84 Walt Whitman’s Democratic Sublime

The following video offers a broad overview of Walt Whitman’s life, from his birth in 1819 to his later life.

Emerson and Whitman

One of the greatest biographers of Walt Whitman, David S. Reynolds, has this to say about the origins of Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest books of poetry ever published:

“Whitman once recalled having carried in his lunch pail a volume of [Emerson’s] essays. … he told the author John Townsend Trowbridge, ‘I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.'”

After self-publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson replied with this letter:

Whitman was such a self-promoter—akin to the most shameless celebrity on Instagram or Twitter—that he republished Emerson’s letter without asking permission. Whitman even published a review of his own poetry, declaring “An American bard at last!” In his eyes, Leaves of Grass was the consummation of Emerson’s great hope for an American poet, freed from European conventions. That hope, a kind of poetic manifesto, is found in Emerson’s 1844 essay “The Poet.”

The rest of this lesson will suggest how to read “Song of Myself,” an epic poem within Leaves of Grass.

The American Sublime: Merging with the Other

One way to read Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is as though it’s having a conversation with Bradstreet’s “Contemplations.” Bradstreet and Whitman both belong to what critics refer to as the American sublime—the yearning of writers and poets to merge with the Other, whether that be a Calvinist God (as with the Puritans) or Being/Nature (as with the Transcendentalists).

In the excellent book, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, Rob Wilson suggests that the Puritans developed their own version of sublimity, which tends to “use nature as sensuous means to affirm sensations and concoct ideas of Nature’s God. … [S]ensuous images of nature, beheld ‘in Raptur’d Contemplation,’ can lead to ecstatic convictions of faith and provide some basis for a metaphor linking this ‘under world’ of nature with a transcendent world of the spirit.”^[1]

As Bradstreet’s speaker states near the end of the first stanza of “Contemplations” “Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.”

For Puritans, meditating on nature entails: 1) a sustained focus on the elevated splendor can lead to 2) a heightened mood of transport before the divine artistry of nature, and 3) the poet ultimately goes on to transcendence of nature through an affective recognition of the “immortal” and “vast” beauty of God.

Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” ultimately relies on a binary of transient nature and an eternal God, with the latter term (God) privileged. God is, for Bradstreet’s Calvinist worldview, the transcendental signifier.

Puritans did not consistently deny the body or nature. The earth’s body could be purified, subsumed, consecrated, or sublimated. In stanza 8 of “Contemplations,” Bradstreet transcends the immediate scene to wander in “pathless paths” of interior consolation, and then returns to nature to heighten these affections:

There’s some degree of specificity in that stanza; not quite enough to “localize” the speaker, but it’s concrete.

And yet, stanzas 10 through 17 presents the figures of the Fall to refresh her consciousness of sin. Bradstreet imagines herself present in Eden, watching “glorious Adam” fall from his harmony with nature into a bickering state of alienation and labor. Two lines of Edenic happiness (stanza 11) give way to five lines of pain.

After contemplating sin, she returns to nature again:

Bradstreet here contemplates the river not as the source of a sublime vision, but as an emblem of the soul’s journey (the river) to the union of paradise (the “longed-for ocean”).

Ultimately, it can be argued that the meaning of “Contemplations” is subordinated to Bradstreet’s Calvinist religion. The natural signs are emblematic of transcendent ideas.

Whitman’s Democratic Sublime

Whereas the speaker of Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” yearns to merge with God, in a Calvinist-Puritan fashion, Whitman attempts to merge with America, including all of its nature, civilization, and everything in between. Furthermore, whereas Bradstreet’s speaker “emblematically” tethers their meditations to biblical moments (typology), Whitman’s poetry is an experiment in what we might term “radical presence,” an ethic derived from the Transcendentalists. The only moment that matters, for Whitman, is now.

Embracing the body and all “lowly” things: Compared to Whitman, all previous versions of the American sublime can be deemed as only partly rooted in body, language, or national scene. Whitman’s sublimity is highly embodied and very much based on his real experience in 19th-century America. Whereas Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” barely hints at the precise location of her meditations, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is full of localizing imagery and descriptions. There’s no mistaking it was written by a mid 19th-century American, who occasionally ambled around Manhattan.

Whitman was also very careful about not making the kinds of poetic “allusions” that students of American literature see in Bradstreet and even Phillis Wheatley. In his notebooks from the early 1850s, he made a note for himself to “Make no quotations and references to any other writers.” “Song of Myself” was to be an experiment in radical self-expression. We might also consider it an experiment in poetic “self-reliance.”

