Walt Whitman Reconsidered

...And Whitman, if he is to be read as a living poet, rather than sanctified as a dead one, must come to seem again as offensive as he really is...

...What binds Whitman's poems together is not the logic of persuasion or pictorial form, but what we have come to label a little misleadingly "stream-of-consciousness": the secret order of repressed wishes and fears that links impression to impression when the conscious mind abdicates or relaxes its control...

...Number 6." and finally "The Indications...

...the authorized final edition of 1891-2 contains 423 sub-poems, not only named and often divided into helpfully numbered stanzas, but grouped under 16 section headings, themselves duly labelled...

...of the roughs" is cut from "Song of Myself"—and the beard grows not merely longer and whiter but more gentle and patriarchal...

...O foolish hectic...

...Surely one goal of any new selection from Whitman ought to be the redemption (from his later self as well as from those who adulate and imitate at his dullest) of that pristine poet, that "dirtiest beast" whom, in a world grown ever more genteel, we cannot afford to lose...

...of his several voices, that of the soapbox orator seems least congenial to current taste...

...The very portrait of the author which faced the frontispiece grew old along with him and his book, changed in character with the mask or persona through which Whitman chose to speak in succeeding editions of the work...

...It is as effectively suppressed by its position in the final version of Leaves of Grass as it ever was by any bowdlerizing editor...

...A handy rule of thumb says beware of Whitman when he uses the "thou" instead of the "you...

...In the process of excision and addition, the nucleus from which the whole Leaves of Grass developed, that bewildering group of thirteen poems (only one of which, "Great are the Myths," was dropped completely) in which the poet found his authentic voice, loses somehow its original jaunty and disreputable air...

...In this he did not, could not, of course, quite succeed...

...my clothes were stolen while I was abed...

...O Walt Whitman, show us some pictures . . . ", he wrote in an abandoned fragment...

...his voice that of one talking to himself, as in the haze of lazy noonday or at the onset of night he falls asleep...

...In the end, Whitman chooses to address us in the role of "good, gray" prophet rather than the cocky disturber of the peace whom an early satirist described as "the dirtiest beast of the age" (and who, as late as 1865, lost a government job for having written a "pornographic" poem) ; and the final form of the book reflects this final revision of himself...

...the very names for the days of the week and the months transformed...

...The perpetuation of "O Captain...

...Passage to India" ("Ah, Genoese, thy dream...

...Some selections in the past have been made with precisely the opposite intent...

...Occasionally, however, not genuine poetic concerns but a desire to cover up or tone down takes over, as when in "Song of Myself...

...and we find it hard to believe that this was not the metrical pattern from which the poem began...

...Now I am thrust forth, where shall I run...

...Pushed further and further into the deadly center of the burgeoning poem, it stands now at a place where few readers, starting boldly from page one and resolved not to skip a line, will ever reach it...

...O hotcheeked and blushing...

...His "imagist" aspect, however, deserves to be better known, and is represented by such purely visual little poems as "A Paumanok Picture" and "The Dalliance of the Eagles," to which Whitman applied not our contemporary word "images" but his own term "pictures...

...and went on to boast, "Yes, in a little house I keep suspended many pictures . . . " But in another place, he compares unfavorably "what we call poems," which are "merely pictures," with "the real poems," which are humans in action...

...It is desirable, however, not to follow what the poet himself called the "form’d and launch'd work," but rather to try to gain some sense of what that work was in the beginning and in "the subsequent adjusting interval...

...Either the poem one picked up at the bookshop of a phrenologist would have to be judged as nonsense spiced with obscenities—or all other poems would have to be re-read, reassessed in order to make provision for an unforeseen species of excellence...

...His emendations are by no means always inept, nor are they invariably dictated by a desire to substitute for earlier versions of himself more current ones...

...Many of the present titles represent the end of a long search and several changes of heart: The verses now known as "Song of the Answerer...

...Not only were new sub-poems added (often merely new tries at saying again what had been said already over and over), but old ones were shifted in position, even dropped: lines were cut or emended...

...I hear the trained soprano—she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip" becomes the much less crude and striking "I hear the trained soprano (what work with hers is this...

...thy dream...

...The average reader is...

...The latter is remarkable not only for one of Whitman's silliest lines ("Then courage European revolter, revoltress...

...Yet Whitman, to the few who read him in 1855, must have provided just such a shock...

...is the secret revenge of the bourgeoisie on the poet who most challenged it...

...Though "Song of Myself has long since received proper recognition, "The Sleepers" has not profited equally from the relaxation of old taboos...

...but it has the distinction of having been distributed by Soviet troops to the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia in 1919...

...Passage to India") are not entirely successful, though in the figure of Columbus Whitman discovered a mask which could represent at once his vision of himself as the Spiritual Discoverer of America and the Neglected And Aging Great Man...

...My Captain!," for instance, is not only banal but banal in a way utterly untrue to Whitman...

...This alternation of joy and anxiety sets up poles around which his inner flux of ideas and associations take on objective forms...

...Indeed, in England neither "Song of Myself nor "The Sleepers," the two most ambitious poems of the first edition and the keys still to Whitman's total meaning, were not reprinted until the nineteenth century was almost gone...

...for instance, were originally two poems called respectively...

