Robert F. Kennedy

[I]f to construct democratic institutions is our aim, how then shall we construe and interpret the natural environment and natural history of humanity in order to get an intellectual warrant for our endeavors[?]...Is the world as an object of knowledge at odds with our purposes and efforts? Is it merely neutral and indifferent?...Or is its nature such that it is at least willing to cooperate, that it not only does not say us nay, but gives us an encouraging nod?

CHAPTER 1

"My Voice Goes after What My Eyes Cannot Reach": Pragmatic Language and the Making of a Democratic Mythology

Any credible discussion of Walt Whitman's democratic vision—indeed, of any political philosophy cast in poetry—must necessarily begin with an examination of that thinker's approach to language. It is one of the great truisms of Whitman criticism that his revolutionary language style and his revolutionary politics are inextricably linked. Whitman's poetics and politics are connected symbiotically. ¹   We first see this mutual dependence of language and democracy in the extraordinarily comprehensive way that Whitman conceptualizes democracy. Because the poet regards democracy as the central organizing principle of nature—including all things humanly natural, such as culture—his theory of language is but an extension of his vision of natural democracy. That is, democracy grounds his theory of language. Conversely, his democracy depends upon language in that his comprehensive vision of democracy is so unique that it could not even be articulated, it seems, were it not for the special features of Whitman's poetic theory, which, in turn, they justify.

Not only is language a central concern of Whitman's democracy, it is also a concern of any conception of liberal democracy. Democracy engages a number of linguistically oriented issues. For example, its foundation in such verbal instruments as contracts and constitutions inevitably begs a host of questions about what interpretative theories should govern the reading of these documents. Even more deeply, democracy would seem to privilege a certain theoretical assumption about language: as it is commonly conceived, democracy asserts the primacy of natural and human (in other words, secular) authority. It implicitly yet unavoidably stands as a challenge to all claims to authority rooted in mystical and supernatural representations—especially the positivist view of language that permits "literal" interpretations of sacred texts while also inoculating those texts from criticism. (This same challenge requires scrutiny of Whitman's own political vision and its reliance on a special kind of language—a critical burden intensified, moreover, by the most commonplace assumptions of modern critical theory, which not only reject the possibility of unmediated, positive language but the possibility of politically disinterested language as well.) For the critic, then, as for the poet, to examine the meaning of democracy is to consider the unique grammar that would govern the construction of that meaning.

At first blush, Whitman's language theory may strike the contemporary critical reader as highly problematic, especially when it is viewed as a mere elaboration of theories prevalent in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1855, when Whitman wrote in the first preface to Leaves of Grass that the "greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself," he was hardly challenging his generation's basic assumptions about the unmediated nature of language; to the contrary, he was attempting to wrench new insights from those beliefs, attempting to advance some of the deepest thinking of his time (CRE 719). After all, Emerson, in the vanguard of American romanticism, had already taught that "words are signs of natural facts." ²   All that was left to Whitman, it seems, was to specify the American cast of those natural facts that the poet utters. To the modern reader, such innocent faith in the possibility of unmediated speech is more likely to look like elegant naïveté. The envelope of language theory has been pushed in the exact opposite direction. Richard Rorty argues that "the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned." ³   Rorty's argument now reads more like a description of current epistemological assumptions than the bold claim it was only a few years ago. In this context, Whitman's "language experiment" may read more like an ironic demonstration in the futility of trying to accurately represent the real. Inevitably, this sharp contrast between nineteenth- and twentieth-century beliefs about language requires, at the very least, that modern critics approach Whitman with an extremely high degree of skepticism.

But when we push beyond Whitman's theoretical formulations to his actual poetic practice, a far savvier poetics may come into view. His poetics may constitute a pragmatically viable democratic metaphysics and an eminently useful political vision as well. Still, to appreciate the significance of Whitman's democracy, does one need to play the scofflaw of contemporary theoretical assumptions concerning the contingency of language or the problems of representation? I do not believe so, and in this chapter I will explore the possibility that Whitman's metaphysics are in fact convincing for the very reason that they do not conform to the explicit dictates of his own poetic theory. Rather, Whitman's poetry implicitly seems to demonstrate an awareness of the arbitrary nature of linguistic communication, of the futility of attempting to verify the truthfulness of words by how accurately they correspond to nonlinguistic fact. In Whitman's verse, words appear to function pragmatically, as tools for the construction of a "reality" that is not bound by the constraints of correspondence theory. Such an awareness of the constructed nature of all representation would clearly afford Whitman enormous freedom; it would allow him to invent a democratic mythology, a metanarrative that functions as a paradigmatic expression of his larger democratic theory while simultaneously appropriating and subordinating the mythological narratives of competing power arrangements. Ultimately, such a pragmatic language would necessarily reveal itself in an equally pragmatic verification regime. And so, mindful of William James's great pragmatic insight that "truth happens to an idea," I will test the proposition that, in effect, Whitman argues that the validity of his democratic vision rests not on its correspondence to known fact or in its ability to explain the present but on its capacity to produce a worthwhile future.

Whitman's Language Experiment

If Whitman did adopt a pragmatic mode of poetic expression, it was probably necessitated by his reluctant conclusion that, ultimately, words really cannot refer to objects in any immediate or pristine sense. His direct statements on language, of course, suggest a much more positivist theory. But his attempts to put that theory into practice seem to have undermined his confidence in the positive power of language. If so, the seeds of doubt were probably latent in Whitman's poetics from the start. In piecing together Whitman's poetic theory from the many comments on language scattered throughout his corpus, Mark Bauerlein has detected "a curious bifurcation" in the poet's opinions on language. At times, Bauerlein notes, his comments reflect the exalted view of language so predominant in the 1855 preface. At other times "he also condemns language for its wanton artificiality," its susceptibility to corruption. Bauerlein does not see this as a contradiction. He maintains that Whitman's poetics stage a competition between conventional language, understood as inherently false because it "involve[s] some supplementation that veils...[its] emotive origin," and his own invention of a mode of pure expression that is authentic because it is transparent. Still, while Whitman attempts to "expurgate the artificial sign from human relations" through the perfection of a natural idiom, he may not have been convinced it was possible. Bauerlein argues persuasively "that Whitman knew very well the contradictions his theory led him into, but he clung to it nevertheless and welcomed those contradictions as the material of great poetry." Bauerlein sees this tension within Whitman's language theory as the force that animates the early editions of Leaves of Grass. Thus, a poem such as "Song of Myself," for example, can be read as a "modernist" work, "a self-reflexive poem relentlessly challenging the possibilities of its creation and openly presaging its incompletion." ⁴  

Bauerlein is surely correct to identify Whitman's struggle against arbitrary language as a central concern of his poetics. But we miss much by locating the primary significance of Whitman's poetry in the way it acquiesces to that problematic. However "modernist" "Song of Myself" may be, it is also a poem that reaches beyond itself to organize new forms of meaning by exploiting the very same linguistic indeterminacy it would otherwise try to stabilize. This is clearly illustrated in section 25 of "Song of Myself," the passage that Bauerlein describes as "The most sustained and far-reaching instance" of the poet's "obsession" with the problem of "writing a natural language." ⁵  

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,

We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

Speech is the twin of my vision....it is unequal to measure itself.

