It was not Alboni’s talent alone that stood out. What made her special was her combined artistry, soulfulness, and egalitarianism. A consummate artist, she was nonetheless down-to-earth and thoroughly human in her delivery. Whitman never forgot the way she got so caught up in her roles that real tears poured down her cheeks. In opera history, Alboni is remembered as one of the great representatives of bel canto, the flowing, simple line interrupted by vocal scrollwork that has an unearthly, almost orgasmic quality. Stylistically, it was this voluptuous, mystical aspect of her singing Whitman had in mind when he referred to her impact on his poetry. A contemporary described the effect of Alboni’s bel canto singing: “There is an indefinable something more delicate than expression, yet akin to it, which makes her song float like a seductive aroma around her hearer, penetrating to the most delicate fibres of his being, and pervading him with a dreamy delight.”48 Whitman’s verse often resonates with a bel canto feeling, even in passages where music is not directly mentioned:
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!49
The rapture Alboni inspired in him had more direct poetic ramifications as well. “I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?),” he writes in “Song of Myself.” “The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, / It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them.” Although he included in his poems the names of several operas, opera characters, and classical composers, he named just one singer:
(The teeming lady comes,
The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother,
Sister of loftiest gods, Alboni’s self I hear.)
As much as anything, he was intrigued by Alboni’s appeal to all classes. “All persons appreciated Alboni,” he noted, “the common crowd as well as the connoisseurs.” He was fascinated to see the upper tier of theaters “packed full of New York young men, mechanics, ‘roughs,’ etc., entirely oblivious of all except Alboni.”50 In an 1855 article, “The Opera,” he said of opera music: “A new world—a liquid world—rushes like a torrent through you.” He called for an American music that might rival Europe’s: “This is art! You envy Italy, and almost become an enthusiast; you wish an equal art here, and an equal science and style, underlain by a perfect understanding of American realities, and the appropriateness of our national spirit and body also.”51
An artistic music underlain by American realities. This is what he had been searching for all along in his musical experiences. In his poems he tried to forge a new kind of singing, one that highlighted American themes but also integrated operatic techniques. “Walt Whitman’s method in the construction of his songs is strictly the method of the Italian Opera,” he would write in 1860, and to a friend he confided, “But for the opera I could not have written Leaves of Grass”52 Opera devices run through his poetry. Many of the emotionally expressive, melodic passages, such as the bird’s song in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” or the death hymn in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” follow the slow pattern of the aria. The more expansive, conversational passages in his poetry follow the looser rhythm of the operatic recitative (Whitman once described himself “here in careless trill, I and my recitatives”).53
To assign Whitman’s poetic patterns to a single performance mode, however, is delimiting and misses the social significance of his imagery and style. In antebellum America, boundaries between different performance genres and cultural levels were permeable. Popular singers borrowed directly from the opera and from oratory. Actors and lecturers cribbed from each other. Artists in various fields mingled the high and the low. Whitman learned from them all. His verse enacted this permeability of modes. In one passage he could sound like an actor, in another an orator, in another a singer. The same was true in his daily life: He would by turns declaim, orate, sing. As both man and poet, Whitman simultaneously heard the thousand varied carols, knew the orator’s joys, and played the part that looked back on the actor and actress.
Four
THE VISUAL ARTS
AS WITH POPULAR PERFORMANCE, WHITMAN FOUND IN PHOTOGRAPHY and painting a rich mine of poetic materials. He regarded art as a means of refining and elevating the masses. In a newspaper article titled “Polishing the Common People,” he called for the widespread distribution of artworks: “We could wish the spreading of a sort of democratical artistic atmosphere among the inhabitants of our republic.”1 His poetry was his gesture toward fostering such an artistic atmosphere.
From the new medium of photography he learned techniques of democratic realism. “In these Leaves [of Grass] everything is photographed. Nothing is poeticized,” he wrote.2 A frequenter of Manhattan daguerreotype galleries, he offered in poetry his own gallery of “photographs”—realistic vignettes of common people engaged in everyday activities.
His democratic portraits of quotidian life were also influenced by the American paintings he loved. An active member of the Brooklyn Art Union, where he befriended many leading painters, he became so caught up in New York’s art-gallery scene that he once devoted a poem, “Pictures,” to describing his own head as a gallery:
In a little house pictures I keep, many pictures hanging suspended—
It is not a fixed house,
It is round—it is but a few inches from one side of it to the other side,
But behold! It has room enough—in it, hundreds and thousands,—all the varieties.3
Whitman’s appreciation of art dated at least from his Eagle days and intensified greatly in the early fifties, when he hobnobbed with Brooklyn daguerreotypists and artists. A third of his thirty-seven articles published between 1849 and 1855 commented on art, and five were devoted solely to it. So involved in the art scene did he become that he was invited to address the opening meeting of the Brooklyn Art Union in 1851 and was subsequently nominated for the presidency of the Union.
