In its first fire Whitman’s verse was magnificently tropic, a crisp, biodegradable composition of the States (not yet “United” but cosmically chaotic) into a demonized poetic topos; a body of work that might have as its most fitting epigraph not the overconfident “Song of the Open Road” singled out by D. H. Lawrence, but “This Compost.” Of the major poems, only “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Song of Myself,” and “The Sleepers” precede it. The grand collection of shorter gems and “sparkles from the wheel” in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass are beach stones that roar and scrape under the immense tidal pressure of some two dozen poems written by 1860.*
The poise of Whitman’s vitality was derived from that fluid terror of Being that courses unhindered through animal life.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
Whitman the poet falls in love with the sweetness of such corruption, celebrating its fatal appeal in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”:
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.
This is on no account the consolation provided by Keats’s nightingale, “half in love with easeful death,” but an implacably alien yet intimate insistence. The repetition of the word “death” establishes by rhythmic habitation an enlarged premonition. This word, this “strong and delicious word,” “the word up from the waves,” “the key” of a “thousand responsive songs at random,” resounds in the mockingbird’s lament for its lost mate. The mockingbird, embraced by Whitman as “my dusky demon and brother,” is an erotic presence commensurate with the sexual testament of the poems “Spontaneous Me” and “A Woman Waits for Me.” The keynote in these poems is unambiguously the “husky pantings through clinch’d teeth” (of “Not Heaving from my Ribb’d Breast Only”), and here the physical source of Whitman’s lifelong emission of poetic lines as “Beautiful dripping fragments” is confirmed. The taste for death develops as a sexual exultation.
Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts of love, bellies press’d and glued together with love …
Whitman’s own sexual identity is consistently that of the “limpid liquid within the young man,” and it’s here if anywhere that the demonic character of his romance with corruption has a truly pioneer quality. Whitman’s sexual body is the dark spot on his verse, which no America short of his fantastic vistas of interracial and multisexual mingling will ever consentingly include.* The sea’s whispered word from its “liquid rims and wet sands” is death, as “I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,” “a trail of drift and debris,” a coital detritus (echoed later in Rexroth’s lines “The waves of the sea fall through / Our each others indomitable / As peristalsis”).
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See the prismatic colors glistening and rolling)…
“Song of the Open Road” concludes with Whitman’s injunction to take to the road and “Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten.” So the poem he’s just composed to forge his commitment is made to unwrite itself. This is the fatal Whitmanian gesture : the writing unwrites itself, effacing the poet before the Republic. Whitman becomes a one-time pioneer, gradually surrounded by communities pledged to another form of commerce than that to which he committed himself in “This Compost” and “Out of the Cradle.” His alliance with bodily joys was the resource of a telling vulnerability; and as long as the sense of sexual exposure was both the shame and the most exalted avowal in his work, Whitman’s sensitivity to persecution and subjugation persisted, giving the poems over in emphatic comradeship to the survivor and the outcast.
Whitman’s poems situate the tropics for later American poetry as simultaneously a scene of unwriting and a view of the body’s compositional heat. The mockingbird’s dirge is a lament for a lost sexual partner, and this harrowing cry combining sex and death is Whitman’s surest mode, his bass drone. In the poem the bird’s song arouses the poet out of the lad. The scene of composition is the ocean marge, its volume of sound far surpassing the isolated voice. As sensual passion and metaphysical argument, the ocean is irrepressible. Its tides write lines on the body of exposed land : “Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, / [I] was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot”—lines that are equally lines of the poems.
On the beach, that strip of land between “all the water and all the land of the globe,” the lines underfoot are the imprint of the tide, just as the ocean of life ebbing in Whitman’s body is a reflection of geophysical song lines that become lines of the poem. In poetry, topographic space is coextensive with a typographic dimension. This has been amplified by Olson’s insistence on taking “SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America” (Call Me Ishmael, 11). Whitman’s lines drawn on sand by the ocean are the first facts of his geophysical identification of the labor of the poem with the ocean as ultimate compost, organically “Hissing melodious” its chant of “death, death, death, death.”
Systems of energy are being proposed here in something so apparently simple as the setting of the poem. The various means of transcription—the writing of the waves on the beach, the ocean of life surging in the poet’s “I” and the styles of the poem or chant—are simultaneous but not identical. As the refrain comes “Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,” there is a harmony or polyphony of the three voices : the sea, the bird, and the child-poet. Their vocal union is achieved only on “The rim, the sediment that stands for all.” Here on the rim the “arous’d child” curiously becomes displaced by the poet, who never ceases to proclaim himself the (sexually) aroused man. The terms of the vision continue to split and multiply. Not only is the aroused wonder of the boy fused with the sexual arousal of the adult, but within the man a sexual split occurs by which he identifies sex itself as polytropic.