It provokes me forever,

It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough....why don't you let

      it out then?

Come now I will not be tantalized....you conceive too much of

      articulation,

Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded?

Waiting in gloom protected by frost,

The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,

I underlying causes to balance them at last,

My knowledge my live parts....it keeping tally with the meaning of

      things,

Happiness....which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search

      of this day.

My final merit I refuse you....I refuse putting from me the best I am.

Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me,

I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.

Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face,

With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic. (LV 35-36)

The immediate problem in this section is the tension established between the differing capabilities of speech and visual cognition, as the poet makes clear in the opening monologue he addresses to his own soul. On the one hand, it would seem that speech is omnipotent, for it preserves the poet's own life, and perhaps life itself, through the continuation (or duplication) of natural processes, the perpetual sending of "sunrise out of me." On the other hand, such power and the ambition it seems to breed inevitably separate it from whatever might be verified by the sense: when he boasts that his "Voice goes after what" even his own "eyes" cannot confirm, he seems to employ eyesight as a "mastersense," symbolically representing the cognitive functions of his other senses and their inability to keep pace with the omnipotent voice. Thus his speech cannot only encompass worlds but "volumes of worlds" because it is infinite, exceeding even the possibility of empirical measurement. Being beyond restraint, it becomes incorrigible as well, taunting the poet to hasty expression: "Walt, you understand enough," it says "sarcastically," indifferent to its own failure to stay within sensory limits, "why don't you let it out then?"

The rejoinder to this challenge reveals that the omnipotence of language is, paradoxically, a manifestation of a corresponding impotence. The poet sternly rebukes his speech: he will not be "tantalized," he fumes; moreover, the problem, he tells language, is that "you conceive too much of articulation." Language is not omniscient; it cannot know—and thus cannot express—all that the senses sense, such as the magnificent confluence of natural processes concealed within the folds of the bud they produce. Whitman insists on a romantic conception of subsensory intuitive knowledge, an immediate apprehension of "underlying causes" which are the poet's responsibility to "balance" in a way that renders his "live parts," those natural processes folded budlike within himself, sensible as meaning. Yet, ironically, the only intuition he succeeds in making explicit is his nagging awareness that such knowledge is too elusive to be pinned down by words, too vast to be contained by language. "My final merit I refuse you," he says in mock obstinacy, as if his failure to achieve a language of perfect correspondence were planned from the start. "I refuse putting from me the best I am." What section 25 dramatizes is perhaps best described as a standoff—not a failure of language per se but a failure of correspondence. On the one side stands the infinite potential of language, the measureless capacity of words to combine and recombine in endless permutations of meaning, indifferent, as it were, to the constraints of worldly human experience. "With the twirl of my tongue," it boasts, "I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds." On the other side stands the infinite human experience of self and things to which language can only imperfectly refer—the fathomless, inarticulate depths of sensory life only a fraction of which even rises to consciousness. Each is characterized by a superfluidity that renders it incapable of synchronizing with the other. They are mutually transcendent. The section ends with the unutterable getting the last word, so to speak; "writing and talk do not prove," the poet asserts, for he carries the "plenum of proof" within him. ⁶  

But this conclusion does not resolve the impasse. In the couplet that precedes the concluding stanza, just after the poet refuses to put from him the best that he is, he seems to strike a flippant but significant one-line bargain: "Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me." There is in this line an unmistakable note of comic exasperation. The poet seems to play the role of a beleaguered parent who must chase the loud, exuberant, irrepressible, childlike voice from the house in order to gain a bit of self-sustaining silence. "Go!" he seems to say, "encompass worlds, play wherever you wish—just stay out of the house, you're crowding me!" The only way the poet can preserve his authentic sense of self against the manipulations of his own intrusive, overbearing voice is to exile voice to the exterior, to the worlds that lie beyond the self. But (as every child knows) there is freedom in exile. By commanding voice to "encompass worlds," the poet has, in effect, granted language a license for unrestricted play—linguistic play that need not be collared by the stiff expectations of correspondence theory.

To be sure, the poet had no choice. He did not emancipate language; indeed, the failure of his own poetic theory to produce a perfect mode of representation pushed him to recognize that language was always already free. In a sense, Whitman pursues that paradoxical implications of our own critical metaphors. We typically describe the discontinuity between words and things—their noncorrespondence—in metaphors of encumbrance. Bauerlein, for example, observes that words "bear supplemental properties" alien to experience. ⁷   Inverted, however, the metaphor reminds us that the objects of experience do not tightly control our words. The failure of correspondence may have forced the poet to confront the inevitability of metaphoric language, but in so doing, it liberated him to exploit its rich potential.

Pragmatic Mythology

Whitman is not generally regarded as an especially metaphoric poet, even though metaphors abound in his poetry. Indeed, if George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are correct in claiming that metaphor is fundamental to language itself, it would be impossible for Whitman's poetry to be anything but metaphoric. ⁸   Still, the critical consensus has been that his poetry does not rely on elaborate metaphors or finely developed conceits. At least one reason for this view is the recognition that his poetry is performative, a verse style that, however defined, is thought by many critics to be antithetical to metaphoric expression. C. Carroll Hollis, for example, points out the essentially oratorical nature of Whitman's early verse; relying heavily on J. L. Austin's speech-act theory, he argues convincingly that Whitman's desire to touch and change the lives of his readers led him to develop poetic lines of "illocutionary" power. Thus, drawing on Roman Jakobson's well-known distinction between metaphoric and metonymic language, Hollis asserts that Whitman was pre-disposed to write metonymically because of that style's association with the sensual, the physical, the concrete, the particular, and the real—rather than in the intellectualized abstractions of metaphor. ⁹   Bauerlein, too, treats Whitman's verse as performative, albeit of a much different kind. In his interpretation of Whitman's ambition, language is not simply a more energetic and demanding mode of communication but one in which "the word must function as a cooperative participant in or an instantaneous manifestation" of experience. He reads Whitman as struggling to develop (or recover) a paradoxical kind of natural language, one that is "vitally metaphoric yet corresponding uniformly with things." The problem, the critic points out, is deciding "[w]hich metaphors are the least metaphoric." ¹⁰  

