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Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	Why Whitman?
Chapter 1.	Things of the Earth
Chapter 2.	The Fall of the Redwood Tree
Chapter 3.	Global and Local, Nature and Earth
Chapter 4.	The Island Poet and the Sacred Shore
Chapter 5.	Urbanization and War
Chapter 6.	Life Review
Notes
Bibliography

Acknowledgments

This book seeks a double audience of ecocritics and Whitman scholars, a goal that has required me to draw upon the resources of a wide and generous community. An anonymous reviewer at the University of Iowa Press and my own energetic students and colleagues in the study of American nature writing and environmental rhetoric have provided the impetus and good suggestions I needed to apply the new perspective and methods of ecological criticism to Whitman’s poetry for the first time in a book-length work. As for Whitman studies, I have been very lucky in having the attentive guidance of the two leading scholars alive today—the editor of the Whitman Series at Iowa, Ed Folsom, and my dear colleague Whitman biographer Jerome Loving, both of whom read drafts at every stage of the work and gave good suggestions and strong encouragement. I lack the words to thank them sufficiently. Holly Carver of the University of Iowa Press joined Ed Folsom in encouraging me to submit my manuscript, for which I thank her. Sherry Ceniza and the students in her Whitman seminar at Texas Tech also read early chapter drafts and discussed the work with me. My graduate students at Texas A&M provided readings and assistance throughout the project. I owe special appreciation to Soojin Ahn, Lynda Ely, Georgina Kennedy, Steve Marsden, Paul McCann, Amy Montz, Dave Pruett, Matt Sherwood, and Lindsay Sloan. I thank Larry Mitchell, head of the English department at Texas A&M, Dean Charles Johnson and Associate Deans Larry Oliver and Ben Crouch of the College of Liberal Arts, and James Rosenheim of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for providing crucial support, both moral and monetary. I thank my daughter, Myrth Killingsworth, an ecocritic in her own right, for being my writing companion throughout the process. In the notes to the text, I try to acknowledge other debts and to show every chance I get that I mean what I say in the introduction: Every scholarly work proceeds as much from a community as it does from the efforts of a solitary individual.

I dedicate this work to my wife and frequent coauthor, Jacqueline S. Palmer, who has but little interest in the interpretation of poetry but knows the value of creative living and how it depends upon the influx of earthly energies. Thank you, Jackie, for showing me the way.

Why Whitman?

I started college in 1970, the year we celebrated the first Earth Day, two years after Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act. In my junior year, 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed. One of the first big test cases was enacted not far from the University of Tennessee where I went to school. The law posed a problem for the plans of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to dam the Little Tennessee River at a place called Tellico. In fact, TVA had already done substantial work on the dam when the new law was invoked by wildlife biologists working with people we learned to call “environmentalists,” a word whose origin dates from my college years. The Oxford English Dictionary (1972 supplement) gives 1970 as the earliest instance of the term as used to mean “one who is concerned with the preservation of the environment (from pollution, etc.)” (Killingsworth and Palmer, Ecospeak 41). It may seem that environmentalists have been with us forever, but they were a relatively new breed, or were traveling under a new name, when they enlisted the help of a rare little fish called the snail darter, which demanded free-flowing water for spawning and whose presence at Tellico stymied the mighty TVA.

At the time, I was an avid hiker and bird-watcher and an English major with a special interest in Romantic nature poetry. I had been brought up with a love for outdoor life and respect for wild things. But like many young people of the day, I began to feel a deeper identity with nature, a politically charged identity in the early 1970s. My peers and I felt threatened by the same forces that endangered the snail darter. In our minds, these forces coalesced to form what we called “the system,” or “the machine,” as in “the war machine.” As the war in Vietnam lurched toward its chaotic conclusion in 1975, the attention of a mobilized activist youth turned to the war against nature, as we saw it, a war carried out by agents like TVA, the pesticide industry, the oil giants, all part of a pervasive power born during the massive technological mobilization that never wound down after firing up for World War II. President Eisenhower had called it the “military-industrial complex,” a system that only grew stronger in our nation’s stand-off with the Communist powers in the cold war years.

