I
WHITMAN’S PLAN to observe “the pigmies” at Washington merged with a grander ambition during the early months of 1857. He was going to be a public teacher who addressed the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, or the nation at large, “as some great emergency might demand,” but always with a single purpose—“to keep up living interest in public questions,” “to hold the ear of the people.” “I see in my country many great qualities,” he said in manuscript notes for a speech. “I see in America not merely the home of Americans, but the home of the needy and down-kept races of the whole earth . . . I say the land that has a place for slaves and the owners of slaves has no place for freemen.” The public voice he had already raised in “The Eighteenth Presidency!” now had a cycle of poems to recite, “Chants Democratic and Native American,” composed during a recent and ongoing surge. The “Chants” were the high-water mark of Whitman’s faith in the politics of democracy; they were also a sort of handbook for oratory, a thesaurus of themes and issues. “Now we start hence,” he announced in “Wander-Teachers”:
We confer on equal terms with each of The States,
We make trial of ourselves, and invite men and women to hear,
We say to ourselves. Remember, fear not, be candid, promulge the body and the Soul,
Promulge real things—Never forget the equality of humankind, and never forget immortality;
Dwell a while and pass on . . .
Like this one, many of the other “chants” were all too nakedly in the. manner of the orator. Still, Whitman believed that with these poems in hand, along with other new “clusters,” he was well on his way to achieving the final intention of Leaves of Grass. “In the forthcoming Vol.,” he told Sarah Tyndale,
I shall have . . . a hundred poems, and no other matter but poems—(no letters to or from Emerson—no notices or anything of that sort.) I know well enough that that must be the true Leaves of Grass—I think it (the new Vol.) has an aspect of completeness, and makes its case clearer. The old poems are all retained. The difference is in the new character given to the mass, by the additions.
This new volume, combining the 32 poems of 1856 with 68 new ones, was to be triple the length of its predecessor. The only difficulty was in finding a publisher. He told her he had finally decided that “Fowler and Wells are bad persons for me. They retard my book very much. It is worse than ever . . . they want the thing off their hands.” She promised him that if he came to visit her in Germantown she would give him a concurring version of Fowler and Wells’s “malpractice.” Meanwhile she sent him fifty dollars toward buying up the plates from them.
For the same purpose, or perhaps just to help a fellow author get through the winter, James Parton, “without the least request or hint from me,” offered a loan of two hundred dollars. Early in 1857 Whitman took the money and gave Parton a short-term note. It is not altogether clear what happened between then and late spring when the note fell due. Talking to Traubel about the Parton loan (or scandal, as it became), he referred darkly to “venom, jealousies, opacities: they played a big part; and, if I may say it, women: a woman certainly . . .” When William Sloane Kennedy investigated the same loan after Walt’s death he concluded that Sara Parton had been “sweet” on Walt but had suddenly developed a case of “unquenchable spite.” One of Kennedy’s sources was Ellen O’Connor, to whom Walt had once confided his side of the story—Ellen’s unrequited passion for Walt may have made her especially attentive to the situation. The cause of Sara’s about-face was “of too private a nature to be discussed,” Kennedy said, but, adopting Ellen’s version of events, he supplied a ponderous clue—“see Potiphar story of Bible”—that was beyond mistaking: Potiphar was the Egyptian official whose wife, failing to seduce their slave Joseph, falsely accused him to her husband, who thereupon had Joseph put in prison.
When payment time came and passed, Parton, who needed cash for a trip to New Orleans to research his biography of Andrew Jackson, put Walt’s note for collection in the hands of Sara’s confidant, Oliver Dyer, one of her publishers and her sole marriage witness. On June 17, acting as attorney for James Parton, plaintiff, Dyer appeared at Walt’s door and seized several items of personal property, including books and the oil painting by Jesse Talbot. According to Walt, Dyer later assured him that Parton had accepted these goods in full settlement and that the debt was discharged, but despite reminders when they met again on the street and ferry Dyer never produced Parton’s receipt or the canceled note; he may have kept the picture for himself. Walt considered the debt “paid,” but Parton did not, and neither did a number of detractors who in time confounded the debt with the fact that Walt, apparently flouting the sacred code of commercial honor, had had to be sued for it at all. The legend of the Bad Gray Poet, now bill-jumper as well as immoralist and barbarian, surfaced after the war, during Walt’s time in Washington. A quarter of a century later Kennedy was doing battle with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who charged that the late poet had built a Taj Mahal mausoleum while bilking his benefactors.