With “Song of Myself,” Whitman had ineradicably written his story as the plot of the nation, unalterably written sex and death into the plan (“Copulation is no more rank to me than death is”) and thereby made the national epic a compendium of “forbidden voices / Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil.” And from “Song of Myself” the scene of vision—the rim on which the vocal and sexual unions sing part-song with the Union of the States—is a kind of no man’s land where litter drifts up in the sea spume. The scene reappears (deformed) a century later in Oppen:
The sea and a crescent strip of beach
Show between the service station and a deserted shack
A creek drains thru the beach
Forming a ditch
There is a discarded super-market cart in the ditch
That beach is the edge of a nation
This, remember, under Whitman’s tutelage, was to have been the scene of transfiguring vision:
Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
But now, “A cold wind chills the beach. / The long lines of it grow longer,” Stevens writes (echoed by Michael Palmer : “The lines through these words / form other, still longer lines”), seeking with Whitman the “spirit that trails in the lines underfoot”; like John Ashbery, convinced that the beach is “The sum of all that will ever be deciphered / On this side of that vast drop of water” (anticipating his convex mirror by globalizing the ocean into a single sphere); or for A. R. Ammons, the locale “where not a single single thing endures, / the overall reassures” in “limited orders, / the separate particles.” For Ammons in the seashore amble of “Corsons Inlet,” “I allow myself eddies of meaning : / … but Overall is beyond me : is the sum of these events / I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting / beyond the account.” The effort, taken in concluding resolve, is “to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope.” In Ammons’s affirmation of
an order held
in constant change : a congregation
rich with entropy : nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
not chaos
it is as if Whitman’s own lines were becoming the beach sediment where Olson notes the opulence of ocean sludge en route to the De-Hy to be processed into cat food. And like Olson, Ammons secures the order of his poems on a fund of disorder permeating the occasion and charging it with energy out of entropy:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center
“I’ve often said that a poem in becoming generates the laws of its / own becoming,” Ammons remarks in “Essay on Poetics,” rendering composition by field accessible in his homespun way. Ammons’s qualification of the organic model is relevant to the “extremest verge” of Whitman’s poetics. As he notes, the growing plant executes a preordained genetic code, whereas
… real change occurs along the chromosomes, a risky business apparently based on accidence, chance, unforeseeable distortion : the proportion of harmful to potentially favorable mutations is
something like 50,000 to 1: how marvelous that the possibility of favorable change is a flimsy margin in overwhelming, statistically, destruction and ruin : that is the way nature pours it on …
“What does not change / is the will to change,” Olson declared in “The Kingfishers.” In Sphere Ammons concurs : “we want to change without changing / out of change.” “We change to keep all else the same” (James Koller). And Muriel Rukeyser : “The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change” (Life of Poetry, 201). One does not “change the world”—a futile repetition of the Prometheus complex—but change the mind that conceives, and accedes to, that composition of the real we acknowledge as a world. Succinctly, Ronald Johnson advises young poets, “Your task is to change the world by word alone” (“From Hurrah for Euphony,” 31). A daunting prolegomenon.
“The usable truth here deals with change”; and this entails corresponding injunctions. For Clayton Eshleman : “Watch out for unity as you age, / it’s in cahoots with reduction.” This reflection arises on another beach (“I’m a little boy in my glandbox / sifting mommy purr, / the simmerunderoar spreads / a virus under tone”) where, yet again, a poet confronts his calling.
Mallarmé’s throw still tumbling in the air,
poetry as shipwreck, oceanic page,
“a throw of the dice” the gamble of alchemical research
“will never abolish chance” no way
to predetermine reception—
Unless a work of art is its own shipwreck
a master is proposed outside the maelstrom
Poets of the composting imagination remain on that rim, still seeking, like Whitman, types (and Olson would later extend this literally to the typewriter, then trace it back to the Greek word typos to suggest the groove on the page that is the material residue of the blow of the type).* These are archetypes in the true sense of arche—they are “blows from an original,” as it were. Remember that psyche as a verb (ψνχειη) means “to blow” (Onians, 120), and this blowing or motive force that leaves types on parchment or sandy beach is an original force, a psycho-typography. So one of the more persistent stories in American poetry is this persistence. There may be a fallacy in the notion of “getting back to the basics,” but there is no mistaking the blow of the original. As long as bodies persist, sex and death imprint us with types of the arche, blows of polysexual sediment commanding psyche. The word Whitman remains one of those archetypal blows, as all the psyche there is of him now (as if this were the instruction) is in type. Dickinson also offers her remains, not in type (though it has come to that) but in the antitype of script, her fascicles reading like poetic ligatures of a provisional camaraderie she was in search of, private monstrance of some Brook Farm in psyche. Her work reaches an apogee of reversals† in which, abjuring publication (as untoward auction of the soul), she gains personal access to an unimaginably larger “public”—nothing short of an exfoliating cosmos where “‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language” (Selected Letters, 246)—in which there could be no “Privacy / From Nature’s sentinels,” in which “Creation seemed a mighty Crack — / To make me visible —” (no. 891).