There is, however, one sequence in "Song of Myself" in which the poet quite successfully puts a highly performative poetic style to work within an elaborate metaphoric construction. In sections 41 through 43, the poet, in effect, takes up his own challenge to "encompass worlds" by encompassing—indeed, subordinating—the totality of world religions, mythical, and cosmological tradition within his own democratic mythology. In brief, Whitman begins these passages by constructing a metaphorical marketplace in which both democracy and religion, figured here as mere rhetorical enterprises, must compete. Predictably, democracy, as personified by the poet, easily "outbids" his competitors. The scaffolding of the commercial metaphor then recedes into the background, whereupon the divine democratic poet exercises his prerogative to appropriate the narratives of his competitors. He reads himself into these narratives, inhabiting them in a way that effectively usurps the mythological grounds upon which they base their claims to authority. This sequence of sections is important, not simply because Whitman has managed to unite two seemingly antithetical literary modes, but rather in doing so, he has created a powerful synecdoche for his entire democratic vision. In other words, even though the whole Whitman canon may usefully be read as a complex democratic mythology, one that is implicitly aware of its own metaphorical foundations and specifically designed to supplant competing systems through a process of appropriation, here the poet makes both his process and its purpose explicit. He provides a kind of narrative blueprint for that mythological construction—including a protocol for appropriating alternative or competing systems.

He inaugurates the commercial metaphor in section 41, where he summons the whole tradition of religious cosmology to account by inviting comparisons with his own assertions:

I heard what was said of the universe,

Heard it and heard of several thousand years;

It is middling well as far as it goes....but is that all?

Magnifying and applying come I,

Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,

The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirit of my own

      seminal wet, (LV 63-64)

The immediate function of the commercial metaphor is ideological or doctrinal, initially having little to do with performance; the metaphor is simply a useful device for making a few important points. First, it permits him to equate democracy and religion by bringing them into the same metaphysical realm in a manner that underscores their status as competitors. He taunts and condescends to "the old cautious hucksters"—yet he also expresses limited credulity: "It is middling well as far as it goes...." This provisional credulity is strategic. He does not want to discredit the pantheon of unnamed generic gods he evokes but seeks to assert his rightful place in it. More important is the way the metaphor allows him to redefine that realm. The pantheon he would join is no hilltop temple elevated high above the traffic of common experience. It is quite the opposite. By identifying all theological assertions, including his own, with the noise and chaos of the marketplace, he avails himself of the huckster's real commercial power—the sales pitch, the banter, the line: rhetoric. The product is power and the power is rhetoric; product and pitch are barely distinguishable. When read in the context of Jacksonian laissez-faire, the metaphor gains in force as the poet's power seems an extension of that era's hyperactive petit bourgeoisie and its explosion of small-time entrepreneurs, ubiquitous shopkeepers, barking street vendors, and traveling snake-oil salesmen who collectively outbid the "old cautious hucksters" of entrenched wealth for economic dominance in antebellum America. In any event, the commercial metaphor pays off: Whitman effectively democratizes all conceptions of spiritual and political hierarchy by shifting their grounds from the supposed authority of their cosmological representations to the material and egalitarian market. Thus he can proceed to catalog the traditions he has outbid as though he were a merchant taking inventory—while ruefully reminding readers that all metaphysical authority is ultimately dependent upon one's willingness to buy a little rhetoric.

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them away,

Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,

Buying drafts of Osiris and Isis and Belus and Brahma and Adonai,

In my portfolio placing Manito loose, and Allah on a leaf, and the crucifix

      engraved,

With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitle, and all idols and images,

Honestly taking them all for what they are worth, and not a cent more,

Admitting they were alive and did the work of their day,

Admitting they bore mites as for unfledged birds who have now to rise

      and fly and sing for themselves, (LV 64)

Another important point the commercial metaphor permits the poet to make concerns the problem of "value." The poet asserts that he takes all the theological metaphors "for what they are worth, and not a cent more." Significantly, Whitman underscores his indifference to correspondence theory by declining to recognize accuracy of representation as a legitimate test of value. Rather, he calculates the worth of theological metaphors pragmatically, according to their function. Judged in their historical context, he admits, their value was high; they were "alive" in that they functioned effectively, doing "the work of their day"—which is only to say that they provided persuasive and socially useful descriptions of experience, although he is quick to qualify that acknowledgement by observing that they also bore ideological "mites" that are antithetical to freedom. The pragmatic determination of truth and value is one of the logical cornerstones of Whitman's democratic vision and will be developed in detail in subsequent discussions. It is worth noting, however, that by commodifying religion myth and reducing it to rhetoric, Whitman has neatly anticipated William James's pragmatic conception of truth as that which has "cash value."

The commercial metaphor is also a demonstration of literary appropriation. In one sense, the appropriation is obvious. Whitman has imported the gods of traditional religion into his own fictive construction to serve as foils: as personified ideas, privileged by custom, his own democratic mythology can vanquish them (through rhetorical force) as a way of allegorizing the legitimacy of democracy's claim to power. But in another sense, the commercial metaphor also functions as a paradigm for the function of appropriation in Whitman's entire democratic mythology. By identifying the "old cautious hucksters," his mythological competitors, with their rhetorical or literary assertions, the poet has utilized the logic of his metaphor to transform those agents he would "outbid" into products he might acquire. He buys "drafts of Osiris and Isis and Belus" and puts others in his portfolio. Their immediate value to the poet is as models of form, a special class of exceptionally powerful metaphors:

Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself....

      bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,

Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,

Putting higher claims for him there with his rolled-up sleeves, driving the

      mallet and chisel;

Not objecting to special revelations....considering a curl of smoke or a

      hair on the back of my hand as curious as any revelation; (LV 64)

Mythological gods then become important not simply as antagonists within the poet's fiction but as literary conventions, elaborate metaphorical arrangements with enormous residual cultural power. They serve Whitman's democratic purposes as mythological prototypes, "rough deific sketches" he may appropriate for use in the construction of a far grander democratic vision. In "The Poet," Emerson refers to the mythological gods Whitman would appropriate as "a sort of tomb of the muses." ¹¹   But he also makes clear that once liberated from their visionary architecture, they are capable of a chameleon-like resiliency. He writes in one of the more famous passages from "The Poet":

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze....Here is the difference betwixt the poet and they mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. ¹²  

