Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I the sea of torment, doubt, despair, and unbelief.5
Whitman, however, had wide-ranging strategies for combating doubt. One he found in physical science. Among the scientists who offered hopeful explanations of nature was the Stockholm chemist Justus Liebig. When the American edition of Liebig’s Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Agriculture appeared in 1847, Whitman raved about it in the Eagle. “Chemistry!” he wrote. “The elevating, beautiful, study… which involves the essences of creation, and the changes, and the growths, and formations and decays of so large a constituent part of the earth, and the things thereof!” Liebig’s fame was “as wide as the civilized world—a fame nobler than that of generals, or of many bright geniuses.”6
Liebig presented a scientific rationale for what would become one of Whitman’s main answers to cynics: even if matter were all, nature constantly regenerates itself and turns death into life through chemical transformation. Liebig gave the idea of the cycle of nature validity through the study of transferred chemical compounds. When people and animals died, their atoms became transferred to the earth and plant life, whose atoms in turn became the source of new life. Whatever diseases they had were lost in the transforming process.
There seemed, then, to be an ongoing resurrection and a democratic exchange of substances inherent in nature. Just as Liebig wrote that “the active state of the atoms of one body has an influence upon the atoms of a body in contact with it,” so Whitman announced in the second line of his opening poem that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”7 As Liebig said that after death humans are changed into other things, so Whitman could write: “We are Nature […] / We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, / We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, / We are oaks.”8 If Liebig envisaged an exchange of life forms through decomposition and regrowth, so Whitman fashioned metaphors that vivified the idea of the ceaseless springing of life from death: “Tenderly will I use you curling grass, / It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men”; “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death”; “And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure.”9 Liebig wrote that “the miasms and certain contagious matters [that] produce diseases in the human organism” become “not contagious” when the organism is absorbed into the earth.10 This becomes the central point of Whitman’s poem “This Compost.” He asks the earth in amazement: “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? / […] Where have you drawn off all the foul and liquid meat?”11 He provides the Liebigian answer:
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious, […]
That all is clean forever and forever.
Whitman also found in science confirmation of his optimistic instincts about the origin and nature of humans and their place in nature. Most scientists before Darwin were not pessimistic about nature and species. What might be called a “progressive consensus” emerged among naturalists and biologists. This outlook found expression in several immensely popular books, including the Edinburgh biologist Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) and the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos, published in four volumes between 1845 and 1857. In 1846 the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz relocated to the United States, devoting the remaining decades of his life to promoting an idealistic version of progressive science.
According to the progressive view, the universe was formed of gases that developed constantly toward man. (By a poetic metonymy, Whitman enacted this idea when he wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution”).12 The earth was not young, as the Bible suggested and as previous scientists had believed, but instead was very old; the Scottish geologist James Hutton actually called it indefinitely old. Although the earth’s extreme age seemed to contravene the Bible’s teachings, the scientists in general did not abandon religious faith.
To the contrary, they believed that every aspect of physical creation revealed a divine plan. They accepted the so-called argument from design, introduced in the late seventeenth century and given fresh life by William Paley’s classic Natural Theology (1802), which taught that everything in the universe was so well adapted to its uses that it revealed God’s benignity. The elegantly efficient joints of the hand and the intricate mechanism of the eye were the kinds of everyday miracles the scientists pointed to. When the Harpers brought out a new edition of Natural Theology in 1847, Whitman argued that it gave scientific proof of the sacredness of physical things.
In Whitman’s poems, the optimism of progressive science is figured forth as heady exuberance. No scientific idealist reveled in common natural experience to the extent he did. The “I” of “Song of Myself” announces that his armpit aroma is finer than any prayer, that his head is finer than all the churches and creeds, that a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. In another poem Whitman writes, “How beautiful and perfect are the animals! / How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!”13 All of these images argue from design with a vengeance. If the scientists called the earth indefinitely old, Whitman exulted in the sense of infinity: “A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, […] / They are but parts … any thing is but a part.”14 Just as several scientists believed that people have evolved upward through many different organisms, he called life “the leavings of many deaths” and added, “No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.” He poeticizes the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory, complete with nebula and progress over time through varied forms:
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb, […]
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.
To communicate his sense of embodying all time and nature, Whitman fastened on the word “kosmos.” The word was so important to him that it was the only one he retained in the different versions of his famous self-identification in “Song of Myself,” which first read, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” and ended up as, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.” The word had been popularized by Alexander von Humboldt, whose multivolume Kosmos was well received and immediately translated into several languages; the English title was Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe.
