Key lines in his poems echo this zestful tone: “I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning every one I meet”; “Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace, I hold up agitation and conflict.”29
He was responding to very real social problems. Glass divisions were growing at an alarming rate. Whitman, whose family felt the constant pinch of poverty, lamented this economic inequality in his poetry. He could sound like Karl Marx or George Lippard when he depicted the grotesque rich: “I see an aristocrat / I see a smoucher grabbing the good dishes exclusively to himself and grinning at the starvation of others as if it were funny, / I gaze on the greedy hog.”30 In “Song of Myself” he repeated the charge often made by labor reformers that the “idle” rich cruelly appropriated the products of the hard-working poor:
Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.
The 1850s was also a decade of unprecedented political corruption, a time of vote-buying, wire-pulling, graft, and patronage on all levels of state and national government. There was historical reference, then, for Whitman’s venomous diatribes, as in the 1855 preface where he impugned the “swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency.”31
The chaos created by the slavery debate caused the collapse of the old party system. He wrote that the parties had become “empty flesh, putrid mouths, mumbling and squeaking the tones of these conventions, the politicians standing back in the shadow, telling lies.” Those responsible for selecting America’s leaders came “from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; from the running sores of the great cities.”
Whitman’s wrath against governmental authority figures extended to presidents. The administrations of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan eroded his confidence in the executive office because of these leaders’ compromises on the slavery issue. Whitman branded these three presidencies before Lincoln as “our topmost warning and shame,” saying they illustrated “how the weakness and wickedness of rulers are just as eligible here in America under republican, as in Europe under dynastic influences.” In “The Eighteenth Presidency!” he lambasted Pierce in scatological metaphors: “The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States. The cushions of the Presidency are nothing but filth and blood. The pavements of Congress are also bloody.”
Whitman was so critical of public figures that one might think that the final effect of his writing was bleak or negative. Quite the opposite, however, was true. It was precisely because of his disillusion with what America had become that he tried mightily to depict an alternative America in his poetry. Leaves of Grass was his democratic Utopia. It presented a transfigured America, one that truly lived up to its ideals of equality and justice. It was America viewed with an intense, willed optimism.
For all his severe words about his nation’s shortcomings, Whitman did not join any of the radical reforms—Abolitionism, women’s rights, working-class reform, the free love movement, and others—that were the main vehicles of social protest in his era. He had a conservative side. He loved to say: “Be radical, be radical, be radical—be not too damned radical.”32 He once confessed, “I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation.”
He feared what then was called “ultraism,” or any form of extreme social activism that threatened to rip apart the social fabric. His ambivalence toward Abolitionism was especially revelatory.
On the one hand, he hated slavery and wished to see it abolished. During the 1840s he joined the so-called Barnburners, the antislavery wing of the Democratic Party. In his newspaper columns he vigorously protested against the proposed extension of slavery into western territories conquered during the Mexican War. In the 1848 election he worked for the Free-Soil Party, and in the early fifties his favorite politician was John P. Hale, the dynamic antislavery senator from New Hampshire.
At the same time, Whitman could not tolerate Abolitionism as it was advocated by the era’s leading antislavery reformer, William Lloyd Garrison. He thought that Garrison went too far in his attacks on American institutions. Garrison condemned the Constitution as “a covenant with death and a compact with hell” because of its implicit support of slavery. His battle cry, “No union with slaveholders!” reflected his conviction that the North should immediate separate from the slaveholding South.
Whitman, who prized the Constitution and the Union, called the Abolitionists “foolish red-hot fanatics,” an “angry-voiced and silly set.”33 He hated the nullification doctrines of Southern fire-eaters as much as he did the disunionism of the Garrisonians. He explained, “Despising and condemning the dangerous and fanatical insanity of Abolitionism’—as impracticable as it is wild—the Brooklyn Eagle just as much condemns the other extreme from that.”34
His mixed feelings about the antislavery movement were also reflected in his middling position on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. On the one hand, he excoriated the law’s supporters in his poems “Blood-Money,” “Wounded in the House of Friends,” and “A Boston Ballad.”
At the same time, he believed that fugitive slaves must be returned to their owners. “MUST RUNAWAY SLAVES BE DELIVERED BACK?” he asked in “The Eighteenth Presidency!” His answer said it all: “They must.… By a section of the fourth article of the Federal Constitution.”35 He called the Constitution “a perfect and entire thing,… the grandest piece of moral machinery ever constructed” whose “architects were some mighty prophets and gods.” He valued the Constitution so highly that he was willing to support its directive that fugitives from labor must be returned.