Emerson may be as much or more concerned with the way all poetic language works (perhaps all language) and the art of reading poetry as he is with establishing a particular poetic methodology. In his discussion of "Circles" in Pragmatism and Poetry, Richard Poirier argues convincingly that Emerson is troubled with the way all writing, his own and others', "the very efforts at non-conformity that result in his tropings of previous truths," amounts inevitably to a kind of entrapment of "creative energy" within the circle of a "discursive formation." ¹³   Hence the poets who would understand and use the past as material for the construction of their own art would be wise to find a way "by which the creative efforts inferable from the productions of the past are, by a hermeneutical leap of faith, replicated and changed within the different linguistic and historical conditions of the present." The past, understood "as a series of monuments," is in a sense discarded in favor of an identification with "those in the past whose energies brought those monuments into existence." ¹⁴  

Whitman would appear to understand Emerson's apprehension concerning the residual ideological content of mythology but chooses instead to try to gut that ideology to render the myths more usable. To do so, his narrative takes on the aspect of a ritual performance, and literary appropriation now becomes a strategy for achieving deep cultural transformation. In the lines quoted above, the poet attempts an act of apotheosis: to put "higher claims" for the framer "with his rolled-up sleeves" is to deify the democratic self. Or perhaps more accurately, it is to acknowledge the always already divine status of democratic being and ground democratic authority in the common experience of human labor, such as the framing of a house. Here the poet travels beyond the scope of his commercial metaphor. The logic of the marketplace allowed him to equalize all ideologies by reducing them to the status of rhetorical competitors. By extension, it permitted him to justify democratic power by virtue of its "superior" (more persuasive) rhetoric. But democracy, as Whitman and others conceive it, has a special claim to legitimacy based on the primacy of common human sensuous experience. I will develop the argument for that claim in subsequent discussions throughout the book; for now, it is important to note that the commercial metaphor does not (indeed, cannot) even suggest such an argument. And the commercial metaphor especially does not put the argument for democracy in the form of a compelling narrative alternative to traditional religious belief. One possible solution would be simply to propound an explicitly democratic mythology, to cast the entire complex of democratic arguments in mythological terms. Whitman's more ambitious strategy is to read himself, as the emblem of common experience and democratic selfhood, into the very narratives he would subordinate. He appropriates—and attempts to reorient—not particular myths or religions but mythology itself and the mode of thinking it structures. In effect, he rereads mythology to uncover the latent democratic aspect at its core.

The poet begins his mythological performance at the conclusion of section 41 in an explicit assertion of his own divinity.

The supernatural of no account....myself waiting my time to be one of

      the supremes,

The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best,

      and be as prodigious,

Guessing when I am it will not tickle me much to receive puffs out of

      pulpit or print;

Be my life-lumps! becoming already a creator!

Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the shadows! (LV 65)

Of course, he also restricts the meaning of that divinity by playing with the classic definition of poet as maker or creator. As he makes the poet (and the people he would represent) into a god—he is "already a creator"—he simultaneously reveals that the gods are, in fact, poets. And since "The supernatural [is] of no account," all claims to authority that are grounded in supernatural representations are equally of no account. All such metaphysical constructions are the work of creator-poets who are certainly not supernatural in the sense of being outside or above nature but who may be considered superior to nature in the limited sense of being able to expropriate the terms of past creations and thereby originate new symbolic versions of nature out of themselves.

Having thus laid claim to divine status—while simultaneously restricting what the notion of divinity may mean—he proceeds in section 42 to root his own divinity in his identification with common people. Momentarily adopting the position of an objective narrator to locate himself among the people, he then gathers them to himself in a song of ritual unification:

....A call in the midst of the crowd,

My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

Come my children,

Come my boys and girls, and my women and household and intimates,

Now the performer launches his nerve....He has passed his prelude on

      the reeds within. (LV 65-66)

"Music rolls," he says, "but not from the organ....Folks are around me" (LV 66). Indeed, the song the "performer" sings would unite people by articulating the common rhythm of living, sensuous experience. For example, he reduces them to fundamental acts of consumption and then contextualizes them within the natural cycles of solar orbit and oscillating tides. "Ever the eaters and drinkers....ever the upward and downward sun....Ever the air and the ceaseless tides" (LV 66). Likewise, he sings of labor as though it were rhythmic physical experience, a continuous, often oppressive, dance: "many sweating and ploughing and thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving" (LV 67). Still, for the poet, the images do not dramatize the brutality of precultural life but the vitality and authenticity of sensuous experiences. He asserts that the people are "refreshing, wicked and real," a conjunction of adjectives suggesting that the immediacy of experience that distinguishes the people as "real" is not just opposed to fossilized moral ideas but the agency by which the moral tradition might be "refreshed." Throughout this section, the poet makes it clear that the people are the sum total of their sensuous experience. He also makes it clear that he is one of them: "This is the City....And I am one of the citizens," he proclaims (LV 67). As the section 42 concludes, the primacy of sensuous experience is reaffirmed in a sequence of questions, each presenting a choice between the artificial and the real: "printed book" versus "printer and printing-office boy"; the "marriage estate" versus the "body and mind" of bridegroom and bride; the painting of the sea versus "the sea itself"' and so on, until finally,

"The Saints and sages in history....but you yourself? / Sermons and creeds and theology....but the human brain, and what is called reason, and what is called love, and what is called life?" (LV 68).

Having thus made himself the "divine" emblem of "divine" human sensuous democratic experience, the poet stands ready to commandeer the narratives of the "cautious old hucksters," the "saints and sages in history" and their lifeless "creeds and theology." Hence in section 43 he mythologizes a return through time to the zenith of each religion's reign:

I do not despise you priests;

My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,

Enclosing all worship ancient and modern, and all between ancient and

      modern,

Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,

Waiting responses from oracles....honoring the gods....saluting

      the sun,

Making a fetish of the first rock or stump....powowing with sticks in

      the circle of obis, (LV 68).

