is not to detract from its significance as a tale of love, loss, and artistic resolution but, rather, to recognize the historical roots of this elegy of dissolution in the state of the nation on the eve of the Civil War.

The poet's tale of two together is a communal idyll, projecting the democratic dream of America that fed the national imagination and spurred Whitman to pour out his own joyous carols. Local Paumanok is a grassy, spring landscape of fertility and generativity, where native American mockingbirds pass their time singing songs of love and union in a
version of American pastoral. Whitman evokes their idyllic existence in the vernacular idiom of the locale, using the Quaker term Fifth Month for May, and words such as he-bird and she-bird, briers, crouched, and peering.

As birds of passage, the "two guests from Alabama" nesting on the shores of Long Island organically join North and South in a single life-rhythm. The union of he-bird and she-bird sustains them through darkness and light and in the midst of potentially disruptive winds from north and south. When the she-bird disappears, the he-bird looks southward as the source of disunion, invoking the south wind to return his mate to him. All summer long his songs are absorbed bv the curious boy:

Yes, when the stars glistened,
All night long, on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer, wonderful, causing tears.

The fracture of idyllic union transforms the he-bird into a solitary singer of loss and separation. In contrast with the sun-drenched landscape of the two together, the bird is isolated in a nocturnal landscape that appears to be the site of violence and execution. No longer a communal singer of harmony and joy, the bird now comes closer to the neurosis and solipsism of one of Poe's lovelorn characters, tossing himself frantically on the grave of his beloved.

The transformation of the bird from a joyous singer of light and union to an elegiac singer of darkness and separation is similar to the transformation that Whitman himself underwent during the period of heightening schism in the nation between 1855 and 1860. In fact, Whitman points out the analogy: Into the past-tense narration from the child's perspective, he interjects the present-tense voice of the adult poet:

He called on his mate,
He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men,
know.
Yes, my brother, I know,
The rest might not--but I have treasured every note.

What Whitman knows, he tells us, comes from both shared experience and the specter of "White arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing"--reminding us of similar visions of shipwreck and drowning in "As I Ebb'd" and other 1860 poems.

The bird's song ends on a forlorn note: "Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved!," he repeats, shifting from the present to the past tense, as he recognizes the fact of "Two together no more." As the bird's song sinks, the poet's song rises in the heart of the boy. "The aria sinking,/All else continuing," Whitman says as he links the sinking of the bird's aria with the emergence of the "outsetting bard of love" in a sequence of participial lines that moves beyond the finality of loss and death, inscribing a unitary pattern of endless process:

The boy extatic--with his bare feet the waves, with
his hair the atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart pent, now loose, now at last
tumultuously bursting,
The aria's meaning, the ears, the Soul, swiftly
depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there--the trio--each uttering,
The undertone--the savage old mother, incessantly
crying,
To the boy's Soul's questions sullenly timing--some
drowned secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard of love.

Here for the first time the "fierce old mother" the sea, whose "angry moans" have surged as a hoarse undercurrent through the poem, joins the boy and the bird to become a major character in the drama; it is she who bears the "drowned" secret suspected by the bird, sought by the boy, and translated by the poet.

Although the poem may say something about the origins of Whitman's art, the interaction between bird and boy is less an enactment of Whitman's emergence as a poet than it is a dramatization of his reemergence as a poet after his crisis of the late 1850s. If the bird projects some of Whitrnan's despairing sense of personal and national loss, the emergent poet represents the renewed dedication to his art through which Whitman attempted to overcome his crisis of faith. In the final version of the poem, the poet emerged as "the outsetting bard" not the "outsetting bard of love," but the initial line is closer to his concept of his role in 1860 as the lover and fuser of his "heated, torn, distracted" times.

But while the bird's "despairing carols" deepen the boy's awareness and release him into song, the bird's effect is not wholly positive. In the final version of the poem, the bird is addressed as "Demon or bird!," echoing Poe's similar "bird or fiend" addressed to his fateful raven. A demon can be a muse, a genius, or an inspiration, but it can also be an evil spirit, a fiend from the underworld, or a demon like Poe's raven piercing the heart with its beak. The boy's reaction to the bird suggests both
senses of the term:

O throes!
O you demon, singing by yourself--projecting me,
O solitary me, listening--never more shall I cease
imitating, perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape,
Never more shall the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent
from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was
before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The dusky demon aroused--the fire, the sweet hell
within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

Echoing the refrain of "The Raven"--"Nevermore"--the entire sequence has a Poesque ring. The effect of the "dusky demon"--a line Whitman later toned down to "messenger"--is in fact mixed, summed up in the paradox "sweet hell"; sweet because he arouses the flames of desire and hell because this desire can never be satisfied in the world. The distance between the peaceful child and the awakened bard of love marks the distance Whitman traveled between his own visionary songs of 1855 and the elegiac poems of 1860.

