The First All-American Poet

By R.Z. Sheppard

WALT WHITMAN: A LIFE by Justin Kaplan; 429pages; Simon & Schuster; $15

When he was good he was very, very good, the words flowing freely as birdsong: "Solitary the thrush,/ The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,/ Sings by himself a song./ Song of the bleeding throat." When he was bad he was the bombastic wizard of "O," pouring forth jingo and transcendental eyewash: "O sacred Union!. . . O air and soil! . . . O universal Muse!" As Walt Whitman, creator of the athletic and homoerotic poetry in Leaves of Grass, he remains elusive, a national trompe l'oeil whose shape and solidity shift with biographical and critical focus.

Scholars seem to agree on one point: Whitman was the first all-American poet. He celebrated landscape and skyline, amplified idiomatic speech through an Old Testament ram's horn, ennobled manual labor, mourned the Civil War dead and provided stirring accompaniment to Manifest Destiny.

Whitman's emotions took him further than his countrymen cared to go. Like all romantic visionaries, he wanted civilization without its discontents; the children of Adam could frolic naked in the sands and build a nation too. Readers were shocked by the explicitness of such early poems as Song of Myself ("You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me"). Wrote one admirer from Boston: "It is believed that you are not ashamed of your reproductive organs."

Not on paper, at least. One of the ironies that Justin Kaplan approaches indirectly in his meditative analysis of Walt Whitman's life and art is that this American Dionysus constructed his own nation--Leaves of Grass--by channeling his sexuality into poetry. Instead of phallic towers there were tumescent words.

In The Solitary Singer (1955), Biographer Gay Wilson Allen read Whitman's odes to male camaraderie as "a vicarious substitute for physical experience." Kaplan adds that the poet recognized his homosexuality "at least as desire if not fulfillment." But he goes on to place Whitman in a broad cultural stream that runs from classical thought to the romanticism and radicalism of the 19th century. Putting himself momentarily in Walt's boots, Kaplan writes: "Why should the sexes be so manacled by custom and decree, by an irrational terror of gender confusion, that aggressiveness was reserved to the male and tenderness to the female? Androgyny, the beautiful integrating principle that had stirred poets and philosophers from Plato to Coleridge, seemed only natural and right to Whitman standing 'all alone,' 'myself,' 'solitary,' a self-contained classless society of one."

Whitman was by his own admission "furtive like an old hen," and he likened his poems to eggs laid in concealment. But once they hatched between hard covers, he knew how to sound the cockcrow of publicity. If his tone was frequently more holistic than thou, the reason was that he believed passionately in his power to relate all things. His own experience was wide. He grew up with the sun, sea and wildlife of Long Island and the muddy streets and busy docks of Brooklyn. Whitman the urbanite was a printer, newsp perman, editor, publisher, teacher, building contractor and real estate speculator. In 1840 this solitary singer even stumped for the election of Martin Van Buren.

He was a large man, some 6 ft. tall and 200 lbs., with "the wild-hawk look foreigners associated with Americans." He had great enthusiasm for Free Thinkers, the militant feminism of Margaret Fuller and George Sand, and such fads of his day as magnetism, sexology and phrenology. According to the bumps on his own head, Whitman had "a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others."

Whitman was that. He knew the works of like-minded European writers, such as Carlyle and Goethe, but as a free man in the New World he did not acknowledge their influence. Rather, he saw himself as "a master after my own kind," a phrase that suggests messianic paganism that led the poet to view his work as a gospel of natural religion. "I must have the love of all men and all women," he wrote. "If there is one left in any country who has no faith in me, I will travel to that country and go to that one."

Biographer Kaplan marks these travels not with a chronological posting of names and facts but with an imaginative and supplely written account that keeps bending back toward Leaves of Grass. This was the course of Whitman's own life. Youth and young manhood fed the first edition in 1855. The poem cycle became an organic reflection of its author as he journeyed through the. South, the Great Lakes, the Hudson Valley, to Washington, where he cared for the Civil War's wounded and dying, and finally to Camden, N.J., where he erected a roughhewn burial vault to house his bones and those of his family. In a sense Whitman's entire life was an act of ingathering and what Kaplan calls "a demonstration of the regenerative power of personality, change and language." The biographer himself is to be congratulated for renewing the poet and his Leaves of Grass in an age of AstroTurf.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Life in the wartime Federal City peaked to a 'mad, wild, hellish' intensity. Tides of office seekers, profiteers and promoters, voyeurs, zealots, do-gooders, quacks, religious enthusiasts, prostitutes, grieving wives and relatives, swindlers, scamperers from ruined reputations and sinking ships drove up the price of food and drink ('38 cts for beer,' Whitman noted with disbelief) and made accommodations scarce. More than New Orleans in the victorious rattle and vivacity of 1848, more than Manhattan, and despite the frightful suffering in its hospitals, Washington seemed to Whitman a city of romance of things beginning. He said he had been drawn there by 'a profound conviction of necessary, affinity.' "

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