When Walt saw his belongings being carted away he also saw a repetition of the Whitman and Van Velsor history of default and foreclosure. But what anger he felt he directed not at Parton, whose work he was to review favorably, but at Sara. “The majority of people do not want their daughters trained to become authoresses and poets,” he commented in the Brooklyn Daily Times on July 9. “We want a race of women turned out from our schools, not of pedants and bluestockings. One genuine woman is worth a dozen Fanny Ferns.”
Two months or so before this gibe, Walt’s money troubles forced him to go back to full-time journalism; the surge of poetry that had occupied him for close to a year came to a halt. Around May 1857 he joined the staff of the Daily Times, a politically independent paper whose proprietor, George C. Bennett, he was to recall as “a good, generous, honorable man.” The paper had endorsed the Republican presidential candidate in 1856—under Whitman it was to welcome the senatorial victory (over Abraham Lincoln) of the Illinois Democrat, Stephen Douglas, as perhaps the beginning of “a great middle conservative party” that alone could avert what the fire-eating Senator William Seward of New York was calling an “irrepressible conflict.” Sometime in 1858, midway through his two years with the Daily Times, Whitman printed up a circular announcing his intention to travel the United States and Canada lecturing, “henceforth my employment, my means of earning my living . . .” But for the most part he seemed resigned to at least the temporary scaling-down of the bard and wander-speaker to a writer of editorials and leading articles for the citizens of Brooklyn. Years later he cited as his proudest achievement on the Daily Times his campaign for the construction of an integrated municipal water system. “With the consent of the proprietor, I bent the whole weight of the paper steadily . . . against a flimsy, cheap and temporary series of works that would have long since broken down, and disgraced the city.”
Walt’s misadventure with Parton had given him a preview of the financial panic of August 1857 and its trail of constricted credit, business failures and unemployment. He figured in October that at least 25,000 people in the cities of New York and Brooklyn would be out of work by winter and an additional 100,000, their dependents, would suffer with them. The diarist George Templeton Strong worried about preserving peace and order during the coming months. “We are a very sick people,” Strong said. “The outward and visible signs of disease, the cutaneous symptoms, are many.” Walt’s prescription came from personal experience. “We must now return to first principles and acknowledge . . . that the money we have received is not our own until we have satisfied all just demands accruing upon it.” Turning to the world of polite letters he took note of the marriage of James Russell Lowell, “one of the truest of our poets,” and of the first issue (November 1857) of the new magazine edited by Lowell, the Atlantic Monthly, a disappointment, “inferior to the average Harper’s Monthly. (Subsequent issues proved to be a “credit to American intellect and enterprise.”) He came to the defense of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose little poem in the Atlantic, “Brahma”—a “pantheistic thought” expressed “with remarkable grace and melody”—was being ridiculed for “unintelligibility.” He defended the memory of Edgar Allan Poe against the slanders of his literary executor, Rufus Wilmot Griswold.
As an occasional sports writer he condemned prize fighting for encouraging “rowdy turbulence instead of calm courage,” celebrated the hygienic virtues of swimming, and covered a New York-Brooklyn baseball game in the course of which three of the local players were disabled by injuries. He had opinions on the need for an American national anthem as stirring as the “Marseillaise,” the vogue of chess, home aquariums, and crossword puzzles, and the apparent completion—it failed after three weeks in service—of Cyrus Field’s Atlantic Cable, “an electric chain from the New World to the Old.” “Utterly unmoved either by covert sneers, or chilly neglect,” Field, the Hero as Promoter, had “won for himself imperishable fame as the foremost man of the Nineteenth Century.” (“The cities confer with each other from across two thousand miles,” Whitman had written in his 1855–56 Leaves of Grass notebook, “the continents talk under the waves of seas.”)
Walt once said that he never had the makings of “a good journalist”—“My opinions are all, always, so hazy—so slow to come. I am no use in any situation which calls for instant decision.” As artist and universal lover he obeyed a different rhythm:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding . . .
Gossamer cables, spun from the self and more “electric” than Cyrus Field’s, linked the single soul to distant spheres of the Not-Me. But so far from webbing all reality Whitman and his book were still only “a promise, a preface, an overture,” he wrote in what may have been the draft of yet another review of his own work. “Will he justify the great prophecy of Emerson? or will he too, like thousands of others, flaunt out one bright announcement, the result of gathered powers, only to sink back exhausted.” He had announced a brave purpose:
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
But he also doubted his purpose:
Shall I make the idiomatic book of my land?
Shall I yet finish the divine volume [?]
I know not whether I am to finish the divine volume . . .
He lived simultaneously in different stages of the future. Anticipating the enthusiasm his work would eventually arouse in Germany, he gave a copy of Leaves of Grass to Frederick Huene, an émigré poet employed in the Daily Times pressroom and got him started on a translation—Huene said that he had to give it up because “I could not do justice to his ideas and thoughts.” The month of the Parton foreclosure Whitman was laying plans both for the one-hundred-poem Leaves of Grass that he told Sarah Tyndale about and for a monumental edition that was to contain one poem for each day of the year:
The Great Construction of the New Bible. Not to be diverted from the principal object—the main life work—the three hundred and sixty five.—It ought to be ready in 1859.
“The world is young,” Emerson said. “We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly worlds.” He himself had set out to write a modern, secular gospel—so had Goethe and Carlyle, Thoreau in Walden and Melville in Moby-Dick. Whitman intended Leaves of Grass to be the trinitarian gospel of natural religion, democracy and science, “a modern Image-Making creation” supplying the vision without which, the Scriptural Proverbialist said, “the people perish.” The author of this gospel spoke for “the people,” but he was a messiah as well:
I am not content now with a mere majority. . . . I must have the love of all men and all women.
If there is one left in any country who has no faith in me, I will travel to that country and go to that one.
“Great is language,” Whitman had declared in 1855, “it is the mightiest of the sciences.” Now he applied himself to the study of historical linguistics with William Swinton, a professor of ancient and modern languages before he joined the Times. “Question for Swinton, “Walt noted, “To tell me of Etruria.” Another question for Swinton: “What are the Turanian languages?” A number of passages in the popular text on language that Swinton published in 1859, Rambles Among Words, bear the unmistakable imprint of Walt Whitman, an unacknowledged collaborator:
New thoughts, new things, all unnamed! Where is the theory of literary expression that stands for the new politics and sociology? that puts itself abreast the vast divine tendencies of Science? that absorbs the superb suggestions of the Grand Opera?
Words were “metaphysical beings,” evolving, vital, organic realities, Walt argued in An American Primer, a collection of notes for a public lecture on language. “A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children . . . or do any thing, that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” Certain words he favored because they were the correlatives of his own preferred identity: “robust, brawny, athletic, muscular . . . resistance, bracing, rude, rugged, rough, shaggy, bearded, arrogant, haughty. These words are alive and sinewy—they walk, look, step with an air of command.” While writing his Primer and working with Swinton Walt also collected hundreds of entries for a combined dictionary and phrase book of American English. He had in mind a sequel to Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), in its time a revolutionary instrument in extending the boundaries of approved usage to take in “new thoughts, new things”; for Whitman these included imports from foreign tongues as well as slang—“shin-dig,” “spree,” “bender,” “bummer,” “So long” (“a delicious American—New York—idiomatic phrase at parting”). In the end, after compiling a great mass of notes under the working title Words, Whitman put the project aside. It threatened to divert his energies from the construction of Leaves of Grass, which he once described as “only a language experiment . . . an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech.”
