Walt Whitman

by Reynolds, David S. ;

  Not only did Whitman participate in the revolution in popular religious style, but Leaves of Grass in turn fed back into popular religion. Some of Whitman’s images—such as the line in “Song of Myself,” “I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name”—were picked up by Henry Ward Beecher, who found them thoroughly compatible with his folksy style.35 Whitman called Beecher “a great absorber of Leaves of Grass” and he said he often met people who, having just heard Beecher preach, told him that “his whole sermon was you, you, you, from top to toe.”36 Whitman was in tune not only with the stylistic revolution but with other dramatic changes in American religion. Surging revivalism, the throes of the market economy, and the rise of mass print culture combined to make nineteenth-century America a remarkably fertile breeding ground of new religions. The Shakers, the Mormons, the Oneidan perfectionists, Phoebe Palmer’s perfectionist Methodists, the Seventh Day Adventists, the spiritualists, and the Harmonialists all sprang up between the Revolution and the Civil War. Several of the new movements were based on freshly inspired sacred writings meant to supplant or complement the Bible, such as William Smith’s The Book of Mormon (1830) or Andrew Jackson Davis’ The Great Harmonia (1850).

  If other Americans were founding new religions, so, in a sense, was he: a poetic religion based on progressive science and idealist philosophy that preached the miracle of the commonplace and the possibilities of the soul. In promoting religion in his poetry, he could sound much like a nineteenth-century showman peddling wares: “Magnifying and applying come I, / Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,” as he went on to review all the world religions and then proclaim the miraculous nature of the everyday world.37 He was conscious from the start about writing a supposedly inspired text. His messianic mission was made clear in the 1855 preface, in which he said of the poet, “The time straying toward infidelity and confections he withholds by his steady faith.” He gave a recipe for salvation, including the command, “read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life.” This mission became stronger with time, as evidenced by his June 1857 notebook entry: “The Great Construction of the New Bible / Not to be diverted from the principal object—the main life work—.”38 He saw that he was one of many who were initiating new religions:

  I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena, […]

  I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,

  Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur.39

  To place him in the camp of nineteenth-century Americans who were inaugurating new religions is not to say that he was solely preoccupied with American religious developments. His notebooks of the late 1850s betray a real interest in foreign and historical religions as well. The religion of ancient Egypt represented for him the miracle of life, as in its worship of the beetle and the sun. India to him meant rhapsody, passiveness, meditation, and Greece the celebration of beauty and the natural world. Christianity stood for love, gentleness, morality, and purity, although he noted its history of harsh penances and religious wars.

  The fact remains, however, that if he had much exposure to foreign religions before 1855, he apparently left few records of it. For example, when Thoreau asked him in 1856 whether he had read the Asian scriptures, he replied, “No: tell me about them.”40 Surveying the poetry of the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, we find many things that appear to echo foreign religion or philosophy but could just as easily have sprung from one or more of several interrelated popular movements that crested in the 1850s: mesmerism, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Harmonialism.

  Whitman in the late 1850s. Ed Folsom Collection

  Mesmerism, which began as hypnotic mind-control and developed into a system of healing, popularized the terminology of animal magnetism that lay behind Whitman’s images of electricity and fluid energy. Mesmerists argued that all phenomena were linked by a magnetic, electrical ether or fluid, called the odic force. Certain people, called “operators,” had the ability to use their odic powers to magnetize, or place in a trance, other people, who thus became “subjects” or “mediums.” Whitman wrote that “the science of animal magnetism…reveals at once the existence of whole new world of truth, grand, fearful, profound, relating to that great mystery, in the shadow of which we live and move and have our being.”41

  Whitman’s use of the vocabulary of animal magnetism and electricity shows the mesmerists’ influence. John Bovee Dods, a leading mesmerist, wrote, “Electricity, as a universal agent, pervades the entire atmosphere,” governing all the operations of nature and linking nature to God.42 So well attuned to the electrical theory was Whitman that at times his poetic persona seems like a bundle of electrical impulses. “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,” he writes in “Song of Myself,” “They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.”43 His praise of the body and sex took on a cleansing, mystical quality when expressed in electrical language:

  I sing the body electric,

  The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

  They will not let go of me till I go with them, respond to them,

  And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

  Allied to mesmerism was spiritualism, which also influenced Whitman. In its popular form, spiritualism emerged in 1848 in upstate New York when two impressionable teenaged girls heard strange knocking sounds that they claimed were produced by a spirit. The case set off a craze for spiritualist seances, in which “mediums” communicated with the dead. The presence of spirits was indicated by rapping, chair-moving, table-lifting, flying objects, and so on. A number of famous mediums, notably Cora Hatch and Anna Henderson, gave well attended lectures on the afterlife while in a trance state. In the 1850s, trance writing and trance lecturing was performed by hundreds who claimed to have spiritual gifts. Several volumes of trance poetry were published.

