by Harold Bloom
With this Psalm, traditionally regarded as David’s victory ode, Tyndale takes the Psalm, not of course for accuracy but for preternatural force and eloquence. This may or may not be Yahweh, but certainly he is John Calvin’s ferocious God. Tyndale writes like a possessed man, overcome by Jehovah’s power. (I change God’s name because “Jehovah” was Tyndale’s own coinage, founded upon a spelling error.) King James softens Tyndale’s intensity in Psalm 18, wary of his burning Calvinism.
The Psalms have drawn many verse translations, including poets as gifted as Thomas Campion, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Carew, and John Milton. But only scholars now read them, so I quote from the King James Authorized Version of Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
The cadences of the Authorized Version are beyond argument. Who would not choose “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”? The phrasing of 1611 is a miracle of style, testifying to the Age of Shakespeare. The last word here belongs to the poet-critic John Hollander:
The verse of the Hebrew Bible is strange; the meter in Psalms and Proverbs perplexes.
It is not a matter of number, no counting of beats or syllables.
Its song is a music of matching, its rhythm a kind of paralleling.
One half-line makes an assertion; the other part paraphrases it; sometimes a third part will vary it.
An abstract statement meets with its example, yes, the way a wind runs through the trees moving leaves.
One river’s water is heard on another’s shore; so did this
Hebrew verse form carry across into English.
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Walt Whitman made a rough start on what was to become Leaves of Grass (1855) as early as 1850. But the notebook fragments that were to become “Song of Myself,” the principal poem of that volume, were composed in 1853. After a career as a New York City journalist, Whitman returned to his parents and brothers and his native Long Island to work as a carpenter and house builder:
I am your voice—It was tied in you—In me it begins to talk.
I celebrate myself to celebrate every man and woman alive;
I loosen the tongue that was tied in them,
It begins to talk out of my mouth.
I celebrate myself to celebrate you:
I say the same word for every man and woman alive.
And I say that the soul is not greater than the body,
And I say that the body is not greater than the soul.
This fragment commences the amazing immediacy of Whitman’s poetic stance and style. He is our repressed voice, celebrating himself and all of us in the triple sense of acknowledging, performing, and honoring. Walt is a loosener, a liberator of the word, which is universal. He stands between soul and body, and urges them to become a unison. Yet the meeting of soul, fictive self, and the inward real me or me myself, is disruptive and overcome by the body’s sexuality:
One touch of a tug of me has unhaltered all my senses but feeling
That pleases the rest so, they have given up to it in submission
They are all emulous to swap themselves off for what it can do to them.
Every one must be a touch
Or else she will abdicate and nibble only at the edges of the feeling.
They move caressingly up and down my body
They leave themselves and come with bribes to whatever part of me touches.—
To my lips, to the palms of my hand, and whatever my hands hold.
Each brings the best she has,
For each is in love with touch.
I do not wonder that one feeling now does so much for me,
He is free of all the rest,—and swiftly begets offspring of them, better than the dams.
A touch now reads me a library of knowledge in an instant.
It smells for me the fragrance of wine and lemon-blows.
It tastes for me ripe strawberries and mellons,—
It talks for me with a tongue of its own,
It finds an ear wherever it rests or taps.
It brings the rest around it, and they all stand on a headland and mock me
They have left me to touch, and taken their place on a headland.
The sentries have deserted every other part of me
They have left me helpless to the torrent of touch
They have all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.—
I roam about drunk and stagger
I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly I am surely out of my head,
I am myself the greatest traitor.
I went myself first to the headland
Unloose me, touch, you are taking the breath from my throat!
Unbar your gates you are too much for me
Fierce Wrestler! do you keep your heaviest grip for last?
Will you sting me most even at parting?
Will you struggle even at the threshold with spasms more delicious than all before?
Does it make you to ache so to leave me?
Do you wish to show me that even what you did before was nothing to what you can do?
Or have you and all the rest combined to see how much I can endure?
