Brutal Light by Lisyanet Rodriguez

I once had a conversation in Beijing with a group of Chinese poets who complained about the oppressive weight of writing in a 10,000-year-old literary tradition. They felt the Chinese tradition was hostile, given the great achievements of those 10,000 years, to innovation and new generations of poetry. They were envious of the friendlier, iconoclastic tradition of American poetry, always looking to future writers for innovation and a re-examination of the past. Specifically, we were talking about Emerson and Whitman, both of whom suggest that by rebelling against them future generations will extend their influence. That sense of a critical re-examination of the past, even under the steady influence of earlier writers, is readily apparent in Whitman. Deeply influenced by Emerson, Whitman radically modifies Emerson in many ways, for one by transforming a Christian dichotomy still found even in Emerson’s later essays. For Whitman, and never quite for Emerson, the self is no longer located exclusively in the soul/mind. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman proclaims, “the body IS the soul.” Once Whitman asserts the unification of the physical/spiritual in the sources of the Self, American poetry has truly entered a post-Christian phase more fully than in any of Emerson’s essays. In one sense, in American poetry, that changes everything.

Whitman extends Emerson’s poetic and deeply modifies it. Like Emerson, Whitman invites future readers to do the same in response to Leaves of Grass. As Whitman says in section 47 of “Song of Myself:”

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

[James E. Miller, ed. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 65.With one exception, all quotes from Whitman are from Miller’s text. Miller’s book includes the final 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass]

Elastic V by Lisyanet Rodriguez

That same idea, or at least a similar one, appears in a less confrontational way in Whitman’s late-life essay, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” which serves as introduction to the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass:

The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight. (Miller, 451)

One explanation for a spiritual optimism in Whitman less present in Emerson’s late essays is that the younger poet never accepts Emerson’s dichotomy between the world of matter (including the body) and consciousness (God and the human soul). As D.H. Lawrence recognizes in his Studies in Classic American Literature, a more traditional source of morality, so often addressed in nineteenth century American literature, changes in Whitman’s embrace of the body as the soul:

[Whitman] was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something “superior” and “above” the flesh.  Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome “superiority” of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it.  Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.

“There!” he said to the soul.  “Stay there!”

Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong. (D.H. Lawrence, 180).

For Emerson, as detailed first in “Nature,” the entire material world, including the human body, mirrors the embodiment of the divine found in human consciousness. But divine energies in consciousness are almost always, for Emerson, present in a dormant state. When consciousness is in a lower state of wake-sleep, as if people were so many automatons, mechanically walking about their daily business with little or no awareness of the mind-soul’s full potential, the Natural world serves as a catalyst to wake the sleepwalkers. God is always present in the Natural world, for Emerson, and can spark the human mind/soul into its wakeful, higher state. In a sense, when the human mind and the Natural world contemplate each other, it is (for Emerson) as if someone plugged in the dead ends of an electric circuit. No power there until that circuit is complete. But plug those ends in and a forcefield fires up, the divine hum of which pulses through all people and things.

Yet Emerson is, in some ways, more severe than a Calvinist, or simply is a latter-day Calvinist. For Emerson, the human mind-soul is almost never in its wakened state. Nature is a superior embodiment of the divine, relative to the human mind, in Emerson’s view of things, when the mind/soul is dormant. But plug the Natural world into the socket of the human mind and consciousness becomes a superior incarnation of the divine. In this hierarchical sort of thinking, the body is, like all other parts of Nature (in terms Emerson borrows from Kant), part of the “Not Me.” [See Chapter VII “Spirit” and introductory paragraphs in Emerson’s essay “Nature” and see the opening paragraphs of “The American Scholar.”]

Though Emerson’s thinking changes in his later essays, he never quite rids himself of this dichotomy. For Whitman, that divine forcefield is always active, always inclusive of all humanity and all Nature too, as humanity is, for Whitman, always fully in Nature. His more radical, monolithic belief that the body is the soul—a view bluntly expressed in “I Sing the Body Electric” —presents more fully a post-Christian conception of the Self. The body-soul exists, for Whitman, in one entity, both spiritually at home, both infused with one another in all states and times.

Whitman’s non-hierarchical celebration of mind-body as embodiments of one spiritual entity, celebrates all things, all people, all body parts and functions, as holy. 

As Donald Hall puts it, writing in 1967 in the Introduction to a Choice of Whitman’s Verse:

Many of Whitman’s admirers…consider that he chiefly concerns himself with the world he sees. They speak of his catalogues, his multiplication of things. Yet, the seen world hardly exists for him, because he spiritualizes everything. He is the ultimate poet of dream. When he sings of himself, he is removed from egotism precisely through inwardness; this self that he observes through imagination has become all selves; he is the multitude he called himself… Appearances in poetry are colours and shapes of spirit by which Whitman brings us to his Invisible World, which he insists is also ours if we will only discover it. [Hall, 7]

Yet even in this regard, Whitman insists on nothing. He gives free license to the reader. If he asks anything of the reader in terms of accepting or advancing an identity, a belief, a sexuality, a world view, a political or social view, it is only to draw the reader into a consideration of areas essential to human life and then, Whitman suggests, the reader fulfills Whitman’s legacy by insisting on the freedom to “pursue [their] own flight.”