...the punctuation and ways of forming compounds altered...

...It has persisted in school anthologies because it suits the bureaucratic bad taste which submits to Whitman's reputation but yearns for the trite and sentimental...

...A professor at Montana State University, Fiedler is author of An End to innocence...

...Yet if one regards as the poet's most considerable achievements "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers" and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (with its pendant "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"), it becomes clear that his characteristic method is no more imagistic than it is rhetorical...

...The hat itself is doffed for the photographer, though the verse remains in which the poet boasts, "I wear my hat as I please indoors or out...

...Dreaming or reminiscing, the poet wavers between what he calls "vision" and "fit," an access of heightened awareness that at some moments elates, at other moments terrifies him...

...A great poet who is also a great technical pioneer is as offensive as any disturber of received ideas, as upsetting as Copernicus or Darwin, Nietzsche or Marx or Freud...

...Leaves of Grass is a single poem, which grew during the almost 40 years which Whitman devoted to it from a modest book of about 100 pages to a self-assured one of more than 450, The thin volume which appeared in 1855 (legend, truer than fact, says on the Fourth of July I included only 13 un-tided divisions...

...O Captain...

...Poem of the Poet," "Leaves of Grass, Number 3," then "List to My Morning's Romanza": and "Poem of the Singers, and of the Words of Poems...

...and in its finally modified form appears as "By Blue Ontario's Shore"—not, however, before a short existence under the more formidable name, "Poem of the Many in One...

...Yet these lines have been left out of the final version of "The Sleepers," along with the seven verses which precede them, in order presumably to conceal from the reader the poet's uneasy sexuality and the fact that loneliness and terror are as essential to him as gregariousness and euphoria...

...There is simply too much bulk, too much of it too soggy even for the undiscriminating appetite of the neophyte...

...The neglect of "The Sleepers" is only one instance of the damage done by such unplanned, lay anthologizing: but it is a typical one...

...It is hard to read the last revision of Leaves with a catch of the breath, a terrified and exhilarating sense that nothing less than the whole poetic tradition is at stake...

...Laps life-swelling yolks . . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky and just ripened: The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterwards...

...Theoretically, Whitman's work may be a single, unified poem: actually, it is sampled as if it were an anthology of self-sufficient shorter pieces...

...The Sleepers" is typical, too...

...unfortunately, most often his own unguided anthologist...

...Sometimes a line will be rewritten as the poet feels his way toward his essential music, as, for instance, the line "Out of the rocked cradle" becomes after 11 years "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking...

...represents his major attempt to make poetry of the theme: but though much admired in some quarters, it remains a forced and turgid effort, lapsing into the sort of unrecitable, faked language into which Whitman falls when he is being self-consciously religious: "copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain'd...

...IN THE MAIN, Whitman has managed to change the values of his earlier work not so much by revision or outright expurgation as by re-arrangement of context, so as to make the varied product of forty years seem consistent with the poet's last version of himself...

...The prose introduction to the first edition was translated into a poem...

...They were excluded, of course, because of the boldness of their erotic imagery, and more especially for their odd habit of describing spiritual crises in specific sexual terms...

...and surely his deepest aim was to transcend the image—to make a kind of poetry which was the equivalent of action, a very act of love...

...Neither as an American chauvinist or romantic internationalist, however, is Whitman worthy of his own talent...

...In the beginning, he confronts us as "one of the roughs," shag-bearded, open-collared, his hat cocked at an insolent angle: but the very phrase "one This is the first in a series of articles based on Leslie Fiedler's introduction to his selection from the work of Walt Whitman, which will be published this month under the title, Whitman, by the Dell Publishing Company in their paperback Laurel Poetry Series (General Editor: Richard Wilbur...

...O for pity's sake, no one must see me now...

...Even the Columbus poems ("Prayer of Columbus," "A Thought of Columbus...

...Surely few poetic scenes in Whitman are more precisely imagined or richly phrased than: The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking...

...His mode is reverie...

...Elementary honesty requires an editor to say that even if Leaves of Grass has a satisfactory over-all form, few ordinary readers survive to discover it...

...Only rarely are more extended passages of first excellence sacrificed out of fear of self-betrayal, but there are examples...

...The former, in its Bardic Americanism, represents a frequent strain in the later Whitman, but it is by no means his most effective...

...The advocate of nakedness as a way of confronting life did not choose finally to betray his nightmare-fear of being found naked...

...It is my aim to focus on neither Whitman the booster nor Whitman the preacher—not even on Whitman the imagist, except as all these sub-serve another Whitman yet to be defined...

...Much is accomplished along these lines simply by sloughing off certain poems in which Whitman betrays his initial private vision to his later public role as Prophet or Unofficial Laureate of America...

...The changes of title, however, represent only the smallest part of the metamorphoses of this strange book, which could not leave off growing and shifting shape as long as its author lived...

...My Captain...

...The same holds for such blatantly editorializing poems as "By Blue Ontario's Shore" and "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire...

...in another respect—an exceptional, but not altogether unparalleled example of the way in which Whitman's own cutting and revision could betray his original vision...

...and his selection more the product of his attention-span than of critical choice...

...and the reader can find latter-day examples of it in great plenty in the sound tracks of government-sponsored documentaries and the folders of Chambers of Commerce...