Walt Whitman

This is midway in this lecture series and I think we've just about got the balance of the shape of the thing. Last week with Melville and this week with Walt Whitman I think we'll be in a good position then to try and round it out. It's difficult to put the United States into perspective. It's a real problem and a real puzzle because it doesn't fit into convenient shapes. And most times when American history is taught and it's still taught the same way they chop the country in half in terms of the Civil War. And you study up to the Civil War in the first semester and then the second semester you take from the Civil War to the present. And they usually rush you at the end of the first term. So you hear about the Civil War in 4 or 5 minutes. And then the second term they're in a hurry to get up to the contemporary scene. So they pass over the Civil War and the rReconstruction. So even though the Civil War was really a ruler down the center of the spirit of this country and made an enormous difference and we will see in the personality of Walt Whitman what kind of difference it made. It's almost relegated to specialists to study. And those who become involved write huge tomes like Bruce Catton I think has 9 or 10 books on the Civil War. Shelby Foote's great three volume series on the Civil War. A couple thousand pages. E. B. Long’s The Civil War Day by Day is about 1500 pages and he just gives the events as they happen day by day. The major events in the shape that I'm trying to develop for us. We have begun with the American Indians and those traditions have been alluded to twice. Once at the beginning and once when we brought James Fenimore Cooper in. And next week we'll come back for the third time with Longfellow. And the first time we had the American Indians we had them as contemporaneous with the historical setting from the 1500s up through the late 17th century. Then with Cooper we went into the Indians as they were seen by the contemporaneous pioneers and colonists and with Longfellow Longfellow reaches way back into 4 or 500 years of American Indian histories to touch upon something back in that past in that spirit which had come to the surface in his time. And Longfellow is a contemporary of Whitman. Melville is a contemporary of Whitman. So really last week and this week and next week are a three pronged presentation of the 19th century genius of the United States in three individuals who had remarkably disparate careers and have been assessed all over the place. They don't even teach Longfellow anymore. And Whitman of course has been a problem for people since it came out along with coming back to the American Indian a third time next week we will end the shape of this course with an American Indian. Black Elk who is a contemporary of ours died in 1950. So that we will see that all this while that a particular stylized consciousness and character was being developed in this country the American Indian vibration behind it was progressively snuffed out and then progressively brought back into manifestation so that by our time late in the 20th century these two crossing directions that seem to make a big X on history finally come into focus and make a sort of truth in our time. They have congruences which are startling only to those who are naive and we find ourselves at this particular juncture even though the newspapers are filled with dread and threat after threat we find ourselves in a great reconciliation of opposites and we look forward to a tremendous spiritual awakening in this country in this decade. And it's I imagine these courses are part of that phenomenon in itself. The Europeans who came to this continent came. Blinded by their own past and by their own minds. And the first images that we have of them at all. Are persons who are clinging to the sea coast in small communities barely venturing inland. More than a dozen miles and just phenomenally in the life of Benjamin Franklin. During that time he was born in 1706 and died in 1792. This tremendous development of the basic character of European Americans as being on a par with the greatest minds and individuals in Europe at the time.

But we begin to see little marks in the life of Franklin which indicate that there are going to be some major differences. And then with Jefferson we found all of a sudden this tremendous explosion of purpose. And where Franklin's world was largely going across the Atlantic to Paris and London and staying in Boston and Philadelphia. Jefferson's vision through the borders of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean and actually the revolution of 1800 when Jefferson took his first office is really by far the more formative revolution rather than 1776. The whole Federalistic Conservatory. Feudalistic structure that had been arrived at by a kind of consensus of power groups was suddenly pick up by Jefferson and his two terms and with Madison and Monroe who were Jeffersonian people and Jefferson still alive and still nearby ofr the first quarter of the 19th century the entire nation was recast and remolded with a certain dynamic and élan which was not understood very well by persons after say the term of Andrew Jackson. After the 1830s the basic character of the United States became bifurcated in the sense that its real nature was forced underground and a opportunist kind of nature came to the foreground. And from Jackson to Lincoln we have a tremendous array of know-nothing individuals who occupy offices and tremendous individuals who would not have anything to do with them. And we see finally that when the wobbling of the illusory United States produced the Civil War that unbelievably right at that moment somebody who had almost been hand fashioned in the backwoods wilderness on the verge of the Jeffersonian dynamic way out in the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana and Illinois. Some homespun spiritual giant Native American appears on the scene and occupies the power position and helps bring the shape back into focus.

