All about Walt Whitman

2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam

In this chapter we are discussing themes in or related to Leaves of Grass. We shall address now the following subjects: the “poetic function” of the language, which is part of the “Scheme of verbal communication” (discussed in the next chapter, in section 3.2, “The method”); how this function relates to Emerson’s idea of poetry, and how his conception will lead us to another poet, William Blake, and then to religiousness and the mythical figure of Adam, as well as the connection between these topics and Whitman. The fact is that the poetic function has a preponderating position in poetry or in creative prose, such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, because this is the function where the language is turned upon itself, where the writer searches for the most beautiful or precise configuration possible to express an emotion or an idea. On the other hand, we can not deny the apparently opposite factor, by which we mean the appearance or existence of poetic constructions that show up in a given language, which is inherent to Emerson’s idea that “Language is fossil poetry”, or the creation of proto-poets long forgotten, as we will see in a quotation below. In both cases, modern poetry and “fossil poetry”, the poetic function is the primary linguistic factor under focus. So, this idea of poetry appearing naturally in common speech had been expressed by Whitman’s Master[1], Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist (1803–82), who was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Divinity School.[2]

Before we present some of Emerson’s ideas, let us take a brief look at his life and works. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, the “Sage of Concord” (he later lived in Concord, Massachusetts) established himself as a spokesman of transcendentalism and as a major figure in American literature. Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that thrived in New England from 1836 to 1860. It originated among a group of intellectuals who developed their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. They were inspired by Kant and English authors such as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Emerson believed that the “moral law” was the “transcendental law, through which man discovers the nature of god, a living spirit.” The ideas of transcendentalism were expressed by Emerson in essays such as “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet” and “The Over-Soul” (1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854), “the revelation of the simplicity and divine unity of nature”. The movement began with the meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. Thoreau, like Emerson, lived in Concord and attended Harvard College, which they paid by doing chores, given their scarce livelihood. Later, both became lecturers. Both, too, were the first persons to recognize Whitman’s poetic genius from the beginning. Thoreau is also the author of “Civil Disobedience”, “the origin of the modern concept of pacific resistance”.

Now, we shall see how the poet is conceived by Emerson as the artist who primarily works on the language to create a new view of the world. In “The Poet”[3], Emerson states that “Every word was once a poem.”  The “[…] world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named, yet they cannot originally use them.”  So, it is “The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, [who] gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object.”, vivifying them, making them “new” to the new eyes that now see them. The poet, “through that better perception, […] stands one step nearer to things”, articulating his vision in images that make what he sees visible to the common eye, “[…] so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.” This process is an act of de-reification of words, an act of treating the language as a living organism that is created and changed by its users and that modifies through time, in form and meaning, but keeps in itself the original meanings, which make up what we could define as originary, primeval or primordial language. In this sense, the language is not just a physical object limited in itself. So, the role of poetry, or of poets, is to revitalize the language by trying to rediscover or search for what the objectification of the language does not allow us to see any more, the hidden beauty of each word. In fact, Whitman uses the word “primeval” to describe forests[4], times[5] and also words, as in “I speak the pass-word primeval”, in section 24 of “Song of Myself”. In the cluster “Children of Adam”, he uses “original” in the same sense when he describes himself as Adam, “with the potent original loins”, the “chanter of Adamic songs” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.264), necessarily written in an original language.

In medical terms, the process of vivifying, healing or nourishing parts of the body, that is, the injection or supplying of blood or fluid into an organ or tissue to provide oxygen and nutrients, or drugs for treating diseases like cancer, is called perfusion. In poetic terms, we could say that this revitalization of ancient myths and poetry is an artistic perfusion, in the sense that the poet injects new blood, new energy, to bring the old corpses to life, as Whitman states in his 1855 Preface when he says that “America does not repel the past” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.616), and that “the greatest poet […] drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. He says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson—he places himself where the future becomes present” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.623). Whitman also expressed this perfusing and invigorating gesture in section 40 of “Song of Myself,” in a passage that portrays a resurrecting and healing act:

To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,

Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,

Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will,

O despairer, here is my neck,

By God! you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,

Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,

Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.[6]

At the height of his creative power and health, he felt capable of infusing life in “any one dying”, as well as being able to join past, present and future in a single act, as he wrote in the Preface and also in the Leaves, for example, in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, when he sang that he was the “uniter of here and hereafter” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.207). In reality, he was bolder than that, for “hereafter”, besides meaning “in a future time” or “after this”, also means “afterlife”, “immortality”. This way, he is saying that he knows what happens after death and is not afraid of it, and that no one needs to be, as he asserts throughout the Leaves. This is a way of creating peace in the present, for the poet assures us that there are no mysteries to be feared in the passage from this to an afterlife. We are convinced that the poet is in reality possessed of an immense power, the power to revive the past and unite the present and the future, and even to unite the material world to the immaterial, invisible world. This peace of mind is certainly what gives him the serenity to accept and write about his own future invisibility, his departure from the material world, as he does in the poem “Full of Life Now”, from “Calamus” (1860):

FULL of life now, compact, visible,

I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,

To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,

To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,

Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,

Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you, and become your             comrade;

Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)[7]

(WHITMAN, 2002, p.116)

In fact, we do not need to know whether he had all this power; the relevant factor in this context is that we know that he believed it to be real and expressed it in his poetry. This is in accordance with what Emerson had expounded on the subject of the poets’ ability to see beyond the limits of the vision of the common man. In order to write this type of message in a poem, the poet must be “one step nearer to things”, he must be seeing something that most common people do not, and for him what separates the visible from the invisible has to be only “glass”, indeed.