His views were similar to Abraham Lincoln’s, then a little-known Illinois lawyer and ex-congressman. Though morally opposed to slavery, Lincoln, like Whitman, hated Abolitionism because he put a high premium on the Union. He also supported the return of fugitive slaves because the Constitution demanded it.
Fearing extremes, Whitman began tentatively testing out statements that balanced opposite views, as though rhetorical juxtaposition would dissolve social tensions.
His earliest jottings in his characteristic prose-like verse showed him attempting to balance antislavery and proslavery views in poetry. Fearing above all a separation of the Union, he penned lines in which an imagined “I” identified lovingly with both sides of the slavery divide:
I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves, […]
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves.36
Hoping to defend the Union while at the same time making room for the South’s demand for states rights, he listed among “Principles We Fight For” the following:
The freedom, sovereignty, and independence of the respective States.
The Union—a confederacy, compact, neither a consolidation, nor a centralization.37
When he wrote these words in 1846, he could not know that fifteen years later America itself would be divided between the Union, representing federal power, and the Confederacy, representing states rights. But he did see that the issue was one of momentous importance, at the absolute heart of American life. In a prose work he said that one of his main poetic objectives from the start was to solve “the problem of two sets of rights,” those of “individual State prerogatives” and “the national identity power—the sovereign Union.”38
He shied away from movements that seemed to upset that delicate balance, and he tried mightily to restore that balance in his poetry. On this theme, the message of his poems was clear: balance and equipoise by poetic fiat. The poet was to be the balancer or equalizer of his
land. “He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key,” Whitman emphasized in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. “He is the equalizer of his age and land… he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking.”39
Seeing that the Union was imperiled by Northern Abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters, in the 1855 preface he affirmed “the union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable.” The President would no longer be the people’s referee; now the poet would be. The genius of the United States, he wrote, was not in presidents or legislatures but “always most in the common people,” as it was better to be a poor free laborer or farmer than “a bound booby and rogue in office.” His early poems are full of long catalogs of average people at work.
The basic problem of the conflicting rights of the individual and the mass was resolved imaginatively in the ringing opening lines of the first edition:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
These lines radiated intense individualism and, simultaneously, intense democracy. The “I” celebrates himself but also announces his complete equality with others—the “you.” Whitman announces to us that this individual-versus-mass tension can be resolved not by arguments over states rights and nationalism but by reference to something much larger: the physical operations of nature, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” All humans occupy the same physical world. They share atoms. There is a fundamental democracy in nature itself. Indeed, nature becomes a key unifying factor for Whitman. His title, Leaves of Grass, referred not only to the “leaves” (pages) of his volume but also to the earth’s most basic form of vegetation—grass. Metaphorically, grass resolved the issue of individualism versus the mass. It was comprised of individual sprouts that could be admired on their own, as Whitman’s persona does when he declares, “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Also, grass was the earth’s ultimate symbol of democracy and human togetherness, for it grew everywhere. As Whitman writes, “Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, / Growing among black folks as among white, / Kanuk, Tukahoe, Congressman, Guff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.”
He knew that Southerners and Northerners were virtually at each others’ throats, so he made a point in his poems constantly to link the opposing groups. He proclaimed himself “A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, / […]At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch.” When he addressed the issues of sectionalism and slavery in his poetry, he also struck a middle ground. In the 1855 preface he assures his readers that the American poet shall “not be for the eastern states more than the western or the northern states more than the southern.” He writes of “slavery and the tremulous spreading hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases of the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease.” The first half of this statement gently embraces the Southern view; the second half airs sharp antislavery anger but leaves open the possibility that it may be a very long time before slavery disappears.
Fearing the sectional controversies that threatened disunion, Whitman represented the Southern point of view in his poetry, as when he described a plantation: “There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all directions is cover’d with pine straw.” At the same time, however, his view was close to that of antislavery activists of the 1850s who were emphasizing the humanity of African Americans. He takes a radically humanitarian view toward blacks several times in the 1855 edition. The opening poem, later titled “Song of Myself,” contains a long passage in which the “I” takes an escaped slave into his house and washes and feeds him, keeping his rifle ready at the door to fend of possible pursuers. In another passage he actually becomes “the hounded slave,” with dogs and men in bloody pursuit. In a third he admires a magnificent black driver, climbing up with him and driving alongside of him. “I Sing the Body Electric” presents a profoundly humanistic variation on the slave auction, as the “I” boasts how humanly valuable his slave is: “There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations, / […]In him the start of populous states and rich republics.”