Like the poet in "As I Ebb'd," the boy wants to be more than a solitary singer of separation and fracture; he wants a further clue that will allow him to move beyond the tragic perspective of the bird:

O give me some clew!
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!
O a word! O what is my destination?
O I fear it is henceforth chaos!
O how joys, dreads, convolutions, human shapes, and
all shapes, spring as from graves around me!
O phantoms! you cover all the land, and all the sea!
O I cannot see in the dimness whether you smile or
frown upon me;
O vapor, a look, a word! O well-beloved!
O you dear women's and men's phantoms!

As an intense response to the prospect of dissolution and chaos, the boy's words articulate the poet's mood in 1860: They link Whitman's uncertainty about his identity and destiny as a poet with his doubts about the fate of the nation and the order of the universe. Like the vision of the land as a corpse that he evoked in his antislavery notes and that flits specterlike in and out of his verse, the passage reverses the regenerative myth that is the source of his faith in human and national destiny. The passage registers the fear of some sort of catastrophe, as joys, dreads, convolutions spring at the poet and phantoms cover land and sea. 'I'hrough the dimness, the poet cannot tell whether he is moving toward light or darkness, regeneration or chaos. In the poem's final version, Whitman deleted all but the first two lines of the boy's desperate address to the sea. The change had the effect of removing from the poem the fact of historic struggle, the sense of panic about human destiny that in 1860 was bound up with the impending dissolution of the nation.

Like the "unsaid word" sought by the poet in "Song of Myself," at the end of "Out of the Cradle" the boy seeks "the word final, superior to all." But the word the boy receives in 1860 is not, as in 1855, "form and union and plan." The word he receives is DEATH:

Answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whispered me through the night, and very plainly
before daybreak,
Lisped to me constantly the low and delicious word
DEATH,
And again Death--ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my aroused child's heart,
But edging near, as
privately for me, rustling at
my feet,
And creeping thence steadily up to my ears,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.

The fivefold repetition of Death responds to the bird's plaint--"Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved!"--seeming to convey a life-affirming message of continuity and process, a message that is underlined syntactically by the passage's participial flow: answering, delaying, hurrying, hissing, edging, rustling, creeping. But from the child's point of view at least, there is still something "creepy" about Death. Like the monster-sea that overtakes Emily Dickinson on the outskirts of consciousness in "I Started Early Took My Dog," the sea that edges toward the child is not completely reassuring. Lisping and hissing, creeping and rustling like a snake, the sea's word of death is at best ambiguous.

The poem moves in the concluding sequence from past to present, returning to the adult frame of the poet. It is here that Whitman seeks to reconcile the dualities of the poem: life and death, love and loss, child and man, land and sea, sun and moon, day and night, south and north, past and present. The poet's final words are a unifying gesture, articulated in a single phrase that appears as a continuous flow out of the world of the sea and the preceding action of the poem.

Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of two together,
That was sung to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's
gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs, at random,
My own songs, awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song, and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to
my feet,
The sea whispered me.

Appearing in his 1860 role as unifier and fuser, Whitman resolves artistically the problem of dissolution by yoking the song of two together, the boy's responsive songs, and the word death in a single poetic phrase that encompasses as it inscribes a compensatory rhythm of life and death, love and loss. Beneath and beyond the poem's artistic resolution we still hear the rumbling of a darker sea that floats up the sediment and debris of "As I Ebb'd." But by using an artistic rather than a chronological ordering in the 1860 Leaves, Whitman presents "Out of the Cradle" as a progression away from rather than toward the wasted shores of "As I Ebb'd."

As a response to the fact of dissolution in self and world, "Out of the Cradle" marks a turn toward the other-worldly poetics of Whitman's later period. The poet locates the source of his songs not in democratic presence, but in absence and death, in the "unsatisfied love" and "unknown want" that he seeks to articulate in song but that can never be fully satisfied in the social world. If the poem dramatizes Whitman's renewed dedication to his art after his crisis of faith in the late 1850s, it is a dedication that arises out of the disjunction between desire and history, between the poet's democracy of the imagination and the fact of a disintegrating world.

