Culture is said to live, while its makers die. The unsettling terms of this respiratory system have a long history, in which themes of truth and beauty (all you know and all you need to know, the Grecian urn tells humbled John Keats) emerge as consolations in the face of unyielding laws of organic life. In the Western world this has fostered a psychological legacy of perennial inadequacy : surrounded on all sides by “classics,” we’re overburdened not only with the malady of belatedness, but with the constant beguilements of consumerism. The apparatus of cultural life increasingly stands between the organism and the broad prospect of an integrated existence in the cosmos. In the culture cocoon, the central facts of the biodegradable energy web are concealed, compromised, or simply forgotten. “The tools we have invented for communicating our ideas and carrying information have actually impaired our memories” (Shepard, Coming Home, 6). To be civilized, then, means being dispossessed of all the discriminations and instincts of an animal birthright.
Our legacy of psychological dispossession attests to the fact that we inhabit a culture we can’t keep up with; our adaptive resources, prosthetically shared out in the artifactual realm, are subject to misalignment and asynchronous alliances. Having generously extended our cybernetic capacities to the servo-mechanisms of daily life, the culture now appears to be outthinking us. Endocolonization, the “boarding of metabolic vehicles” in the regimes of techno-acceleration—as Paul Virilio describes it in Speed and Politics—is accompanied by an aesthetic transfiguration. “We have gone from the esthetics of appearance, stable forms, to the esthetics of disappearance, unstable forms” (Virilio and Lotringer, 84). Not only are we ineptly engaged with psyche, we can’t even operate all the equipment, which is constantly changing out from under us by market-driven obsolescence. The dilemma is not unique to us of the late twentieth century. Tribes, cities, states, and entire civilizations have invariably reached that point at which problems are not matched by any collective resolve to address them. Weston LaBarre chronicles numerous instances in The Ghost Dance, amounting to a surrogate history of maladaptive cultures. Edward Hyams’s Soil and Civilization recounts a similar story. Hyams offers a simple but valuable index:
the artists and poets of the balanced phase of any civilization have a profound feeling for the grain of life. Poetry which runs against this grain, and is a product of the failure of the poet’s community to retain their faculty of tact as members of life, may still be profoundly impressive : but so may any clever, bitter act of perversity and destruction (11).
American literature, as if to illustrate Hyams’s thesis, offers two exemplary cases : Poe and Whitman. For Poe, the thought of death is such a delectable stimulation that his work is preordained to macabre hallucinations. For Whitman, on the other hand, death is the supreme organic event, the measure of all creaturely striving. No one would argue that Whitman’s work embodies anything less than a “profound feeling for the grain of life”—making him, in Hyams’s terms, a poet of the balanced phase. Whitman was indisputably intent on reminding his fellows of their “faculty of tact as members of life.” But in the wake of the Civil War his poetic focus became increasingly compliant with that booster spirit that made C. L. R. James compare Whitman’s rhetoric to toothpaste and deodorant ads (C. L. R. James Reader, 206).
Whitman’s vast inclusive organic vision, as it happened, was a democracy few were prepared to embrace, inciting lifelong racial and sexual mingling. Ezra Pound later came to see himself (in the mask of Mauberley) as a man out of key with his time, and Whitman’s vision of 1855–60 was no less out of key with his. The adventure and scale of his America was, however, equal to the unmanageable proportions of the nation. And Whitman could no more sustain such a vision by himself than America as a nation could retain its revolutionary character after the war of independence. The nation of Whitman’s youth was in flux, teeming with opportunity and risk. (Melville’s The Confidence Man marks that volatile frontier as well as any other document.) Whitman’s response in Leaves of Grass was commensurate with American exhilarations. He felt himself, rightly, the poet of the emergent condition. When the Civil War broke out, he assumed that to be there at all was to be the poet of the great debacle; and that he was. But the war, like all modern wars, was a sleight of hand concealing power plays beneath the state of emergency, and when the war was over the nation was no longer the same nation. While the jeremiad “Democratic Vistas” laments this degeneration of original prospects, Whitman the poet seems curiously oblivious to his own diagnosis.
By 1871 Whitman is chanting the song of imperialism, in step with the nation, but not with the persona of the poems. He sees the completion of the transcontinental railroad as “The road between Europe and Asia,” but he fails to take account of the human cost—no mention of the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers who suffered the worst blizzard conditions in the Rockies, some freezing to death with picks in hand to meet the company schedules—a Whitmanian image if he’d used it. But maybe “public domain” is best : “Some poetry is in the public domain from birth,” Muriel Rukeyser reflected in The Life of Poetry, citing the legacy lost to that domain by the inattentions and abuses of history : “the miner’s songs of the past, the songs of the Chinese workmen on the western railways, the poems of the Nisei camps, the lost songs of the slave underground” (102). Whitman enjoins his soul to see a divine purpose in technological finality—“the earth to be spann’d, connected by network, / The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage”—but again, not a word of the Chinese workers, forbidden contact with white women and not allowed to bring wives of their own. In 1860 Whitman had been the voice the polity could never absorb, visionary of American vistas forever antithetical to the greed of a nation on the brink of becoming a world power. But on and on he wrote, persuading himself he was merely repeating and embellishing the great themes of his former chants, leaving a big book of poems, most of which would be safely absorbed into the republic’s new façade of the reconstruction years and their ambitious aftermath, the Asian market and Pacific expansion.