Consequently, as the poet is the one who is capable of conveying the knowledge he acquires in his vision to the readers, we could argue that, according to this conception, the poet may be called visionary, because of his “better perception” through which the material world becomes “glass” and the immaterial world becomes visible. However, we have to be careful in dealing with this subject, for the term visionary has distinctive connotations that apply specifically to two different types of people. Therefore, visionary can be someone who is characterized by vision or foresight (perception of events before they happen), and also someone who has fantasies, dreams, and visions, such as a seer. In this case, the two types of visionary people are the ones who may be given to apparitions, prophecies, or revelations, and the ones who are utopian and idealistic. The first type can be exemplified by William Blake (1757–1827), the English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. He did have visions and did see angels. He recorded these visions in books such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793; Albion is the ancient name of Great Britain) or America: a Prophecy (1793), Europe a Prophecy (1794), and engravings. The second type of visionary can be defined by a passage in Canby’s biography of Whitman, Walt Whitman, An American:

One remembers that the real visionaries of the twenties of this century were not idealists, but the supposedly hard-headed industrialists, financiers, and politicians who have been proved by the depression and the war to have been dreamers, whose fantasies of progress were not even good dreams, and emphatically did not come true. (1943, p.266)

Canby uses the definition above to emphasize that Whitman’s “democratic idealism […] is in no sense visionary” (1943, p.265), that there is no utopia in his works and that Whitman’s “ideas are flexible, often indefinite, but they are based on what became an extraordinarily wide and intuitive knowledge of the heart of the common people, and […] only along the path he indicates can democracy succeed.”  According to Canby, Whitman can not be called a visionary of the second type, since he does not fit into this definition.[8] On the other hand, by using Canby´s own words mentioned above, we must relate Whitman to the other type of visionary, the one in which Blake fits into, for both poets present this prophetic trait and both have visions. Prophetically speaking, they are very close, for both are deeply religious men. The following verses from Whitman’s “The Sleepers” show the readers the way into his prophetic and seeing soul. The poem, which first appeared in the 1855 edition as the fourth of the twelve original poems and was titled “Night Poem” in 1856, has eight sections and in short goes from a pessimistic view of the world to an optimistic one; this is the opening passage:

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of the sleepers,

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,

Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping. (WHITMAN, 2002, p.356)

Then, he continues describing his capacity to see through the night: “Now I pierce the darkness—new beings appear, / The earth recedes from me into the night, / I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.” Going from “bedside to bedside”, he adds: “I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the other dreamers.” As he sang in “Song of Myself”: “I am he attesting sympathy” (section 22), he is the one who can feel what others feel, which he states in another section (48): “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,”, that is, without sympathy, one is emotionally dead. Nevertheless, he continues to give us more details of his vision from “The Sleepers”: “I see the hiding of douceurs [French for “delights”], I see nimble ghosts whichever way I look” (2002, p.357). In section seven, the terrible sights are over, and the poet finally sees everything in the light:

I swear they are all beautiful,

Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is   beautiful,

The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

Peace is always beautiful,

The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

The myth of heaven indicates the soul,

The soul is always beautiful […]

(2002, p.362)

As we have said before, Whitman has this knowledge or intuition of the nature of the material and immaterial worlds. As a result, he was never afraid of death, he actually welcomed it. The following verses from “Song of Myself” will illustrate the point, because they show, from the beginning, his view on this subject: “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death” (section 6); “I know I am deathless” (section 20); “Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!” (section 45); “the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me” (section 42); “No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.” (section 48); “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.” (section 49). His being “at peace about God, and about death” indicates that he was aware of the “myth of heaven”, which made him sing its beauty. And this beauty means that, in his vision, the only thing that dies is our body, which becomes “good manure” (section 49) for the vegetation, which implies that we, like all other living beings, follow the cycles of nature of birth and death. The four last verses above make a logical statement: the beauty of the soul is based on the beauty of heavenly peace.

Another aspect presented in the passage above, besides his being at peace with death, is his not being afraid of the night, which he, in the poem “The Sleepers”, depicts as his mother:

They pass the invigoration of the night, and the chemistry of the night, and         awake.
I too pass from the night,

I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again, and love you.

Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?

I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,

I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,

I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you, but I           know I came well, and shall go well.

I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes;

I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you.

