Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself
by Jerome Loving
California. 595 pp. $35.00
The only way to become a poet of genius is to be born with a radiant gift. But even that is not enough: one must also be able to turn to artistic advantage whatever may chance in one’s direction. Walt Whitman (1819-92) lived just the life he needed to make himself the bard of American democracy.
Jerome Loving, the author of four previous books on 19th-century American literature, finds the sources of Whitman’s exemplary democratic sentiments in his having had a rough life. He started out common as dirt, and not even very good dirt, being the second of nine children born to an unsuccessful Long Island farmer who became an unsuccessful Brooklyn house-builder. After attending the only public school in Brooklyn—a despised charity school for the children of the poor—Whitman went to work as an office boy for a small law firm at the age of eleven. One of the lawyers tutored him in writing and bought him membership in a lending library—“the signal event of my life up to that time,” Whitman would remember.
A couple of years later, the boy found a place in a newspaper printing office. Except for a miserable interlude as a small-town schoolmaster, Whitman would toil in the newspaper business into his thirties, graduating from printer to writer to editor. He was good at his trade, but journalism was not his vocation. Reading the Bible, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Nibelungenlied, Dante, and Shakespeare showed him the way his life would take.
Whitman set to work on Leaves of Grass in late 1854; henceforth, the usual ambitions had to yield to a consuming need. As Loving declares, “he practically walked away from his life to write his book.” The first edition of Leaves of Grass, a rather slender volume of poems, appeared a year later, and Whitman added steadily to the collection over the years; by the seventh and so-called definitive edition of 1881, he had a hefty tome, over 400 pages long, comprising poems as various in length as they are in quality, from lapidary observations of a line or two to his longest and most famous poem, “Song of Myself.”
The only thing that could really distract him from poetry was war. In December 1862, Whitman read in a New York newspaper that one of his brothers had been wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and the poet headed off to Virginia to find him. The suffering that Whitman witnessed—“war-life, the real article”—moved him to settle in Washington, D.C., and spend the rest of the Civil War as a volunteer nurse in the Union military hospitals. There, by his count, he ministered to over 100,000 wounded soldiers, some of whom became his devoted friends.
After the war, Whitman stayed on in the capital, earning his living as a lower-tier government bureaucrat. Then in 1873 he suffered the first of several strokes, and was never quite the same. Moving to Camden, New Jersey, a working-class suburb of Philadelphia, he lived a generally quiet life, continuing to write poems and essays and occasionally venturing forth to give lectures (mostly on Lincoln, whom he falsely claimed to have known).
As he grew old, he became something of an eminence. Thomas Eakins painted him. Horace Traubel, the American Eckermann, recorded his conversation in several volumes. Oscar Wilde paid him court, and told courtiers of his own that he had left with Whitman’s kiss upon his lips. (Homosexuals have recently claimed Whitman as one of their own, but Loving does not buy it.) At the age of seventy-two, he died of pneumonia, a complication of the tuberculosis he had been carrying since the Civil War.
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Ordinary life, even low life, was the stuff of Whitman’s poetry, and he found it near to hand. In the fate of certain members of his own family, Whitman saw, and felt, what life can do to those unfortunate enough to get inescapably on its wrong side. His elder brother was a violent alcoholic; his youngest brother was mentally retarded and lame; another brother’s widow became a prostitute. Out of this misery, Loving suggests, came poetry of great power. The outcast, the degraded, the criminal, the wretched of every description were to enjoy prominent places at the egalitarian banquet Whitman’s poetry advertised. There, in a democratically-minded improvement on New Testament teaching, everyone would be called, and everyone chosen:
I will not have a single person
slighted or left away,
The kept woman, sponger, thief,
are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited,
the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between
them and the rest.
Whitman’s ambition was to fill his poetry with as much life as it could possibly hold, but doing so required a poetic form more elastic and accommodating than traditional verse. According to Loving, the poet found the model for the formal liberty he was seeking in the art of supreme artifice: opera. “This kind of accompanied declamation,” Loving writes, “in which the actors sing the words in irregular rhythms simulating speech, suggested to Whitman that words in a poem needed to sound the human rhythm of speech rather than the cadenced rhythm of traditional poetry.” In bursting the constraints of rhyme and meter, Whitman invented a poetic form that embodied the same virtues he attributed to democracy and nature alike: namely, freedom and variety.
And what freedom and what variety. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote that there is nothing so unpoetic as modern democratic life. Whitman’s appointed task was to prove Tocqueville wrong: democracy would produce a poetry distinctively its own, and richer in its themes than that of the aristocratic past. Thus, in “Song of the Exposition,” Whitman honors the American Muse, ever alert to the splendid in the humdrum:
By thud of machinery and shrill
steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe,
gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable
intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the
kitchen ware!
And in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of his best poems, he records the magnificence that, in a democracy, is always near to hand and that every human soul is somehow aware of:
The glories strung like beads upon my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Whitman’s greatness is in the intensity of those “smallest sights and hearings,” in the determination to illuminate the stuff of everyday life with the certainty that the dustiest corner of creation holds its marvels—and that he, Walt Whitman, holds them, in his poetry, for the rest of us. As he vaunts in “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
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That is a lot for any one man to contain, and sometimes Whitman staggers under the weight. His preaching of the sublimity of the lowest pleasures, the greatness of the heroic outlaw—most notably in such poems as “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers,” “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d,” “Native Moments”—has had a pernicious influence: Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg are among those who took this doctrine to heart, and the damage they have done with it is incalculable.
There are other flaws, more subtle but just as serious. Whitman understands himself to be the greatest sage that democracy has produced, and in “Song of the Answerer” he lets everyone know how far his purview extends: “The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,/ His insight and power encircle tilings and the human race.” He is also smugly certain that he comprehends the suffering soul, and in “Song of Myself” he is the first to say just how well he comprehends it, and how compassionate he is: “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” In fact, Whitman slips into and out of other people’s agonies so easily, he hardly feels them at all:
The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets.
All these I feel or am.
Scene-painting of this kind is vivid enough, in its lurid way, yet neither here nor anywhere else in Whitman’s poetry is there even an inkling of what it really is to be a soul in torment, a soul in whose pain the universe seems to have concentrated all its capacity for evil. A man in agony needs to know why he is suffering, but Whitman lacks the power of imagination—of compassion in its highest form—to give evil its due; and so he comes nowhere near the remorseless sharpness with which the Book of Job or the poetry of Victor Hugo or the novels of Dostoevsky render and comprehend the world’s pain. When he announces, in perhaps his most famous line, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there,” one feels obliged to protest that he is not, he did not, he was not.
Yet if evil is not his natural element, goodness is, and exhilaration at life’s sweetness his most winning mood. Moreover, even when he comes up short, extolling the supreme joys of living beyond good and evil, or making suffering disappear with a wave of the hand, he remains a rhetorician of such beguiling power that more often than not one feels the temptation to yield. To have this power is a dangerous gift; Whitman always uses it greatly, even if he does not always use it wisely.
Jerome Loving’s biography ably relates the life from which the poetry was made, and is especially useful on the response to it by Whitman’s contemporaries. Unfortunately, although he calls his book a critical biography, only intermittently does Loving have anything revealing to say about the poetry itself. But it is to the poetry that one should turn, and one should try to take it in large draughts. For there one will find in abundance America’s glory and hope, its sorrow and its foolishness, its worst along with some of its very best.
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