Walt Whitman

by Reynolds, David S. ;

  Another of Whitman’s scenes of racial harmony, the later passage in “Song of Myself” about the African American team driver, also had precedent in genre paintings, particularly those of the Long Island artist William Sidney Mount. The influential Mount, whose works crowded the New York galleries, became famous in part because of his paintings of blacks. Whitman in an article mentioned having seen “Mount’s last work—I think his best—of a Long Island negro, the winner of a goose at raffle.”15 It is likely Whitman and Mount knew each other.

  Particularly suggestive among Mount’s paintings in terms of Whitman’s portrayal of blacks is Farmer’s Nooning (1835). The painting shows five farmers—three white men, a white boy, and a large black man—resting by a tree and a haystack at noon hour. The black man is strategically foregrounded: He is the only adult lying in the sun rather than in the shade, and he is the only one whose full body and face are shown. He is a massive, handsome man clad in a sparkling white, open shirt and tan pants. As he lies on the ground, his arms outspread, a young white boy is playfully tickling his face with a piece of straw. The theme of racial intermingling and comradeship is underscored by Mount’s positioning of the figures. All the bodies blend into each other because they overlap on the canvas. Mount creates a picturesque moment of racial harmony.

  Whitman evokes a similar spirit in his passage about the black team driver:

  The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,

  The negro that drives the huge dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece, […]

  His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,

  The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs.

  I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,

  I go with the team also.16

  The pictorial quality of this racially bonding passage is unmistakable. Whitman calls the driver “the picturesque giant” and emphasizes his aesthetic, ennobling features. Even more than Mount’s massive black, Whitman’s is foregrounded, since he is not framed by whites but stands tall and commanding in his driver’s seat. As in Mount, his open shirt exposes his upper chest and the sun suffuses his black body, highlighting its beauty and brawn. The gesture toward racial harmony made in Mount’s poem is repeated in Whitman’s passage, which ends with the “I” sitting by the black man as he drives his team.

  Whitman and Mount shared an interest in the homey details of everyday life and people, usually with an emphasis on the joyful activity of country or artisan types. Just as Mount liked to capture workers in moments of recreation or ease (e.g., rural folk dancing or playing instruments or just idling), so Whitman chants of lazily contemplating the grass or of common workers singing songs. Just as Mount represents the activity and movement of common life, so Whitman captures varied subjects in the midst of everyday activities, relying heavily on active verbs or participles. When Whitman’s friend John Burroughs described the poet’s catalogs as “one line genre word paintings,” he doubtless had in mind the kind of crisp, lively vignettes Mount had popularized in such paintings as Bargaining for a Horse, Eel Spearing at Setauket, and Ringing the Pig.17

  As with Mount, even the most common activities take on interest for Whitman. It is not far from Mount’s artistic sensibility to that of Whitman, who generated catalogs like this:

  The one-year wife is recovering and happy, having a week ago borne her first child,

  The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,

  The pavingman leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,

  The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread.18

  Elsewhere in this catalog Whitman writes, “The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways.” Whitman’s catalogs as a whole are a kind of exhibition-gallery, reflecting the democratic eclecticism in the antebellum galleries where Mount and others exhibited. Mount was hardly alone among artistic precursors of Whitman’s catalogs. The Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham, a Western version of Mount, produced popular genre studies of frontier types that Whitman knew of. Bingham’s The Jolly Boatman (1846), notable for its vernacular treatment of frolicking flatboatmen, may have influenced vignettes in Whitman’s poetry, such as this one: “Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees, / Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas.” There is also a similarity between Bingham’s painting Shooting for the Beef (1850) and Whitman’s account of a Western turkey-shoot.

  While genre painting contributed to the catalogs, in a larger sense Whitman was committed to the union of matter and spirit, the real and the ideal that informed antebellum painting as a whole. He responded favorably to two leaders of the Hudson River school, Thomas Doughty, whom he called “the prince of land-scapists” and “the best of American painters,” and Asher Durand, about whom he wrote, “all he does is good.”19 These painters modified the ideal, allegorical style of their fellow-Hudson River artist Thomas Cole, turning to a near-photographic style in the faith that nature in its unembellished details always pointed toward God’s harmonious universe.

  Whitman joined his contemporaries by picturing light and its prismatic refractions. The light that floods luminist painting, suggesting God’s immanence and man’s goodness, is akin to the light that plays through his poetry. A particular analogy can be made between him and Fredric Edwin Church, who forged an epic luminism by depicting vast, light-filled landscapes on huge canvases. These landscapes affirmed both the grandeur of the physical world and the ever-present possibility for transcendence.