There's so much whispering and breathing outward in this passage that we can't help but remember that the word "death" rhymes with "breath," even if Whitman doesn't take advantage of the rhyme. In fact, he doesn't need to; the sensual fullness of "death" is enough for him. He's obviously in love with the word, and not ashamed to show it. The word has a magical power for him; he chants it, turns it this way and that, like an amulet, and allows the poem to pass almost entirely into the word. Of course, the word is a name, and perhaps one of the most unusual names in our language, since no one who uses or has ever used the language has experienced the reality the name calls forth. So it's a particularly impotent name, as names go, and few poets have ever said it as successfully as Whitman does here.

Whitman, with the help of the ebbing rhythms of the ocean, wills the reality of death into the word. Or perhaps he seduces that reality, by singing to it. Whitman here is like Isis, who stung Re with a serpent and then withheld the cure for the sting until he told her his most secret name; when he did, he was completely in her power. Whitman in fact has seduced death into saying his own name.

Furthermore, Whitman has succeeded in uniting in this passage the opacity of language and the supple gestures of speech. He's also succeeded in uniting the sayable and the unsayable. These are perhaps the most brilliant features of this passage. The more you repeat a word, the more mute it becomes: you become aware of it not as a sound that denotes something, but simply as a kind of dumb sound. By chanting the word as he does, Whitman strikes an exact balance between on the one hand calling the reality of death forth with the insistence of his chant, the gesture of it, and on the other hand allowing that reality to pass over into silence, in the way any word repeated enough times passes over from meaning into pure, empty sound. All that can follow a passage like this is silence, itself a kind of death. Unfortunately, Whitman wrote another stanza after it. This has something of the effect of Beethoven continuing his A-minor quartet after the third movement, or of Rachmaninoff continuing his second symphony after his third movement. The only justification I can think of is that there's no way we can reenter the world with that kind of music in our heads; we need some ordinary language or ordinary music to ease the shock.

Autobiographical in content and operatic in structure, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," inspired by Whitman's walks on the Long Island beach, begins with an overture/introduction, followed by a long act divided into sequences of arias and recitatives.

The curtains part in the spring: in the fifth month, as the Quakers referred to the month of May. Nature in awakening. The stage is set.

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining as if they
were alive....
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings
I heard....
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the
mist….
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

As the narrator regresses and scenes drawn from his lonely childhood pass in review, he seems to take on two personalities: "A man, yet by these tears a little boy again" (18). The mature bard, the poem's author, progressively flooded by the emerging image of the boy he once was, lives out two identities.

With utmost maternal solicitude (emphasized by clusters of dependent phrases and clauses identified with the referrent "I", the fatherly man seeks to console the sensitive and deeply distressed little boy. In so doing, he may believe he can help him cope with his misfortune. Distinctions between youth and old age give rise to particularly poignant moments -- sometimes as obscure projections, in other instances as strong imagings.

The mature poet now resurrects a specific sequence in his past: he sees himself as a "curious boy" who has just discovered some mockingbirds nesting nearby. Although intent upon peering into their secret world, he is very careful not to disturb the family's joyous harmony:

And their nest, four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

The mockingbird is soon to become the focus of the drama enacted.

The clarity and lyrical quality of Whitman's verbal tones, as these resound in the following lines, shed an atmosphere of foreboding and distress. So intense is the bird's melodious interlude, ranging as it does from highs to lows, so gripping are the images accompanying its performance, that it may be viewed as a poetic transliteration of an aria from La Favorita, which Whitman heard in New York City performed by the contralto Marietta Alboni. The continuation of the mockingbird's warblings and threnodies might also have been inspired by and paralleled to the passionate tones of the famous tenor Allesandro Bettini, singing the male lead in the same opera. About him Whitman wrote:

"His voice has often affected me to tears. Its clear, firm, wonderfully exalting notes, filling and expanding away; dwelling like a poised lark up in heaven; have made my very soul tremble. --Critics talk of others who are more perfectly artistical. But the singing of this man has breathing blood within it; the living soul, of which the lower stage they call art, is but the shell and the sham".

