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There are those in life who cast their nets far and wide, and when they succeed they make a catch of the world in all its scope and grandeur. There are others who cast their nets deep, who make for the mysteries. In the case of the American poet Walt Whitman, who casts his nets both wide as well as deep, a myth has evolved: one day lightning strikes, and like a man who dies and is reborn, he awakens to focus, depth, clarity, time, simplicity, hope, faith, and love. He has no choice but to write poems. So he lets down his nets and hauls up from the deeps his life's opus, a song so strong that it's as if he has to stand back and simply bear witness to the renewal, through language, of his experience that touches on the unspoken mysteries.
The poet-speaker early on in "Song of Myself" declares he is ready to satisfy both sides of the coin of human exchange--the giving of love, and the receiving of it. In poetic terms what he's after, of course, is freshly imagined, newly experienced images that resonate in both worlds--the conscious and the unconscious--images that may forge new links between the two realms, that can cross the threshold and allow traffic to flow smoothly between them. As Whitman's poems make clear, in human terms trade may involve a form of exchange, but it's not about the money, it's about the exchange. The conscious mind of the poet sets up shop, as it were, and solicits business from the unconscious mind, and the poem acts as mediator serving to expedite and smooth the flow. Then, by means of negotiation, the poet mines the depths for its potential gold. From the poet's standpoint, doing business is never an end in itself. Rather, the aim involves letting the material from the unconscious be refashioned into a product of new value, for its own sake, the fruits of which all of society may enjoy
As a stronghold, an individualized personality appearing on the stage suddenly larger than life, Whitman's poet-speaker speaks for an America to which anyone in fact may belong, a spiritual America, a state of being where one is open to experience, open to pain and suffering, open to hunger, open to joy, open to longing and fulfillment. Where one is out in the open air, under open skies, taking an open stance, in an open atmosphere, playing with an open hand, "both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it." 3 Where each moment is seed opening and dissolving in the ground... where every moment, if followed all the way to its end in depth, leads to an open house whose open door beckons... And through the open door of the open house, one enters to where there is an open grave. And in the open grave lies an open casket. And there, lying in the open casket, is an open heart, beating and fully alive, like a budding flower, its petals opening, blossoming, as if in one's open arms.
Reading Whitman's poems is like riding a horse bareback, with no saddle between you and the horse; or it's like walking barefoot, feeling the earth directly between your toes; reading Whitman, in other words, is like reading the world bareminded--directly, without intermediaries, without bias of canonical tradition or through the screens of ideologies or moral agendas. One feels as if one is standing at the threshold of the creative flux of life, emptied yet filled with oneself too, as if standing to one side and watching the self interact and become one with all manner of otherness.
But Whitman has too much respect for reality, and too much love for the reader, to allow for our being swept along aimlessly in the flux; instead, through his omnivorous catalogues he offers footholds, myriads of footholds that ground the reader in the everyday and the common. He shows us how he sees the world. Look: now this, and this, and this. We are given a path to seeing not only what he sees but also the way in which he sees it--off the cuff, on the wing, yet deeply, wisely, his capacity for amazement not to be underestimated. In his poems he declares: "Plentitude is already here; I pledge it and bear it witness." And, as it turns out, he proves equal to the task, honoring his pledge in a performance that becomes a lifelong undertaking, profound in its ramifications, in which the plenipotentiary of the individual self, of one invested with full powers to transact business between the conscious and unconscious realms, is celebrated. The business of poem-making is underway. He brings to every poem a state of inner self-sufficency and completeness that creates a blue-print of hard-won consciousness for readers or 'poets to come' to be inspired by and inspirited with。
This is a poet transparently in the throes of meaning-making, stretching the boundaries of meaning, showing us the possibilities, pointing us in new directions. The meaning we make, Whitman would remind us, is the means we have for becoming, as human beings, what and who we are meant to be. As such, meanings we create out of our own experience, arrived at privately, in inner dialogue with the world, express the ultimate human liberty.