Humboldt pictured nature not in chaos or conflict but as a source of calmness, always in equilibrium, with humans as the acme of creation. “Cosmos” signified both the order of nature and the centrality of human beings. “Cosmos” was ready-made for poetic adaptation, since it gathered together nature, intuition, and art. Whitman in his poem “Kosmos” (he retained the “k” of the German) associated the word with a person in tune with all things, one
Who includes diversity and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also, […]
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all times, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.
The circle of scientists and pseudoscientists surrounding Whitman, most of them associated with his early distributor Fowlers & Wells, had a special role in popularizing and Americanizing such progressive, optimistic ideas. Phrenology, the pseudoscience that taught that all character traits were produced by specific brain organs, became in the hands of his friends Orson and Lorenzo Fowler a system of self-help for all aspects of the human bein
g, physical and spiritual.
After hearing Orson Fowler lecture in 1846, Whitman rejoiced over the phrenological idea that any mental faculty could be developed through exercise. Whitman wrote, “If the professor can, as he professes, teach men to know their intellectual and moral deficiencies and remedy them, we do not see that our people may long remain imperfect.”15 On July 16, 1849, Whitman went to Clinton Hall to have his head examined by the quiet, learned Lorenzo Fowler. He was doing nothing unusual. Among others who had their skulls read were Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Mark Twain.
Whitman had reason to be pleased with the result of his skull exam. On a numbering system of one to seven (with the high score of seven indicating the largest size of a brain organ), Whitman got a six to seven in Self-Esteem and Caution and a six in Amativeness, Adhesiveness, Philoprogentiveness, Concentrativeness, and Combativeness. He must have been cheered by Fowlers’ assessment, “You are yourself at all times,” and puzzled by his low scores of four in Tune and five in Language—not good signs for a budding bard.16 But Whitman was sufficiently happy that he published his phrenological chart on four different occasions. His interest in phrenology lasted long after the craze had died out. In old age he confessed, “I probably have not got by the phrenology stage yet.”17
He also used phrenological terms throughout his poetry. In the 1855 preface he included the phrenologist among “the lawgivers of poets” and added phrenological force to his description of the poet by saying he has “large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality.”18 Phrenology taught that everyone possessed a unique blend of characteristics, an idea communicated in the first version of “Song of the Broad-Axe”:
Never offering others always offering himself, corroborating his phrenology,
Voluptuous, inhabitive, combative, conscientious, alimentive, intuitive, of copious friendship, sublimity, firmness, selfesteem, comparison, locality, individuality, form, eventuality.19
The Fowlers had changed phrenology, mainly an intellectual concern abroad, into a popular program for self-help. The numbers they assigned to the various brain organs had a purpose: a low number suggested that a certain organ was too small and must be developed by exercise of that particular trait; a large number, by the same token, suggested that a trait had to be controlled so that it did not become dominant.
Above all, the Fowlers advised keeping the various brain organs and other bodily functions in equilibrium. Anything that threatened that balance could cause insanity or physical disease. It was not the brain alone that signaled well-being: All other bodily parts did too. Everything about a person—the walk, the laugh, the lips, eyes, skin, voice, gestures—betrayed character. Whitman echoed this holistic view in several poems, including “I Sing the Body Electric”:
[T]he expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees.20
What was most hopeful about the Fowlers’ program was that they offered methods of repairing mental imbalances. One was vigorous self-reprimand. A person on the verge of addiction to a certain vice or excess was enjoined to shout inwardly against that vice. In outlining a remedy for the widespread vice of masturbation, for instance, Orson Fowler used capitalization to suggest how one should talk to oneself:
TOTAL ABSTINENCE IS LIFE; animal, intellectual, moral.
INDULGENCE IS TRIPLE DEATH! RESOLUTION …
STOP NOW AND FOREVER, or abandon all hope.21
Some of Whitman’s most revealing notebook entries show that he had learned the technique of self-reprimand. In one entry he announced: “I have resolv’d to inaugurate for myself a pure perfect sweet, cleanblooded robust body by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk—and all fat meats later suppers—a great body—a purged, cleansed, spiritualised and invigorated body—.”22 This was straightforward Fowlerian self-control.