And who is there but to chronicle all of this firsthand but the greatest poet of the 19th century Walt Whitman and one of Whitman's jobs in the Attorney General's office was to rewrite all the correspondence coming in to be presented to Lincoln so that it was easy for him to read and so forth. So Lincoln was seen firsthand for years by one of the greatest poetic voices of the age and he was able to understand how the tremendous spiritual shape of the United States had been reconstituted and brought back into focus. And he felt himself almost like an Old Testament prophet who had been picked up by the scruff of the neck from being a young rowdy newspaperman a printer somebody who just loved to roam and was suddenly raised up into the sunlight and held up in the fresh air and told by his inner voice this country needs a voice and yours is it. And you will chant the sacred rhymes that are needed in this time. And Whitman did.

And of course he survived the Civil War. He survived the travesty of the assassination and murder of Whitman. He survived all of the vicissitudes and innuendoes of the Reconstruction and lived all the way to 1892 and it's hard to believe that when Whitman died early in 1892 that it was really just a little more than 100 years since Benjamin Franklin had died. One can hardly ever in world history find a century more packed with complete and utter genius and total change of circumstances than that 100 years of the United States history from 1792. 1892 was an unbelievable change and Whitman since he was born in 1819 came into the midst of this development and he was born on the 31st of May. Incidentally his birth date will be coming up on Long Island which he refused to call Long Island. He called it by its Indian name Paumanok. And he had a wonderful boyish childhood there. They had moved to Brooklyn when he was very young but he spent a lot of time out in the wild marshy salty sandy stretches of Paumanok Long Island because in the early 1820s it wasn't what it looks like today by any means. And Whitman as he grew up just attended normal public school in Brooklyn he began to become interested in the printing trade very much like Franklin and found himself able as a young man teenager 18 18 19 able to teach school occasionally in various places 4 or 5 different places and he found himself also beginning to edit a few small newspapers.

And in fact as I mentioned last week in 1846 for a period of some months he was the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and wrote the review of Herman Melville's Typee his first great work that came out. He began to read assiduously and Whitman as a young man apparently began to conceive of himself in what we would consider I think initially as a very egotistical kind of a stance. He wanted to improve himself so that he could out match anybody that he would meet in terms of what he would later call personality. The key with Whitman is personality. And at first personality to him meant me. Later on of course that would transform many times over and begin to include all. But he began checking books out and buying books taking the scissors and clipping out his favorite statements and pasting these things into great big notebooks. And pretty soon Whitman would pore over these things. And by clipping out his favorite passages from Shakespeare or Homer or John Bunyan or Cooper or Emerson he began to see the greatest jewels of expression as building blocks in his hand as these movable mobile elements in a mosaic of his own making. And he got into the habit of thinking that he could juggle the entire wisdom of the world if he had just enough time to do it.

And with this kind of background of course he began to think of himself as a writer as a very particular peculiar kind of writer as a poet. But he was going to write just one real poem in many many parts. Each of the parts would be like a chip of his scrapbook mosaic. And he thought he would continuously rearrange this throughout his lifetime so that the finished product would be this grand mural of his personality and that he would transform himself bit by bit day by day year by year into the language into the literature and by attending to it all the time like a gardener of the soul. His great poem as it grew and shifted and changed and shaped would displace him as a personality so that his book Leaves of Grass stands in place of the man. The man has died. He was buried and he even designed his own little tombstone a kind of a triangular shaped Greek granite block that fitted over a granite white granite pillars. And it simply said Whitman on it. Somebody once observed there probably never was a human being who tailored his career more carefully than Walt Whitman. He even planned for his after death. Well he began on this very serious operation with the most naive equipment imaginable. I mean he just simply his first poems the first edition of Leaves of Grass he literally I guess we would call it today xeroxed up about a hundred copies.