Adamic, Leaves of Grass disavows sources, traditions, antecedents, and, in general, what Whitman thought of as “pictures of things” as opposed to “real things themselves.” But his book continued to derive blood and fiber, even if only abreactively, from his readings in Rousseau and Voltaire, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe, ancient cycles, epics, and sagas, including the Hindu. In his notebook he reminds himself to read Blackstone’s Commentaries and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, books on physiology, the ancient Hebrews, life and manners in Persia. He rejects as much as he accepts. Paradise Lost is “offensive to modern science and intelligence. . . . Think of a writer going into the creative action of the deity.” “Of life in the nineteenth century it has none, any more than statues have,” he says about Keats’s poetry. “It does not come home at all to the direct wants of the bodies and souls of the century.” He is determined, it seems, to take all knowledge for his province and bend it to his purposes. He reads Blackwood’s Magazine, Edinburgh Review, Westminster Review, conduits for the culture and learning of Victorian England. He writes newspaper reviews of biographies of Michelangelo and Frederick the Great, a history of France and a sociological study of prostitution, Dr. David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in Africa, Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic. He collects and annotates chronologies and tables, articles on history, law, geography, exploration, astronomy, archaeology, the fine and applied arts, geology, life in foreign countries, oratory, religion, science. “Go study the human figure—study anatomy—study it along the wharfs and levees, the ’long shoremen, hoisting and lowering cargoes. Study the pose of the drivers of horses.” He reads the proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Absorbing the spirit of the times, he is already an evolutionist when Darwin publishes Origin of Species. His wonder at unimaginable vistas of existence is matched by his interest in the weekly reports of the United States Patent Office and the light they throw on “America and American character.”
He dines with Sarah Tyndale’s son Hector, a cultivated man who has made many trips to Europe, and he quizzes him about “where he thought I needed particular attention to be directed for my improvement—where I could especially be bettered in my poems.” Tyndale tells him to emulate the massiveness and sweeping effects of York Cathedral, and Walt dutifully notes this advice together with a comment solicited from another acquaintance, that Leaves of Grass lacked “euphony—your poems seem to me to be full of the raw materials of poems, but crude, and wanting finish and rhythm.” Walt records a conversation with a traveler recently returned from China who gives him an account of religion, slavery, polygamy, military service, capital punishment, tea production, and other features of life during the T’ai P’ing Rebellion.
Walt often spends hours at a stretch in the house of Mrs. Abby Price, a friend of his mother’s, and virtually becomes a family member. Abby’s husband runs a pickle works near the Navy Yard. She and her daughter Helen supplement his income by making the rounds of Brooklyn households, including the Beechers’, with their Singer sewing machine, a recent improvement. (“What a revolution this little piece of furniture is producing,” Walt exclaims—Abby and Helen, booked for a fortnight ahead, could accomplish in a day with their foot-treadle machine what would have taken a seamstress six months with a needle.) Even in this setting the work of self-improvement continues. Walt discourses on books, music, the opera, Marietta Alboni and his other favorite singers, “the spiritual nature of man,” “the reforms of the age,” and kindred topics. He has friendly debates about politics, patriotism, democracy, and the news of the day with a lodger in the Price house, John Arnold, whom he suspects of harboring a bias against the common people. According to Helen Price, Arnold, a retired preacher, was a Swedenborgian in allegiance although not a church member and “a man of wide knowledge and the most analytical mind of any one I ever knew.” “Conversation with Mr. Arnold 7 March ’57,” Walt notes—the topic is the life of Dr. Joseph Priestley, the British scientist who isolated oxygen, left England because of his allegedly atheistic and Jacobin sympathies, and became one of the vexed figures in American Unitarianism. He “must have been a real man,” Walt decides. “He was not followed by the American Unitarians. (How these Unitarians and Universalists want to be respectable and orthodox, just as much as any of the old line people!)”
One of these old-line people, the Reverend Dr. Elbert Porter, pastor of the Williamsburg Church (Dutch Reformed) and editor of the Christian Intelligencer, surprises Walt when they meet by assuring him that he has not only read Leaves of Grass but wants “more.” He hopes that Walt has retained the Dutch Reformed faith that he must have inherited from the Van Velsor side of the family. “I not only assured him of my retaining faith in that sect,” Walt reports to Sarah Tyndale, “but that I had perfect faith in all sects, and was not inclined to reject one single one—but believed each to be as far advanced as it could be, considering what had preceeded it.” Porter—“the head man of the head congregation of Dutch Presbyterians in Brooklyn, Eastern District!”—is not put off by this answer and invites Walt to dinner.