The poet can enclose "all worship ancient and modern" not simply because, as the emblem of the democratic people, he has assumed the role of a superior god. More pointedly, as the representative of sensuous experience, material consciousness, he can testify to the irrational origins of the religious imagination: he himself made "a fetish of the first rock or stump." As such, he was from the outset both initiator of those myths and a participant in their ritual practices:

Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,

Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession....rapt and

      austere in the woods, a gymnosophist,

Drinking mead from the skull-cup....to shasta and vedas admirant....

      minding the koran,

Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife—

      beating the serpent-skin drum;

Accepting the gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing

      assuredly that he is divine,

To the mass kneeling—to the puritan's prayer rising—sitting patiently

      in a pew,

Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis—waiting dead-like till my spirit

      arouses me;

Looking forth on pavement and land, and outside of pavement and land,

Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. (LV 69)

In his commercial metaphor, he had figured belief systems as rhetorical competitors; now he depicts them as physical experiences. The first physical experiences take on the aspect of highly ordered ritual expressions, as he helps the lama trim the lamps. They quickly descend into the elemental or primitive: he dances through the streets, a "gymnosophist"; he drinks from the "skull-cup"; he walks the teokallis beating a drum; he kneels in mass, rises in prayer, and sits in the pew. Eventually, formal ritual disintegrates completely, and he rants and froths, consumed by nothing more than the explosion of his own inchoate senses. Of course, he "encloses all worship ancient and modern," is "one of the supremes," "already a creator," for he is pure sense, pure physicality. Thus critics who assert that Whitman presents a religion without God surely miss the point. The real and acknowledged god at the heart of every religion, he seems to say, is the sensuous self—the "framer framing a house," indeed, all the "eaters and drinkers" who sweat, plough, and thrash. His "faith," then, "is the greatest of faiths and least of faiths" because he can see that at the core of the supernatural narratives by which hierarchies justify their usurpation of power there is a very natural, experiential, democratic god that belies their claims. In effect, the poet thus delineates the proper function of religious thought in a secular democratic society. He asserts democracy's prerogative to embrace whatever moral ideas a people choose to venerate by establishing democracy's prior claim of ownership over these ideas. At the same time, he denies authority to the clergy (or any entity) who might interpret these ideas as a rationale for their own exercise of power.

The significance of these three sections to Whitman's practical poetics is manifold. As an example of Whitman's poetic practice, particularly his reliance on metaphoric constructions, his acknowledgment of the value of rhetoric, and his radical style of appropriation, these sections reveal him to be far more pragmatic than his positivist theoretical assertions would suggest. As performative poetry, they dramatize Whitman's particularly aggressive style of textual reinterpretation—characteristic of his approach to other texts generally—while also modeling a strategy for cultural reform. As a mythological expression of his democratic vision, they function paradigmatically, signaling the comprehensive scope of that vision while organizing many of its key elements. The common thread linking all of these manifestations of Whitman's poetics, however, is that they are all antithetical to correspondence theories of truth. In one way or another they each exploit the undecidability of words and the inescapably problematic notion of truth. Yet they are all true—at least in the context of the pragmatic theory of truth Whitman develops in Leaves of Grass.

Truth and Verification

The pragmatic theory of truth, intended as a challenge to the notion of simple correspondence, received its first full articulation in William James's Pragmatism. Even if one were to accept the findings of a correspondence theory and "grant an idea or belief to be true," he writes, the pragmatist is still left with the primary question of "what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?" ¹⁵   This is not, as it has often been accused of being, an anti-intellectual bias against speculation in favor of simple utility; rather, it is a recognition that the "truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea" through the very process of its validation. ¹⁶   In other words, truthful ideas are fruitful ideas, ideas that produce new insights or successfully open up new lines of inquiry. By shifting the concern for truth away from an idea's ability to "copy" nature and onto an ongoing experimental process of verification, James introduces the element of time; to be sure, as John Dewey points out, so long as humankind continues to live, work, and think, the results of any experimental process are always open to revision. Empirical thinkers who properly conceive their role "are not concerned with framing a general theory of reality, knowledge and value once and for all, but with finding how authentic beliefs about existence as they currently exist can operate fruitfully and efficaciously in connection with the practical problems that are urgent in actual life." (QC 45). Full realization of this condition means an empiricism that understands itself to be "prophetic rather than descriptive. It can offer hypotheses rather than report of facts adequately in existence....It is speculative in that it deals with 'futures.'" (QC 77-78).

One consequence of such a conception of truth is that it acknowledges no sharp distinction between scientific inquiry and moral or poetic speculation—between our ideas about nature and our ideals about how to live as part of it. When we think of ideas as instruments whose truth value resides in their capacity to direct a course of experimentation toward desired consequences, we open ourselves up to the consideration of all possible consequences of those ideas, not just the narrowly conceived results of a particular scientific procedure but any way that a potential action latent in an idea might affect the course of human life. But if our empirical investigations, subject as they are to future validation, are in that sense subordinated to our ideals about what we want that future to be, the converse is also true. Our ideals about the future are the projections of what is good about the present. Thus our ideals are dependent on our understanding of the real world in that they represent what Dewey calls in Reconstruction in Philosophy "intelligently thought out possibilities of the existent world which may be used as methods for making over and improving it." ¹⁷   For Dewey, as for James, truth-making is the process by which we tests the efficacy of our ideals, a "prophetic" act of the imagination that reads one version of the present into the future so that that future may exert a corrective influence on the present.

The logic of the pragmatic conception of truth is so prevalent in Leaves of Grass that it seems that Whitman actually anticipates James and Dewey. More to the point, it adds a pragmatic dimension to his poetics and conditions the way we should read his democratic mythology and prophetic vision. This is particularly evident in his treatment of futurity. "The greatest poet," he writes in the 1855 preface, "forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is...he places himself where the future becomes present" (CRE 718). This is the poet in his role of pragmatic prophet. Though the consistence of his imagined future is formed from past and present, it is still an edited and reconstructed version, for "[i]f he does not expose superior models and prove himself by every step he is not what is wanted" (CRE 715). Vision and verification, in other words, go hand in hand. But recall that pragmatic verification is a two-way street—a kind of continuous dialogue between the constructed present and the imagined future: as our constructions of the real and present must be validated by their ability to anticipate the way phenomena will behave in the future, so, too, must our ideals, which are but selected projections of our constructed present, be subjected to verification based on the desirability of the concrete behaviors that they generate in the here and now. While the former involves the verification of the present by the future, the latter is a verification of the future by the present. Both, as Whitman will make clear, involve the kind of manipulation of time that will necessitate a poet who "places himself where the future becomes present." When the poet asserts that he must "prove himself by every step," it is the latter, the validation of ideals, to which he refers—a point I will take up shortly. But it is because our ideals are intimately linked to our ability to construct nature adequately—the real in the here and now—that the job of judging these constructions must be one of his poetic functions. "Still the final test of poems or any character or work remains," he writes in the preface (CRE 728, emphasis added). "The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead and judges performer or performance after the changes of time" (CRE 728). By these lights, his claim that he is "no arguer" but rather "is judgment" itself becomes more clear. It is an existential kind of "process" judgment, one that requires no criteria, or even a final decision, for "he judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing" might simply shed light on phenomena in a way that enables continued examination (CRE 715).