There were 12 poems and with great effrontery he sent one off to Ralph Waldo Emerson up in Concord. And of course Emerson ever with his ear to the ground to hear the rhythms of this country caught something not in his eye and not in his mind but in his great capacity to hear the tone of the spirit hidden and enfolded as it was in those first few poems of Leaves of Grass. But there nevertheless. And someone like an Emerson will hear it even if it's buried completely in the center of the earth. So he wrote to Whitman on the 21st of July 1855, “Dear sir I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of leaves of grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it as great power makes us happy. It makes the demand. I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy nature as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean.”

And then he goes on to pay his respects to Whitman. So Whitman got out his scissors cut that letter out and pasted it right in the front and put out a new edition of Leaves of Grass with some more poems and was on his way. And by 1860 he was already talking to publishers saying I really I have something going here and I have a wonderful preface and if you're interested to get in on my bandwagon now while I'm cheap this is the time to do it.

And in 1860 a new edition of Leaves of Grass was brought out considerably enlarged 154 poems and it began to take shape. And in this larger version of Leaves of Grass by 1860 was a remarkable large poem or poetic structure set in the middle of this larger poetic tapestry of Leaves of Grass called Song of Myself. And in Song of Myself and there have been many studies of it presentations. One of the most interesting and esoteric of these was done in India and written as a PhD at the University of Nebraska Press published it called Whitman and the Light of Vedantic Mysticism. And most of the argument in here is based on a minute analysis of Song of Myself in terms of Vedantic mysticism. And of course the conclusion here is that there is not really any linear structure to Song of Myself and he doesn't use the terms. But what he meant to say was that it's more like a mathematical matrix within which any series of elements can be arranged in any way whatsoever and produce new vectors of imagination shooting out so that the reader through a creative act on his part can reconstruct new elements of this man's personality that were not there before.

So that the creative reader as opposed to the passive reader who just simply slugged by the words on his eyes. The creative reader participates in the reading in the creating of this structure in the creating of this personality and unfolds new elements of this personality. So that Leaves of Grass turns out to be like a jewel. And the more hands that hold it and the more ways that we turn it the more facets are disclosed. And like one of these wonderful holograms new dimensions occur. Well this was just what Walt wanted. He felt that there was every indication that if we simply take ideas or Images and give them to each other. We're going to all end up bored to death by this process of collecting these static bits of bubblegum cards. Whereas if we participate ourselves in engendering in our own personalities the experiences that went into the gestation of these ideas and these images we would then have the capacity to reconstruct the energies of all time and all mankind in ourselves. And thus he was able to say quite seriously late in his life do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes. This tremendous discovery of course was a furthering of the American spiritual vision. We had gone from Jefferson who expanded it geographically and politically in terms of its capacity and shape. We had seen how with Cooper and Emerson that the tremendous spread of culture and civilization and intellect had grown and with Melville how the penetration of the American wilderness was suddenly extended out to the oceans of the world. And so now with Whitman we find that this tremendous energy of exploration and discovery is turned in on the person himself and that the secrets of universal individuality are revealed just like a diamond cutter who manages to learn how to carve the facets of the gem splitting it along the crystalline axes. So by constant motion here a gem is made and refined. So Whitman wrote for himself and wrote also for all of us who will bring ourselves creatively to the work and thereby elicit in ourselves those facets of personality which heretofore we had either muffled or disregarded or never supposed to have existed. Thus Whitman becomes a psychological and spiritual paradigm of a poetic process that allows for no imitation but makes every avenue available for those to carry on his work. And I will come back to Song of Myself but one of the most interesting parts of Whitman in a work called Song of the Broad-axe later on in Leaves of Grass and this was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous passages in Whitman which he quoted very often. Whitman wrote how beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed. How the fluidness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man's or a woman's look all waits or goes by default till a strong being appears. The strong being is the proof of the race and the ability of the universe when he or she appears. Materials are overawed. The dispute on the soul stops. The old customs and phrases are confronted. Turn back or laid away. Where is your money making now? What can it do now? Where is your respectability now? What are your theology? Tuition. Society. Tradition. Statute. Books. Now. Where are your jibes of being now? Where are your cavils about the soul now?