“He is a born exalté,” Helen Price says of Walt—“his religious sentiment. . . pervades and dominates his life.” Encouraged by Arnold, Walt attends Swedenborgian meetings in New York and studies Swedenborg’s life and writings. In the Daily Times he calls him a “precursor of the great religious difference between past centuries and future centuries,” yet he is puzzled and unsatisfied by the seer’s gospel—“There is something in it that eludes being stated.” He had his own millennial religion, with the priest surrendering his place at the altar to the poet, “the divine literatus.” Religion was too important to be the property of churches, of “Saint this, or Saint that”—it belonged to “Democracy en masse, and to Literature.”
Dinner at the Reverend Dr. Porter’s house was, if not the first, probably the last of Whitman’s love feasts with the Brooklyn clergy. His editorials dealt forthrightly with the sexual needs of unmarried men and women, the benefits to be derived from licensing the brothels, and the doctrinal debate over slavery then raging in the Baptist Ecclesiastical Council. After two years on the Daily Times, during the summer of 1859 Whitman “resigned his place,” Huene said, “in consequence of articles which were very unfavorably criticized by ministers and church people, about which he had quite a philosophic debate With Mr. Bennett.” Whitman remembered Bennett warmly, but ministers and church people in general—“institutional, official, teleological goodness”—he came to “thoroughly disapprove of—hate—yes, even fear.”
II
A few days after his thirty-eighth birthday in 1857 Walt noted as his “principal object—the main life work . . . the Great Construction of the New Bible.” The following year he marked his birthday with an appeal, largely addressed to himself, for “a revolution in American oratory” and the emergence of “a great leading representative man, with perfect power, perfect confidence in his power . . . who will make free the American soul.” In later years he commemorated the season of his birthday with other declarations of purpose. But in 1859, when he became forty and rounded the potently symbolic turn into his fifth decade, he entered a dark period. “It is now time to stir,” he wrote in a notebook entry for June 26, ‘To Stir. . . and get out of this Slough.” He was either out of work or about to be. For the next three years he was to squeeze out a living—perhaps six or seven dollars a week supplemented by occasional windfalls from his poems—selling articles to the papers. “The New Bible” that was to have been ready in 1859 was still an intention only. The brave persona announced in 1855—hero-poet, “the equable man . . . the equalizer of his age and land”—had not stood up under the test of change and experience, had become more tragic in vision, less “insolent” in certainty.
The poet who walks the Long Island seashore in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”—published as “Bardic Symbols” when Whitman managed to sell it to James Russell Lowell at the Atlantic in April 1860—hears not a song of celebration but a dirge sung by “the voices of men and women wrecked.” His “bardic symbols” are drift, debris, rotting leaves, windrows, tufts of straw, froth, bubbles, the wrack and waste left by the restless intercourse of his father, the land, and his mother, the sea. The poet imagines himself a corpse:
(See! from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last!
See—the prismatic colors, glistening and rolling!)
His work has come to no more than “a trail of drift and debris”:
. . . I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my insolent poems, the real Me still stands untouched, untold, altogether unreached,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every work I have written or shall write.
Striking me with insults till I fall helpless upon the sand.
He had failed to understand his own meanings. In his language primer he said that American young men were capable of “a wonderful tenacity of friendship, and passionate fondness for their friends” but possessed “remarkably few words [or] names for their friendly sentiments . . . they never give words to their most ardent friendships.” The phrenologists had a word for these friendships, “adhesiveness,” as distinguished from “amativeness” or “sexual love.” The cluster of forty-five poems that became “Calamus” in the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s attempt to find a language for “manly love” and “the love of comrades,” the ultimate democracy of the heart. Poems celebrating “the most copious and close companionship of men” were themselves “Chants Democratic.” On the eve of the Civil War he was still able to imagine a “continent indissoluble” and raised above sectional strife:
Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,
Those who love each other shall be invincible,
They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name.
In Fowler’s diagram of the human brain “adhesiveness” had been symbolized by two women embracing, but from now on men too were to embrace, greet one another with a kiss, walk hand in hand. More splendid than a warship under full sail or the great city itself was the sight
. . . of two simple men I saw to-day, on the pier, in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,
The one to remain hung on the other’s neck, and passionately kissed him,
While the one to depart, tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.
Among the hundred poems Whitman had in hand by June 1857 were a dozen or so that were the “embryon” of “Calamus.” Leaves of Grass arose in part from an accommodation with death that had now begun to fail. Love itself became bound up with his own death—
Scented herbage of my breast,
Leaves from you I yield, to be perused best afterwards,
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves, growing up above me, above death,
Perennial roots, tall leaves . . .
