Whitman's Ecstatic Union by Sowder Michael;

Author:Sowder, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Praise, adulation of the reader, becomes the dominant tone (and, one might add, a central meaning of the poem). The reader, indeed, is made the very subject of the poem. The title in 1856 was “Poem of You.” Line eight stresses: “Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem.” The poem brings to fruition the promise of the Preface that if you follow his sermon and “read these leaves in every season everyday of your life your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Can there be higher praise from the “greatest poet” than that you be his poem? In line after line he affirms your merit, perfection, and worth: “None has understood you, but I understand you … None has but found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you … I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, god, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself” (ll. 13–17).

He continues with a litany of praise: “O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!” “There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you.” Sweeping the reader up into this sublime rhetoric of praise, where glories are exceeded and immensities outrun, the poet bestows upon the reader all the powers and attributes the greatest poet had claimed for himself in the Preface—to span America and stand equal to God: “These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you. / These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they.” “I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.” He draws perfect equality among poet, reader, America, and God. The Preface foretold that the “messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms. Only then can you understand us. We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose” (vii). This essential equality of poet and reader is continually reaffirmed. And now it seems this sublimity is not something he bestows but something that waits “intrinsically in yourself.” But it is now in this poem that it has been finally recognized. “You have not known what you are, you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life.” The Preface said the same thing: “the others are as good as him only he sees it and they do not” (v), and in “Song of Myself,” “all as immortal and fathomless as myself; / They do not know how immortal, but I know” (ll. 128–29).

Thus, Whitman’s welcome begins democratically, then moves into celebration and recognition of your intrinsic sublimity. He speaks as if you were already regenerated and filled with Deity. The poem attempts to make sublimity and equality the same thing, all readers (and things) equal on an elevated plane of Being, when, logically, sublimity, being relational, implies the transcendence of something. But Whitman seeks an “equalitarian sublime.” And

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