Like many causes during those formative years of environmentalism, the opposition to the Tellico Dam depended partly on scientific investigation and partly on a web of political identity reinforced by metaphors and myths. The famous nature writer Peter Matthiessen invoked the war metaphor when he traveled to east Tennessee in 1979 to write an article on Tellico for the New York Review of Books.He crafted a compelling image of the green and flowing nature of Appalachia cut and partitioned by TVA’s concrete and barbed wire, patrolled by armed guards whose presence made the old farms and forests seem like a war zone. Matthiessen spoke of the opposition to the project not only by environmentalists with their snail darter but also by a much older endangered species in the region, the Cherokee Indians. The proposed dam would flood a burial ground and the site of an ancient city that the Cherokees held sacred. In Matthiessen’s view, TVA was an irresistible power of government and industry victimizing a peaceful Native people who only wanted to maintain their traditions and honor their ancestors, as well as the tiny snail darter that needed the river to live and propagate its kind, a fetish in those days for the burgeoning movements of political ecology.

The opposition to the Tellico Dam reenacted a grand myth of the conservation movement, stirring the century-old roots of environmentalism with the memory of early efforts to preserve nature in the face of industrial expansion and urban growth. At the center of the myth was the legendary John Muir, the father of conservation. Muir, who entered adulthood as a talented mechanic and inventor, devoted body and mind to the culture of the machine. But a factory accident blinded him temporarily and left him to reconsider his place in the world. When his sight returned, like Paul, he was transformed. Vowing to devote his life to studying not the creations of humankind but those of God, he left his home in the northern Midwest and tramped across the continent, settling finally in the Sierra Nevada, where he formed a bone-deep identification with the high mountains and the great Sequoia trees (trees named, incidentally, for the Sequoya, whose birthplace was Tellico). Muir wrote volumes of poetic prose extolling the beauty and wisdom of nature, he entertained poets and presidents from Emerson to Theodore Roosevelt in his beloved mountains, he founded the Sierra Club to work for conservation, and he enjoyed many successes in wilderness protection, including the preservation of the Yosemite Valley as a national park. But when he lost the battle to save the Hetch-Hetchy Valley in the late 1890s, his energy failed and he died. It was a dam, built to ensure water for the fast-growing urban population of San Francisco, that did him in. Muir’s identification with the land was so complete that his own life seemed to depend upon the preservation of the living waters and the open valley.

By the time TVA finally got to build its dam at Tellico, after hired scientists successfully transplanted snail darters in other rivers, the course of my own environmentalism was firmly established. The sense that something valuable had been lost in the Tellico Valley with its little river and fertile farms led me to join the Sierra Club and to identify with its founder.

My deepening awareness of environmental issues during the years of the Tellico dispute overlapped exactly with my years as a graduate student in English, 1974–1979. On hikes in the Smoky Mountains, one of my regular companions was my friend and major professor F. DeWolfe Miller, who had among other distinguished accomplishments edited a fine edition of Whitman’s Drum-Taps and was an authority on Whitman’s wartime experience. Professor Miller directed my dissertation, which ultimately led to my first book, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. As I plodded toward completion of the book, which was finally published in 1989, I worked on a side project involving the language of environmentalism. I had begun to keep a big box of articles about the human threat to nature that I collected from random sources. Now and again I would dip into the box and write an essay about the rhetoric of the environmentalists and their opponents. In 1985 I met Jacqueline Palmer, who also had a box of articles. We decided to merge boxes and work on a book together. The result appeared in 1992, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America.

The first article in my box was Matthiessen’s essay on Tellico, “How to Kill a Valley,” which I saved just as I was saying good-bye to DeWolfe Miller and my friends in Tennessee and heading west where my job search led me. At the time, it never occurred to me to think about my work on Whitman and the body as a project strongly connected to my political and scholarly interest in environmentalism. Considering all the time that Professor Miller and I spent mulling over lines from Leaves of Grass as we walked mountain paths through the occasional virgin stand of hemlocks among acres of towering forest regrown in the perpetually wet Appalachian earth after years of logging gave way to national park protection, and considering that I wrote the first chapter of my dissertation while encamped on one of South Carolina’s sea islands where the very plants and animals as well as the music of the great ocean resonated with Whitman’s experience as the island poet of the New York coastline, I can now only feel obtuse at missing the connection.

But perhaps there are good reasons for my having missed it. Critical consciousness is a communal process, and intellectual culture like any other tends to create blind spots along with its insights in the process of delimiting topics or points of focus for study. For one thing, I was cautioned to keep my work in rhetoric separate from my work in poetics, following the tradition that comes down from Aristotle. A reader of an early draft of Whitman’s Poetry of the Body urged me to delete every mention of the word rhetoric from my pages. Though people like Paul de Man were using the word regularly at the time to describe their criticism of poetic tropes, rhetoric was mainly associated in the American academy of the 1970s and 1980s with practical work in composition (which occupied much of my time as a teacher) and with political prose. I found that my earliest colleagues in the study of environmental rhetoric came from departments of speech communication. Even when the first works of self-proclaimed ecocriticism began to appear in American literary studies in the 1990s, the focus fell primarily upon nonfiction prose in the tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. The work I did myself centered on Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and other naturalists who wrote lovely prose with a keen political edge. ¹  

The political edge was important. In the early days of environmental rhetoric and ecocriticism, we gravitated toward writers who were overtly political in their engagement with nature. Our chief aim was to “evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (Kerridge 5). ²   This approach limited the field nicely as far as nineteenth-century authors were concerned. In England, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, who caught something of the Luddite spirit, could be profitably studied as early influences on environmentalist consciousness. ³   In America, nature poetry seemed tame by comparison to both the English Romantics and our own authors of fiery transcendental prose. Until recently, it did not occur to me to ask why.

I was led back to Whitman and his contemporaries in American poetry through my study of conceptual metaphors in ecology, a study that gradually morphed into a preoccupation with “ecopoetics.” Instead of looking for influences and forerunners of environmentalism in literature from various periods, I gravitated toward a form of study that attempted a more radical investigation into the possibilities and limits of human creativity, a study of how we use language to figure out our relationship to the earth, the study of poiesis as a kind of making that honors the search for beauty and meaning in human exchanges with nature. As I began to see that the appeal of scientific and activist prose depended upon metaphorical links with topics considered outside the circle of environmentalist concern—Rachel Carson’s linking of pesticide abuse with nuclear weaponry and with advances in medical research, for example—I kept remembering my work on Whitman’s wild personifications of the earth, his borrowings from medical science, his use of everything from bees and flowers to machines and electricity in celebrations of human productivity and sexual experience. When I decided it was time to choose a site for a scholarly treatment of American ecopoetics, I kept finding myself on the familiar ground of Whitman’s poetry. After finally accepting it as my point of departure, I have found the old ground rich enough to generate another book, which amounts to a reconsideration of Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and a reconsideration of that world through the lens of Whitman’s mighty language.

In this thinking, I find myself part of a communal shift in ecocriticism. I follow the British scholar Jonathan Bate, for example, who has suggested that ecopoetics may be an ascendant term in the field: “Ecopoetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling-place—the prefix eco- is derived from Greek oikos, ‘the home or place of dwelling’”(Song of the Earth 75)—and the terms “making” and “place of dwelling” recall Martin Heidegger’s famous essays “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” which have been widely cited in environmental rhetoric, philosophy, and politics if not in ecocriticism before Bate. Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” illustrates how German Green thinking links back to Muir’s experience and anticipates the episode of the snail darter by focusing on a dam—this time a hydroelectric project on the Rhine River—as an example of technology that not only uses the resources of nature for human purposes (a necessary and inevitable requirement of life) but actually alters nature at the level of being. Unlike a boat or even a bridge, the dam interferes with the very “riverness” of the Rhine. Heidegger’s distinctions among crafts that are in varying degrees purely instrumental in their negligence of nonhuman being or creative in their concern for enhancing both sides of the interaction become for Bate the foundation of an ecopoetical hermeneutics, which for me suggests a way of questioning the interplay of human language and the objects of nature, paralleling the interplay of authors and readers. Both forms of engagement—from author and nature to author and reader—are matters of give and take that may involve mutual betterment, harmful neglect, or a struggle for domination and manipulation. As Kenneth Burke says in A Rhetoric of Motives, the process of identification, which I see at the heart of both environmental rhetoric and ecopoetics, is traditionally associated with overcoming division in a setting of discord and domination (Burke famously invokes the barnyard) but also includes the kinds of appeals associated with the lover, the peacemaker, and the apostle.