—and with the death of others. He seems almost to foresee the war years he spent ministering to the torn bodies of soldiers:
Of him I love day and night, I dreamed I heard he was dead,
And I dreamed I went where they had buried him I love—but he was not in that place,
And I dreamed I wandered, searching among burial-places, to find him,
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death . .
One day he told Helen Price about a young man he knew on the Daily Times who had destroyed their “delightful silent friendship” by expressing his affection “in heated language.” Psyche must not look on Cupid, Walt said to Helen, citing Apuleius’ legend of baffled love. The secret of his own nights and days, as he wrote in “Calamus,” could be got at only by “faint indirections.”
Among the men and women, the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.
Lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections,
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.
From his schoolteaching years on, Walt had assumed an anomalous sort of role—tender, protective and nurturing—with his pupils, his brothers, even casual acquaintances who are now only names in his notebooks. “You grew up with me,” he tells the “passing stranger” in one of the “Calamus” poems.
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving . . .
In his soul he wished adolescence could have been frozen in time and adulthood deferred. Yet as pseudo father, as guardian, husband, brother, lover, and comrade to young men, he invested himself in their growth away from him into independence and heterosexual maturity.
For years the chief support of his homoerotic fantasy of “two boys together clinging” had been Jeff, his one “real brother” and only “understander.” After their trip to New Orleans Jeff followed Walt’s example and worked in the printing trades in Brooklyn and New York. When he began to be interested instead in land surveying and civil engineering he went to work for the municipal water system that Walt was lobbying for so vigorously in Daily Times editorials. Jeff was proud of Leaves of Grass and passionate about opera and music. “Flocks of ideas,” Walt wrote in an early notebook, “beat their countless wings and clutch their feet upon me, as I sit near by where my brother is practising at the piano,” which Walt had bought for him. “God’s blessing on your name and memory, dear brother Jeff!” Walt wrote in 1890, remembering “how we loved each other—how many jovial good times we had!” Jeff “was very much with me in his childhood & as big boy greatly attached to each other till he got married” (in 1859, the year of Walt’s “slough”), moved to his own place with his wife, Mattie, and had his own family; he was Walt’s ward and companion no longer. Walt loved Mattie as if she were a sister—she and Louisa Whitman were “the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known or ever expect to see.” Still, his cherished and exclusive relationship with Jeff had been fractured along with his understanding of “adhesiveness,” now divested of its sanctions in brotherly love.
While Walt was in his slough, it seemed to him, as Carlyle had written about his own sickness unto death, that “all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath were but the boundless jaws of a devouring monster.” Confronting his bare-stripped heart, the brave and joyous poet yielded to the profoundest melancholy.
The record of that confrontation is, in part, the cycle of twelve lyrics that Whitman composed during the spring and summer of 1859 and preserved in fair copies in his notebook, perhaps with no thought, at first, of ever printing them. They were “fit to be perused,” he noted privately, “during the days of the approach of Death.” He called them “sonnets,” not because of their form, which is typically irregular, but perhaps because they make up a narrative sequence, like Shakespeare’s, that dramatizes—not necessarily recounts—a passionate attachment to a younger man; the roots in literal happening of Whitman’s attachment are just as obscure as those of Shakespeare’s, but the pattern of this attachment prefigures Whitman’s baffled love affairs over the next two decades. “Live Oak with Moss,” as Whitman originally titled this cluster, is an act of self-exploration and in the end a recognition of his homosexuality at least as desire if not fulfillment. It is Whitman’s poetry, and not any overt act that one can point to, that defines his nature. “Live Oak with Moss” records a perception of possibilities—and a crisis of “intimacy,” in Erik Erikson’s terms, auguring “a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-absorption”—with which Whitman must come to terms.
“Burning for his love whom I love,” as he writes in the opening poem, he compares himself in the second to the Louisiana live oak, emblem of his trip South with Jeff,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near, I know very well I could not.
He goes on to make a series of contrasts between success, as he had first thought of it, and a newly discovered kind of happiness:
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arms lay lightly around my breast—And that night I was happy.