***

It was with such a deference to the reader that I taught Walt Whitman to a group of undergraduates in Fall 2022. My challenge was to bring even the most skeptical student to Whitman’s 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass as it appears in James E. Miller Jr.’s Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman. Students also had regular assignments in our companion text—Ed Folsom’s and Kenneth M. Price’s Re-Scripting Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Blackwell Publishing, 2005). This was a 3000-level course, mainly for junior English majors, many of whom hoped to become high school teachers. I invited students to engage in a critical discussion of any aspect of Whitman’s poetry they found suspect. I shared with them my belief that if Whitman were able to join us, he would welcome their critiques. We started with Whitman’s insistence, in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” that he deferred to the future for an assessment of his life work:

I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time. [Miller, 444]

I also opened the portion of the semester on Whitman (second half of the course, first half on Dickinson) by sharing Whitman’s bombast, and by sharing his deep sense of humility. I recognized the many famous ways that Whitman self-promoted, among them by writing favorable, anonymous reviews of his own books. On their own, students picked up on the utter hubris of the poetry itself. At least a few of them found it annoying. “What I assume you shall assume.” Really? Why does he get to speak for us?  My twenty-first century students had much to say back to the Good, Gray Poet, especially at a time when racial, ethnic, and sexual sensitivities on college campuses were heightened in the wake of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements.

At least initially, and likely (for some students) through the entire semester, it was hard to understand how humility and bravura might co-exist in one poetic voice, much less in an actual life. Yet we found moments of that humility in “A Backward Glance:”

“I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of anything, or any results.” [Miller, 444]

So in Whitman’s self-assured bombastic yawp, sounded over the rooftops of the world, there is a radical humility, a deference to the reader, a deference to the common man, a deference to his own eventual decomposition, a deference to the “strongest and sweetest songs” that will surely be written by future writers, greater (Whitman claims in “A Backward Glance”) than the poems of Leaves of Grass. There is, in Whitman’s retrospective essay, at least a degree of skepticism toward the value of his literary worth:

[I]n respect to pictorial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in verbal melody and all the conventional technique of poetry, not only the divine works that to-day stand ahead in the world’s reading, but dozens more, transcend (some of them immeasurably transcend) all I have done, or could do. [Miller, 447]

That Whitman has fared extraordinarily well in the future’s estimation of his work is, of course, beyond argument. A partial list of world and American poets who owe at least something to the allegiance include: Nazim Hikmet, Apollinaire, Rilke, Szymborska, Neruda, Pavase, Martí, Darío, Borges, Vallejo, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Lawrence, and Duo Duo, among many other international poets, and Roethke, Hart Crane, Pound, Hughes, Stevens, Rukeyser, H.D., Williams, Toomer, Sandburg, Rich, Jordan, Olds, Pattiann Rogers, Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, Espada, Ruth Schwartz, Jeffers, Lorde, Glück, Ross Gay, Ginsberg, Hongo, Kinnell, and Stern, among many Americans. Hoping first to engage their skepticism, I waited until the end of the semester to share with my students Whitman’s powerful legacy among future generations of poets, preferring first to focus on the actual texts, though this proved to be more difficult than I initially imagined. Which texts? Which editions? We began with a poem that seemed specifically addressed to myself and to my students:

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” overtly celebrates the relationship of Whitman’s poetry to future generations. Whitman refers, in “Brooklyn Ferry,” to readers “Fifty years hence…A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence…” Whitman, the great “uniter of here and hereafter” (as he refers to himself in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”), Whitman the uniter of North, South, East and West (writing in the violent decade prior to the Civil War, with hopes to unify the country), Whitman the unifier of men and women, sexually and otherwise, Whitman the self-proclaimed uniter of races black, white, yellow, red and brown (more on this subject, shortly), has this to say to the future in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:”

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd… [Miller, 116]

Especially when I was living for four years in New York City, I felt Whitman’s ghost in the lower part of Manhattan, knowing that he was personally addressing me through cobble stones he once touched, and through the sunset as he describes it in “Brooklyn Ferry,” “the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water.” In that great poem, those beams form “in the sunlit water” a natural halo around the shadow of Whitman’s head. That he also refers to a corpse “struck from the float forever held in solution” in Section 5 of “Brooklyn Ferry” suggests that in Whitman’s halo there is both death and divinity. But if there is anything saint-like or spiritual about Whitman’s self-image in “Brooklyn Ferry,” it has nothing to do with moral or spiritual perfection:

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me… [Miller, 118]

Though Whitman never affirms, in this or other poems, belief in individual identity beyond the grave, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” nevertheless establishes a spiritual relationship between Whitman and future generations of Americans. In my use of the word spiritual, I intend anything that is so fully part of individual identity that one cannot define the Self without including that other person, place, thing or event. In that sense, as Whitman predicted in writing “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he is now in a spiritual relationship with readers of our own day. Though my most skeptical students begged to differ, among regular readers of contemporary poetry who can think of an American identity without including the Good, Gray Poet?