Pass as you will; take drops of my life, if that is what you are after
Only pass to someone else, for I can contain you no longer
I held more than I thought
I did not think I was big enough for so much ecstasy
Or that a touch could take it all out of me.
This was the true starting point for “Song of Myself.” The headland is the first of what Whitman would call vistas or tallies, his prime images of voice. When the incipient poet laments, “I am myself the greatest traitor. I went myself first to the headland,” then he acknowledges that he went out too far on a precipice and could not unaided scramble back. Materially, this refers to autoeroticism, but self-gratification is merely an emblem of the actual adventure of achieving the incarnation of the poetic character.
The adventure is hardly an easy achievement. At this fragmentary stage, Whitman had no notion how to bring his scattered inward faculties into a harmony. There is a contradictory range of affects assaulting him at once. His autoerotic climax mixes shame and pleasure. When he calls himself the greatest traitor, who or what has he betrayed? Who is the “I” who went first to the headland?
Contrary to his reputation, Walt Whitman is a very difficult poet. He may look easy, but that is a deception. His very original psychic cartography is still largely unmapped. And although his outrageous comedy has been studied, its full enormity requires further appreciation. Here is a wonderful early fragment:
The crowds naked in the bath,
Can your sight behold them as with oyster’s eyes?
Do you take the attraction of gravity for nothing?
Does the negress bear no children?
Are they never handsome? Do they not thrive?
Will cabinet officers become blue or yellow from excessive gin?
Shall I receive the great things of the spirit on easier terms than I do a note of hand?
Wh
o examines the philosophies in the market less than a basket of peaches or barrels of salt fish?
Who accepts chemistry on tradition?
The light picks out a bishop or pope no more than the rest.
A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger billions of infidels.
Eight fierce questions are framed by the initial “The crowds naked in the bath” and then conclude with two lines juxtaposing a deprecation of the high clergy with the miracle of a mouse that somehow awes a vast horde of infidels. In between, the reader’s sight yields to the defensive closing up of the oyster sensing danger. Then comes the nonsense of gravity set aside. The defiant celebration of the Negress bearing handsome and successful children meant more in the 1850s than it does now, even in Trump’s America. Best of all is the speculation of whether the presidential Cabinet, after excessive indulgence in gin, will turn blue or yellow. The next three questions are rhetorical and thus self-answering.
Another Whitman, in his first appearance as the American Christ, daringly proclaims his Resurrection. Churches are dismissed as mere matter, and by implication the Bible is set aside by the human presence:
In vain were nails driven through my hands.
I remember my crucifixion and bloody coronation
I remember the mockers and the buffeting insults
The sepulchre and the white linen have yielded me up
I am alive in New York and San Francisco,
Again I tread the streets after two thousand years.
Not all the traditions can put vitality in churches
They are not alive, they are cold mortar and brick,
I can easily build as good, and so can you:—
Books are not men—
There is no word in any tongue,
No array, no form of symbol,
To tell his infatuation
Who would define the scope and purpose of God.
Mostly this we have of God; we have man.
Lo, the Sun;
Its glory floods the moon,
Which of a night shines in some turbid pool,
Shaken by soughing winds;
And there are sparkles mad and tossed and broken,
And their archetype is the sun.
Of God I know not;
But this I know;
I can comprehend no being more wonderful than man;
Man, before the rage of whose passions the storms of Heaven are but a breath;
Before whose caprices the lightning is slow and less fatal;
Man, microcosm of all Creation’s wildness, terror, beauty and power,
And whose folly and wickedness are in nothing else existent.
O dirt, you corpse, I reckon you are good manure—but that I do not smell—
I smell your beautiful white roses—
I kiss your leafy lips—I slide my hands for the brown melons of your breasts.