There are times, especially in the "Calamus"poems, where Whitman raises the stakes, taking readers into the very heart of his sensibility--visceral, pulpy, vulnerable, meaty. We see Whitman pushed to the breaking point, like a wounded lion, swallowing his pain manfully. His envy of a normal couple's pleasures is evident:
His shame at his own sexual yearnings is evident:
These are the poisons--envy and shame--that would threaten to devour and consume him were it not for his struggle and willingness to bring them into expression. As Rumi said, Suffering is fit work for the poet. He lets the pain sink in; he sinks into the pain. He won't let the shame and envy and anger blind him to the larger realities of life. He lets go of them, and moves on. Yet at the same time he never quite fully lets go, for these are the demons that give rise to the poems. He lets himself feel their poison a little, so as not to be completely consumed by them. He is not trying to transcend suffering but move further down towards its roots in love, exploring the insecruity and pain, trying not to push it away, discovering how to keep on when things do fall apart. For as psychologist James Hillman has written: "Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings." 11
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney has said that "The whole artistic enterprise is a kind of holding action, it's a little bridgehead for the spirit." 13 This recalls Robert Frost's famous notion of the poem as a "momentary stay against confusion." For Walt Whitman, however, the artistic enterprise is much more than an achievement of momentary rest, a peaceable respite for the weary, battle-worn spirit. Indeed the poem is, above all, a crossroads, a critical juncture, a threshold where initiation into imaginative life can take place. It is where ritual communion happens between poet and reader, an imaginative structure which both reader and writer create to honor the boundaries, the thresholds, of human experience. And the primal threshold, Whitman would remind us, is the body:
The ecstatic fit, the standing outside or apart from oneself, as the Greek root defines it, subjects the poet to influences and upheavals, to an alchemy of transfiguration which puts him at risk of going under and not returning, of losing himself for good. This dissolution of personality by contact with otherness --"desirable yet dangerous," 15 as poet Czeslaw Milosz says-- is a sort of crisis that, at best, awakens creativity. Thus, for the poet the crisis fits; the fit of madness, the fit of ecstasy, the threat of dissolution, is fitting. To open your heart, as Socrates said, is to become mid-wife to Spirit.
The presence of otherness in the poet acts to build up in him a certain pressure. The pressure, as it flows in one direction only, would soon be felt as pain, as crisis. But if the pressure were allowed to flow in opposite directions, simultaneously--as in holding oneself in contradiction--that pressure soon begins to be felt as pleasure, as balance. Rather than attempt to cut oneself off from the perceived source of pain, in other words, one submits to it, and in this surrender a powerful new flow begins, a movement toward joy. The poet, in other words, surrenders to those very forces that would threaten to overwhelm and dissolve him, and searches for the most fitting words to contain or hold those forces. The poems, then, are a kind of holding action, a container for energy that seeks release, or expression, in order to achieve equilibrium and restore balance within the poet.
The fit to which the poet is subject, then, somehow fits. The ongoing crisis equips the poet with a "new tongue." The contact with otherness brings the poet-speaker naturally into the flow of exchange, what Henry Miller called the "unlimited circulation," or the traffic between self and other that is mediated now by the body, now by language. In Whitman's view the poet is the "best fitter," one who searches for the most fitting word to be spoken and in the process insures mental and physical fitness. For only by possession is there expression. At the threshold of sickness and health the poet sings, bringing into harmony what hitherto had been disease and disorder. The other side of sickness is health, says Whitman.
The imaginative faculty which allows our inner voices free play in the realm of creative labor offers the artist in us more than a means of survival, it offers a means to holding a vision of a future we cannot literally see but know is awaiting us. The practice of any craft, but especially that of poetry, is bound to have an effect felt outside the realm in which it is practiced, for the shaping and making faculty spills over into everyday life where new demands are placed on us, new challenges rise to meet us. As poet Stanley Kunitz says,
It is at this threshold between art and life that Walt Whitman the poet stands, offering, for those who would hear the call, an outstretched, welcoming hand.
For if one is to 'get at' the meaning of the poems one must, as it were, cross over to the 'other side.' It is, after all, that place from which Whitman's poet-speaker addresses the reader and to which the reader must go in order to feel his presence and hear what he truly has to say. In short, it involves being in a profound state of love. And one has never been in love like this before.
Whitman takes the shared experience, the mutuality of reader and writer, to a new level, exploring the intimacy, even in bodily aspect, that the meeting of minds implies. Walt Whitman's poetic presence--provisional, promiscuous and haunting--seems to ask of the reader: With whom can you be more yourself than with me? With whom can you more fearlessly live your soul than with me? Whom can you arrive at and depart from more naturally, more freely, more faithfully, than me? And from whom after a visit can you depart more nourished, more balanced, more freshened, more centered in the ground of your own being than with me? For just as I am one man, I would also be a fact of nature, and you, rested and enlivened and buoyed by my presence, receive the best from me, that serves to remind you that all that you are is faultless. For at the deepest levels the encounter with Otherness is a kind of near-death experience. And when Whitman says,
it's as if at this threshold where together we stand, we, poet and reader, are both shareholders in the eternal. Little by little the call heard coming to us from the other world becomes, by a mysterious turning inside out, the source of sustained dialogue between eternity and the here-and-now in this world. This call of otherness, this stirring of the soul originating beyond words yet recognizable in us all, forms itself into questions that the child asks, such as: What is the last number? or, Who is the first mother? or, Why do people think? Early on in "Song of Myself" the poet-speaker poses the child-like question, "What is the grass?" and the answers that ensue show no need of definitive response, the poetic impulse itself seeking not closure but depth. Our response to the call, in other words, comes not in the form of answers per se but in the questions themselves, the asking of which are vital for the creation of fresh meanings by which we may deepen our relation to the world.