The most famous of all his notebook entries, the 1870 one in which he struggled to come to terms with his feelings toward his friend Peter Doyle, showed him again using the kind of self-reprimand the Fowlers had advised. Phrenologists regarded adhesiveness, or friendship between people of the same sex, as an essential part of the human mind. But when either adhesiveness or amativeness (heterosexual love) became overactive, the results on the mind could be disastrous. As Orson Fowler wrote, “When inflamed, fevered, dissatisfied, or irritated, [the social organs] inflame every other portion of the brain, throwing it into violent commotion, especially the animal propensities; but if their action is natural, if they are properly placed, they put to rest the other animal propensities.”23
When struggling with his feelings about Doyle in his diary, Whitman wrestled with such inflamed feelings. He warned himself
TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY & for good, from the present hour, this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless, UNDIGNIFIED PURSUIT of 16.4 [Peter Doyle]—too long, (much too long) persevered in,—so humiliating— —It must come at last & had better come now—(It cannot possibly be a success) LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING, NO GETTING at all henceforth (NOT ONCE, under any circumstances)—avoid seeing her [originally “him”], or meeting her, or any talk or explanations —or ANY MEETING WHATEVER, FROM THIS HOUR FORTH, FOR LIFE July 15 70
Outline sketch of a superb calm character […]
Depress the adhesive nature /
It is in excess—making life a torment /
Ah this diseased, feverish, disproportionate adhesiveness /24
The most genuinely confessional of all Whitman’s writings, this passage has been variously interpreted as an unequivocal expression of homosexuality and as a massive repression of the homosexual urge. But the vocabulary of modern psychology was not available to Whitman. He used instead phrenological self-regulation. Internalizing the language of the phrenologists, he says here that his “adhesiveness” has become “diseased, feverish, disproportionate” and warns himself to “Depress the adhesive nature.” He is trying to bring this inflamed inclination under control, to regain mental equilibrium. His first strategy, as with the Fowlers, is self-reprimand. Just as they said that the first step toward self-correction was the “DETERMINATION TO STOP NOW AND FOREVER,” so he tells himself “TO GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY” the pursuit of Doyle, warning sternly, “LET THERE FROM THIS HOUR BE NO FALTERING.”
Interwoven with these strong resolutions are reminders of what a person in equilibrium is like. Whitman plans a sketch of “a superb calm character,” echoing an earlier notebook entry in which he told himself to develop “A Cool, gentle (LESS DEMONSTRATIVE) MORE UNIFORM DEMEANOR” and “to live a more Serene, Calm, Philosophic Life.—reticent, far more reticent—yet cheerful, with pleased spirit and pleased manner.”25 Behind these reminders lay the phrenological conviction that inner balance could be gained through exercise of the will.
“Hurrah for positive science!” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself.” “Long live exact demonstration!”; but then he says to scientists: “Your facts are useful, yet they are not my dwelling, / I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.”26
Religion and philosophy helped address some of the larger questions left unanswered by science. He generalized that from the start in his poetry “one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since—and that has been the religious purpose.” The poet, in his words, was the “divine literatus” who replaced the priest.27 America, he constantly stressed, could be rescued from materialism and infidelity only by literature that pointed to the spiritual and moral. He clung to a faith in immortality. “I am not prepared,” he told Traubel, “to admit fraud in the scheme of the universe—yet without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.”28 His close Brooklyn friend Helen Price found his “leading characteristic” to be “the religious sentimen
t or feeling. It pervades and dominates his life.”29
Whitman did not have much first-hand exposure to European Romantic philosophy but received it through edited collections like Frederick Henry Hedge’s Prose Writers of Germany, which the poet called “a big valuable book.”30 All the philosophers in the volume accepted the argument from design that was an underpinning of progressive science. Sometimes their expression of the outlook approached a kind of pre-Whitmanian mysticism. The physiologist Johann Caspar Lavater emphasized the miraculous nature of apparently insignificant things: “Each particle of matter is an immensity; each leaf a world; each insect an inexplicable compendium.”31 Whitman would write in the same vein that a tree toad is the chef d’oeuvre of the highest, a leaf of grass is the journeywork of the stars, and so on.
Whitman observed American Protestantism with interest. The evangelical groups that grew most dramatically, especially the Methodists and Baptists, were promoted by an intense zeal manifested in conversion “exercises” like running, barking, dancing, convulsions, a zeal captured in Whitman’s line about a religious convert “Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis.”32 Evangelical religion was spread by a vigorous, lively brand of preaching that made use of slang and humor. Brooklyn’s Henry Ward Beecher made extensive use of jokes and illustrations. Whitman was rapturous about Beecher’s pulpit style. In time, his fascination with popular preaching made him susceptible to the eloquence of the homespun sailors’ preacher Edward Thompson Taylor, whom he called America’s “one essentially perfect orator,” and later to Brooklyn’s T. DeWitt Talmage, whose lively sermons he enjoyed.
In a time when mainstream religion was becoming increasingly secular, promoters of religion could be thoroughly enjoyed without reference to the churches with which they were associated. Whitman wrote in his pre-1855 notebook, “The new theologies bring forward man.”33 Whitman separated someone like Beecher from church religion. “It was only fair to say of Beecher that he was not a minister,” he said. “There was so much of him man there was little left of him to be minister.”34
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