Photography’s ability to reflect reality would always remain for Whitman its chief attraction. He once declared: “The photograph has this advantage: it lets nature have its way: the botheration with the painters is that they don’t want nature to have its way.”4 The more realistic moments in his poetry owed much to the vogue of the daguerreotype in America. Introduced in New York in 1839, the daguerreotype achieved a popularity in America unmatched abroad, where legal restraints interfered with its commercialization. By 1853 there were more daguerreotype studios in Manhattan alone than in all of England, and more on Broadway than in London. By then, around three million daguerreotypes were produced annually in the United States.
Whitman registered photography’s place in modern culture in his poems. In one he mentions “The implements for daguerreo-typing,” and in another he writes, “The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype.”5 Even more important than such explicit references were ideas about popular art he absorbed from the daguerreotype scene. Among those responsible for America’s distinction in the new art form were three daguerreotypists he knew and admired: John Plumbe, Jr., Mathew B. Brady, and Gabriel Harrison. All three were prize-winning daguerreotypists who ran the popular galleries he frequented.
Whitman got through the Welsh-born Plumbe one of his earliest exposures to the exhibition-gallery experience. After touring Plumbe’s gallery in July 1846 he wrote: “You will see more life there, more variety, more human nature, more artistic beauty (for what can surpass that masterpiece of human perfection, the human face?) than in any spot we know of.” Whitman felt he was in the presence of “an immense phantom concourse—speechless and motionless, but yet realities” and he added: “Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblances with the reality.”6
Photography seemed to provide a miraculous suspension of time and space by preserving the essence of individuals. This preservation of peo
ple’s essential selves through pictures was a topic of conversation between Whitman and the era’s leading photographer, Mathew Brady. Whitman often went to Brady’s Broadway daguerreotype gallery and in 1846 called him “a capital artist” whose “pictures possess a peculiar life-likeness.”7 Whitman told Brady that he believed history could be best preserved through realistic portraits. Whitman’s compulsion in Leaves of Grass to have everything “literally photographed” reflects his faith in the power of photography to absorb experience and hold it fast. In this sense, his poetic “I” was a kind of roving camera eye aimed at the world around him.
As the experiences of both Brady and Whitman would show, however, pictures do not reflect history in a straightforward way. Rather, they show the shaping hand of the photographer, who can include or exclude people or things according to a particular vision of the world. Brady’s most famous achievement in the 1840s and early ‘50s was the photographing of celebrities of all kinds, particularly political leaders. When people of different viewpoints—often political enemies—were grouped together in daguerreotype dignity as “illustrious Americans,” a kind of visual utopia was created in which sectional hostilities and bitter personal rivalries were temporarily suspended. Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850), published the year of the Compromise of 1850 (including the Fugitive Slave Act), showed the utopian possibilities of the daguerreotype. Juxtaposed in the volume were pictures of the Southern loyalist John C. Calhoun, the Northern antislavery editor Horace Greeley, the senatorial compromisers Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and others, all conjoined in pictorial stateliness.
Like Brady, Whitman would perform a political balancing act in Leaves of Grass, in which proslavery types and their antislavery foes were “photographed” and put on exhibition. Whitman’s “illustrious Americans,” however, had little to do with the social leaders Brady had valorized. Between 1850 and ‘54 incompetence and corruption in high places eroded public confidence in the powers that be. Whitman, like the emerging Republican Party, fiercely rejected entrenched authority and advanced a new kind of populism. As the Republicans would come up with the hardy western explorer John Fremont as their 1856 Presidential candidate, so Whitman advertised himself as “one of the roughs,” an image powerfully communicated in the frontispiece portrait of the casually dressed Whitman in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman had known the artist behind the picture, the dagguerotypist Gabriel Harrison, since the 1840s. Harrison was a pioneer of the so-called “occupational” daguerreotype—that is, the picture of average, working-class people. When Harrison opened his studio on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Whitman in the Star hailed Harrison as “one of the best Daguerrean operators probably in the world” and his pictures as “perfect works of truth and art.”8
On a sweltering summer day in 1854 when Garrison saw Whitman on Fulton Street coming home from his carpenter job, he summoned him into his studio probably with the aim of producing an occupational daguerreotype. What he produced, as it turned out, combined the egalitarianism of the occupational with the resonance of the allegorical—an ideal combination for the poet who in 1855 wished to present himself as both the ordinary American and the messianic Answerer.
In the picture Whitman stands with an air of I-am-your-equal, with his open shirt, rumpled pants, tilted hat, and grizzled face radiating egalitarianism. At the same time, there are unexpected depths and subtleties. The right hand is perched openly on the hip, but the left disappears into the pants, suggesting the bodily mysteries Whitman will be exploring. The expression of the face is full of emotional shadings: insolence, calmness, compassion, even a touch of sadness.