Whitman’s copious contributions to the weeklies and dailies he edited and wrote for are deeply infused by the standard rhetoric of his time. Despite his affirmation of solidarity with contemporary life, it is intriguing to think of Leaves of Grass as a fantasy on the order of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris. Edwin Fussell perceptively designates 1855 as the point at which “Whitman was the West, i.e. the frontier between the American self and its imaginative New World” (Frontier, 412). As that frontier was pushed back in the postwar years, Whitman’s habitat increasingly resembled Disney’s Adventureland. The character of the American frontier was radically and definitively altered to one of exploitation rather than discovery and settlement at the precise moment of Whitman’s euphoric sanitization. In old age Whitman avoided the malignant specifics of American history—specifics for which he had patiently amassed his vocabulary of inventory—and the later voice dims noticeably to that of the good conscience offering Boy Scout prescriptions (at the very end, in fact, Whitman hoped for success with a bowdlerization of his own book, to be called Leaves of Grass, Junior).
Looking back from the present abundance of American poetry, we can see in the multivolume Testimony by Charles Reznikoff and the road-show dystopics of The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg, if not the Whitmanian rendering, at least the quantity of horrifying detail accompanying American imperialism. One installment of Testimony documents the years 1891 (the date of Whitman’s death) to 1900. The different sections are comparable in length to the sections in Whitman’s sequence poems, and Reznikoff displays much of Whitman’s stamina (if not his personable gusto). The first two sections document teams of horses being driven out on weak ice to their death in the water below; the third a mule train hit by a locomotive. The book goes on to chronicle—in as toneless and unassuming a language as any American poet has written—thievery, rape, mutilation, murder, and sundry acts of astonishing viciousness. Driven by curiosity, a boy looks into a laundry only to be confronted with a woman saying, “You will look in here, will you!” as she throws a bowl of lye into his face.
His mother came to the laundry
and shouted, “Why did you do that to my poor little boy?”
And the wife of the laundryman answered : “Yes, I done it,
and will do it again if I have a chance.
I will make them keep away from my door!”
The boy’s eyes ulcerated,
burst and sloughed away,
and the lids grew together on what was left of the eyeballs.
To read all of Testimony is unnerving; and it’s no surprise that it comes from a man who also wrote a book-length verse chronicle, Holocaust. Reznikoff is not the poet Whitman failed to become, but he is an indication of Whitman’s complacency as the nation assumed its modern dominance. No wonder Jack Spicer reproaches the bard : “you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for fifty years. You did not ever understand cruelty.”
In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman spoke of the poet as “the pioneer who ‘leaves room ahead of himself,’ … He places himself where the future becomes present … he glows a moment on the extremest verge.” For a time he perched on that verge alert to every extremity, cognizant of a “dark obverse” to fledgling nationalism (Sauer, 147). But the most extreme verge Whitman could celebrate, as the century drew to its close, was the World’s Fair, that comfortable descendent of the English peep-show spectacle of exotic Orient and faraway places of empire. The strongest section of the 1871 “Song of the Exposition” is its litany of a vanished world of European legend (lines 22–59), followed by a prescient transumption of American destiny in the person of the housewife, “install’d amid the kitchen ware!” The opening of the poem envisions the national task as “Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate, / To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead.” To accept, fuse, rehabilitate—these are the terms with which Thomas Jefferson sought to apply his racial philanthropy to the American natives; and Whitman’s “to follow more than to lead” describes an arc in American politics scarcely completed yet. Whitman’s final abdication from the actual history at hand is as much his legacy to American poetry as his earlier strident vision of the young prewar nation. His great five-year beginning was his “moment on the extremest verge”; as that moment receded, he uncannily took on the artificial glow of Edison’s new invention, the electric filament bulb. “Song of the Exposition” hails the nation for its industry (“thy rapid patents”) and its leviathan attainment of “wide geographies, manifold, different, distant, / Rounded by thee in one—one common orbic language, / One common indivisible destiny for All” which Whitman could hardly foresee becoming an omnivorous conformity. Looking back at the new buildings of 1871, we can hardly comprehend Whitman’s acclaim of “Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping, / High rising tier on tier with glass and iron façades, / Gladdening the sun and sky.” The Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., gladdening sun and sky? Whitman’s increasing use in later years of the antiquarian “thee” (forfeiting his arduous struggle to shed himself earlier of such poetic affectations) completes his mummification as resident national poet in the pornotopia of American kitsch culture, that bulwark of hyperbolic anachronism. Whitman even sings the sarcophagal stones into place : “this and these, America, shall be your pyramids and obelisks.”
What distinguishes an early poem like “Our Old Feuillage” from the later “Song of the Exposition”—both poems undertake a kinescope version of the “continent of Democracy”—is the centrality of one Walt Whitman, vulnerable, mortal, polysexual watcher : the man who stands apart yet who is “the joiner, he sees how they join.” In “Our Old Feuillage” he is not yet the self-effacing chronicler and neutral enthusiast of an emerging society of the spectacle. Whitman presents himself in the modern manner of the home-movie voice-over : “Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida,” but this image suggests a unison with his animal counterpart (as his lament merges with the mockingbird on the beach in “As I Ebb’d”), a union based on the scream. Later in the poem, in its only clear instance of aggression, he returns as the endangered animal : “In Kanadian forests the moose, large as an ox, corner’d by hunters, rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with this fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives—and I, plunging at the hunters, corner’d and desperate, / In the Mannahatta, streets, piers.” The empathetic vulnerability of such scenes has its license from the threshold, the margin, the edge or verge of opposing spaces and types, a rim where sediment accumulates traces of a furtive passage. As Susan Howe speculates, “Maybe margins shelter the inapprehensible Imaginary of poetry” (The Birth-mark, 29).
… A
darkness there
like tar,
like bits of
drift at ocean’s
edge. A slow
retreat of
waters beaten
back upon
themselves.