To say that what we have of God is man establishes one of the affinities of Walt Whitman with William Blake, whom eventually he was to read. The worship of the sun, however, is not Blakean but more in the mode of D. H. Lawrence, whose later poetry was flooded by Whitman’s. The description of man raging with passions and caprices, holding in wildness, terror, beauty, and power; folly will do very well for King Lear. Walt, making love to the earth, is like an Egyptian god pouring his semen into the ground as the act of creation.
The opening strophes of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, with the initial poem termed “Song of Myself,” have become so familiar that we have to make an effort to read them with the shock of recognition that Ralph Waldo Emerson experienced when Walt Whitman sent him the strange-looking little book:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease….observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste of the distillation….it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever….I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers….loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration….the beating of my heart….the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice….words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses….a few embraces….a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, fields and hillsides,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health….the full-noon trill….the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun….there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand….nor look through the eyes of the dead….nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
This amazing declaration simultaneously offers us Walt Whitman as mediator while telling us we do not need him. The crucial line of the above excerpt is the final one: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”
Brilliantly anticipating the conclusion of “Song of Myself,” Whitman offers us the rich trope of “filter.” The penultimate tercet of the epic illuminates this origin:
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Try the experiment of reading this passage as though no one had ever read it before you. Though Harold Bloom has been a disciple of Emerson since 1965, he is well aware that he cannot be the sage of Concord. And Emerson, like the Hebraic sages, would remind him that his burden is to be Harold Bloom. Today is November 27, 2017, a Monday at 3:00. p.m. Weary from exercise and suffering pain in a highly arthritic left knee, the eighty-seven-year-old Bloom sits uncomfortably in his wheelchair, chants Whitman silently to himself, and dictates these sentences to a very helpful assistant.
The American epic, probably never to be matched, begins: “I celebrate myself.” Whitman deliberately counterpoints that assertion against Homer’s “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus” (Iliad); “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven” (Odyssey); and Virgil’s “I sing of arms and of a man” (Aeneid). Only Walt Whitman would dare to begin his central poem with self-celebration.
Attempt to imagine Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, or T. S. Eliot starting a poem with “I celebrate myself.” It is beyond belief. Hart Crane, obsessed with and inspired by Whitman, celebrates the Brooklyn Bridge as the myth of America, but when it comes to self, Crane destroys his own being as an Orphic sacrifice
. But Walt Whitman has come to heal us.
Whitman was an admirer of Fanny (Frances) Wright (1795–1852) and had read her novel about Epicurus, A Few Days in Athens (1822). I have read it more than once and still find it useful, though aesthetic value is wanting. Wright employed the Epicurean philosophy as a noble materialism on behalf of labor, feminist, and abolitionist causes. Whitman first heard her lecture when he was seventeen, and retained a lifelong admiration for her. He read the greatest of Latin poets, Lucretius, in translation and absorbed a more refined version of the Epicurean philosophy. In Democratic Vistas (1871), Whitman boasted that he would go beyond Lucretius:
What the Roman Lucretius sought most nobly, yet all too blandly, negatively to do for his age and its successors, must be done positively by some great coming literatus, especially poet, who, while remaining fully poet, will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them, and out of his own genius, will compose the great poem of death.
To call Lucretius “bland” is absurd. Whitman’s best poetry was written from 1855 to 1865, climaxing in his great poem of death, the “Lilacs” elegy for Abraham Lincoln. There is a sadness in Whitman’s assertion. In his wonderful decade, he indeed had been the peer of Lucretius, like Shelley before him and Wallace Stevens in his wake.
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Whitman loafs and invites his soul to behold a spear of summer grass. The remarkable trope, “leaves of grass,” is endless to unpack. The leaves could be the pages of Whitman’s book—or are they an emblem for Whitman’s radically new poems? I invoke here a crucial phrase from Wallace Stevens: “the fiction of the leaves.” That fiction comes down to Whitman and to Stevens from a long tradition that begins in the Bible and Homer and then goes through Virgil and Dante and then on through Milton to Coleridge and Shelley.
Here is the prophet Isaiah:
And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.