  Whitman watched the spiritualist movement with genuine curiosity. He noted that the movement was “spreading with great rapidity.” He estimated nearly five million American adherents of spiritualism and wrote: “There can be no doubt, that the spiritual movement is blending itself in many ways with society, in theology, in the art of healing, in literature, and in the moral and mental character of the people of the United States.”44

  One of the things it blended with was his poetry. In the 1855 preface he includes the “spiritualist” among “the lawgivers of poets.”45 His repeated assurances about immortality retain the optimism of the spiritualists. With the confidence of the spiritualist he announces, “I know I am deathless, […] I laugh at what you call dissolution.”46 In a self-review of the 1855 edition, he said of himself: “He is the true spiritualist. He recognizes no annihilation, or death, or loss of identity.”47

  On some level, the poet became associated in his mind with the spiritualist medium. As he wrote in his notebook, “The poets are divine mediums—through them come spirits and materials to all the people, men and women.”48 In a poem titled “Mediums” he says that a new race of mediums is arising that will “convey gospels” about nature, physiology, oratory, and death.49 He used the vocabulary of spiritualism in other poems: “O! mediums! O to teach! to convey the invisible faith!,” and, “Something unproved! something in a trance!”50 In a “Calamus” poem he feels surrounded by “the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come.” Another poem describes “the rapt promises and luminè of seers, the spiritual world.”51

  Closely associated in his mind with spiritualism was Swedenborgianism. In an 1857 article he identified Emanuel Swedenborg as “the Spiritualist” and insisted that “his spiritual discoveries have special reference to America.”52 Swedenborg’s doctrine of “correspondences” held that every material thing had a spiritual counterpart, or “ultimate.” His was a body-specific, erotic mysticism. He described God as the Divine Man, who
speaks to humans through the head or heart by “influx,” or “divine breath.”

  Whitman averred that Swedenborg would have “the deepest and broadest mark upon the religions of future ages here, of any man that ever walked the earth.” Like Emerson and Henry James, Sr., he found appealing Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences. The Swedenborgian idea that everything has a spiritual essence is echoed in his lines in “Starting from Paumanok”:

  [H]aving look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.

  Was somebody asking to see the soul?

  See, your own shape, countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.53

  “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” makes use of a similar idea, as the city and the commercial river traffic are called “dumb, beautiful ministers” of which “none else is perhaps more spiritual,” and all “furnish your parts toward the soul.”54 His longest and most fervent poem in this vein was “Eidólons,” the title of which was his word for the Swedenborgian “ultimate.” The poet looks everywhere and sees only the spiritual counterpart of every physical and emotional thing.

  Swedenborg’s mysticism was inherently body-specific, as believers were thought to communicate with God through particular parts of the body. The lungs were said to play a key role in spiritual communion. The “divine breath,” also called the “influx” or “afflatus,” was taken in from the spiritual atmosphere through the lungs, which in turn emanated an “efflux” of its own into the atmosphere. The Swedenborgian terms “influx,” “efflux,” and “afflatus” are used in the early editions of Leaves of Grass. The “I” of “Song of Myself” calls himself the “Partaker of influx and efflux” and declares: “Through me the afflatus surging and surging … through me the current and index.” In “Song of the Open Road” Whitman writes: “Here is the efflux of the soul, / The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions.”55 Like the post-Swedenborgians of the fifties, he could combine the notion of efflux with the “charge” and universal fluid of animal magnetism:

  The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

  I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,

  Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

  Here rises the fluid and attaching character.

  Swedenborg suggested to Whitman how the erotic and the mystical were linked. He told Traubel, “I think Swedenborg was right when he said there was a close connection—a very close connection—between the state we call religious ecstasy and the desire to copulate. I find it confirmed in all my experience.”56 Since the body was deeply involved in worship for the post-Swedenborgians, they often came up with physical metaphors for prayer. The soul for the Swedenborgians was no rarefied essence but almost a palpable other self.

  This cultural background of erotic mysticism casts light on the section in “Song of Myself” in which the “I” describes lying with his soul on the grass on a transparent summer morning. The passage begins with a religious statement—“I believe in you my soul”—and leads through rapturous union to an affirmation of the peace and joy and love of God’s universe.57 The mixture of the physical and the spiritual is established at the start, when the persona says that neither the soul nor the body should be abased to each other. If Swedenborg could describe union with God as reception of the divine breath through the head or the chest, so Whitman could imagine the soul plunging its “tongue” into the “bare-stript heart” and spreading until it embraced the beard and feet. The expansive aftermath of the erotic-mystical union also has Swedenborgian overtones. In Epic of the Starry Heavens by the popular mystic Thomas Lake Harris (whom Whitman discussed in his notebooks) the soul, in its visionary flight to the divine world, encounters the spirits of countless men and women bound in love. Similarly, Whitman’s “I” feels that he is bonded with all the men and women ever born and that a kelson of the creation is love.