Such passages help explain why his poetry has won favor among African American readers. The ex-slave and Abolitionist lecturer Sojourner Truth was rapturous in her praise of Leaves of Grass. The Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes could talk of Whitman’s “sympathy for Negro people,” and June Jordan said, “I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman.”40
Whitman’s growing disillusion with authority figures sparked his deep faith in common people and in the power of populist poetry. America, he believed, desperately needed a poet to hold together a society that was on the verge of unraveling. He created his powerful, all-absorbing poetic “I” to heal a fragmented nation that, he hoped, would find in his poetry new possibilities for inspiration and togetherness. With almost messianic expectations for the impact of his writings, Walt Whitman believed that America would reverse its downward course by seeing its diverse cultural and social materials reflected in the improving mirror of democratic poetry.
Three
THEATER, ORATORY, AND MUSIC
WHEN WHITMAN SAID HE SPENT HIS YOUNG MANHOOD “ABSORBING theatres at every pore” and seeing “everything, high, low, middling,” he revealed his complete identification with the performance culture of antebellum America.1
There was a fine line in antebellum theaters between enthusiastic applause and uncontrolled mob frenzy. The b’hoys and roughs of the gallery went to the theater as much to engage in deviltry as to see plays. Often the din of clapping, yelling, cheering, or hissing drowned out the actors. At the slightest provocation, unruly elements in the audience would throw things onto the stage. Whitman fondly recalled “those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery—no dainty kid-gloved business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew’d men.”2
Actors reciprocated in kind through an intense kind of emotionalism that defined the “American” acting style. The greatest exponent of this style was Junius Brutus Booth, Whitman’s favorite actor and the leading tragedian of antebellum America. “His genius,” said Whitman, “was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression.” “He had much to do with shaping me in those early years,” he added. The neurotic but talented Booth was for Whitman an inspired genius who defied convention and established a new style. Whitman declared that “he stood out ‘himself alone’ in many respects beyond any of his kind on record, and with effects and ways that broke through all rules and all traditions.”
The aspect of Booth that most impressed Whitman was his powerful expression. “I demand that my whole emotional nature be powerfully stirred,” Whitman generalized about acting.3 No one could satisfy this craving more than Booth, who was a key figure in the development of the new acting style. Whitman explained, “The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings.”4 It was the peaks for which he became known. “When he was in a passion,” Whitman wrote, “face, neck, hands, would be suffused, his eye would be frightful—his whole mien enough to scare audience, actors; often the actors were afraid of him.”5
When Whitman said Junius Brutus Booth shaped him in his early years, he was referring to the fervent emotionalism that made Booth seem not an actor but a real person. As Whitman put it, Booth “not only seized and awed the crowded house, but all the performers, without exception.”6 Booth evidently crossed the line between acting and real life. Many times while playing Othello he became so involved in the role that other actors had to pull him away lest he actually kill the Desdemona of the night. As the sword-wielding Richard III, he was known to pursue Richmond out of the theater and continue fighting on the street.
In several senses, Whitman hi
mself was an actor, in daily life and in his poetry. “I have always had a good deal to do with actors: met many, high and low,” he said.7 Obviously they shared trade secrets with him. Not only did he declaim passages from plays on the streets and at the seashore, but he took pride in subtleties of interpretation. Thomas A. Gere, an East River ferry captain, recalled that he would regale passengers with Shakespearian soliloquies, stop himself in the middle and say “No! no! no! that’s the way bad actors would do it,” and then begin again. “In my judgment,” Gere said, “few could excel his reading of stirring poems and brilliant Shakespearian passages.”8 His “spouting” of loud Shakespeare passages on the New York omnibuses reflected his participation in the zestful turbulence of American life.
He developed a theatrical style in his daily behavior. When he grew his beard and adopted his distinctive casual dress in the 1850s, people on the street, intrigued by his unusual appearance, tried to guess who he might be: Was he a sea captain? A smuggler? A clergyman? A slave trader? One of his friends called him “a poseur of truly colossal proportions, one to whom playing a part had long before become so habitual that he ceased to be conscious that he was doing it.”9
Nowhere did he act so much as in his poetry. The “I” of Leaves of Grass has proved puzzling to critics. Some have seen it as a sublimation of private anxieties and desires. Others see it as a complete fiction, with little reference to the real Whitman, as indicated by the many differences between the poetic persona and the man. Such confusions can be partly resolved by recognizing that the “real” Whitman, as part of a participatory culture, was to a large degree an actor, and that his poetry was his grandest stage, the locus of his most creative performances. When developing his poetic persona in his notebooks, he compared himself to an actor on stage, with “all things and all other beings as an audience at a play-house perpetually and perpetually calling me out from behind the curtain.” In the poem “Out from Behind this Mask” he calls life “this drama of the whole” and extends the stage metaphor by describing “This common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in you for you” and “The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!” 10
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