Like William James's pragmatic theory of truth, Whitman's conception of judgment endlessly defers any final determination of value, thereby laying special stress on the notion of usability as a criterion for judgment. "Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets," he claims. And he is confident that the need will be met, for the United States "doubtless will have the greatest and use them the greatest" (CRE 714). The clear implication is that the poet is to be judged according to his usability. But, this only begs the question: how are we to judge usefulness? Whitman raises the question and then struggles to answer with a sexual metaphor: "Will it help breed one goodshaped and wellhung man and a woman to be his perfect mate?" (CRE 730). He develops the metaphor later in his letter to Emerson that prefaced the 1856 edition. "Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness," he wrote. "Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood" (CRE 734).

These and other similar sexual metaphors are typical of Whitman's descriptions of his poetry, and they serve a variety of purposes in his work. In this context, they would deflect the impulse to assess the efficacy of his vision, its usability, in terms of its ability to shape specific policies or produce concrete initiatives. For many, this generalized procreative energy may seem to be no criterion at all. The poet recognizes this in section 40 of "Song of Myself": "Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands, / Say old topknot!...what do you want?" (LV 61-62). But rather than responding with some tangible demonstration of the poet's powers, the poet curiously asserts that he is dumb:

Man or woman! I might tell how I like you, but cannot,

And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,

And might tell the pinings I have....the pulse of my nights and days.

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity,

What I give I give out of myself. (LV 62).

The poet would have us believe that the value of his poetry is to be found not so much in its ability to shape inchoate emotion or structure the kind of intellectualized meanings conveyable through lectures but rather in its ability to reproduce in others something vital within himself. But he cannot articulate the idea without also qualifying it. That is, he cannot tell us of his inability to reduce to mere words the full experience of his affection for us—to "tell how I like you" or to tell us his "pinings"—without at least pointing to the fact that such feeling exists and is central to his purpose. Neither can that affection be dissociated from the rest of his democratic vision, for it is one of its defining features. Thus, as he completes section 40, making it clear that the poetic procreative energy must be understood as a functional, creative, even mystical force, we see that it is also implicitly but inescapably concrete in that it suggests the entirety of his more programmatic, goal-oriented, democratic philosophy:

You there, impotent, loose in the knees, open your scarfed chops till I

      blow grit within you,

Spread your pals and lift the flaps of your pockets,

I am not to be denied....I compel....I have stores plenty and to spare,

And anything I have I bestow.

I do not ask who you are....that is not important to me,

You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

To a drudge of the cottonfields or emptier of privies I lean....on his

      right cheek I put the family kiss,

And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babies,

This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.

To any one dying....thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,

Turn the bedclothes toward the foot of the bed,

Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man....I raise him with resistless will.

O despairer, here is my neck,

By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.

I dilate you with tremendous breath....I buoy you up;

Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force....lovers of me,

      bafflers of graves:

Sleep! I and they keep guard all night;

Not doubt, not decrease shall dare to lay finger upon you,

I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,

And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so. (LV 62-63)

On the one hand, if we are looking for a specific policy prescription by which to verify the Whitman vision, we shall not find it here. The ultimate test of the poet's oration, he asserts, is in the sheer force of the "blow[n] grit," the "tremendous breath" that dilates all indiscriminately with an invigorating, "jetting," seminal power. Rather than action we have activation—a form of pure power that can enable action but not control or specify it. On the other hand, this seminal poetic power is not totally devoid of ideological content. For example, in his insistence that the power be disseminated indiscriminately ("I do not ask who you are") and most especially in his identification with the powerless, particularly the laboring class (in the cotton fields or emptying privies), the poet has linked his notion of an enabling, "procreative" poetic force to the larger complex of democratic ideas of his vision. The poet would not have us judge his work according to its ability to specify the material means by which a humane democracy might be realized but rather in its ability to generate the spiritual, cultural, and emotive energy each new generation needs to reinvent for themselves the meaning of a humane democracy—and then to use whatever historically contingent means are at their disposal to make it a reality. The validity of Whitman's prophetic democracy is in its capacity to inspire the continuous re-creation of democracy.

The vision of democracy Whitman advances in Leaves of Grass is an explicitly constructed vision. Its mythology, as well as the whole range of psychological, cosmological, historical, cultural, and political ideas that that mythology symbolizes, must be read in the light of his distinctly modern recognition of the undecidability of language. But it is a construction that takes into account the many implications of being constructed. Whitman exploits these implications—sifting the past for usable mythological or linguistic forms from which he might construct a vision to guide the continuous process of social reconstruction in an ever-receding future. In that sense it is also prophecy but of a special kind: a pragmatic prophecy, a vision that understands that the future it names is a contingent one and that also builds in the mechanism to test and realize that future. William James famously claimed that pragmatism is not a philosophy but a methodology only, not a closed set of representations but an ongoing process by which we continuously construct, test, and reconstruct our representations. Whitman would claim that democracy is more than just a methodology—but the burden of deciding precisely how much more he leaves to us and to those who follow.

CHAPTER 2

"What Is Less or More Than a Touch?": Sensory Experience and the Democratic Self

The pragmatic nature of Whitman's language—particularly the purely utilitarian way he pillages the world's warehouse of religious ideas to cobble together a democratic mythology—certainly suggest that Whitman did not feel bound by literal readings of the ancient texts he appropriated. We would especially expect that he would be hostile to the various mystical and spiritual conceptions of selfhood codified by those texts, for they are clearly at odds with his affirmation of the democratic implications of material and experiential conceptions of self. By extension, we should find in Whitman a poet who is indifferent to one of the most fundamental truth claims of nearly every religion from which he would borrow: "dualism," or the ontological distinction between body and mind or spirit. Still, dualism seems to be everywhere in Whitman's poetry; paradoxically, it even appears to be central to his entire architectural vision of democratic selfhood. For example, the dramatic premise of "Song of Myself" is that a separation between the poet's body and soul has somehow occurred and must no be healed—a point that has led critics such as Malcolm Cowley and James E. Miller Jr. to see Whitman as a mystic who seeks a reunion of antinomies. ¹   Whitman opens the great poem by proclaiming:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass. (LV 1)

Clearly, the poet assumes a kind of objectified aspect of himself, a soul, which is distinguishable from the physical (speaking) subject that is loafing on the summer grass.

All that is distinguishable, however, is not necessarily ontologically separable. And a literal interpretation here is a mistake. Whitman's soul is nothing like an ethereal entity at all; it is a naturalistic conception of consciousness. It is, in fact, an elaboration of his conception of natural, democratic selfhood. The particular role it plays in Whitman's poetry may dramatize its fundamentally social—and democratic—origins. George Herbert Mead, John Dewey's younger colleague at the University of Chicago, claimed in his posthumously published lectures, "Mind, Self and Society," that objectifications of the self (such as we find in references to the human soul) are wholly consistent with naturalistic theory, even though they form the basis of so much mystical, religious, or superstitious thought. ²   The natural origin of the objectified self—or self-consciousness—was one of Mead's most fruitful preoccupations. A brief sketch here of mead's insights will be useful in explaining Whitman's invitation to his soul—especially in its social context, its reliance on immediate experience as a vehicle of realization, and the passive pose he takes in extending his invitation.

