by Lewis Hyde
When Whitman speaks of his work in terms of an outer audience, he tells us, to take a key example, that he intended Leaves of Grass “to arouse” in the hearts of his readers “streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever.” It seems an odd direction at first: “from them to myself.” As we saw in Whitman’s life, we have before us an artist who is hungry for love. He knew it. He speaks of his desire as “this terrible, irrepressible yearning,” and he speaks of his poetry as the expression of a “never-satisfied appetite for sympathy, and [a] boundless offering of sympathy … this old eternal, yet ever new interchange of adhesiveness …” If we read the next sentence literally, we shall find the source of his need: “The … surest tie between me and Him or Her, who, in the pages of Calamus and other pieces realizes me … must … be personal affection.” Whitman is saying, as he said in the poem about the “terrible doubt of appearances,” that the state in which he comes to life requires that he find a reader to whom he may communicate the gifts of his soul. He exists, he is realized, literally, through this completed contact:
The soul, reaching, throwing out for love,
As the spider, from some little promontory, throwing out filament after filament, tirelessly out of itself, that one at least may catch and form a link, a bridge, a connection …
Whitman’s confessions of artistic intent reveal the same frustrated yearning that lies behind the Calamus poems, and I should not proceed without noting that his neediness sometimes undercuts the work itself. There are some clammy poems in Leaves of Grass. We feel a hand on our shoulder, a pushy lover (I am thinking, for example, of a moment in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” when Whitman claims to have imagined all of his readers before they were born; it seems presumptuous). But in the best poems, Whitman manages that poise, requisite to both art and love, which offers the gift without insisting. He may not have found the love he wanted in life, but it would be wrong to consign his appetites entirely to personal circumstance. Who among us has been sufficiently loved, whose heart has been fully realized in the returning gaze of the beloved?
Let us turn now to the function of the work once it has been given to the outer audience. When Whitman offers his poem to the literal reader, he sometimes addresses him as “O reader of the future.” In part this is a poet’s way of imagining a better audience than the one that was offered him in time, but I think we may also take the phrase as an atemporal invocation to the reader that lies potentially in each of us. Whitman directs his gift toward our souls now. He speaks in the prophetic perfect to wake the gifted self in any who would receive his poem. The poet, he says, “spreads out his dishes… he offers the sweet firm-fibered meat that grows men and women.” “This is the tasteless water of souls… this is the true sustenance.” A work of art that enters us to feed the soul offers to initiate in us the process of the gifted self which some antecedent gift initiated in the poet. Reading the work, we feel gifted for a while, and to the degree that we are able, we respond by creating new work (not art, perhaps, but with the artist’s work at hand we suddenly find we can make sense of our own experience). The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.* “If youbecome the aliment and the wet,” says Whitman of his poems, “they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees.” A work of art breeds in the ground of the imagination.
In this way the imagination creates the future. The poet “places himself where the future becomes present,” says Whitman. He sets his writing desk in the “womb of the shadows.” Gifts—given or received—stand witness to meaning beyond the known, and gift exchange is therefore a transcendent commerce, the economy of re-creation, conversion, or renaissance. It brings us worlds we have not seen before. Allen Ginsberg tells a story about a time when he was a young man, out of luck and out of lovers, lying on his bed in Spanish Harlem, reading Blake. He had put the book aside. He had masturbated. He had fallen into a depression. And then, as he lay gazing at the page he heard a voice say Blake’s poem, “Ah sunflower, weary of time / That countest the steps of the sun …” “Almost everything I’ve done since has these moments as its motif,” Ginsberg has said. “The voice I heard, the voice of Blake, the ancient saturnal voice, is the voice I have now. I was imagining my own body consciousness …” It is Ginsberg’s use of “imagining” that I wish to mark. With a poem as his seed image, the young man imagined the sonority and quiddity with which the older man has come to sing the songs of Blake.
The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination. Ginsberg could have said, “O dear, now I’m hearing voices,” and taken a sedative. But when we refuse what has been offered to the empty heart, when possible futures are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known. But Ginsberg responded as an artist responds. The artist completes the act of imagination by accepting the gift and laboring to give it to the real (at which point the distinction between “imaginary” and “real” dissolves).
The college of imagination which conducts the discourse of art is not confined by time. Just as material gifts establish and maintain the collective in social life, so the gifts of imagination, as long as they are treated as such, will contribute toward those collectives we call culture and tradition. This commerce is one of the few ways by which the dead may inform the living and the living preserve the spiritual treasures of the past. To have the works of the past come to life in the active imagination is what it means “to have gathered from the air a live tradition,” to use Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase. Moreover, as a commerce of gifts allows us to give more than we have been given, so those who participate in a live tradition are drawn into a life higher than that to which they have been born. Bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn, our gifts grow invisibly among us to sustain each man and woman above the imperfections of state and age.