(2002, p.550-1)

We believe that it is his feeling at peace with everything, with God, death, night, and nature that creates space in his soul for never losing hope in God and other entities, even when he, like any other human being, undergoes hardships. Even in moments of despair, described in poems such as “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” or “The Prayer of Columbus”, in the end, his hope for better and happier times always overcome his ephemeral sadness and suffering. In the worst moments, he would “cling fast” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.542) to God, or to the Son of God, the “Lamb”[9]. This deep religiousness, which Whitman considers to be what constitutes the “union and rapport among all the poems and poets of the world, however wide their separations of time and place and theme[10],” is what links Whitman to the poet mentioned above, William Blake, who is also a very religious poet. For this reason, we quote below a poem by Blake about the Lamb: the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence[11]:

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

“Pipe a song about a Lamb!”

So I piped with merry cheer.

“Piper, pipe that song again;”

So I piped: he wept to hear.

“Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer:!”

So I sang the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.

“Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.”

So he vanish’d from my sight;

And I pluck’d a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

Curiously, Blake uses a reed[12] to make a pen to write his songs, the same reed that Whitman chose to be the symbol of comradeship in his Leaves, and also of writing, music (the reed is used to make pipes as well), and closeness to nature[13], as we have seen in the section on calamus. In addition, Blake is asked by a “child” that is “on a cloud” to pipe a song “about a Lamb” and to write “happy songs [that] every child may joy to hear”, indicating that he is receiving messages from an ethereal[14] being, that is, from someone who appeared to him in a spiritual vision, requesting him to convey a message that may bring “joy” to children[15]. Curious, also, is the fact that Whitman wrote a poem called “Mediums”, in which he call them “divine conveyers”, such as poets who are both visionaries and prophets, like Blake. In this context, we might say that they were mediums as well, in the sense that a medium is a person who serves as channel for thoughts. Whitman, already in his 1855 Preface, hinted at this subject, relating the poet to mediums: “The great poet has less a mark’d style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.624). He described these traits in the poem “Mediums”, speaking of his prophetic visions:

They shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos,
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive,
They shall be complete women and men, their pose brawny and supple, their drink water, their blood clean and clear,
They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products, they shall    enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, bread-stuffs, of Chicago the great    city,
They shall train themselves to go in public to become orators and oratresses,
Strong and sweet shall their tongues be, poems and materials of poems shall       come from their lives, they shall be makers and finders,
Of them and of their works shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey     gospels,
Characters, events, retrospections, shall be convey’d in gospels, trees,      animals, waters, shall be convey’d,
Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be convey’d.

(WHITMAN, 1996, p.590)

Mediums with sweet tongues that will produce poems and “convey gospels” certainly might be called poets too. Poets that will chant the “future”, as he does in section 2 of “Passage to India”, where he predicted the reality of today, when networks are part of our daily lives: “Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? / The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work” (1996, p.532). This is not even an interpretation of his words, it is the literal meaning: he envisaged an earth “connected by net-work”, “The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires” (sec. 1, p.531), based on the scientific advances of his times, which already had developed a technology that was capable of establishing communication between America and Europe by submersed cables. This was the case of the Atlantic cable in 1866 (after four previous attempts: one in 1857, two in 1858, and another in 1865) or the construction of the Suez Canal, which joined the Mediterranean and Red seas, begun in 1859 and opened in 1869. Whitman’s prophetic capacity has been attested by critics and biographers. Allen writes: “Walt Whitman must be given credit for being truly prophetic, in every sense of the word, in foreseeing the importance of humanizing science” (2000, p. xviii). Again, Allen, this time in The Solitary Singer, provides us with some prophesying or predictions by Whitman. On page 213, he writes on the celebration of “the laying of the Atlantic cable” in 1858:

[…] Whitman declared this was the biggest celebration in the history of the city. [August 17] […] Previously, on July 17, he had also discussed the need for “A Northern Pacific Railroad” and predicted its construction. Some years later he would be able to celebrate these two engineering feats in one of his great poems, “Passage to India.”

On page 228, Allen comments on Leaves by quoting a passage from the poem “Starting from Paumanok” (section 17), as follows:

O expanding and swift! O henceforth,

Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious,

A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,

A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,

New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise,

You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,             stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

(WHITMAN, 1996, pp.186-7)

Allen says that although there is a positive atmosphere in the first part above, the second shows that “[…] the new age will not come into existence calmly and peacefully.” About the oceans, waves and storms, he says:

It is not clear whether the poet was actually prophesying about himself or the nation. If himself, he perhaps anticipated a period of great creative activity; if the nation, he was indeed a true prophet, since this must have been written before 1860. But it is significant that his mood so closely paralleled the actual condition of “The States” between 1856 and 1860.