Life or death, who knows which side Whitman was on? The soul's presence can abduct us, hold us hostage, the way the past can come to exert a hold over the present, or the way an encounter with beauty can exert a hold over our imaginations, or the way the afterlife can come to exert a hold over this life. Likewise, the presence of Walt Whitman's poet-speaker, to borrow from the German poet Rilke,
But he would not sanction his having a hold upon our imaginations beyond what is sufficent for our use. He would not have us slavishly beholden to him. Rather, his hold upon our imagination would be but a foothold, lest his power or force or influence hold sway over us. He offers himself as a guide for the duration only, no more, no less. Such a teacher accompanies us, brings us to the threshold, and says farewell. The time comes, we say our goodbyes, we move on, grateful for the guidance, for having been brought to a newer, a larger conception of reality, for lending us the courage and the faith and the wisdom to enter, as it were, a greater part of ourselves--the household of the divine Self where beholden to no one, one withholds not oneself, but instead gives of oneself unstintingly, utterly, to the world one loves, as one's joy.
Whitman's poet-speaker declares. But the truth is, we bottle up our joy and then bury it. When we do manage to recover it, for most of us it is like the bottle with an evil genie inside, demanding from us our very lives. The genie is in his bottled prison because of the threat he poses, because he is dangerous, because civilized life as we know it can hardly survive such freedom. We sense true joy is so powerful that we resign ourselves to throwing it back. Some of us build monuments--called Art--at those very places or junctures in our lives when we happen upon the bottle. Throwing it back into the deeps again is, of course, the necessary trade-off, else the evil genie inside the bottle would, as he warns, destroy us for releasing him. The "art' we make out of such encounters ends up marking the spot for other travelers or comerades coming after us on the same trail, the same 'open road.' Like the fisherman, the role the poet can play in reclaiming those depths which have been lost in the process of becoming 'civilized,' is, as Walt Whitman shows, vital. By writing his "Leaves of Grass" Walt Whitman marks the spot, commemorates the encounter at the threshold of joy that for him lasts a lifetime. His poetry is evidence of the possbility of being reconnected, through the BODY, to one's joy, to nature and to wholeness. Whatever it was that turned Walter Whitman's life around and transformed him into the poet Walt Whitman, he remained faithful to it to his dying day. "Master," he writes in his famous letter to Emerson, "I am a man who has perfect faith." 26 That faithfulness speaks volumes about the man. Our excess of joy, then, perhaps like that of a child's, if left unchecked and free to express itself would remake the world. But the power of natural joy is so great that we learn to fear it. And rightly so. For truly it is a power greater than all the machines and technologies and nuclear bombs ever devised by man. The old tales teach us that our excess of joy can be re-owned, but only by giving up much, and by giving its gifts away, without seeking reward. We possess joy only by giving it away. From excess of joy great civilizations have arisen. From wont of joy great civilizations also have perished. The gifted minds of every culture have each in their own way learned how to harness, or serve, this joy. What Walt Whitman's poetry shows is this: that joy needs to be met and honored in the world, daily, as often as is humanly possible, or we risk losing life itself. For without joy in our lives, there is nothing but death. We die from joylessness. He would remind us that all of life is a kind of joy, that we must bear it, and learn to give it back somehow. For guilt and shame spread wherever the gift is refused. What his poems say is this: be not afraid of your joy. Give it, spend it. It is excess that the world needs from you, young or old. Learn how to bear it, to pass its gifts on to the next generation, and the generation after that and all beings shall thrive. Let there be overflow into perpetituity from the fountainhead of life. Give the devil his due, pay the Pied Piper and move forward, move on to more life. Let the greater necessity of work and prayer and sacrifice not be in vain but add to the next life, and the life after that, and so on for life ever-after. This is what the poems say to us: learn how to "let fly," for it is in letting fly and letting go that you find your joy, your true life, which the afterlife--and this we know--must not, cannot, refuse. For Whitman's life-work demonstrates how it is possible to regulate that flow of joy and energy--how to weather the storms it engenders, how to ride the cresting waves, how to take in the harsh facts of life, how to transform or translate the pain, how to find balance by reaching both inward and outward in search of human identity, and how our conceptions of divinity, in viable, earthly terms, need to be renewed in every age in order to replenish the human spirit. We read Whitman and make use of him in myriad ways, as he intended us to. Discovering uses to which we may put this poet indeed serves his greatest purpose. Crossing the threshold into the future, however, where Walt Whitman as poet still stands, as it were, it is impossible to see what lies ahead. As Whitman's poet-speaker says:
NOTES 1 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley
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