Walt Whitman's America by David S. Reynolds
Author:David S. Reynolds [Reynolds, David S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76192-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00
The tensions between liberty and power, states’ rights and union, are here resolved by an “I” who proclaims both individuality and total equality with others. In the aftermath of Kansas-Nebraska and Anthony Burns, America in fact had difficulty in celebrating itself except with bitter irony. Whitman’s representative “I” is the antiauthoritarian individual American of the fifties, mistrustful of power structures. He can celebrate himself and announce equality with others because he is attuned to the full range of unifying cultural possibilities. Celebrating “myself” instills personalism and purity to the idea of celebration, harking back to those intimate populist festivals of Whitman’s childhood, so distant from the chilly, impersonal public celebrations he complained of in the fifties. When in the final version of the poem Whitman added the phrase “and sing myself,” he was opening up another potential unifying force—music—that was also a key part of his poetic blend.
So powerful was his belief in the possibilities of cultural democracy in 1855 that he could take an almost totalitarian stance: “And what I assume you shall assume.” The “I” of the 1855 edition asserts total control, because he wants to direct attention constantly to those aspects of experience he thinks most of his readers share. The next line—“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”—plants the notion of sharing in the very process of nature. Echoing the ideas of two of his favorite authors, Fanny Wright and Justus Liebig, about a democratic interchange of atoms, he expresses the faith in the natural cycle that remains a major source of affirmation throughout the poem.
He is careful, however, to avoid materialism. “I loafe and invite my soul” proclaims the matter/spirit dualism that, in ways often allied to Swedenborgianism and spiritualism, is asserted insistently throughout the 1855 edition and that took on even greater prominence in later editions. This line also adds philosophical depth to the notion of loafing, which in Whitman’s day (as his own newspaper pieces attested) was ordinarily associated with derelict behavior among the shiftless urban underclass. Having his loafer invite his soul has the same ennobling effect as the addition of the word “kosmos” to Whitman’s later self-description as a “disorderly fleshy sensual” rough. Having him contemplate a spear of summer grass introduces the notion of the miracle of the commonplace, derived mainly from progressive science and Harmonialism, which is another key theme of the poem. Also, the valorization of the grass is a means of seeking resolution of the individual-versus-mass tension in nature itself: grass embodies simultaneously individualism, each spear a unique phenomenon, and radical democracy, as it is a common vegetation that sprouts everywhere, among all sections and races.
In his opening lines, then, Whitman presents a reconstructed democracy, one in which the self, culture, and nature fruitfully intermingle. If in his notebook he was declaring that “We want no reforms[,] no institutions, no parties” but “a living principle as nature has, under which nothing can go wrong,” in “Song of Myself” he created a world in which many deficiencies of political and social life were imaginatively corrected.
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