While Bate insists that the ecopoetical turn he pursues does not deny the political import of nature writing and ecological criticism, it does suggest for him the simplemindedness of beginning and ending critical work with “a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues”; instead, he argues, ecopoetics should seek “a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell upon the earth” (Song of the Earth 266). And while the field should not be confined to poetry as traditionally defined, or even imaginative literature broadly defined—poiesis being an aspect of creativity that touches all parts of life and all genres of writing—it should recognize that poetry deserves special attention: “the rhythmic, syntactic and linguistic intensifications that are characteristic of verse-writing frequently give a peculiar force to the poiesis” so that poetry may well offer “the language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling” (75–76). Metered writing offers “a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat,” the hum of the body that echoes the song of the earth (76).

For me, ecopoetics remains a tributary of ecocriticism, not a separate stream as Bate sometimes. My study favors ecopoetics but also goes with the mainstream of ecocriticism at times. Roughly speaking, I use the term ecopoetics when my readings aim for a primarily phenomenological significance and ecocriticism when they take a sharply political turn, invoking issues on the current environmentalist agenda. The perspectives shift here and there to show the multifaceted qualities of my subject.

As for my choice of subject in particular—Walt Whitman’s poetry—Bate’s search into the canon of high Romanticism and its philosophical heritage for the roots of ecopoetics certainly hints toward a rationale for exploring American versions of Romantic and post-Romantic writing. ⁴   But we can also see an eccopoetical treatment of poets like Whitman as part of an expansion of the canon that dominated early ecocriticism now under way on other fronts as well. Ecocritics are pursuing their themes in ever wider circles of international literature and in a greater variety of genres and modes. They are attending more closely to women writers and underrepresented ethnic groups who have their own versions of environmentalism—ecofeminism, the environmental justice movement, and postcolonial concerns with globalization. ⁵   Recent critics have gone so far as to suggest that since all writing is concerned with place at some level, any text may yield to the methods and may advance the favored themes of ecocriticism (see Dobrin). Yet some seasoned authors draw back at this suggestion. Patrick D. Murphy, for example, whose work champions ecofeminists and writers of color, suggests in his book Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature that ecocriticism must be careful to distinguish among different levels of engagement with the earth. ⁶   Struggling to keep Lawrence Buell’s concept of the “environmental imagination” alive (when even Buell in his current work seems to be moving on), Murphy argues that “nature-oriented” literature keeps the nonhuman Other as a central concern, refusing to treat the environment as a mere setting for human actions. While his category of “environmental literature” (as distinct from “nature writing,” “environmental writing,” and “nature literature”) is wide enough to admit Walt Whitman—largely because of Whitman’s willingness to “encounter the other” in nature, a feature of “environmental” poetry in this scheme (Murphy 11)—I would argue that Whitman’s poetry and prose also participate in the other categories of Murphy’s taxonomy and that we can sometimes see shifts from category to category within the same text. Failing to find the value in categories that bleed so heavily into one another, I would prefer the widest possible opening of the field and say that ecopoetics has as much to offer to a study of cereal boxes or technical reports as it does to canonical American poetry. ⁷   In this position, I join Cheryll Glotfelty, among others, in claiming for ecocriticism a field as wide as that claimed by feminism, Marxism, postcolonial studies, and any other critical school. It is not the literature we study but ecocriticism itself that is bound to keep the earthly other in sharp focus.