Furthermore, in contrast to former understandings of the sublime, Whitman refused to see the sublime only in or as the immense. He chided a theosophist of his day: “After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights—not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else—is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.” Any object, such as the lowly grass, could instigate fits of mental grandeur, vast conceptions of self and self-as-divinity. For Whitman, the commonplace is the grandest of all things. We can read this more expansive view of the sublime as part of the broader American Romanticism movement, which we also find in the essays of Thomas Cole and Emerson. The chapter on Thomas Cole explains more about how this movement developed a more comprehensive notion of the sublime.

Whitman’s oracular sublime enters into everything, extending even to the “lower” instincts (“body electric”). The Whitmanesque sublime existed in the most humble or degraded object.

In “Song of Myself,” the speaker moves from contemplating a “spear of summer grass” to becoming increasingly “intoxicated” with the particulars, energy, scope, and materiality of America and cosmos until they can affirm the immensity of each object as extensions of himself: “And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, / And brown ants in the little wells beneath them” (Section 5).

Whitman’s Poetic Techniques

James Perrin Warren’s “Style and Technique(s),” published in 1998 for Walt Whitman: an Encyclopedia, offers a helpful overview of the rhetorical innovations that make Whitman’s poetry so unique.

Poetic diction. Warren points out that Whitman “creates a rich mixture of words borrowed or adapted from foreign languages, colloquialisms, Americanisms, geographical place names, and slang expressions,” including words like omnibus, promenaders, experient, savans, embouchures, vivas, venerealee, amies, foofoos, en-masse, kosmos, eleves, promulqes, accoucheur, and debouch.

Many of the poems in “Song of Myself’ interweave this richly textured poetic diction with emblems that feel appropriate to Transcendentalism. From section 6:

The movement in Section 6 is highly expansive. It begins with a concrete image appropriate to a Transcendentalism, the “grass,” then proposes to view it as a “hieroglyphic,” then the rest of the poem surfs a variety of phenomena across America that could be contained by that single emblem. “Song of Myself” attempts to spread the sublime as widely as possible, as though fulfilling the hope of Cole and Emerson that nearly anything could become an oracle (although in this respect Whitman extends the sublime to include aspects of culture, not just nature!). Innovative poetic diction places a key role in that process, nesting the “exotic” and “familiar” alongside each other.

Free verse + clausal parallelism. Warren and other critics demonstrate that the seemingly free-wheeling nature of Whitman’s poetry is an adaptation of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Greek texts such as Longinus. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is easy to identify because of the long line in free verse (no rhyme or regular meter). Instead, we find different rhetorical techniques that help Whitman structure his thoughts and images, some of which feel at home in Emerson’s essays. We can view these free verse strategies as patterns and regularities that tie the mass of material together into an epic blend. The distinctive rhythm of Whitman’s lines can be explained in terms of clausal parallelism and other forms of repetition (see below).

Syntactic parallelism: This strategy is possibly adapted from the Hebrew Psalms. Warren: “Whitman tends to establish a sequence of coordinate clauses, from two to four lines long, based on the parallelism between syntactic units within lines.” Here’s an example from “Song of Myself,” Section 1: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

Repetition: Repetition is common in many different rhetorical traditions. “Song of Myself” includes three types. Anaphora is the repetition of the same word(s) at the beginning of lines, epistrophe repeats the same word(s) at the end of lines, symploce/complexio combines anaphora and epistrophe. Warren includes the following as an example of Whitman’s repetition, from Section 5:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know [anaphora] that the hand of God is the promise of my own [epistrophe],
And I know [anaphora] that the spirit of God is the brother of my own [epistrophe],
And that [anaphora] all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that [anaphora] a kelson of the creation is love,
And [anaphora] limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And [anaphora] brown ants in the little wells be- neath them,
And [anaphora] mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

Cataloguing: This strategy is a type of repetition that can include other sub-types within it (such as anaphora). One of the most famous catalogues can be found in section 33:

By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumbermen,

The section continues in this fashion. The most obvious technique is anaphora (“Where the…”), but here that form of repetition sutures many different concrete items. It’s an epic list.

Stanza irregularity: The sections of “Song of Myself” also feel free-wheeling and epic because of the irregular stanza length. Warren suggests that the “stanzas tend to form units of expression,” organized around a “figure or theme that is announced in the first line of the stanza.” Each stanza expresses a single thought and continues as long as it takes to complete the thought.