(ALLEN, 1955, p.228)

Allen is referring to the turbulent state of affairs in the U.S. at that time, politically, socially and economically with the withdrawal of 11 Southern states from the Union in 1860-1861, which led to the Civil War. Whitman’s capacity to look into the future is also testified by another biographer and critic, Canby, who was discussing Whitman’s abilities as a prophet in the field of democracy, because, already at that time, Whitman saw the “Corruption, degeneracy, pettiness, both physical and spiritual” (1943, p.263) that were devastating the United States of the 1850’s and later the 1870’s: “Was he a good prophet in his recital of the dangers to democracy lying just ahead? His prophecy was bitterly good, because bitterly true. […] Yes, it was true prophecy” (1943, p.264). Even though we might run the risk of contradicting Canby in his view of Whitman (1819-1892), we must say that the poet may be highly praised for his personal capabilities to foresee the future and even when it comes to democracy, for in this field it was Canby who highlighted the poet’s “flexible ideas” and his capacity to grasp what was taking place in the heart of the people.

As Whitman had been deeply involved in politics in his younger years and had an accurate perception of people’s feelings and attitudes, we must agree that he was prophetic in this field. However, as we have commented before, he was also utopian or idealistic, for he dreamed of a nation united by comradeship and mutual love, as is depicted in “Calamus”. This idea of a loving society is the same ideal society or community that appears in “Children of Adam”. The only difference in relation to “Calamus” is that in “Children of Adam” the focus is on procreation and love between the sexes, which Whitman defined as amativeness, as we explained in section 2.5.4. As the title of this cluster indicates, the poems are about the creation of a new garden in the New World by “Adam”, together with his beloved “Eve”. In reality, the two clusters address the same subject, which is the necessity to create union in a Nation that was heading to division. The two groups of poems first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which also featured Drum-Taps, the book of poems on the nation at war, as we have explained in section 2.1. To introduce the subject of Adam and its connection with Democracy, we will supply some more information on the life of Whitman and North America in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Until 1849, when Whitman left the field of politics, he had been a member of the Democratic Party and later of the new Republican Party, while still living in Brooklyn and New York City. During and after the Civil War he lived in Washington, the capital city of the United States, where, from 1865 to 1874, he was a Government clerk. He had then inside knowledge of practical politics and he knew its real effects on the American spirit, which he had a close relationship with when he helped the sons of the Nation in the improvised hospitals as a volunteer nurse[16]. It was in Washington where he witnessed procrastination taking place at the core of the federal administration, where he watched his beloved countrymen sick and exhausted by the war be deceived by the Government which they served with their own lives. From his office he saw the men’s miserable state, coming from the hospitals to collect their pay and find nothing, just waiting for interminable weeks for an income that would take them home. The poet, who worked first at the Paymaster’s office (ALLEN, 1955, p.286), saw the sad faces of the soldiers when they received nothing there. Thus, he could not enjoy the view he had from the beautiful place where he worked. Many of these suffering soldiers were the same ones he had taken care of while working as a nurse in military hospitals. He felt this problem on his own skin, for he spent his own income to buy the soldiers food and writing material. He was aware of both sides of the situation, for he could observe and experience them from the point of view of the employees and employers, since he was close to soldiers and government officials. This direct knowledge of the situation is what gave him the capacity to predict the dangers lying ahead on the path of democracy. With all this information, it was not difficult to anticipate what could happen if the actions taken in the future were the same as the ones taken at that time.

It is probable that these manifold aspects of life in the nineteenth century in the United States are what prompted him to perform the incarnation of a creation myth, trying to make an “indissoluble” continent, and “magnetic lands” with the “life-long love of comrades”. Especially when we consider that he had a profound feeling of union for the nation and a clear perception of the division taking place in politics since the 1840’s. As we have written before, he had been able to predict the approaching conflict. As he was disappointed in politics, his creative power needed another means of expression. The best one for him was poetry, which he had been practicing along with his journalistic career. In poetry, he would be able to dream about the “inseparable cities” of this new nation, free from the old problems, cities that would be the home for “Democracy”, the poet’s “femme”, in the case of “Calamus”, and   “Eve”, in the case of “Children of Adam”, where he would be “Adam”, the big Father of all the sons of the Nation: the citizens, the comrades, all of them the children living in a new garden in a new  world. Although these two books are apparently dealing with opposite themes, adhesiveness or love between the same sex, and amativeness or love between the sexes, their background subject is love as the linking factor uniting all the inhabitants of the country.

It is undeniable that the great force behind all these elements is the poet’s love for his country, his people, everything good or bad, and his desire, as well as his inspiration, to express this feeling towards his nation in poetry. One thing that is visible in his poetry is the fact that what he was writing in his book he was actually accomplishing in his private and public life. He did have this infinite disposition to dedicate his energy to the care for his family as well as his friends, and the thousands and thousands of soldiers he cared for. Thus, what he predicted and promised to do in “Song of Myself”, in reality he did in New York and Washington: he visited prisons and hospitals[17], he denounced slavery in New York[18], and later he cared for wounded soldiers in camp hospitals. In his private life he did that also; after his father’s death on July 11, 1855, just five days after the first advertisement of the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in a newspaper, he took his place in supporting his mother (until her death in 1874) and siblings, whom he watched over as his own children.