Whitman in 1854; from daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, copied by Samuel Hollyer onto a lithographic plate and reprinted opposite title plate of the 1855 Leaves of Grass.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Whitman’s portrait showed an illustrious American for the mid-fifties: individualistic, defiant, rooted in the working-class consciousness that seemed to offer redemption in a time of failed social rulers. It pointed to the gallery of “photographs” in the early poetry—vignettes of common life promoting the artisanal values Whitman was holding up to the nation.
Photography offered an ideal of a direct mimesis of reality, supporting Whitman’s oft-repeated aim of establishing an honest, personal relationship with the reader. He once told Traubel that the superiority of photographs to oils was that “they are honest.”9 He wrote in a poem, “The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?”10 Here the photographic representation of the loved one is the catalyst for a fuller appreciation of the loved one’s actual presence. The picture as a focusing of experience led back to life.
Antebellum painters had the same ethos as daguerreotypists: they strove for mimetic realism. Theirs, however, was a spiritualized realism, one that accorded at once with Whitman’s earthly and religious sides. Accepting, like Whitman, the harmonious vision of the physical creation advanced by progressive scientists such as Humboldt and Agassiz, they pictured nature in detail but still retained a mystical aura that led in the fifties to the emergence of luminism. The pendulum swing in Whitman’s poetry from earthly minutiae to mystical suggestion had precedent in a painting style that was at once mimetic and transcendental.
The art exhibits he frequented were filled with life-affirming, nature-affirming works: the Hudson River paintings of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Doughty; the Greek revival sculpture of Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers; the optimistic, intensely democratic genre paintings of William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham; the peaceful luminist landscapes of Fitz Hugh Lane, Sanford Gifford, and John F. Kensett; the grand, epic luminist canvases of Frederic Edwin Church.
The American paintings of the period were democratic in style and subject matter. They minimized the painterly and stylized on behalf of the direct, the accessible, the transparent. In nature paintings, the main effort was to enable the average viewer to experience God’s creation afresh, particularly in the form of still landscapes tinged with luminist iridescence. In genre paintings, the effort was enable ordinary folk to see slightly idealized versions of themselves in action, at work or play.
There were many practitioners of these principles between 1830 and 1860 in addition to several theorists, most notably the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who argued that ornament must be stripped away and artistic form should be natural rather than artificial. Anticipating Whitman, Greenough believed that America desperately needed art and artists. He called for a democratic art that was simple, unembellished. Along with naturalness came experimentation. He noted that in nature “there is no arbitrary law of proportion, no unbending model of form,” and so artists should “encourage experiment at the risk of license, rather than submit to an iron rule.” Greenough was also a chief figure in the American treatment of the nude. He wrote of “the human frame, the most beautiful organization of earth, the exponent and minister of the highest being we immediately know.”11
Whitman’s search for a transparent, democratic style free of artifice and close to nature’s forms was akin to this artistic theory. In the 1855 preface he labeled “a nuisance and revolt” anything that “distorts honest shapes,” specifying that in paintings or illustrations or sculptures Americans “shall receive no pleasure from violations of natural models and must not permit them.”12 Just as Greenough argued that art should follow nature’s rhythms, so Whitman wrote, “The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.” Following the democratic trend to get directly back to the creation in art, Whitman gave the Adamic promise of unadulterated, sun-washed nature and a return to origins:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poe
ms,
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.13
At times, he could borrow directly from specific paintings. The artistic school he usually tapped was genre painting. For subject matter, the American genre painters looked to hearty outdoor types—farmers, hunters, trappers, riverboatmen. More often than not, these subjects were portrayed good-humoredly engaged in some form of leisurely, often prankish activity. Also, genre painting was one of the few public arenas in which Indians and blacks were treated with less of the overt racism that permeated nearly every aspect of American society.
Whitman’s relationship with two artists who treated Native Americans—George Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller—are particularly telling. Catlin, the foremost antebellum artist of the American West and the Indians, struck Whitman as a strongly American artist whose works were national treasures. Whitman got to know Catlin, who before going to Europe gave him a painting of the Seminole chief Osceola, which became the basis of Whitman’s poem “Osceola,” depicting the tragedy of that heroic Native American who died as result of treachery by whites.
The humanization of minorities in American art had a strong influence on Whitman. The section of “Song of Myself” picturing the marriage of the trapper and the Indian woman was based on The Trapper’s Bride, an often-reproduced painting by the Baltimore artist Alfred Jacob Miller. Miller showed how the tabooed topic of miscegenation could be handled frankly and without apology. In Miller’s rendering of the theme, the trapper stands with his bride as friends and family watch nearby. Whitman gives an almost identical picture: an Indian tribe watches as a bearded trapper, dressed in buckskin, leans on his rifle as he grasps the hand of his bride, whose long hair frames her body.14 Miller’s painting had opened up possibilities for racial harmony and love, and Whitman followed suit.
Walt Whitman Page 6