That Whitman's mockingbird took on human dimensions is not surprising, given the number of allegorical birds appearing in religious as well as in literary texts throughout the centuries: the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Horus), the Ramayana (Garuda), the Koran (Ababil), and Attar's Conference of the Birds (Simorgh), the Song of Solomon, not to mention the writings of such poets as Robert Browning ("Home-thoughts, from Abroad"), Emily Dickinson ("No ladder needs the bird.... "), Alfred Lord Tennyson (The Eagle"), and Alfred de Musset ("May Night"). The latter's depictions of the allegorical pelican, a personification of the suffering and alienated poet, whose sorrows are transformed into food by the creative individual, may be regarded to a certain extent as a precursor of Whitman's stanzas.

As the focus of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" changes, the father mockingbird and his family take center stage. His joyful aria now rings with masculine bravura, confident as he is in a life that has brought him thrilling and unending romance.

Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth, great sun!
While we bask, we two together.

Naively, the father bird rhapsodizes over his mate in glowing sonorities -- over their eternal passion for one another and the beauty of their young love.

Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all the time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Soon we learn in the recitative that fate has stricken its blow -- cruelly, incisively, and without warning. The she-bird has vanished. The crash of breaking waves accompanies the revelation of the event; their hissing sounds, reverberating in the distance, preludes the blackness of night enclothing an atmosphere of doom. The rising moon's soft glow has a calming effect on the raging undulations of the ocean, but only for a moment, after which they break out more formidably than before: "the hoarse surging of the sea". The sibilants in the just-quoted line underscore the bird's sorrow and its rage over life's unwarranted cruelty.

The boy, identifying with the bird's lamentations, is encapsulated in the drama. His loss of identity mystifies him; his loss of self-control wipes away the rest of the world from his focus. Wrapped in silence, he listens to the bird's threnodies, which are now his own. Gone are his former childlike excitement, his bounding energy, his carefree ways. Deeply sensitive, he feels into the bird's mourning cries: "Blow! Blow! blow!"
it warbles, apostrophizing the wind, begging it to blow his mate back to him. Night descends, the most painful of hours, finding the bird alone on the dunes, still intoning his cry of despair.

Transfixed, the boy listens in silence to the rhythms of the pounding waves, which once had -- but no longer -- a cradling effect on him, like a mother rocking and cradling her baby in her ocean-uterus. Has the seemingly endless body of water now become an ocean-coffin? The bird continues his vocalizations in true Romantic style, allowing his feelings, but only momentarily, to be lured into the pleasures of past times, into the oblivion of the water's now lulling effect.

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.

The drama intensifies as harsh sounds again burst forth, paralleling the crashing noise made by the "slapping waves." Every shadow the bird sees in the distance, every form, every decoy, and breaker tossing its spray, raises his hope of finding his mate. "Loud! loud! loud! / Loud I call to you, my love".

Because he is no longer blind to the dualities of life, both torment and joy are imbricated on his verbal palette. Not one without the other. His art, he assures himself, will enable him to meld pain and happiness into the poetic process. In a touching and loving apostrophe to the bird, he says:

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating
you ....

The raw experiences of life, the mature poet has learned, must now be transformed into the work of art: the personal crises and the original sensations that had stirred both the young boy and the mature man must now be impersonalized. To verbalize feeling involves discipline, vision, and the ability to formalize the informal.

Only now is the presence and message of the "savage old mother" clarified for the mature poet.

Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again, death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, 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 laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.

As previously suggested, the archetypal mother/ocean figure is identified with the unconscious. So demanding a parent may she have become that her impact on her son may have taken on "savage" proportions. In Whitman's case, his great attachment to his mother had transformed a positive into a negative power. Indeed, he even sought to play the "mother" to her, helping her financially and emotionally to care for his siblings. So incapable was he of breaking away from her that he never succeeded in cutting the umbilicus. For the poet and man, such attachment spelled death!

The poem's macabre soundings of incessant waves fiercely crashing are metaphors for the heaving pulsations emanating from Whitman's subliminal spheres, endlessly spelling out the same message. Whitman has succeeded in imbricating his invasive conflictual emotions into the work of art.

My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me.

No longer only a threatening power at the poem's conclusion, the immortal mother/ocean has become a wondrously comforting force, a nurturer of life. She, who had brought the bard into the world, had also been the one to have stirred his poetic voice. Now she invites the poet to awaken to a new world. Strengthened by his new found inner harmony, he finds himself able to compose his message of faith in his creative powers.

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