What we are trying to explain is that here we have reached the core of his action through life: his coherence linking his private, public, journalistic and poetic attitudes. Everything is connected, as we will see in chapter 3, section 3.5, where we discuss about Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian sociologist, who said that Whitman had this Spanish personality, in which all these traces are connected and we cannot separate one from the other, for all of them are essential parts of the same complete man. This is why we are trying to deal with all these various aspects of the man, the poet, the politician, the citizen at the same time, to show his comprehensive approach to humanity in North America in the nineteenth century.

Thus, apart from his visionary skills, both in his journalistic/political activities and in his poetic craft, he also had the adamic capacity for naming things, because “The world and history lay all before him. And he was the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him” (LEWIS, 1955, p.5). This passage by Emerson in “The Poet” helps to clarify the idea:

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.[19]

It is of much interest to us that Emerson refers to the poet as the “namer”, the person who goes about naming things after their appearance or essence. It is probable that Emerson, who was a minister, was inspired in his idea of the poet as capable of naming things by the figure of Adam in the Bible, who received from the Lord his capacity for naming things and living beings, as we can see in this quotation from the book of Genesis, chapter 2:19-20:

19 And out of y ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every foule of the aire; and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
20 And Adam gave names to all cattell, and to the foule of the aire, and to every beast of the fielde; but for Adam there was not found an helpe meete for him.

(The Holy Bible: King James Version, 2005)

The poems in “Children of Adam” develop poetically the theme of the adamic ability. It is not necessary to look for hints, for the poet refers to himself as Adam in various occasions, such as in verses like: “The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,” from “Spontaneous Me” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.89-91), or the poem “As Adam early in the morning,”, where he sings to people: “Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach, / Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, / Be not afraid of my body” (2002, p.96). As Whitman calls the poet “the true son of God”, and as we know that Adam is the first son of God, and definitely a true one, and at the same time Whitman identified himself completely with Emerson’s definition of the poet, the one who goes about naming things, it is clear to us that what we see here is another expression of Whitman’s capacity to give life to ancient myths, reenacting in North America the scene of creation. The poem “I Sing the Body Electric” chants the love of the body, of man and women, without shame, and in complete sacredness. It carries two biblical references: sacredness and enumeration, for the poem contains a catalogue of the parts of the body (see more information on catalogues in chapter 3, section 3.4). The following passage, from section 8 of the poem, will help us illustrate the point:

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?

Have you ever loved the body of a man?

Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and     times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,

And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,

And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful          than the most beautiful face.

Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that           corrupted her own live body?

For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

(WHITMAN, 2002, p.86)

Haroldo de Campos, whose translatorial method will be presented in chapter 3, reminds us of the meaning of Adam in his posthumous book Éden, Um Tríptico Bíblico (Eden, A Biblical Triptych), where he mentions Adam as the man who “gives names by divine order” (2004, p.44). Campos refers to Adam in the same sense as Emerson does. Whitman, who recognized Emerson as his master, was probably inspired by him and the Bible in order to conceive of himself as the American Adam, so that he could create a primordial language. The subject of an American Adam has been addressed by writers, and one of them is Lewis, an American scholar and critic (1917-2002), who dealt with “articulate thinkers and conscious artists” in his book The American Adam (1955, p.1). The first artist he discusses in his book is Whitman. For his approach, he defined the “image” represented by the title of the book: “A century ago [1855], the image contrived to embody the most fruitful contemporary ideas was that of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentiality, poised at the start of a new history” (p.1). In this sense, this American myth was not based solely on Leaves of Grass, it was a collective creation, a new one, a beginning, not the end of almost two thousand years of history. This meant that the co-creators of this myth saw no connection with the past and only saw the future. Then, the individual who embodied this “hero” was “standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with […] own unique and inherent resources” (LEWIS, 1955, p.5).  In this manner, a generation that had the Bible as its most common source of reading identified this new hero as “Adam before the Fall”, the “first, the archetypal man”, whose “moral position was prior to experience” and who was “fundamentally innocent” (p.5).

However meaningful this is, we must have in mind that, despite Whitman’s viewing himself as Adam, he, like any other author, could not deny the fact that between the first man created by God and the new Adam in a new land, thousands of years of History had elapsed. Therefore, he was conscious of his role as Adam, but that was not everything. His awareness was an important aspect of the work of re-creating/reviving the myth, whose essence was represented in the Leaves by the newness of language and vision, not by ignoring hundreds of successive generations on the earth. This is clearly expressed in his 1855 Preface, where the first thing he says is: “America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions [...]” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.5). In reality, his greatness in this act is in his ability to incorporate an ancient myth of origin, embodying the first man, without any language or history ahead of him, affiliating himself with God, and at the same time not denying the already existing peoples and histories of the whole world, uniting in a single act the freshness and newness of a soul just arrived in Paradise and now living in a human form with all the existing creatures already living there with their own histories and religions. If there was something creative in this myth reviving movement, it was his capacity to do that, for it shows that he was working for the conservation of life, he was in favor of life, and he did not come to attack it. Another aspect of this revitalization of the past in his poetry is indicated by the use of catalogues, as pointed  before, about its use in “I Sing the Body Electric”, a form of composition which he inherited from the Bible and Homer’s epics, as we will see in chapter 3, section 3.4.