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman recognizes a secular sort of spirituality that unites him and his time with future generations of Americans. If there is a hereafter in this equation, it is anywhere in temporal space where a reader might imagine Whitman wandering around Old Fulton Street, or it is Fulton Street itself, where a reader might rub against things Whitman once touched. In Whitman’s self-proclaimed spiritual connection with future generations of Americans, the “dumb, beautiful ministers” addressed in the final stanza are inanimate objects. Tangible things fill the role of traditional ministers in serving as “middlemen” between living people and an invisible, communal, ever-present spiritual source. Material objects in the lower part of Manhattan become, in a sense, like the pocket watch I inherited from a grandfather who died before I was born: When I touch the thing he once daily touched, when I wind it so it will keep good time, I feel his inseparable presence and hold it tangibly in my palm.

Whitman defines in “Brooklyn Ferry” a connection to the future that does not ask anything of the reader in terms of belief or ideology—a sort of spirituality that might speak to BOTH a sacramental and a secular view of the natural world. Before contemporary America embraced, on college campuses anyway, the goal of inclusiveness, Whitman was already, in every aspect of his poetic vision, striving to become all-inclusive. We can see gestures toward inclusiveness in Whitman not only in religion or spirituality, but in politics, geography, sex, race, unavoidably in death, and likely many other subjects I am missing. We hear more of Whitman’s all-inclusive religious sensibility in section 48 of “Song of Myself”:

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death).

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. [Miller, 66]

At other moments in Whitman’s poetry, he again shows characteristic optimism (leavened by a hearty skepticism) when he appears to question his own assumptions. For example, in “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances,” a poem from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, Whitman questions an Emersonian sensibility (borrowed from St. Augustine) that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. That belief pervades Whitman’s poetry even as he sometimes doubts it. Even if the afterlife takes the modest form of grass flourishing from the graves of the dead, Whitman leans hard in the direction of a sacramental view of the Natural world. Yet in "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” he also considers the possibility that any claim for the presence of divine energies in Nature might turn out to be other than he imagined:

[M]ay-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they
     are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,) … [Miller, 88-89]

In a view of Nature in which there is or may be no sacramental presence, Whitman, eternal optimist, uniter of all things here and hereafter, uniter of the body and the soul, of all believers and unbelievers, is nonplussed:

When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround
    us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing
    further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me. [Miller, 89]

Temporal love, the nature of mammals to cling together for comfort, for nurture, to share bodily warmth, to share sustenance in terms of sex, food, and good feeling, is (or can be) alone enough to fulfill the narrator of this poem. Once again, all-inclusive Whitman speaks presciently to the twenty-first century, finding inherent meaning even in the possibility of a purely materialistic Natural world.

***

Whitman may be at his most characteristic sense of the self when he both believes and disbelieves in the possibility of a sacramental presence. Even if there is no resurrection in the reference to Christ in Whitman’s beautiful Civil War poem, “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” still a human corpse is “Dead and divine and brother of all.” [Miller, 219] And as Whitman famously says at the end of section 6 of “Song of Myself”:

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. [Miller, 29]

The eternal optimist in Whitman chooses not to define (except based on tangible evidence) a subject beyond human understanding—what happens when we die? Yet there is a continual presence of death—the mother of his song—in the voice of this nineteenth century cantor. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” Whitman hears a death-cry even in the cradle, and he hears the word death “incessantly moaning” in the “fierce old mother” of the sea. In a new awareness of that moan, Whitman says, “My own songs awaked from that hour.” Death is the key, “the word up from the waves,” “the word of the sweetest song and all songs,” even as it creates—especially because it creates—a “sweet hell within.” [Miller, 184] If death is the mother of beauty for Wallace Stevens, for Whitman death is the mother of song, and the eternal optimist in Whitman still affirms the experience of living in any form:

If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.
(Miller, 45)

A life-affirming sensibility runs through Whitman’s poetry whether or not a spiritual core at the heart of Nature corresponds to a spiritual core at the heart of humankind. This life-affirming sensibility continues to speak, in my sense of things, to future generations, especially in the twenty-first century. As a father, as a worried man living at a time when intergenerational continuity is challenged by any number of things—nuclear weapons, biological weapons, unending U.S. war in the modern era, climate change, greenhouse gasses, other forms of pollution caused in large part by the insatiable appetite of Americans to consume things—in a world where we live with an awareness that civilization could very possibly come to an end, sooner rather than later—for this one reader, Whitman’s celebration of life in any form comes as a source of spiritual sustenance.