The solution to the dilemma of selfhood, Mead believed—as well as the source of enormous confusion about it—was located in our commonsense experience of the self as both object and subject. "It is characteristic of the self as an object to itself that I want to bring out," Mead wrote. "This characteristic is represented in the word 'self,' which is a reflexive, and indicates that which can be both subject and object." ³   On the one hand, we sense ourselves living in and responding to our environment spontaneously, from the position of an immediate subjectivity. On the other hand, there are times when we think about the nature of that spontaneous being, our "self," objectively, as though it were distinguishable from the subjectivity that at any given moment might bring the self into consciousness. But the fact that making such a distinction seems to be an inescapable habit of human thought does not mean that the distinction has metaphysical standing. Mead thought the distinction is functional—reflective of the different aspects of the mind's operations within the ever-present social environment in which it lives. He expressed these different functions in terms of a contrast between the subjective "I" and the objective "me." Effective social life, Mead argued, required of every human that they internalize the attitudes, codes, and standards of the group they belong to—the "rules of the game" that regulate conduct and organize relationships among individuals. The vehicle of this internalization, Mead believed, accounted for the natural evolution of the linguistic capability in humans. Language, then, and the very cognition that language makes possible (the "internalized conversation of gestures," as he put it), amounts to a "generalized other" that every individual imports into the self. Within the matrix of the generalized other, people can witness themselves acting; they can imagine the responses of others to their actions and, in turn, imagine their own reactions to those imagined responses of others in a seemingly infinite circuit of social interplay. The imaginative being we each construct from this interplay of subjective responses to the internalized social material is what Mead calls the "me." When people think of their own selves, they are thinking of entities that only manifest themselves as an objective "presentation" to consciousness through their behavior within the web of social relationships. When we conjure up an image of a self, in other words, what we see is a being defining itself through a process of social interactions: "That which we have acquired as self-conscious persons makes us such members of society and gives us selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so far as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also. The individual possesses a self only in relation to the selves of the other members of his social group." ⁴  

The function of this "me," the objectified and socially implicated aspect of the self, is to mediate the individual's responses to his or her environment by organizing and internalizing socially governed perceptions of that environment. But this is not to say that the entire self consists of an organization of social attitudes. To the contrary, it exists in tension with the subjective "I," the bare, impulsive, immediate, reacting function of the self. In an "active" sense, the "I" contributes to selfhood through the novelty of its responses to the environment—including the internalized environment that comprises the "me." Since every new situation in which we act is to some degree unique, unprecedented, so, too, must each response the "I" makes contain some element of novelty. But at the instant of completion, the action of the "I" becomes a memory, which is to say an object to consciousness, an aspect of the "me" to be reconciled with the rest of the "me." In a more "reflective" sense, the "I" contributes to selfhood through introspection. It is "the 'I' which is aware of the social 'me,'" Mead writes; put another way, it is the consciousness upon which self-consciousness is predicated. ⁵   One point must be underscored: the "I" is not directly apprehensible—it is a presumption, derived from our awareness of the "me":

The "I" does not get into the limelight; we talk to ourselves, but do not see ourselves. The "I" reacts to the self which arises through the taking of the attitudes of others...

The simplest way of handling the problem would be in terms of memory. I talk to myself, and I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The "I" of this moment is present in the "me" of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to catch myself. I become a "me" in so far as I remember what I said. The "I" can be given, however, this functional relationship. It is because of the "I" that we say that we are never fully aware of what we are, that we surprise ourselves by our own action. ⁶  

If Mead's conception of a dialogic structure to consciousness that is irreducible to human physicality places him outside the school of mechanical materialism, he is, nevertheless, no dualist; while primary, sensuous experience cannot alone account for the workings of the mind, it still plays a key role in Mead's understanding of the process of selfhood. And to the degree that sensuous experience is significant to the development of the self (and much sensuous experience is so habitual, Mead asserts, that it is not), it becomes significant only when processed by the sociolinguistic agency of the mind. This same dynamic is clearly at work in Whitman's poetry. In the 1855 version of "There Was a Child Went Forth," Whitman explicitly and dramatically links the process of identity formation to the individual's internalization of socially entwined responses to physical stimuli. The psycho-dynamics informing the poem are sketched in its first stanza, whose titular first line begins with a self so objectified as an artifact of memory that the subject "I"—the speaking subject—is concealed and must be assumed:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or

      love or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of

      the day....or for many years or stretching cycles of years. (LV 149)

By asserting in line 2 that "he became" the "first object" encountered and then modifying the formula in line 3 so that subsequent objects "became part of him," assimilated into the existing self, the speaker opens up the intriguing prospect that no subjective self exists to organize sensory data prior to the emergence of an objectified self, or Mead's "me," the self of introspection. Just as significant is the pivotal part played by emotion in the transaction. It is not simple sensory perception that makes the difference; the "me" can only emerge as an object to itself when sensory experience is conditioned by wonder, pity, love, or dread. Central here is Dewey's definition of emotions, which Mead drew upon, as "attitudes" abstracted from formerly useful primordial behavior that are aroused as a means for realizing ends. As Andrew Feffer further explains Dewey's conception, "emotions are 'truncated acts,' acts which do not achieve their full purpose because they are inhibited either by circumstances or by the actor. Emotions signify the inhibition of the act, and spur the actor to find a solution to the problem." ⁷   The suggestion of passivity conveyed by the poet's encountered objects "received" with emotion conceals the active manipulations of a consciousness becoming a "self-consciousness"' that is, what the poet imports into consciousness is not a set of objects that he, in some simplistic sense, becomes but a set of latent acts regarding those objects, which, through the reconstructive work of the imagination, becomes a kind of architecture of relations defining the self. What he becomes is the totality of those relations—manifested to the self objectively as the things that induce the self to act.

As the poem continues in the third stanza—following the stages, we now realize, of a child's development—the poet chronicles all types of sensory data that provide material for the self's reconstruction. But that the truly significant objects in the process of self-consciousness are human and social becomes clear as soon as we read beyond the catalog of "early lilacs," "morningglories," "white and red clove," "noisy brood of the barnyard," pond fish, and other natural objects that also "all became part of him," to the third stanza's "old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the tavern whence he had lately risen" (LV 150).

And the schoolmistress that passed on her way to the school..and the

      friendly boys that passed..and the quarrelsome boys..and the tidy

      and freshcheeked girls..and the barefoot negro boy and girl,

And all the changes of the city and country wherever he went.