Later in the Preface he declared that “The power to destroy or remould is freely used by the greatest poet, but seldom the power of attack” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.620). Thus, we know what he was trying to destroy: the illusion that we can address a new form of life with past instruments, without creating the new tools according to the reality approached. We can not describe today’s world with disregard to its changes, progress and discoveries in every field. Therefore, we need a new vision to look at our own times from a current perspective as Whitman himself put it: “What is past is past. If he [the greatest poet] does not expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not what is wanted” (2002, p.620-1). If he just tried to destroy the past, even if it was only a past vision or past beliefs, without presenting “superior models” in the sense that they are adequate ones, he would be considered as just another crazy, ignorant person, who would soon be forgotten by Literature and History.

However, from the evident interest Whitman aroused in other poets and critics in the western world, we might undoubtedly say that his “superior models” worked well, and that they were largely recognized and used as valid creations. For example: his centering as the leading figure in the American Canon by Harold Bloom[20], and his acknowledgement in other lands by renowned authors such as Fernando Pessoa (1983, p.65), who, through his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, regarded Whitman as his master and model, and to whom he wrote an Ode in 1915; William Michael Rossetti, who was Whitman’s English editor in the nineteenth century, on whom we provide more information in chapter 3; Jorge Luis Borges, whose translation of “Song of Myself” into Spanish was published in 1969[21]; and Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian sociologist, who presented a conference on Whitman in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro. Further, in chapter 3, we will show the relations between Whitman, Pessoa and Freyre. Also in chapter 3, there will be a section on Longfellow, one that deals with the same subject we are discussing here, to show why Whitman’s poetry was superior to Longfellow’s in portraying the American scene in the 19^th century, even though the latter was more popular.

When critics said that he was attacking traditional institutions, against his own statement in the Preface, Whitman wrote the poem “I Hear it Was Charged against Me”, which was included, significantly, in “Calamus”, which is a sign of his never retreating when confronted by “prudish critics”. It was rather the other way around, as his biographer Allen tells us about an episode that had the effect of making “him [the poet] more stubborn than ever” (1955, p.350) about critics[22]:

I HEAR it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions;

But really I am neither for nor against institutions;

(What indeed have I in common with them? Or what with the destruction of them?)

Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of These States, inland and seaboard,

And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large, that dents the water,

Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument,

The institution of the dear love of comrades.

(WHITMAN, 2002, p.110)

As his editor annotated, the poem was not a “reaction to a specific charge”, it was effectively an act of affirmation of his vast and multifaceted work, which could not be “confined by the institutional” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.110, note 6).

The Adamic innocence referred to above was personified by Whitman, who, according to Lewis, was free from artificiality. Whitman, in “Children of Adam”, which contains his adamic songs, had the “ambition” to “assert nature untroubled by art, to re-establish the natural unfallen man in the living hour” (1955, p.43).  Natural man was supposed to be naked, and nakedness is appointed by Lewis as something proper to Adam, for covering came only with the Fall. The verse “Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass” from the last poem in “Children of Adam”, “As Adam Early in the Morning”, demonstrates this nakedness.

However, nakedness for the poet was not something so simple as taking off the clothes, as we can see in the poem “I Sing the Body Electric”, which deals with the sacredness of the body and of the soul, for he treats both as equals, raising them back to an immaculate state previous to the Fall. The last lines of this poem show that: “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these [the parts of the body] are the soul!” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.87). Thus, when he writes about nakedness, this includes nakedness of the soul, so that everyone can lose the fear of appearing in public as one is, without coverings hiding our true selves, honestly, frankly, openly. As he sings in a poem from 1856, “Poem of the Proposition of Nakedness”, later excluded from the Leaves, in which he expresses his wish to see all things from a different perspective including all people: “Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly, at the peril of our lives! let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses!” (2002, p.517). This is more than simply being or seeing unclothed people; he is trying to ask people to show themselves and himself with a naked spirit. His question at the end of this poem asks exactly for that: “What real happiness have you had one single hour through your whole life?” (2002, p.518). Here the poet wants to see naked spirits without the covering shame of social masks. The masks that hide what people do to their own bodies or think of them, as he asks in “I Sing the Body Electric”: “Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves; /And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?” (2002, p.81). Thus he gives the answer to the spirits who want to show themselves without artificialities: “Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the rest,” (p.84); here, he is talking about body and soul, and their free expansion and expression with no restrictions coming from old customs or dogmas, because the “the human body is sacred” (from the passage quoted above), and no one can blame it.