It’s as if Whitman says to the reader, it is enough to be alive, it is enough to breathe air, it is enough to say that life has inherent meaning, come what may. Or, to use Whitman’s own words from “A Backward Glance,” one essential quality Whitman offers the troubled new generation is “good heart as a radical possession and habit.” Faith might fail you, but good heart as a radical possession and habit can get you through the day. Yet, as Whitman reminds us at the end of Section 32 of “Song of Myself,” he is not a quahog in its shell. In Section 32, he admires animals (in part because they do not make him “sick discussing their duty to God”) and he claims also to “out-gallop” a stallion. Then in section 33 Whitman celebrates an inwardness that is, possibly, unique to humankind in its ability to soar over vast realms of time and space.

Through thought and memory, through reflection, through consciousness, call it what you will, in section 33 of “Song of Myself” Whitman’s narrator—humanity as a whole—form common identities, attachments, continuities, communal relationships, based on shared understandings passed through generations, based on shared experience. Through these relations, all humankind has within the innate ability to arrive at a sense of connectivity to things and people from past, present and future times. While his deepest inclination keeps pace with Emerson’s sense of divine energies located at every point of the Natural world, he declines to be defined by dogmatic belief. As he says in “A Backward Glance,”

While I cannot understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through Time. [Miller, 453]

Like Melville and Dickinson, but with a larger dose of optimism, Whitman believes and disbelieves, depending on the given moment, and like them, in any given moment, sometimes he simultaneously believes and disbelieves:

“I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths…” [Miller, 60]

Whitman goes on, in section 43 of “Song of Myself,” to include Hindus, Muslims, and Christians in his divine embrace. Earlier, in section 41, he includes Buddha. He represents in that messianic chant people who might reject those religious sensibilities too. In one sense, a basic impulse in Whitman’s life work is to track a sacramental presence he intuits in the material world. Yet, as Whitman makes clear in “A Backward Glance,” another basic impulse is to celebrate also perspectives that skew against his more characteristic inclinations:

I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance (“to justify the ways of God to man” is Milton’s well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones; to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. [Miller, 453, my italics]

The spiritual connection Whitman sends out of himself to his readers, like a filament from his noiseless, patient spider, suggests but requires no belief in God, no certain belief in divine energies woven everywhere into the human and natural worlds.

***

Yet if Whitman claims for Leaves of Grass “some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance… which is the foundation of moral America,” many of my students found him morally lacking. In class discussion we pursued their concerns as open-ended questions, admiring the rhetorical power and sweep of his vision and bringing some skepticism to the poems too. Whitman’s radical, post-Christian sensibility that so distinguishes him from Emerson—that the body IS the soul—was an easier idea to digest for my 20 undergraduates than many of the other all-inclusive gestures Whitman repeatedly offers in Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s hope that his poetic yawp might unite all races, all ethnicities, all genders, all sexualities into a New American hymn, with Leaves of Grass its fundamental Bible, met with greater incredulity. And though I didn’t say so out loud during class discussion, his new American faith suggests also a communal sacrament—the “treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding” (as Whitman says in section 28 of “Song of Myself”), melting on the tongue and elsewhere in the body the new embodiment of something holy:

…[I]t has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature. I am not going to argue the question by itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it is altogether in its relations, bearings, significance—like the clef of a symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to, and the spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all ‘Leaves of Grass,’ and the work must stand or fall with them, as the human body and soul must remain as an entirety. [Miller, 452]

For Whitman, sex pulses in all people everywhere, in all places and times, in all parts of Nature, and offers yet another way that “Song of Myself” might “speak for you.” In Whitman’s beautiful musical metaphor, sex is the clef, the foundation through which the aria of a life is sung. As Whitman says in Section 3 of “Song of Myself,” “urge and urge and urge,/always the procreant urge of the world.”

But possibly Whitman would not be surprised by the complaint of some undergraduate women who felt that he fails to represent female sexuality in a meaningful way. In terms of Whitman’s treatment of sex, many of my students didn’t think that Leaves of Grass could speak for them. How well did Whitman portray female sexual desire, for example, in Section 11 of “Song of Myself”? The female figure in that section watches from her window 28 naked men on the beach and is, some students complained, simply a stand-in for Whitman’s same-sex, male sexual desire. The 28 naked men are unaware that the voyeuristic woman is the 29th bather. In this phallocentric section of Whitman’s great poem, the sea and each of the 28 young men “souse [her] with spray.”