  Whitman similarly registered the vast effects of light. “Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,” he wrote. His poem “A Prairie Sunset” pictured an expansive landscape aglow with the full range of colors:

  Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,

  The earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power consign’d for once to colors;

  The light, the general air possess’d by them—colors till now unknown,

  No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—the high meridian—North, South, all,

  Pure, luminous colors fighting the silent shadows to the last.20

  Like Church, Whitman here transforms a colorful landscape into a metaphor for cosmic unity. The colors are varied, but they have a unifying effect because they encompass the entire scene and, by association, the whole world.

  The luminist tendency to see an idealizing light everywhere enabled him to update the traditional religious image of the halo. In his poem “To You” he recreated Christian art in modern, luminist fashion:

  Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,

  From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light,

  But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light,

  From my hand the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

  This passage states directly an implied message of much antebellum art: the potential divinity of mankind. Whitman is as interested in the light emanating from humans as in the light that suffuses nature.

  Despite real affinities between Whitman and contemporary painters, there were important differences. He knew the rough, turbulent aspects of American experience, and he saw that they were minimized by the main Hudson River painters. He wanted picturesqueness but also explosiveness, rebelliousness, suggestiveness.

  Late in life he would discover these qualities in the French painter Jean-François Millet. He found in
The Sower (1850), Millet’s famous study of peasant life, “a sublime murkiness and original fury,” reminding him of the explosive cultural forces behind the French Revolution.21 In Millet’s works Whitman felt “the untold something behind all that was depicted—an essence, a suggestion, an indirection, leading off into the immortal mysteries.”22 He felt such a kinship with Millet that he once said his poems were “really only Millet in another form—they are the Millet that Walt Whitman has succeeded in putting into words.” There is no evidence, however, that he had been aware of Millet before he had produced the early editions of Leaves of Grass.

  Although Whitman did not find a Millet on the antebellum scene, he made what use he could of the artistic materials America had to offer. He spent a lot of time in the Brooklyn studio of the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, whose work he admired. He also befriended many other artists, including the young sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, the landscapist and portrait painter Frederick A. Chapman, and the Hudson River landscapist Jesse Talbot.

  There was one American artist Whitman thought showed especially great promise: the Brooklyn portrait painter Walter Libbey. He found in Libbey’s work the texturing and suggestiveness that was absent from the prevailing hard-surfaced style. He especially praised a Libbey portrait of a casually dressed country boy playing a flute while seated on a river bank. “There is no hardness,” Whitman wrote, “and the eye is not pained by the sharpness of outline which mars many otherwise fine pictures. In the scene of the background, and in all the accessories, there is a delicious melting in, so to speak, of object with object; an effect that is frequent enough in nature, though painters seem to disdain following it.”23 It was this “melting in” quality that Whitman missed in much American art and which he tried to attain in several artistic moments in his poetry. With all his attention to vivid particularities, he also strained toward vista and suggestiveness, as in this line: “A show of summer softness—a contact of something unseen—an amour of the light and air.”24

  Like most antebellum artists, however, Libbey failed to absorb the wild, agitated, radical idioms that represented the more subversive elements of American society and politics. Whitman took it upon himself to push American art theory toward a broad, inclusive realm that had room for the full range of experience, from the placidly beautiful to the rebellious and explosive.

  His speech before the Brooklyn Art Union, delivered on March 31, 1851, promoted his idea that art was desperately needed by an increasingly materialistic society and extended the idea of art to include all heroic actions, especially revolutionary or subversive ones. He gave as examples of artistic action the self-sacrifice of “all great rebels and innovators,” including the Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth, the exiled Italian rebel Mazzini, and others.25 He concluded the address with a recitation of the lines from his own poem “Resurgemus” about the corpses of murdered young rebels nurturing the seeds of freedom and revolt against tyrants all over the earth.

  This was Whitman trying to bring social and political conscience to American art, which by and large was politically complacent in his day. The fact that he ended his Art Union address with a passage from a political poem laced with the barbed rhetoric of working-class protest showed him trying to push American art in a new, radical direction.

  His interest in the Art Union was part of his overriding desire to organize artists everywhere so that they might reform American society. If he hoped that groups like the Brooklyn Art Union would contribute to this social reorganization, he soon learned otherwise. Although he was nominated for the presidency of the Union in the spring of 1851, the group quickly fizzled.

  But Whitman’s faith in the socially transforming powers of art did not die. To the contrary, it was given fresh life by the opening in the summer of 1853 of the world art and industry exhibition at New York’s Crystal Palace. This long event was the culminating moment of antebellum exhibition culture.