As we are speaking of innocence, the first man and Whitman’s “Children of Adam”, we must make another inter-textual reference here, for it is definitely not by chance that this cluster received this title: the fifth chapter of the book of Genesis is called “The book of the generations of Adam” or “The Descendants of Adam”. The biblical reference is practically literal: twelve years ago, we translated this title into Portuguese as “Descendentes de Adão” (SARAIVA, 1995, p.60), instead of “Filhos de Adão” to maintain the rhythm and phonetic construction of the English title. However, there is another reference which is also an act of creation. As Adam was formed by God: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, & breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soule.” (The Holy Bible: King James Version, 2005, Genesis, 2: 7), Whitman, in his act of co-creation (if we are to acknowledge that Creation, in its highest sense of creation of the universe, can only be an act of God), did with poetry what God did with Adam: he formed, or in his own words, “moulded” his poems of the “dust of the ground” available to him: the words of the language, which he used to describe the landscapes of America, its materials and its peoples. But a poet deals with words, his real dust, which leads us back to the idea of language as “fossil poetry,” since it was the first man/the namer/poet who created it in the beginning of time and it is preserved until today under layers of new meanings. Now, if we apply this poetic idea back to God’s Creation, we can understand the poet when he says that the real poems are the people. He is talking about God’s poems/creations. If we think of God as a poet, then, a “true son of God” must be a poet as well, as he sings in “Passage to India”, section 5: “The whole Earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless Earth, shall be completely justified; / Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the true Son of God, the poet” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.349).

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[1] Whitman referred to Emerson as “dear Friend and Master” in his Preface to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was actually a letter to Emerson, because the poet had not “found how [he] could satisfy [himself] with sending any usual acknowledgment” of Emerson’s letter to him (WHITMAN, 2002, p.636-46).

[2] Fernando Pessoa is a great master in the use of “common speech” in poetry. Apparently, his poems are written in daily language with common words; however, when studied in detail, we see that the verses are carefully composed and executed with great poetic precision, that is, the poems are so perfectly conceived that they sound like natural language to the reader.

[3] Essays mentioned and general information on Emerson and Thoreau found in The American Tradition in Literature, 3. ed.. New York: Norton, 1967, v. 2, pp.1161-1236, edited by Sculley Bradley.

[4] As in “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, from “Birds of Passage” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.192).

[5] As in “The Bible as Poetry”, from “November Boughs” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1163).

[6] Our translation of this passage:

“A qualquer moribundo, corro e giro o trinco da porta,

Viro as roupas-de-cama para o pé da cama,

Mando o médico e o padre embora.

Agarro o declinante e o ergo com vontade irresis­tível,

Ah desesperado, eis meu pescoço,

Por Deus, não irás afundar! pendura todo o teu peso em mim.

Dilato-te com um tremendo hausto, dou-te alen­to,

Cada cômodo da casa preencho com uma força armada,

Amantes de mim, obstruidores de túmulos.” (SARAIVA, 1995, p.47)

[7] Our re-creation of this poem:

PLENO DE VIDA AGORA

“PLENO de vida agora, compacto, visível,

Eu, quarenta anos de idade no octogésimo-terceiro ano dos Estados,

A alguém um século adiante ou qualquer número de séculos adiante,

A ti ainda inato estas, buscando-te.

Quando leres estas eu que era visível me tornei invisível,

Agora és tu, compacto, visível, percebendo meus poemas, buscando-me,

Fantasiando quão feliz serias se eu pudesse es­tar contigo e me tornar teu camarada;

Que seja como se eu estivesse contigo. (Não estejas certo demais, mas estou contigo agora)

(SARAIVA, 1995, p.92)

[8] As Whitman himself acknowledged his contradictions, we can not say that Canby is wrong, especially after what we have written in the previous section about the Apollonian and the Dionysian characteristics of Whitman. In “The Sleepers”, he writes in section 1: “I wander all night in my vision, / […] / Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.542). And in “Song of Myself”, section 51, he sings the famous lines: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself; / I am large—I contain multitudes.)” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.246).

[9] The Gospel according to John (1:29-34) reads: Behold the Lamb of God

29 The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lambe of God, which taketh away the sinne of the world!
30 This is he of whom I said, After me commeth a man, which is preferred before me: for he was before me.
31 And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therfore am I come baptizing with water.
32 And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a Dove, and it abode upon him.
33 And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the holy Ghost.
34 And I saw, and bare record that this is the Sonne of God. (The Holy Bible: King James Version)

[10] This statement is from “Five Thousand Poets”, an article included in “November Boughs” (1888): “In a very profound sense religion is the poetry of humanity. Then the points of union and rapport among all the poems and poets of the world, however wide their separations of time and place and theme, are much more numerous and weighty than the points of contrast” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1209).

[11] Blake’s works are nowadays available on the internet at various sites.  “The William Blake Archive”, sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, is an excellent source. It contains reproductions of Blake’s engravings and etchings. Available at: <http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/>. Accessed on 27 July 2007.

[12] For more information on the reed, or calamus, see previous sections.

[13] The “Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence” shows the piper, the child on the cloud and lambs in the middle of a forest. Available at

http://blake-dev.lib.unc.edu/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=s-inn.b.illbk.01&java=yes; accessed on 10 December 11, 2007.

[14] From Latin aetherius, from Greek aitherios, from aith r, upper air, meaning celestial, heavenly (FERREIRA, 1999, p.848).

[15] It is a well known fact that Jesus liked little children and viewed them as symbols of innocence, the innocence that is required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as we can see in this passage from “The Gospel according to St. Matthew”, 18: “Who Is the Greatest?

1 At the same time came the disciples unto Iesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the Kingdome of heaven?
2 And Iesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,
3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except yee be converted, and become as little children, yee shall not enter into the kingdome of heaven.
4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himselfe as this little childe, the same is greatest in the Kingdome of heaven.
5 And who so shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.” (The Holy Bible: King James Version, 2005)

[16] See annex, which brings “Origins of Attempted Secession”, a document where he depicts the reasons for the war and provides personal information on his activity in politics, in which he was directly involved from 1840 to 1860, as a member of parties and as editor of various newspapers.

[17] “During the winter of 1861-1862 Whitman continued to visit the hospital on Broadway, which had begun to receive soldiers after Bull Run [first major battle of the American Civil War, 21 July, 1861] and steadily increased its military men as the war continued. By the spring of 1862 this hospital was taking care of several hundred sick and wounded soldiers, and Whitman was regularly spending his Sunday afternoons and evenings visiting them and trying to cheer them up.  […] Like the stage drivers, these veterans were often unsophisticated country boys, surprisingly youthful, and Whitman found them wonderfully congenial and interesting […]” (ALLEN, 1855, p.277)

[18] In 1856, Whitman wrote an article simply entitled “The Slave Trade”, in which he depicted the commerce of slaves still taking place in New York, though it had been declared illegal in 1808. About the same year, he wrote a “[…] more ambitious treatise on the political aspects of contemporary slavery and the attempts of 350,000 slaveowners in the South to inflict their selfish will on thirty million American citizens. He called this essay “The Eighteenth Presidency!”, whose language was “violent and overtly emotional”, but given the situation, was “pertinent” and “just”, as Allen indicates in his biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer (1855, pp.195-6).

[19] The text of this essay by Emerson is in The American Tradition in Literature (BRADLEY, 1967, p.1192).

[20] Whitman is considered by professor and critic Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon (1995, pp.247-8), as “Center of the American Canon”. He argues that in literature “No Western poet, in the past century and a half, not even Browning or Leopardi or Baudelaire, overshadows Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. […] Nothing in the second half of the nineteenth century or in our now almost completed century matches Whitman’s work in direct power and sublimity, except perhaps for Dickinson.”

[21] Up to now, we have not been able to acquire a copy of this book. What we have is an article on this subject by Fernando Alegria, “Borges’s “Song of Myself”, included in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, edited by Ezra Greenspan (1995, p.208). Alegria says that Borges’s translation is indeed his [Borges’s] reading of the text, which was done in a free way, with the Argentinean author taking liberties with the text, but with a great “sense of rhythm” (1997, p.209).

[22] When living in Washington, Whitman was appointed Government clerk on January 24, 1865, at the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. On June 30, 1865, he received an “official notice” of dismissal. Allen tells us that the new Secretary of the Interior, Senator James Harlan, who had the support of the Methodist Church and of “an influential bishop in Philadelphia”, did send a note to the press on the issue of “dispensation” of Department clerks based on “loyalty”, “fidelity to duty” and “moral character”, but not “economy”, the reason allegedly used to dismiss Whitman.  In fact, Secretary Harlan had found the copy of Leaves of Grass that Whitman was revising and which he left at his office desk. It came to Harlan’s hand, and he did read it. The noteworthy aspect is that three poems that were marked for deletion in this copy were retained in the next edition of the Leaves, which is a sign of Whitman’s never conforming to biased opinions or criticisms. Fortunately, this episode showed that Whitman had “several loyal and influential friends” and he was “shifted to a department in which his service and his literary talents were far more appreciated”, and he could continue with his revision, writing, and visiting the hospitals. All these events appeared in the papers at the time. Some papers were against Whitman, calling him “eccentric”, “immoral”, “shocking”, but his friends defended him too. It was at this time that he received a letter from a person who signed himself A. Van Rensellaer, from New York, who told him that, while “calling on President Lincoln in the company of a member of Congress, Whitman had strolled past the White House, and Lincoln had asked who he was.”, and he explained to the President who Whitman was and mentioned Leaves of Grass, which the President had read. This person said that the President kept looking at the poet until he was “quite gone by” and said “pretty loud […] with emphasis on the words […] underscored”: “Well, he looks like a man.” Whitman always recollected this incident with joy, especially when he was writing his Lincoln elegy “When Lilacs…” and in times of sorrow.  After nine years and a half of work, Whitman was dismissed on July 1, 1874 (1955, p.461), and moved to Camden, N.J., where he lived until his death in 1892 (ALLEN, 1955, pp.344-51).

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