Ningio III by Lisyanet Rodriguez

Then we discussed “A Woman Waits for Me,” a poem as controversial in the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first, but for different reasons. As Folsom/Price point out, in his time Whitman’s poems of same-sex male love “did not cause as much sensation because, even though they portrayed same-sex affection, they were only mildly sensual, evoking handholding, hugging, and kissing, while ‘The Children of Adam’ poems [where lovers are female] evoked a more explicit genital sexuality.” [Folsom/Price, 73]

My students complained that “A Woman Waits for Me” addresses (at least rhetorically) an individual woman in the title and opening line and then, throughout the rest of the poem, the rhetorical stance is entirely generic—an address to all women:

It is I, you women, I make my way,
I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I press with slow rude
     muscle… [Miller, 77]

I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you?! To extend the conversation further, I asked the class how often we found in Whitman convincing portraits of individual women, in or outside the sexual moment. We questioned also whether lovers in Whitman’s poems are always, or most often, present in a generic sort of way. Were the male lovers in the Calamus poems more fully (in effect) living/breathing individuals, with lives and aspirations wholly their own, apart from Whitman’s imagined use of them? Were portraits of Whitman’s male loves (or “comrades,” as he often calls them) rendered in a more distinct, individuated way than, say, the bride in Section 33 of “Song of Myself,” who spends her wedding night with the multitudinous protagonist of America’s greatest poem, only after he bombastically throws the bridegroom out of the house?

I am a free companion. I bivouac by invading watchfires,
I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

We wondered whether the lovers in Whitman’s poems, male and female, often seem to be abstractions, typecasts rather than (in effect) real flesh and blood, fire-breathing humans. Had I been able to draw up Whitman’s ghost from the lower float of Manhattan, he might have conceded the point to the women who complained of ineffectual attempts to speak for female sexual experience. Some students were quick to cite a passage from the Folsom/Price biography in which the youthful Whitman says that he knew “nothing about women from either ‘experience or observation.’” (Folsom/Price, 9).

Not for these poems only, in a class made up almost entirely of women, my students grew increasingly skeptical as we continued to discuss Whitman’s all-encompassing claim, “What I assume you shall assume.” What about Whitman’s portrayal of his mother, in Section 6 of “The Sleepers,” I asked? Do we find there a more convincing moment of individual female portraiture? One student replied that, to the extent writers need to love someone to write about them well, it seemed stereotypical of a gay man that, among all women in the world, it was only his mother he could sketch in loving detail. My challenge, as the semester continued, was to bring my students nevertheless to a careful consideration of Whitman’s poems.

To extend the conversation further, I wondered whether Whitman might be at his all-inclusive best when he skips or undercuts the use of gender-specific pronouns and brings a high degree of gender fluidity to the sexual moment. We considered Section 28 of “Song of Myself’ and Section 1 of “The Sleepers.”

Section 28 of “Song of Myself” begins with the question, “Is this then a touch?” The entire section is devoted to physical sensation and follows earlier sections in “Song of Myself” that address specific sensory acts or perceptions. Section 26, for example, is devoted to listening, section 25 largely to the act of speaking. That the lover, or lovers, in Section 28 are never directly identified by gender creates another instance of inclusion in Whitman, in which all people, all sexualities, are drawn into the commonality of human experience:

My flesh and blood playing out lightening to strike what is hardly different from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away…

Section 28 culminates in one of the most powerful moments of human touch—an orgasm:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

Once the sexual “floodgates” have opened, once the sexual release has passed, Whitman writes in section 29:

Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. [Miller, 45-46]

Possibly the use of “fellow senses,” “rich showering rain,” “floodgates,” and the phrase “what is hardly different from myself,” point in the direction of male, same-sex love. Yet that Whitman also dodges gender-specific pronouns suggests that for all people, in Whitman’s vision, regardless of gender, the physical, wrestling, loving moment of orgasm is an experience that extends a “perpetual loan” and “perpetual payment” in return. The “recompense,” Whitman says, is even more powerful in the moment after. Though I may have talked my way around these lines carefully in class, and though Whitman, in a typical way, fetishizes people of color in this passage (the unfortunate metaphor of the lover as a “red marauder”), this may be one of the more beautiful descriptions of a loving sexual climax in American literature.

The end of Section 1 of “The Sleepers” presents yet another moment in which Whitman celebrates sexual climax in the context of gender fluidity. “The Sleepers” is a strange, semi-surreal poem in which the commonality of human experience is found in an activity shared by all humanity—sleeping and the subconscious state of dreams. Here are the opening lines:

I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,
Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping. [Miller, 297]

Whitman emphasizes sexual energies throughout much of the poem’s first section, as he visits and hovers over different kinds of sleepers, including “the sick-gray faces of onanists.” In the semi-surreal state of this poem, Whitman’s speaker goes from “bedside to bedside” and sleeps “close with the other sleepers each in turn.” The narrator not only enters the subconsciousness of all other sleepers, he also enters their dreams, dreams their dreams, and becomes the other dreamers:

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.