In other words the disclosure of the universal capacity of the individual to refine and transform themselves into the universal gem of cosmic personality made Whitman one of those pivotal geniuses in world literature. And incidentally this had not been done in European tradition consciously before so that by the time of the Civil War 1860 1861 Whitman was well on his way with a method with a message if you like with a vision with a profound sense of élan and dynamic. And then he entered into the Civil War. Whitman took himself to Washington D.C. from New York. He always called it Mannahatta. Mannahatta instead of New York. And he became obsessed. He was a little too old to fight but he became obsessed with the idea of all these wounded soldiers pouring in off the battlefields and he found himself increasingly drawn to ministering compassion to the wounded to the sick. He was not a doctor and it wasn't first aid that he was interested in. It was something deeper something which if you were here for the Gandhi lecture you would recognize that Gandhi also felt this. That in ministering to his fellow man total strangers hundreds of them thousands of them year in and year out Whitman began to develop that other concomitant that is classically needed to gel a cosmic vision because wisdom without compassion very quickly becomes a sport and shoots off on a tangent and burns itself out like a meteor in circumstance. These 3 or 4 years of Whitman's day in and day out constantly administering to the strangers who were wounded dying sick maimed writing letters for them to their parents talking with them helping bury them when they died helping rejoice when they survived made Whitman a universal heart to go with this tremendous gem like consciousness which he was developing and faceting in himself. I have. He brought out at the end of the Civil War a collection called Drum-taps. And in Drum-taps the early egotism which was in a lot of the poems of Leaves of Grass the shorter Poems completely transformed. Here's one entitled. And his titles are often long Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night. And that's the first line,

Vigil strange I kept in the field one night when you my son and my comrade dropped at my side that day. One look I but gave. When your dear eyes returned with a look I shall never forget. One touch of your hand to mine. Oh boy. Reached up as you lay on the ground. Then onward I sped in the battle. The even contested battle. Till late in the night. Relieved to the place at last. Again I made my way. Found you in death. So cold dear comrade. Found your body. Son of responded kisses. Never again on earth. Responding. Bared your face in the starlight. Curious. The scene. Cruel. Blue. The moderate night wind. Long. There and then. In vigil I stood dimly around me. The battlefield spreading. Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet. There in the fragrant silent night. But not a tear fell. Not even a long drawn sigh. Long long I gazed. Then on the earth partially reclining. Sat by your side. Leaning my chin in my hands. Passing sweet hours. Immortal and mystic hours. With you dearest comrade. Not a tear not a word. Vigil of silence. Love and death. Vigil for you my son my soldier. As onward silently stars aloft eastward. New ones upward. Stole vigil final for you brave boy. I could not save you. Swift was your death. Till at last lingering of the night. Indeed. Just as the dawn appeared I wrapped my comrade in his blanket enveloped while his form folded the blanket well tucking it carefully overhead and carefully under feet. And there and then and bathed by the rising sun my son in his grave and his rude dug grave I deposited ending my vigil. Strange. With that vigil of night and battlefield dim I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket and buried him where he fell.

Again and again in Drum-taps and Whitman's letters in his prose we find him at this period bringing himself to a focus in the presence of the spectacle of death. And again and again in his writings he opens himself up to whatever impressions or feelings might be caught or reflected or cognized in this kaleidoscopic personality which he had developed quite far by this time to understand in full universal openness to as he once wrote to his mother let death's waters wash over me again and again and again until there was no mystery left. And out of this experience of confronting himself with primordials. Love and death. Birth. Suffering. The universe prayer language came a steady deepening of his resonance and his rhythm both in his language as a poet and in his vision as by this time we cannot just call him a poet but really a sage a seer a universal master of the spirit someone who had brought himself to a peak of presence and put the presence in the lap of God. In this development the penultimate tragedy of course was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed to Whitman that this was the cruelest death of the entire Civil War. It seemed to him that this was the experience of death which had the largest most universal meaning of his time. And he often wrote of Lincoln in terms of saying that if there ever was a Homeric figure in our time it was Lincoln. If there ever was someone for whom there should have been a Plutarch to write his life it was Abraham Lincoln. And so one of Whitman's greatest poems is on the memories of President Lincoln. And it's a poem long with a very famous title When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. And the beginning of course always as with Whitman the first line is the title. Just six lines from it and then I'll go to the end of it and give you a few more lines.

When lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and the great star early dropped in the western sky in the night. I mourned. And yet shall mourn. With ever returning spring. Ever returning spring. Trinity. Sure to me you bring lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the West. And thought of him I love.

And of course Whitman true to his word would deliver an annual address and a speech on Lincoln on the day of his assassination. For years he did in fact. And this is always an indication of great spiritual integrity. The last public speech of Whitman was his last eulogy of Lincoln in 1890 and he at that time somebody described him as the doddering Whitman half paralyzed by several strokes his frayed white hair and the great hat on and his cane and his crumpled clothes and coming up to the podium but staying true to his word to deliver these annual spring eulogies for the experience of death of a hero within which he found the core of meaning for the maturing of the personality of light the end of memories of President Lincoln. These few lines. This is how When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd ends.

Passing the visions passing the night. Passing on. Loosening the hold of my comrades hands passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul. Victorious song. Death's outlet song yet varying ever altering song as low and wailing yet clear the notes rising and falling flooding the night. Sadly sinking and fainting as warning and warning. And yet again bursting with joy covering the earth and filling the spread of heaven as that powerful Psalm in the night I heard from recesses passing I leave thee lilac with heart shaped leaves. I leave thee there in the dooryard blooming returning with spring.

So that Whitman's tremendous sense of maturation with the Civil War and with his experiences with death and with Lincoln especially in particular left him in the early 1870s as probably one of the maturest spirits in the face of the earth. He simply was a giant and became the hallmark of the American spirit. He had not been appreciated before that time very much. There were 10 to 20 critics for every person who thought well of him.

But when he brought out the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1871 by this time the enormity of the task and the excellence of its achievement began to impress almost anyone who picked it up. There were still people like James Russell Lowell who in their professorial dignity would not touch Leaves of Grass. There were those who would make a reputation on cavilling against the great so that they could be published in magazines and print various critics critiques and so forth. But the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1871 made it for the first time the classic which we now regard it as. It was substantial. It included Drum-taps complete. It included a lot of other poems which had been held in abeyance until then. And a second book came out the same year. One of Whitman's great wonderful achievements a work in prose called Democratic Vistas. And Whitman as a responsible spirit realizing that he had been handed a critical podium in a critical time chose that moment of light and sun to write. It was about 50 or 60 pages long a precis for the complete vision of the democracy and the spiritual nature of the United States and its destined sense of being. And in Democratic Vistas Whitman reaches out and he takes democracy he takes nature and he takes being and he braids them together into a prophetic vision. And Democratic Vistas reprinted occasionally by itself but usually consigned to collections of Whitman begins. And I'll just give you a few sentences just to get the flavor. It came out in 1871 the same year as the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass which is really the big edition. There's one more deathbed edition but the editions and the deathbed edition are not that great. He began Democratic Vistas

as the greatest lessons of nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom. The same present the greatest lessons also in new world politics and progress. If a man were asked for instance the distinctive points contrasting modern European and American political and other life with the old Asiatic cultists as lingering beneath. Yet in China and Turkey he might find the amount of them in John Stuart Mill's profound essay on Liberty in the future where he demands two main constituents or substrata for a truly grand nationality.

First a large variety of character and second full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions. In other words we've got to open up not only the doors and the windows. We have to take the roof off. We have to unlock the gates to the garden. Later on in Democratic Vistas he writes “thus we presume to write as it were upon things that exist not and travel by maps yet unmade and a blank. But the throes of birth are upon us and we have something of this advantage in seasons of strong formations doubt suspense. For then the afflatus of such themes haply may fall upon us more or less and then hot from the surrounding war and revolution. Our speech though without polished coherence and a failure by the standard called criticism comes forth real at least as the lightning. And of course the lightning continued.”