A live tradition is neither the rhetoric nor the store of facts that we can learn in school. In a live tradition the images speak for themselves. They “itch at your ears,” as Whitman says. We hear voices. We feel a spirit move in the poems that is neither “me” nor “the poet” but a third thing between. In a live tradition we fall in love with the spirits of the dead. We stay up all night with them. We keep their gifts alive by taking them into the quick of our being and feeding them to our hearts.
Ezra Pound once wrote in a pamphlet: “Of religion, it will be enough for me to say, in the style of a literary friend …, ‘every self-respecting Ravennese is procreated, or at least receives spirit or breath of life, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.’” For Pound, a culture husbands its liveliness in its works of art; they are like storage barrels for that “tasteless water” which the citizen drinks to revive, or procreate, his soul.
A live tradition extends in both directions in time, but most artists seem to face themselves in a primary direction, toward either the past or the future. The fils à papa (the father’s son), say the French, has the spiritual attitude that serves the past, while the fils à maman is in love with emerging life. The terms well differentiate Whitman and Pound, to whom we shall be turning soon. Pound—one of the few American poets who remained close to his father throughout his life— was in love with the past. It fed his soul, and he dedicated his work to its preservation.
But Whitman, the mother’s son, courted the future. “I meant Leaves of Grass… to be the Poem of Identity (of yours, whoever you are, now reading these lines) …,” he says. He means “identity” in the sense we have developed—the poetry is a gift that offers to pass through and transform the self. When we speak of “the Whitman tradition” in art, we mean that line o
f artists—Hart Crane, Isadora Duncan, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Henry Miller, to name only a few—who have professed the spirit that came to life with their reception of the poetry. Just as Whitman was the enthusiast of Emerson and Carlyle and George Sand, allowing their spirits space in his body, so these artists are the enthusiasts of Whitman. They are not merely students, of course, but laborers who permitted his gift to live in the imagination and be the seed for new work, work connected to the spirits of the dead but distinct, current, alive. “Sprouts take and accumulate…”
II • Adhesive Riches
Democratic Vistas, Whitman’s long, rambling, postbellum meditation on art and politics, sets democracy on two opposed foundations, the individual and the masses (the “average,” “the all-leveling aggregate”). Whitman gives preference to neither of these poles in the practice of his democracy, but in describing its formation he begins, as the poetry began, with the individual coming to his powers, or hers, in isolation. “The noiseless operation of one’s isolated Self” precedes community. Our actions and character must spring from what is received in the ground of our being, else they will be merely derived behaviors, appliqué personalities. Any political thinker will notice right away, of course, that we are dealing here with a politics of inner light, one in which “man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself.” The initial event in Whitman’s democracy is not a political event at all. “Alone … —and the interior consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous lines to the senses.”
Even Whitman’s emphasis on the masses arises from his desire to nurture the idiosyncratic. Individual identity cannot thrive where some people count and others do not. Just as all are invited to the poetry (“I will not have a single person slighted or left away”), so democracy enfranchises every self— politically and spiritually. Whitman pauses in his Vistas to address the Europeans: “The great word Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a nation as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.” Hierarchy, any line drawn to separate “the best from the worst” in social life, is the hallmark of what Whitman calls “European chivalry, the feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world,” a world whose manners, he felt, still held sway in the New World. He would have them replaced by his universal suffrage of the self—a suffrage not so much of the vote but one in which no man is obliged to take his hat off to any other. He places each citizen on this equal footing not only to protect the idiosyncratic self but to produce it as well. Democracy has a future tense. Enfranchisement “commence[s] the grand experiment of development, whose end (perhaps requiring several generations) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman …” Whitman begins his democracy with individual identity, but in its action neither the One nor the Many is primary, each exists to produce the other so that the nation might be their union, “a common aggregate of living identities.”