Yet these exquisitely tender and simple commemorations are also fearful. The poet who had once declared it was enough for him “to strike up the songs of the New World” and spend his life singing them now says his lover is jealous of these songs “and withdraws me from all but love”:
I am indifferent to my own songs—I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together—We never separate again.
He strikes through his “impassive exterior.” He wishes to be remembered “ages hence” as one
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him—and freely poured it forth,
Who often walked lonesome walks, thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
Who pensive, away from one he loved, often lay sleepless and dissatisfied at night,
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he loved might secretly be indifferent to him.
He tells of “sullen and suffering hours . . . hours of my torment” when he fears that his lover is lost to him. His lover may little know
. . . the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me
and that threatens the poet himself:
For an athlete is enamoured of me—and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me, eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words—not even in these songs.
About the time that he finished this sequence Whitman planned another “string of Poems (short, etc.),” this one “embodying the amative love of woman—the same as Live Oak Leaves do the passion of friendship for man.” The new cluster—“Enfans d’Adam” in the 1860 Leaves of Grass and later, fortunately, “Children of Adam”—is often lacking in felt emotion. In an athletic, impersonal, even ideological way, these poems celebrate “stalwart loins” and the act of procreation.
A woman waits for me—she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking . . .
Even when his cadences are at their most passionate he seems to be addressing a lover who is not so much a woman as she is a prospect of history.
Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and of America . . .
Walt the “wander-speaker” and “wander-teacher” has set out to bestow on the people of the New World the freedom Adam and Eve knew in the Garden of Eden before they knew shame; their children were to be readmitted to Paradise by embracing the flesh and nakedness. There is an implicit sexual politics in “Children of Adam”: before homosexual men can freely enjoy even a little happiness with one another, heterosexual men and women together must be able to enjoy a great deal more. But perhaps he had put his own balance in jeopardy by discovering so much in “Live Oak with Moss.” He did not reserve these “sonnets” for the days of approaching death. Instead he broke up their loose narrative sequence and in the 1860 Leaves of Grass distributed them among poems that dealt with adhesiveness in a less intimate and perturbed way, in the manner of a social document. He changed the collective title to the symbolically cognate “Calamus,” after the aromatic rush native to the Eastern and Southern states and also known as “sweet flag.” “The recherché or ethereal sense of the term,” he explained in 1867, “arises probably from the actual Calamus presenting the biggest & hardiest kind of spears of grass.” But as early as 1855, in a passage celebrating “some of the spread of my body,” he had made it plain that the primary features of calamus were not only its leaf and pine-tinged rootstalk but also its floral spike, phallic as the thrusting live oak haired with moss:
Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you,
Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn it shall be you,
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you;
Sun so generous it shall be you,
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you,
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you,
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you,
Broad muscular fields, branches of liveoak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you,
Hands I have taken, face I have kissed, mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.
For the rest of his life Whitman grappled with the self-doubts and renunciations of “Live Oak with Moss.” With several younger men he was to know a certain love along with “sullen and suffering hours,” hours of “sick, sick dread.” But just as he had put himself in danger through poetry, through poetry he reconstituted himself and moved on to a new stage of composure and understanding. One evening late in the autumn of 1859 he called on the Prices, bringing with him the manuscript of a new poem that he told them was “about” a mockingbird and based on a real incident. At his urging, Preacher Arnold and Abby Price read it aloud under the lamplight. Then he read it himself, and to their surprise—they thought of him as a demigod—he asked them for their criticisms, even though he seemed to be satisfied with what he had written. Helen Price remembered her introduction that evening to “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” as one of the high points of her life. A little later, across the ocean, a young Algernon Swinburne read this major new poem in the 1860 Leaves of Grass and called it “the most lovely and wonderful thing I have read for years and years . . . such beautiful skill and subtle power.” (His own “Triumph of Time,” evoking “the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea,” bore the impress of Whitman’s elegy.)
The poet of “Out of the Cradle” again throws himself on the Paumanok sands of “Bardic Symbols.” He is “a man—yet by these tears a little boy again” as he remembers the white arms of the breakers and the mockingbird’s song of love, loss, and the transcending of loss.
He poured forth the meanings which I, of all men, know.
The outsetting bard is always to hear “the cries of unsatisfied love” and be the chanter of “pains” as well as “joys,” of
. . . the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.