  His treatment of religious matters also had precedent in the Harmonial movement led by the famous “Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis, whom Whitman discussed at length with friends. While in a trance state, Davis could accomplish apparently miraculous things, such as reading books through walls and peering inside people’s bodies to spot hidden diseases. In what he termed “traveling clairvoyance,” Davis voyaged mentally to distant places and times.

  Whitman participated in the trend of Harmonial mysticism. In a notebook entry of the period he wrote, “I am in a mystic trance exultation / Something wild and untamed—half savage.”58 In a later entry he described being “in a trance, yet with all senses alert” and with “the objective world suspended or surmounted for a while, & the powers in exaltation, freedom, vision.”59 The early editions of Leaves of Grass are filled with his versions of traveling clairvoyance. He outdid even Davis in his adventurous gamboling with time and space. In “Song of Myself” he writes: “My ties and ballasts leave me, I travel, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, / I skirt the sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision.”60 If the trance writers mentally traversed history and space, so Whitman jumped rapidly between historical events (e.g., “Walking the old hills of Judea with the beautiful gentle God at my side”) and distant places (“Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars”).

  The spiritually healing powers of his persona bore the impress of the Harmonial outlook as expounded by Davis. The Harmonialists thought that electrical magnetism was perfectly in balance in nature and that by plunging into nature people could be physically healed and spiritually refreshed. The madly loving, sometimes sexual attraction to nature in the early editions of Leaves of Grass bore the Harmonial stamp. Whitman’s persona embraces nature like a Harmonialist hungry for a magnetic charge:

  Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night!

  Night of the south winds—night of the large few stars!

  Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

  Such “magnetic nourishing” power is supplied by virtually every facet of nature the “I” embraces. “Smile O voluptuous cool-breathed earth!” he proclaims. “Smile, for your lover comes.” “You sea! I resign myself to you also […] / Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.” As with the Harmonialists, the sights, sounds, smells, touch of the physical world have magnetic reverberations in the poet’s sensibility.

  The sun had high significance for both the Harmonialists and Whitman. For the popular mystics, the sun was a chief source of the electrical fluid that permeated nature and quickened life. As the highest recipients of this magnetic energy, humans were thought to be extensions of the sun. In Thomas Lake Harris’ poem, spirits in space congregate around suns and absorb odic force. Whitman’s persona too is a “solar” man, responsive to the sun’s special power and emanating an odic sun-force himself.

  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  He is able not only to “send sunrise” out of him but to speed like one of Harris’ spirits through solar spheres: “I depart as air, I shake my locks at the runaway sun, / I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.” Like the Harmonialists, Whitman is not just appreciating nature but exhaling its magnetic force.

  He was trying to define a model person who could heal both social and physical disease. The magnetic “I” at the heart of his poetry was the ideal Harmonial person, always ready to be absorbed into the mass but always himself—and, above all, in balance. Both spiritually and physically, the “I” is a Harmonial healer. “Of your soul I say truths to harmonize, if anything can harmonize you,” he reassures us: Life is not “chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.” “I shall be good health to you,” he says at the end of “Song of Myself,” “And filter and fibre your blood.” In his 1855 poem “The Sleepers” the soothin
g “I” has all the capacities of a mesmeric healer and Harmonial life-affirmer. The poem moves through disease and social disorder to a sense of Harmonial peace.

  It is not surprising, however, that it was the disordered, sometimes bizarre qualities of Whitman’s verse that caught the eye of some reviewers, like one who noted that sometimes he ran toward chaos in rhapsodic time-space flights, “as in the rigmarole of trance-speaking mediums, and we are threatened on every hand with a period of mere suggestion in poetry, mere protest against order, and kicking at the old limits of time, space, the horizon, and the sky.”61 A British reviewer similarly pointed out that Whitman’s time-space flights were odd to the foreign sensibility, “but perhaps not so to a nation from which the spirit-rappers sprung.”62

  Reviewers inclined to accept the new mystical movements, on the other hand, felt comfortable with Whitman’s religious vision. The leading Harmonial journal of the 1850s, the Christian Spiritualist, gave a long, glowing review of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which it called “a sign of the times,” representing a form of “poetic mediumship” that portrayed the influx of spirits and the divine breath.63

  Although Whitman never joined any of the popular mystical movements, he remained curious about them to the end. Realizing they were a potent cultural force, he represented their spirit and their images in his all-absorbing poetry.

  Six

  SEX, GENDER, AND COMRADESHIP

  DETERMINEDLY AVOIDING BOTH RETICENCE AND OBSCENITY, WHITMAN in his poetry brought to all kinds of love a fresh, passionate intensity. He profited from developments in the areas of physiology, marriage reform, and the visual arts.