To arrive at this union, Whitman’s democracy needs one last ingredient. A series of realized selves does not automatically become a community. There must be some sort of glue, a cohesive to bind the aggregate together. “The two are contradictory,” says Whitman of the poles of his democracy, “… our task is to reconcile them,” and he does so, first of all, with a political version of the manly love of comrades: “Adhesiveness or love … fuses, ties and aggregates …, fraternizing all.” Whitman borrowed the term “adhesiveness” from phrenology. This nineteenth-century form of pop psychology distinguished between “amative” sexual love and “adhesive” friendship (which, in the phrenologist’s iconography, was symbolized by two women embracing each other). Adhesive love is the second element in Whitman’s politics which is not strictly political, at least insofar as politics has to do with power. Perhaps we would do well to differentiate the term: adhesiveness is an eros power while most of what passes as politics is logos power. Law, authority, competition, hierarchy, and the exercise of royal or despotic will through the courts, the police, and the military—these are logos powers, and they are the skeletal structure of most political systems. The image of two women embracing is not found on any nation’s flag. Whitman envisioned drawing isolated individuals into a coherent and enduring body politic without resorting to the patriarchal articles of the social contract. In short, he would replace capitalist home economics with “the dear love of comrades.” His politics reveal an unspoken faith: that the realized and idiosyncratic self is erotic and that erotic life is essentially cohesive. He assumes that the citizen, like the poet, will emerge from the centripetal isolation, in which character forms, with an appetite for sympathetic contact and an urge both to create and to bestow.
In this last we come to the fusion of Whitman’s aesthetics and politics, the social life of the gifted self. Even more than the love of comrades, I think, the true cohesive force in Whitman’s democracy is art. In his political aesthetic, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, the artist absorbs not “objects” but “the central spirit and idiosyncrasies” of the people. And his responsive act is to create “a single image-making work for them.” It is this work, or better, the nation’s artistic wealth as a whole, which draws a people together. We could even say that the artist creates (or at least preserves) the “central spirit” of the people, for, as in the poetry, a spirit that has never been articulated cannot endure. As the poet Robert Bly says in a different context, “Praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name …” Nor can we nurture or take sustenance from a spirit that remains unspoken. In Whitman’s democracy the native author creates an “embryo or skeleton” of the native spirit. The artist absorbs a thing that is alive, of course, but its life is not assured until its name has been given. Literature does not simply absorb a spirit, says Whitman, it “breed[s] a spirit.”
Whitman insisted that a spirit dwelled in the American people which was different from the one articulated by romantic novels from the Continent or by native authors, such as Longfellow. And he believed the spirit would soon be lost if it could not be realized in art. Democratic Vistas calls for American authors to create a domestic literature by which to ensure the survival of democracy. Our art should accrue a national image, he says, “an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all, typical to all.” Literature forms the “osseous structure” that fuses the nation together so that its spirit may survive trauma. The urgency of Whitman’s essay grew out of his own disappointment with democracy in action in 1870. How, without a native literature, was the Union to survive the corruptions that followed the Civil War? “The lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.” Art is a political force for Whitman, but for a third time we must say that we are not speaking of politics in the conventional sense.
Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power.* Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective. It has no logos power, but the law and the legislatures will say they thought it up when it comes to term. In an early letter Whitman writes that “under and behind the bosh of the regular politicians, there burns … the divine fire which …, during all ages, has only wanted a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of tyrants, hunkers, and all their tribe.” The work of the political artist creates a body for this fire. So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will, whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not, as witness American artists during the 1930s or during the Vietnam war, Spanish artists during their civil war, South Korean poets in recent years, all Russian artists since the Revolution, Bertolt Brecht as Hitler rose
to power, and so forth. In times like these the spirit of the polis must be removed from the hands of the politicians and survive in the resistant imagination. Then the artist finds he is describing a world that does not appear in the newspapers and someone has tapped his phone who never thought to call in times of peace.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the American spirit was largely absorbed in an expanding and self-confident mercantilism. The Industrial Revolution had arrived in the New World. And what was our poet’s relationship to this part of the native spirit? He was in love with it, or with a part of it at least. Whitman is a sort of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., for poets, whose Vistas “cheerfully include … a practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic character …,” whose “theory includes riches, and the getting of riches …” What Whitman loved was the shimmer, the bustle, the electric excitement of the marketplace, not the practical aspects of making a living. He participated sensually in trade. In a letter to Peter Doyle he offers an emblematic description of his delight, sitting atop an omnibus in New York City:
If it is very pleasant … [I] ride a trip with some driver-friend on Broadway from 23 rd street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. You know it is a never-ending amusement & study & recreation for me to ride a couple of hours, of a pleasant afternoon, on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama—shops, & splendid buildings, & great windows, & on the broad sidewalks crowds of women, richly-dressed, continually passing, altogether different, superior in style & looks from any to be seen any where else—in fact a perfect stream of people, men too dressed in high style, & plenty of foreigners—& then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel & private coaches, & in fact all sorts of vehicles & many first-class teams, mile after mile, & the splendor of such a great street & so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings, many of them of white marble, & the gayety & motion on every side—You will not wonder how much attraction all this is, on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, & exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy & just looks on & observes.