Just a few sentences here from the very heart of Democratic Vistas “we have frequently printed the word democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps quite unawakened notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come from pen or tongue. It is a great word whose history I suppose remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. It has in some sort younger brother of another great and often used word nature whose history also waits unwritten. And then later on there is in sanest hours a consciousness a thought that rises independent lifted out from all else. Calm like the stars eternal shining. This is the thought of identity. Yours for you whoever you are. As mine for me. Miracle of miracles beyond statement. Most spiritual and vaguest of Earth's dreams yet hardest basic fact and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth. Significant only because of the me in the center. Creeds conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea under the luminousness of real vision. It alone takes possession takes value like the shadowy dwarf in the fable. Once liberated and looked upon it expands over the whole earth and spreads to the roof of heaven. The quality of being capitalized being the quality of being in the object itself according to its own central idea and purpose and of growing there from and thereto not criticism by other standards and adjustments thereto is the lesson of nature.

So that in this great vision Democratic Vistas Whitman finally spells it out in prose and astounded at his capacity to step outside of even the bounds of this enormous structure which he had been designing for well on a generation by that time. Whitman really took the bit in his mouth and began writing another book called Specimen Days which was total prose and which was very much like Leaves of Grass only done in prose only done very very quickly. He did it in the space of a couple of years and he searched back in his memory to bring up events which had happened in the past. He searched his notebooks but he made it a loose form structure very much like Leaves of Grass. Only he compressed the time element to see what would come out and he put it in prose instead of putting it into poetry. And this was published and came out in 1882.

By this time of course Whitman was really a literary figure. He was in correspondence with most of the greats of his day. He had moved to Camden, New Jersey across the river from Philadelphia. He had a secretary, Horace Bell. I brought one volume of the. There's three large volumes entitled with Walt Whitman in Camden and with Bell being his secretary day by day all of the events of the day all the conversations were noted in this. Whitman of course becoming rather frail and brittle with age. He had suffered a paralytic stroke as a young man, a fairly young man and it had taken him years to recover full use of himself. And then as he aged again another series of mishaps came upon him. Finally in 1889 at age 70 he added the last sections to Leaves of Grass and he was preparing what is known as the deathbed version and in stands at 71 of the real real fine poems from Whitman one which is only about eight lines long. But it was an event which caught his vision and at this stage. Whitman at 70 was able to see with such kaleidoscopic penetration that almost any event that he chose to see or any person he chose to come into presentational contact with opened up into a symbol of the largest proportions. He was in Buffalo, New York and the city fathers and some businessmen were going to unfold this statue which had been draped with a huge cloth and there was an enormous crowd gathered and all these wealthy merchants proud of the fact that they were going to have their picture in the paper and all that. And when the cloth came down from the sculpture there was old Walt seeing something in the moment. And so he wrote and the title of the poem is the name of the old Indian Iroquois orator Red Jacket. And he wrote this poem Red Jacket

From aloft upon this scene this show yielded today by fashion learning wealth nor in caprice alone some grains of deepest meaning. Happily aloft who knows. From distant sky clouds blended shapes as some old tree or rock or cliff thrilled with its sole product of nature's sun stars. Earth direct a towering human form in hunting shirt. The film armed with his rifle a half ironical smile curving its phantom lips like one of Ossian's ghosts looks down.

Whitman at 70 seeing in this statue of the old Indian orator the penetrating elegance of someone who had a presence more in stone than the beetling heavily initialed people milling around at the base of it. He concluded his Leaves of Grass and I'll come back after the break and give you some indications of how to exploring this he concluded this literally on his deathbed and was very pleased by the fact that he had prepared his cemetery spot prepared his book had done all the transformations and as he passed out there seemed to be a kind of a gaiety to himself. And as a matter of fact he began referring to his soul as his fancy in one of his very very last poems. And the last one in Leaves of Grass is simply entitled Goodbye My Fancy

Goodbye my fancy. Farewell dear mate dear love I'm going away I know not where or to what fortune. Or whether I may ever see you again. So goodbye my fancy. Now for my last. Let me look back a moment. The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me. Exit night fall. And soon the heart thuds stopping. Long have we lived. Joyed caressed together. Delightful now separation. Goodbye my fancy. Yet let me not be too hasty. Long indeed. Have we lived slept filtered become really blended into one. Then if we die we die together. Yes. Will remain one. If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens Maybe we'll be better off and blither and learn something. Maybe it is yourself now. Really ushering me to the true songs. Who knows Maybe it is yourself now. Really ushering me to the true songs. Who Finally. Well goodbye and hail my fancy.

Let's take a break.

I guess I should show a few things here. There are always individuals who like to follow up. The Correspondence of Whitman is in five volumes from New York University Press and most major libraries would have a set. And in the letters and correspondence you will find a tremendous reservoir of Whitman's own observations. The best biography of him is by Gay Wilson Allen called The Solitary Singer. Been reprinted a number of times. There are whole libraries of books on Whitman and all kinds of little critical anthologies and so forth. Leaves of Grass almost always appears as a complete edition. It's about 500 pages. The Complete Prose of Whitman is a larger volume running close to I guess about well 5 or 600 pages. There is a Portable Whitman published by Penguin Books which gives you a selection from Leaves of Grass and gives you Democratic Vistas whole and I think November Boughs whole and then selections from the letters and from Specimen Days.

His real lasting impress however is still from Leaves of Grass and still is the notion of the individual who is able through a consistent chanting prophetic vision which he called songs. As a young writer he wrote many songs. Song of Myself, Song of the Open Road, Song of the Rolling Earth, Song of Myself etc.. His basic insight centers around a typical kind of mystical experience which many persons have had. This one will be descriptive. There are many others that could be singled out. He would be standing beside a shoreline like the Atlantic Ocean or one of the larger lakes and he would fix his tramps out to the horizon. And as the waveform patterns would come into the shore and break he would gear himself to the rhythm of the ocean's waveform patterns or the lake and what mathematically record in himself the interval so that the music of his expressive forms has a universal structure in its pacing and when read the right way and brought out it recreates the feeling toned responses of the Mother Ocean sending her waves ashore. And so that kind of mystical trance experience recorded into the gem of his personality played out through the stylus of his expressive forms the poems allows it to be engendered in the creative reader at the moment in which they are participating in it. So he's a prisoner of language that focuses onto tremendous mystical moments of insight and vision and positions them so that if you will only come wide open to that prison they will play themselves out in you in the theater of the mind and the amplitudes of the spirit. The first example of his becoming conscious of this facility and attentive to the requirements of the art was in Song of Myself. And he begins

I celebrate myself and sing myself and what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. You see the sense in it now. I loaf and invite my soul. I learn and loaf at my ease. Observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue. Every atom of my blood. Formed from this soil. This air born here. Of parents. Born here from parents the same and their parents the same. I now 37 years old in perfect health begin hoping to cease. Not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance. Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are but never forgotten. I harbor for good or bad. I permit to speak at every hazard nature without check with original energy.

And so his style and his language and his forms through this type of acquaintanceship become progressively clearer and transparent. Whitman never obfuscates never gets in the way of the experience. It was an absolute code of ethical honor with him to make the form as accurate as humanly possible because he had been given directly by the muse herself the task. And he says in later on in fact I'll skip over to it just so you can see the tremendous energy. Late in his career he wrote a long poetic sequence called By Blue Ontario's Shore. Lake Ontario. And in this he had a series where he finally set himself up. Let's see. 314 he finally set himself up as the resonant arbiter of what credible poetic genius this country might produce in the future. Not because he was a critic but because he was a tuning fork still resonating truthfully to the muse herself to the presence of the Holy Spirit itself. And in By On Blue Ontario Shore he wrote

For the great idea that oh my brethren is the mission of poets. Songs of stern defiance. Ever ready songs of the rapid arming and the March. The Flag of Peace. Quick folded. And instead the flag we. No warlike flag of the Great idea.

And then later on he wrote.

Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States. The place is August. The terms obdurate. Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body and mind. He may well survey ponder arm fortify harden make light himself. He shall surely be questioned beforehand by me with many and stern questions. And so we find Whitman very near the balancing point of Leaves of Grass and By Blue Ontario Shore suddenly coming up with a list there the requirements. So you would be a poetic visionary voice for this people.

Very well then who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America. Have you studied out the land its idioms and men? Have you learned the physiology phrenology politics geography pride freedom friendship of the land its substratum and objects? Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first year of independence signed by the commissioners ratified by the states and read by Washington at the head of the army. Have you possessed yourself of the federal Constitution? Do you see who have left all futile processes and poems behind them and assumed the poems and processes of democracy? Are you faithful to things? Do you teach what The land and the sea the bodies of men. Womanhood heroic angers. Teach. Have you sped through fleeting customs? Popularities. Can you hold your hand against all seductions follies worlds fierce contentions? Are you very strong? Are you really of the whole people? Are you not of some coterie some school some mere religion? Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? Have you vilified yourself from the maternity of these states? Have you to the old ever fresh forbearance and impartiality? Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity for the last born little and big and for those errant?

And so he goes on in this vein setting himself up not so much as a critical judge but as that truthful visionary standing at the crossroads of the expressive process that must be followed regardless of whatever way in which you follow it. One must be that prism through whose works is reflected the capacity for experience in the people themselves the readers themselves. And not just to think that your particular cherished grab bag of ideas which you have culled is what they should have in their minds exclusively. What they should have is the freedom to discover what is in their minds from the universal experience. That is a gift to all and is there. And that he says is a democratic poet. Which is different he says from just mere literature. In this way as we will see later on William Faulkner observed characters cast shadows. And the writer suddenly starts up from his work table and realizes he's not filling blank pages at all. He's creating reality for a hungry future. So that in Song of Myself presaging all this Whitman comes to near the end of Song of Myself in the 44th section and he writes

It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up what is known. I strip away. I launch all men and women forward with me into the unknown. The clock indicates the moment. But what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers. There are trillions ahead and trillions ahead of them. We have births that have brought us richness and variety and other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller. That which fills its period in place is equal to any. In other words the resonance of the present when it is complete is a universal that which fills its period and place is equal to any. And then later on my feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs on every step bunches of ages and larger bunches between the steps and all below. Duly traveled and still I mount and mount. Rise after rise. Bow the phantoms behind me. Afar down I see the huge first. Nothing I know I was even there I waited unseen and always and slept through the lethargic mist. And took my time and took no hurt. From the foetid carbon long was I hugged. Close long and long. Immense have been the preparations for me. Faithful and friendly. The arms that have helped me.

And then he goes on with this. And then bringing Leaves of Grass in the small form of Song of Myself to a close in the last section. 52nd section. He steps back and suddenly opens up.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me. It flings my likeness after the rest. And true as any on the shadow'd wilds it coaxes me to the vapor. In the dusk I depart as air. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drifted in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. 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. Failing to fetch me at first. Keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.

So this wonderful kaleidoscopic prism had been developed in the midst of the 19th century in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in the midst of all places Brooklyn and Camden, New Jersey. It was just thrown out on the tables of the world and it really wasn't until our time in the middle of the 20th century that we really had a population of people true enough to their own experience sophisticated enough in their own perception and honest enough in their own spiritual direction to be able to respond in like kind to the gifts that had been laid out. And in a very curious way one of the great inheritors of Whitman in our time was the great Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda who said Whitman is our grandfather North and South. And Neruda's famous phrase was “write poetry so that the critics won't understand it. Don't let them net you and beg you in their books. Get out there and get into people's pockets and stay there. That's where the poetry is and that's where we need to be.”

Well contemporaneous with Melville and Whitman was Longfellow. And we'll do Longfellow next week especially with Hiawatha. And we find another strand of the genius of the United States being developed almost contemporaneous with Melville and with Whitman. Yet in a totally different tack and we'll see that Longfellow long forgotten and set aside is just a children's author really has something equally miraculous to deliver to us. And we'll look at that next week. Thank you.