As the scope of ecocriticism has expanded, so have the theoretical underpinnings of the field grown more complex and sophisticated. Writers such as Bate, who strives powerfully (and in my view successfully) to establish a theoretical foundation for ecopoetics that extends (even as it questions) the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Martin Heidegger, admits the difficult position of ecocriticism in the current critical climate. Because the “‘crisis of representation’ or ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is at the core of ‘postmodern’ literary theory” (or any other version of theory that begins with the prefix post-), “[e]cology, with its affirmation of not only the existence, but also the sacredness, of the-things-of-nature-in-themselves seems naïve in comparison” (Song of the Earth 247). However, if ecocriticism and environmental rhetoric emerged under the sign of a “naive” realism, which views “nature” as an object that can be brought seamlessly into the language of those who would defend, promote, and protect it, recent work has developed along a continuum whose opposite pole is a radical social constructionist position, which says that nature is always only a construct of language that has more to say about human desire and political ideology than it does about earthly objects themselves. ⁸   Between these two poles of naive empiricism and social construction we find a variety of positions. On one side, realism has developed into a more complex viewpoint that, while granting the complexity and difficulty of representation, retains some faith in the factuality and reality of the solid earth. At the other pole, one step back from pure social constructionism, we find phenomenological positions such as those of Bate and Buell, who adopt “a more dialectical model for understanding the relationship between social ideologies and the actual dynamics of natural systems and processes” (Levin 175). ⁹  

Like my subject Walt Whitman, I find myself occupying various points along the continuum in different stages of my thinking and writing. And while I would prefer to see myself in the exact middle, somewhere between the complex realist and the phenomenological positions, it is not my goal to settle the internecine disputes on theory within the field but to reflect and expand upon the theoretical possibilities, adding some neglected or shortchanged perspectives, such as new developments in “thing theory” (Brown) and the concept of “resonance” in ecological communication (Luhmann), both of which have powerful implications for a nature-oriented mysticism like Whitman’s, even as I hold some of the latest developments at arm’s length. I cannot accept, for example, David Mazel’s notion that “the supermarket is a complex and instructive nexus of energy flows, as pedagogically sound a window into ecological relations as a pristine forest or wetland” (28), though I admire his critique of environmentalism as a cloak for personal and political agendas on the part of those who claim to “speak for nature.” ¹⁰   I appreciate Lawrence Buell’s blurring of the lines between nature and culture, and between rural and urban life, as a foil for the romanticizing of pristine nature as an alternative to human folly, an earthly force to replace the heavenly gods as the object of our appeals and hope, but I resist going too far in that direction either. The environmental historian William Cronon, on whom Buell relies, is no doubt right in suggesting that the wilderness is more of a myth than a reality in modern life, but the reason for that condition is that human beings have remade the earth on a scale and with powers that our human ancestors, who also walked every part of this land, could not have managed. In her introductory essay “Ecocriticism,” Kate Rigby thus argues that it is “precisely the imperilment of the biosphere wrought by [human alteration] which impels the ecocritical reinstatement of the referent as a matter of legitimate concern" (154). It is still valuable for the environmental imagination to reconstruct an image of wilderness and, while acknowledging that the world has altered under human influence, remember that something resists us.

It has been said that facts are the things that refuse to yield to the human will in thought and language, that remain the same no matter what we think or say (Latour 93; Fleck 98). Along these lines, we might also say that while Nature with a capital N is certainly a product of human thinking, an ideological construct, the earth continues to be one thing that resists. Rigby writes, “to the extent that the ecological crisis pertains to what Lacan terms the ‘real,’ that which precedes, defies and disrupts symbolic representation, it remains strangely elusive to thought, even while pressing in upon us daily, shifting the literal ground of our being”(152). Ecocriticism attempts to bring the crisis and the real into the foreground against formidable odds: “For at the same time that ecosystems sustaining life on earth have become ever more critically endangered by our growing numbers and levels of consumption, ever more people (above all, those whose ecological debt is the largest) live at an ever greater remove from the natural world, unmindful of their impact upon the earth” (151–152). Looking for beauty and meaning in an increasingly engineered world, ecopoetics has an interest in preserving the concept of nonhuman being, that which exists outside language and culture and which hints at something larger and more lasting than the products of human hubris. This acknowledgment of the other-than-human—or “more-than-human natural world”(Rigby 155)—is one of the key points I take away from my reading of the final chapter in Bate’s The Song of the Earth—entitled “What Are Poets For?”—which offers a cogent apology for ecopoetics in light of the late-twentieth-century distaste for the concept of representation. What I attempt in the following chapters is an extension of Bate’s line of thinking that, in drawing upon American pragmatism, among other sources, points us away from a preoccupation with representation. Pragmatism grows impatient with definition, with Heideggerian and Platonic essentialism, and wants to know not so much what something is but what it does and how it fits in larger patterns and systems. ¹¹  