In a moment paralleling Tiresias’s gender fluidity, Whitman’s speaker is, at times, both male and female and has intercourse with various people and things:

I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly,
My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

Double yourself and receive me darkness,
Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.

In the amorphous, subconscious fluidity of this sleep-and-dream state, Darkness takes the place of the male lover and penetrates the female speaker:

He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
He rises with me silently from the bed.

Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.

Be careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me?
I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,
I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

By the time the poem arrives at the close of Section 1, the reader is a half-page removed from the pronoun that last identified the speaker as female. The effect is that Whitman’s speaker, most often a male voice in this poem, seems to be penetrated first by another man and then by Darkness. And that this is a coital and then a post-coital moment is made clear by the line that immediately follows, in the opening of section 2:

I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid… [Miller, 298-299]

The closing of Section 1 of “The Sleepers,” as Whitman ends it in the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves, seems to me one of the more erotic, same-gendered portrayals of male sex in Whitman’s poetry, far more so, in my opinion, than the sexually cautious language in the Calamus sequence. Yet it is a moment that morphs also into heterosexual intercourse in a speaker who segues from male to female then back to male again. Yet again, as in section 28 of “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s erotic, barbaric yawp opens to multiple forms of sex and sexualities. In this sense, section 28 of “Song of Myself” and Section 1 of “The Sleepers” speak to Whitman’s deepest impulse—to bring disparate aspects of humanity together into one loving, erotic embrace.

***

Yet there is still another aspect to “The Sleepers” I failed to address adequately in class. The original published version of the poem includes six stanzas that were excised from last editions of Leaves of Grass, a reality I skipped over in my lifelong habit to read in, and to teach from, the final 1891-1892 edition. In three of those missing stanzas, Whitman speaks in the voice of an enslaved black man. In the less turbulent version of “The Sleepers” that my students encountered (minus those excised stanzas), Whitman’s all-inclusive gesture to people of all nations and colors drew a troubled response from my tenacious undergraduates:

The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and American are hand in hand,
Learn’d and unlearn’d are hand in hand, and male and female are hand in hand… [Section 8 of “The Sleepers,” Miller, 302]

In a class comprised almost entirely of white women, I asked especially my more skeptical students if the above lines seemed to them a shallow, feel-good, Kumbaya moment, and they said yeah. And what they meant was hell yeah! Discussion deepened as we encountered the shock felt by Whitman’s abolitionist friends when he failed to support the 15th amendment in the years following the Civil War, as detailed in our Folsom/Price biography. [Folsom/Price, 101-104] Much as I tried to avoid too fully disclosing my identity as a Whitman devotee, I found myself sharing what I knew of Whitman’s appreciation by American writers of color—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, other writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Whitman also appears in Invisible Man through references to Club Calamus, and he is invoked with more resonance in the closing sentence of Ellison’s Great American Novel: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”

Had I done my homework well, in class discussion I might have directly quoted Langston Hughes’  “Like Whitman, Great Artists Are Not Always Good People,” a newspaper article in which Hughes argues in favor of Leaves of Grass “as a very great book, and one which Negroes, or anyone else, for that matter, should read and remember.” If Whitman contradicts his own ideals, Hughes says it is “the best of him that we choose to keep and cherish, not the worst.” [as quoted in Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, page 2]

In class, we considered why Whitman might be received warmly by writers other than American white males, despite moments when racial stock characters appear in the poems. Possibly Whitman was embraced by Hughes and Toomer and others because he wrote of America from a position far from the seats of wealth, education and power, and opened the door for others who might do the same? Possibly he was appreciated for recognizing, and attempting to portray, a wide range of racial and ethnic groups in his vision of America. (“I resist anything better than my own diversity,” he says in Section 16 of “Song of Myself.”).

After the semester was over, in reading Ivy G. Wilson’s Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, I first became aware that the original version of “The Sleepers” includes lines that were cut from the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass. In the three missing stanzas that originally appear at the end of Section 6 of “The Sleepers,” an enslaved black man abruptly speaks following Whitman’s portrayal of his mother. The dropped lines are among the most famous of Whitman’s literary out-takes:

Now Lucifer was not dead…. or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir;
I have been wronged…. I am oppressed…. I hate him that oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn him! how he does defile me,
How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for their blood,
How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat that carries away
    my woman.

Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk… it seems mine,
Warily, sportsman! Though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is death.
[Whitman Archives, U.S. Editions of Leaves of Grass]

This passage adds at least a momentary recognition of racial outrage, racial turbulence, and roughs up the idyllic, bed-fellow harmony of what my students felt to be a sentimental, rainbow-coalition moment in Section 8. As Matt Sandler says in Whitman Noir, in the essay “Kindred Darkness: Whitman in New Orleans”:

Whitman’s decision to excise the slave character from “The Sleepers” represents a loss to American poetry that extends beyond the circumstances of the poem itself. The choice to delete the character meant sacrificing a personal protest against slavery that contrasts with the reasoned objectivity of his ironic embodiment of the slave auctioneer [in “I Sing the Body Electric”]. The poetry he has influenced, by African Americans and everybody else, could certainly have used the elaboration of this fiery voicing. How would Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, for starters, have responded to the inclusion of these lines? [Wilson, 76]

The plot thickened as I continued to read in Whitman Noir. As Ivy Wilson puts it is in his introduction to the collection:

…[Whitman Noir] begins with Ed Folsom’s essay, “Erasing Race: The Lost Black Presence in Whitman’s Manuscripts.” Folsom focuses on the “ghost black” in Whitman ’s writings—the ethereal presence of blacks who are more often found in his manuscripts than his published work—to illustrate a more nuanced understanding of what now appears to be Whitman’s sustained thinking about blacks. Folsom concludes by suggesting that perhaps Whitman was imagining “a stunning new vision of a racially healed nation” but has to leave un-answered the neoconservative politics of such a vision premised and underwritten by the very exclusion of African Americans. [Wilson, xiv]

In Ed Folsom’s contribution to Whitman Noir, he discusses many key passages from Whitman’s original drafts that were spoken by a narrator who transitions fluidly from voices of black characters to voices of white characters, and to voices and positionalities in between. But only the Lucifer stanzas survive in the 1855 edition as a moment in which Whitman’s narrator not only comments about black Americans but speaks directly as a black American. Other lines originally cast in Whitman’s manuscripts in the voice of black speakers appear in the 1855 edition of Leaves without any indication of their initial racial context.

In “Erasing Race,” Folsom praises especially the scholar Martin Klammer for his “ground-breaking” scholarship, Whitman, Slavery and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass. Klammer’s book details the influence of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in sparking Whitman’s poetic celebration of a common humanity. Even minus many manuscript passages excised from the first edition of Leaves, Klammer argues that the 1855 edition represents “Whitman’s radical notion that the slave’s experience is at the heart of American identity.” [Klammer, 141] Or, as Klammer puts it even more forcefully, even while noting elsewhere Whitman’s occasional tendency to slip into racial stereotypes:

The representation of African Americans in Leaves of Grass is unlike anything Whitman—or anyone, for that matter—had ever written. Published in 1855 in the wake of public ferment over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the [fugitive slave] Anthony Burns case, Leaves of Grass portrays African Americans as equal partners with whites in a democratic future as beautiful and dignified people, the paradigms of a fully realized humanity. [Klammer, 115]

If Whitman expunges from the 1855 edition many black “voices” that appear in early drafts, after the Civil War he excises from later editions more lines involving black Americans, among them (eventually) the Lucifer stanzas quoted above. Following the Civil War, as Klammer also details, Whitman adds to subsequent editions of Leaves many new poems that offer (with few exceptions) little or nothing of black America, further diminishing (relative to the 1855 edition) a multi-racial emphasis in Whitman’s published work. As Folsom’s essay has it:

… disillusionment with postwar America became so intense, [Whitman’s] fear of black equality eventually trumping his hopes for a transformed nation, that his later writing suffers from a kind of stunted growth, a truncated sense of how America could learn to cope with, build on, and build with its tortured racial past…. As his vision of a multiracial society dimmed, his decisions about what to print and reprint and what to silently erase have, over time, occluded our ability to see the brief flowering of Whitman’s multiracial hopes. [Wilson, 24]

Truth be told, with a heavy teaching load, and with my writerly bias to privilege primary texts over secondary source material, we never arrived in my class at a comparative discussion of Whitman’s many editions of Leaves of Grass, much less at a discussion of his early unpublished drafts, with the out-takes from those first manuscripts much more fully inclusive of an African American presence. Ivy G. Wilson’s Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, and Martin Klammer’s Whitman, Slavery and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass, would have led us to a more useful discussion.