  In Whitman’s eyes, the Crystal Palace itself was a work of art. Covering nearly five acres in the area of what is now Bryant Park, near 42nd Street, the building was shaped like a tremendous Greek cross, with pane-glass ceilings and a towering dome at the intersection. Whitman called the Crystal Palace “an edifice certainly unsurpassed anywhere for beauty and all other requisites for a perfect edifice … an original, esthetic, perfectly proportioned American edifice—one of the few that put modern times not beneath old times, but on an equality with them.”26 He was equally taken with the multifaceted exhibit it housed. He was irresistibly attracted to it, recalling later, “New York, Great Exposition open’d in 1853. I went a long time (nearly a year)—days and nights—especially the latter.”27

  The Crystal Palace was antebellum America’s grandest attempt to make art available to the general public. The authors of the exhibition catalog wrote that “the power of Art to educate and refine the masses” would be realized only “when its works are no longer a monopoly, but an every-day possession, within the reach of the mechanic and the tradesman as well as the opulent and noble.”28 The Crystal Palace promised to help fulfill Whitman’s dream of transforming society through art, since, for the first time on a grand scale, the American masses could be exposed to art on a regular basis.

  This was art in the most inclusive sense. On the one hand, there was a full range of paintings, daguerreotypes, and sculptures. Alongside such art works were displayed elaborate chinaware and tapestries, the cotton gin, the electric telegraph, a fire engine, different pistols, the Adams printing press, and other instruments. It was a potpourri of the modern and the neoclassical, the artistic and the mechanical that lent credence to Whitman’s idea that art could be defined flexibly and broadly. He saw beauty and wonder in machines and liked to exhibit them in his poetry:

  The cylinder press … the handpress … the frisket and tympan … the compositor’s stick and rule,

  The implements for daguerreotyping … the tools of the rigger or grappler or sailmaker or blockmaker, […]

  The walkingbeam of the steam-engine … the throttle and governors, and the up and down rods.29

  That his catalogs are linked to antebellum exhibition culture is made clear by the unfinished and uncollected pre-1855 poem “Pictures,” which has survived in a faded notebook. The poem outdid even the heterogeneous exhibits in the Crystal Palace in the eclecticism of its images. Whitman had long sought an organizing principle to coordinate the wide range of people and things he viewed as artistic. He was discovering that organizing principle in his poetic “I.”

  He begins the poem with the startling image of his own head as a gallery with “many pictures hanging suspended” and repeats the motif at the end: “And every hour of the day and night has given me copious pictures.” The picture gallery here is being internalized and identified with the poetic imagination. Whitman presents quick vignettes from history—Adam in Paradise, Christ, a Hindu sage, Socrates with his students, the Battle of Brooklyn—and even enters the spirit world, describing “Phantoms, countless, men and women, after death, wandering.” Recent American history is included with pictures of Jefferson and Emerson. He uses the exhibition trope to personalize his yoking together of various geographical regions, as he speaks of “my” Southern slave-grounds, “my” Kansas life, “my” Oregon hut, and so on. He introduces an urban element absent from most antebellum art by celebrating “the young man of Mannahatta—the celebrated rough,” adding emphatically: “The one I love so much—let others sing whom they may—him I sing for a thousand years!”30

  Five

  SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION

  “LO! KEEN-EYED TOWERING SCIENCE, / As FROM TALL PEAKS THE MODERN overlooking,” writes Whitman in “Song of the Universal.” In the next breath he adds, “Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science.”1

  These lines point to the movement in his poetry from the scientific to the spiritual. He struggled to bring together the two in his poetry, and he made use of popular approaches that made such couplings possible.

&n
bsp; Like the eighteenth-century deists, he denied the specialness of any single religion and forged a broadly ecumenical outlook that embraced all religions. As he wrote, his was “the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths.” His ecumenical outlook engendered two long passages in “Song of Myself” in which he listed by name the major world religions, indicating that he respected and accepted them all. He surveyed them again in “With Antecedents” and affirmed: “I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, / I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception.”

  He accepted all religions but believed in no single church. It was difficult for him to have faith in the churches at a time when he felt they had become poisoned by association with economic injustice and chattel slavery. “The churches,” he wrote Emerson in 1856, “are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves…. The spectacle is a pitiful one.” In the scathing poem “Respondez!” Whitman wrote: “Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have died of the most filthy of diseases! / […]Let there be no God!”2

  Often his doubts about the churches merged into skepticism about larger matters. He frequently meditated on death in his writings. “Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse,” he writes in one poem; “Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never cease—they are the burial lines.”3 His poetry is scattered with the dead: the 412 soldiers slaughtered at Goliad, the drowned swimmer, the mashed fireman, the lost she-bird, Lincoln, the Civil War dead.

  Pondering death brought him to the brink of doubt. He knew, as he wrote in “Song of Myself,” the feeling “That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crepe and tears.”4 He could identify with bitter atheists: