Withman s poetic vision This is an extract of Walt Withman s poem Song of Myself that was the first of the twelve poems in which is divided the collection of poems entitled Leaves Of Grass originally published in 1855. In this edition the poems had no title and the sections were not numbered. It is in the 1881 edition that the first poem, composed of fifty two sections, took the title Song Of Myself and that the sections were numbered. Thus, this extract belongs to the first five sections of the poem entirely written in free verse. Indeed, American poet Walt Withman (1819-1892) is often considered the father of free verse. He was influenced by the American romantic writers also called Transcendentalists. Thus, in Emerson s Nature or Self-Relience, or in Thoreau s Walden or Civil Disobedience, these writers expressed the main ideas of Transcendentalism, like, for example, deism, individualism, self-reliance, faith in men and the belief in the natural goodness of the world. They also believed that there has to be a true national poet, and that the civilization values such as reason, positivism and work must be rejected because their evils were evident. Intuition and imaginary creation were privileged. In this extract, the poet moves between a terrestrial and a transcendental world. Thus, the poet has a double identity: the ordinary man in his everyday earthly life and the spiritual man, whose aesthetic attitude of sensual contemplation enables him to give a transcendental dimension to everything, even to the smallest things of nature. Poets are above all men. Whitman is not ashamed at all of acknowledging it. He does not believe in the baseness of human nature. In his poetry there is room to the common people as well as to the highest degrees of human mysticism. Throughout this extract the poetical character is divided into the common man and the poet, but the first is not less important than the second and vice versa. In a resounding apostrophe, the poet addresses to his soul and affirms that there is no hierarchy in his double identity: I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / and you must not be abased to the other (l.144-145). However, in the preceding lines, Withman seems to recognize that there is one himself truer than his other himself. On the one hand, there is the person of the everyday life. This person is surrounded by temporal things, and by what is the most banal in temporal things, such as the latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new/ my dinner, dress, associates, looks compliments, dues ( ) / the sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing or loss/ or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations (l.122-126). As any man poets are submerged in the banality of life but he knows that all the things than compose this kind of life are not the Me myself. (l.130)
His true identity is not immerged in the temporal world: Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am (l.131). Another kind of attitude characterized his true identity. If his other identity is, so as to speak, in a rush, doing, working and trying to survive, trying to follow the rhythm of a world whose main values are time and money, the true identity Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, / looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest ( ) (l.132-133). Idleness is essential for Withman. It is the opposition to the rashness of a country that is the beginning of a long process of industrialization. Idleness is a way of escaping from the temporal world with its values of time, work and production that dehumanize men. And the dehumanization of men is the loss of faith in him. Whitman, whose beliefs have been influenced by Trascendentalism is particularly faithful to men and the principle of faith is love: he loves himself, he loves the others, he loves even the smallest things of nature who in fact are incommensurable: I know ( ) that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women / my sisters and lovers, / And that a keelson of creation is love, / and limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, / and brown ants in the little wells beneath them. (l. 160-166) But only one particular type of person is able to observe these details, who in spite of his own desperation, deeply in his heart he is faithful to humanity: poets. In this extract, Whitman tries answer the question raised by Emerson s appeal to a true national poet. But not the writer of poetry brought up in schools whose head is heavy of erudition. Withman describes also an attitude particular to those who feel this urge of singing under their creative idleness. Withman seems to say that what could be called a poetic attitude is above all the fact of feeling the original energy of life: Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems (l. 61-62), invites Withman after evoking the ecstasy of his sensual experience during the perception of the flux of life. He begins to describe this attitude in the first section: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / and what I assume you shall assume. (l.10-11). What seems a selfcentered tone becomes an universal tone, in which I, you, he, she, it and they becomes irrelevant. Only the oneness is relevant, this universal We that link us together: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. (l.13). And yet, Withman, who proclaims the visceral importance loving one s identity and body, seems to say to Emerson that his attitude is the attitude of the true American poet whose tongue, every atom of ( ) blood, form d from this soil, this air, / born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their / parents the same. (l.17-18). But this attitude consists also in a strong criticism of schools that keep on teaching an intellectual knowledge, full idées-reçues that stagnates. The poet wants to keep creeds and schools in abeyance (l.22). Poetry is a matter of life and not of
traditional ideas and intellectual authority. Only direct experience will enable the poet to get one of the suns left : you shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through / the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books ( ) (l.65-66). Schools are not only the institutions of teaching. They held creeds, the system of beliefs, the paradigms of a civilization. They protect them and divulgate them. They are the guarantors of their continuation. And one of this system of beliefs, against which Withman rebels, is the separation of the body and the soul, the corpus et animam of theosophists. Withman is the poet who celebrates the body because he knows that doing that he is celebrating the soul. Withman gives a special importance to the senses, knowing that the spiritual lies in the physical: I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass (l.14-15). Withman is aware that behind this spear of summer grass lies the original energy. The old division body and soul, the disdain for the body, the shame of nakedness do not have a place in Withman s poetry vision: I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, / I am mad for it to be in contact with me (l.38-39). Withman conceives in a differeny way the senses that traditionally were considered as the cause of error. For Withman, senses are what enable the poet to observe, i.e., to see that everything is limitless Observe means also give a transcendental dimension to the physical world. And yet, Hölderlin said once that poets were only those who were able to listen. Perhaps this was an indirect allusion to Homer, the blind; a way to say that the sense of the sight, so privileged in this world, is not that important for a poet. Anyway, in Withman the ear indeed seems to have a special importance in his attitude of idle contemplation. The poet has to listen the buzz d wispers of the soul of each thing in nature. And his own soul belongs also to this great gathering of souls. When Withman writes: I believe in you my soul, he is not only addressing to his own soul but also to the other souls. To Believe in the beauty of his body and love it, is a way of believing in the beauty of each thing and love them. It the same way, believing in his soul is a way of believing in the soul of each thing. He addresses to it and invites it to loafe ( ) on the grass. But more importantly he invites it to loose the stop of your throat (l.147). He only wants to listen at it: only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice (l.150). At the beginning of this commentary it was said that in Withman s poetry there was room to common men and to the highest degrees of mysticism. However in his poetry disappears this spatial distribution of high and down of traditional mysticism. The opposition in Withman is not comparative but it has a tendency to go towards unity of life: Out of the dimness opposite equal advance, always substance and / increase, always sex, / always sex, /always a knit of identity, always distinction always a breed
of life. The poet harbors equally for good or bad, there is neither highness nor downness and there is neither baseness nor highness. Body is not apart from soul. In his body there is any stain of vileness: Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, / nor an inch, nor a particle of an inch is vile. In this way the transcendental word that the theosophists found in divinity, is found by Withman in-corporated in nature. To Wordsworth that writes in the last part of his marvelous Prelude: Withman replies: Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified Ву reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which mid all revolution in the hopes and fears of men doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. (l.74-79) The temporal adverb now is associated to the spatial adverb here. Perhaps the lasting inspiration consists in discovering the beauty of the duality of the world. A duality that is fruitful because of the energy of fusion: Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world (l.81-82)
In conclusion, Whitman believes in the multiplicity of existence and in the double identity of the poet. His soul easily moves from the banal existence of everyday life to universality. But this is not Plato s aseptic world of ideas. Universality is the result of an attitude, of a particular way of feeling in which even the smallest detail of nature gets a transcendental dimension. Therefore the dichotomy carnalspiritual, physical-divine of the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions in which one part is privileged and the other is detested, disappears in Whitman s poetic vision. Andrés Arboleda-Toro