If my students didn’t need secondary source material to pick up on moments of racial typecasting and fetishizing in the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, still they would have benefitted from exposure to a wider range of views on Whitman and race. In class we discussed especially “I Sing the Body Electric.” My students cringed when Whitman’s speaker offers to assist the auctioneer in the sale of a naked black American man and a naked black American woman. This one Whitman devotee cringed with them. Though Whitman might be praised for bringing the reality of the slave auction into American letters, his narrator’s offer to help the auctioneer is a deaf moment, despite any intended irony. Whitman claims the auction caller does not know his business well. Only the speaker of Whitman’s poem fully realizes the value of a body and can define for potential buyers the immensity of what was being bought and sold:

A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. [Miller, 74]

Though it was sad to learn more fully of Whitman’s post-Civil War period in my post-semester reading, even with this new knowledge I believe I would have ended the semester in the same way. On the last day of class, fearful that some students might throw the baby out with the bath water, I drew on the board “For Him” and “Against Him” columns. I asked the class to help me fill in the blanks. In the “For Him” column we listed Whitman’s greatest poems, among them “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,” “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” We listed the saint-like impulse in a man who would visit—unpaid—an astounding 100,000 wounded soldiers, black and white, during the Civil War to comfort and offer small services in ways that earned him the deep respect of some doctors, one of whom had Whitman’s portrait hung on the hospital wall. [Folsom/Price, 85]

We listed Whitman’s willingness to throw care to the wind at age 43 by offering his services as a nurse to the Northern army for the duration of the Civil War. I could hardly imagine, even in my earlier, younger years, forgetting about career advancement, forgetting about my 401k, and living as fully in a crucial moment. We listed Whitman’s committed opposition to slavery prior to the Civil War, his willingness to damage his own personal welfare in support of that view. For his opposition to slavery, in 1848 he was fired as editor of The Brooklyn Eagle. (Folsom/Price, 12] We listed Whitman’s celebration of sex as a universal force that brings disparate people together in a loving, blood-bond, with or without resulting children. We listed Whitman’s ability to articulate a spirituality that might include both sacramental and non-sacramental visions of Nature and the human world. We listed Whitman’s “brave early expressions of gay identity,” after which “it became possible to express love through acts that before had been cast outside love’s reach.” [Folsom/Price, 64 & 73]

In the “Against Him” column we noted his failure to support black male suffrage in the form of the 15th amendment, his inability to portray female sexuality in a convincing way, his inability ever to imagine same-gendered female sex, his typecasting of people of color, his sexual fetishizing of people of color. I didn’t know, at that time, the extent of Whitman’s erasure of earlier lines that referred to, or were spoken by, black Americans, or the extent that black America failed to engage his poetic imagination in the years following the Civil War, decreasing with each new edition of Leaves of Grass the black presence in Whitman’s work as a whole. I asked the class what Whitman might say if we could bring him physically into the room to answer for any lapses or transgressions. When no one answered, I wrote on the board: “Vivas to those who have failed!”  I was quoting Section 18 of “Song of Myself.”

Vivas to those who have “periled their lives,” as Whitman says in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass. It is no small thing to try to speak for all humanity, but that’s what great poets do. Vivas to those who embrace the integrity of every person in their vision and in the quicksand of their actual lives, even as they fall short of that elusive dream, even as they may take conscious steps to contradict their deeper inclinations. Maybe as a flawed creature Whitman becomes more fully human for those who do not look to literature for human perfection? I suggested to my class, Vivas to those who have ventured greatly! Maybe in literature it is always in imperfection that we see more clearly the fullness of a life? I also quoted something I once heard Obama say—that, except in stray moments when children are sitting well-fed around the table, people generally fail at whatever they set out to achieve in life. With some thought to how I might have handled the semester differently, with a nod to Martín Espada, who once wrote a book of poems by this title, with a wide range of American poets, with poets all over the world, maybe with all humanity, I said to the class at semester’s end, Vivas to those who have failed!

Stephen Haven’s fourth book of poems, The Flight from Meaning, is forthcoming from Slant Books in 2025. His earlier collections are The Last Sacred Place in North America, Dust and Bread, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. More details at www.stephenhaven.com *** Lisyanet Rodriguez was born and raised in 1987, Cuba, and currently lives in Miami. Among other places, she has been a fellow at the Djerassi Foundation, Isolo 17 Gallery, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries, and, among other venues, she has shown solo exhibitions of her work at Florida, Atlanta, Italy. More details on her website, www.lisyanetrodriguez.com

***

TEXTS CITED

Emerson, Ralph. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, See Chapter VII “Spirit” and introductory paragraphs in Emerson’s essay “Nature” and see the opening paragraphs of “The American Scholar.”

Espada, Martín. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (Norton, 2017)

Folsom, Ed, & Kenneth M. Price. Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Hall, Donald ed. A Choice of Whitman’s Verse. (Faber & Faber, 1968).

Klammer, Martin. Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).  First published in America by Thomas Seltzer, Inc., in 1923.

Miller, James E. Jr., ed. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman (Houghton Mifflin, 1959). Except for expunged lines from “The Sleepers,” quotes from Whitman’s poetry and prose in this essay are from the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. 

Whitman, Walt. U.S. Editions of Leaves of Grass (1855). Lines from “The Sleepers” expunged from the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass are quoted from this source.

Wilson, Ivy G., ed. Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good, Gray Poet (University of Iowa Press, 2014)