His own parents..he that had propelled the fatherstuff at night, and

      fathered him..and she that conceived him in her womb and birthed

      him....they gave this child more of themselves than that,

They gave him afterward every day....they and of them became part

      of him.

The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the suppertable,

The mother with mild words....clean her cap and gown....a

      wholesome odor falling off her persona and clothes as she walks by:

The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust,

The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,

The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture....the

      yearning and swelling heart, (LV 150-151)

When we recall at this point that the poet is not simply recounting childhood experiences but enumerating those "objects" that were to become part of the growing child's actual self, the last quoted line becomes particularly remarkable. By linking the objectivity of the relevant social group, the family, its customs, its language, and even its collectively owned furniture, together with the subjectivity of the individual's emotional responses within the group, "the yearning and swelling heart," the poet has blurred the boundary between externally perceived objects and internally experienced emotions. He has effectively erased all subject-object distinctions. Though the individual organism may "feel," the mediation of those feelings is understood as a social fact. The organizing of those feelings into recognizable objects requires, then, the imaginative reconstruction of "others" (in this case a mild-speaking mother or an angered father) who are differentiated from each other by their particular responses to the subject; as others become differentiated, so may the poet differentiate himself as an object available for introspection and translation into poetry.

But such insight comes at a cost to the poet, as the next few lines indicate. In recognizing just how blurred the separation between object and subject is, the poet appears to become anxious about what within that matrix may truly be called essential. Though he would feel confident of his possession of the "Affection that will not be gainsayed," that confidence is unavoidably undermined by "The sense of what is real...the thought if after all it should prove unreal." And, "The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime...the curious whether and how, / Whether that which appears so is so....Or is it all flashes and specks?" (LV 151). The profound specter of doubt and anxiety captured in these lines catches the adventuresome spirit of the remaining eleven lines of the poem in an undercurrent of uncertainty about the exact boundaries of the self. So as the poem's child moves in a centripetal fashion, out and away from the family and village and toward the "horizon's edge," he is also moving centrifugally, in from the objectified sense of the self that is entangled in social fact and toward the "Shadows..aureola and mist" of pure subjectivity, unmediated by other human beings—toward, in other words, the immediate, organic, impulsive presumption of essence we might usefully call the soul (LV 152).

To say that the soul is not an entity but an intimation, a reified function of self-consciousness, is not to say that "inviting' it to the center of one's attention—deliberately heightening one's sensitivity to the workings of the self it designates—makes no sense. As "Song of Myself" makes clear, such an invitation—or, more precisely, such a retreat to a (sometimes meditative) state wherein sensory experience seems more immediate, more "authentic," and less controlled by the already socially restricted self of introspection—is a very logical choice of tools for the job of personal liberation. To subordinate the directives of the social "me" by living, if only momentarily, on the level of pure impulse, one, in effect, alters or expands the "me" through an increased level of "novel" behavior—behavior once outside the self's known boundaries but which now becomes new information to be assimilated into the new, reorganized, "me." Since the "soul-function" is concerned with a particular body's unique responsiveness to physical stimuli, what better way to focus one's attention on such an internal abstraction than by leaning and loafing at ease, while the mind, perhaps a little numbed by the summer heat, allows the eyes to fix themselves on "a spear of summer grass"?

So prevalent in Whitman is this retreat to the senses—and so closely associated are sensations with his conception of his essential self—that references often seem like comic postures. When he announces himself in section 24 of "Song of Myself," for instance, as "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos," he immediately adds that he is "Disorderly fleshy and sensual....eating drinking and breeding," (LV 31), a point about himself he will amplify a few lines later by saying, "I believe in the flesh and the appetites, / Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle" (LV 32-33).

But what is truly miraculous about the visual, auditory, and tactile sense is not simply that they are inexplicable organic marvels that enable the body to operate; it is more that, as contact points with the environment, they provide the machinery for the self's reorganization. Section 26 of "Song of Myself" begins with the poet saying explicitly that "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen, / And accrue what I hear into myself....and let sounds contribute toward me" (LV 36). If the poet of "There Was a Child Went Forth" was sufficiently insightful to recognize that the objectified self is a socially implicated being, a product of the process whereby external material is imported through the senses into consciousness, here the poet has taken the next step of attempting to regulate that process by choosing the particular moment and type of sensory stimulation. He then proceeds to rapidly catalog the wealth of sounds around him, such as the "bravuras of birds," the bustle of wheat, the clack of flames, and all other manner of city and country sounds, but he slows to concentrate on those types of sounds that seem to move and mark him in particular ways:

I hear the trained soprano....she convulses me like the climax of my

      love-grip;

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,

It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,

It sails me....I dab with bare feet....they are licked by the indolent

      waves,

I am exposed....cut by bitter and poisoned hail,

Steeped amid honeyed morphine....my windpipe squeezed in the

      fakes of death,

Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being. (LV 38).

Though the only sense engaged here is auditory, the stimulation is so intense that the poet seems to have lost all volition, all ability to act; his responses appear to be completely involuntary, completely beyond conscious direction of control. As he is brought to the "fakes of death," the "puzzle of puzzles" that "we call being" becomes not a matter to be pondered, thought about, or reasoned through. It is a puzzle to be felt. By engineering an experience of such intensity, the poet has attempted to bypass the manipulations of what Mead calls the "me" so that he might apprehend directly the subjective "I," the most intimate aspect of "Being."

Still, however close the poet may have come to a direct apprehension of subjectivity while sitting paralyzed in his seat in the opera house, the very act of translating that moment into the verbal machinery of poetry is at once the act of bringing the moment into cognition and making it a matter for reflection and analysis. Thus he beings section 27 with the question the experience has raised: "To be in any form, what is that? / If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough" (LV 38). The poet's own rhetorical question prompts him to shift his attention away from what Mead and others have called the "distance" class of sensory experience (for example, the visual, olfactory, and auditory senses) to the "contact" senses (for example, touch and taste). While even the hard-shelled quahaug has a being to be democratically affirmed, what seems to set it apart from the more "developed" human being is primarily the latter's responsiveness to tactile experience. Thus the poet immediately declares:

Mine is so callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch any person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand. (LV 38)

In the very next line, the first of section 28, the poet makes it explicit that the significance of immediate, tactile experience is in the role it plays in the reformulation of the self. "Is this then a touch?" he asks, "....quivering me to a new identity" (LV 39). But the reader might easily lose track of the question, for the twenty-eight lines that follow, comprising all of sections 28 and 29, are a riveting and dramatic rendition of a highly charged autoerotic