Even with the new range and theoretical richness of ecocriticism, few scholars have undertaken monographs that look deeply into the writings of a single author. Indeed, some of the leaders in the field have been criticized for their truncated readings that never seem to go beyond the level of the general survey or introduction. ¹²   With this work on Whitman, I hope to signal a new trend in the field, the aim of which is not only to read deeply into the work of single authors but also, while acknowledging the authors’ participation in larger movements, to go beyond the general categorization of them as “naturalistic,” “pastoral,” “nature oriented,” “bioregional,” “environmental,” “romantic,” “modern,” or “postmodern” and capture something of their individuality as people and as poets living in their particular corners of the earth.

My central ecocritical contention is that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology. At midcareer, when he was producing his most exuberant celebrations of human potential and natural abundance, Whitman was forced to redefine his life and poetic mission in the face of a great and terrible war. The Civil War became the defining moment for American culture as he knew it. The early poems in Leaves of Grass, written and published in the 1850s, anticipated the conflict with frantic calls for democratic union. Then came the poems of Drum-Taps and his best-known prose works, which illuminated the experience of living through the war as a witness and worker in the military hospitals. Finally, the later poems surveyed an America devastated by loss but sustaining the hope of a more fully democratic nation for the future. Scholars agree that the poems written after the war diverge sharply from those written before in tone, style, and form even when addressing the same themes, including the theme of nature. The difference in quality and voice has been a matter of much dispute. An ecopoetical reading offers a new perspective on the changes in Whitman’s work. The poems reflected upon shifting historical contexts, not only the obvious social and political changes brought on by the war but also geographical upheavals in an age of westward expansion, urbanization, galloping development in industry and technology, and emerging globalization. The poems were also affected by Whitman’s own physical life. Mediating between world and text, the poet’s body felt the accelerated decline of illness and grief associated with the war and its aftereffects, helping to account in part for the increasing abstraction and distance in the postwar poetry’s treatment of natural scenes and phenomena.

In short, Whitman’s poetry forms a powerful record of life in an aging body, in a war-torn nation, and in an increasingly troubled landscape. Ecopoetical scholarship traces the patterns of this record and seeks connections to our own times. Studies in environmental rhetoric and ecocriticism have suggested, for example, that the discourse of environmentalism in the 1970s had deep ties to cold war rhetoric and the experience of the Vietnam War and that with the new politics of globalization (and rhetoric about the “end of the cold war”), the old metaphors and myths (such as the “population bomb” and other relics of the atomic age) have grown stale and fail to attract a new generation of activists and scholars in humanistic environmental studies. ¹³   Concern about the “shelf life” of issues and their representations should make us wary of historical arguments that identify post–World War II cultural representations with nineteenth-century Romanticism, as seen in everything from the popular use of the term Luddite to the canonization of Wordsworth and Thoreau in British and American ecocriticism. But the interplay among the discourses of war and nature—the world as a scene of battle enacted repeatedly over many generations in the last two centuries—strikes me as a pattern with ongoing significance. This pattern and many others stand out boldly in Whitman’s writing in part because we can see it at a distance.

I suspect that the tendency of early ecocriticism to canonize particular kinds of nature writing arose from a need to seek allies and find heroes in the struggle to save the earth. As we come to see “saving the earth” as one metaphor among many—a metaphor conditioned perhaps by the historical experience of the cold war—our focus can broaden to include a greater diversity of writers, the study of whose work may lead to new ways of understanding the human experience of (and on) the earth. And these new ways, we can hope, will partake of values that have guided poetics since ancient times—the search for beauty and meaning in a warring world and an alternative to discourses whose value is measured by the starkest gauges of utility and material profit.

I take as my point of departure in chapter 1 a poem from the second (1856) edition of Leaves of Grass—“This Compost”—in my view, Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology. The poem begins not with a celebration of identity with the earth but with a dramatic recognition of difference. We see the poet face to face with the earthly other, alienated from the very ground of his daily walk by the “thingishness” of the environment, which forces him toward the recognition of death, disease, and dissolution. Though best known as a poet of imposition—the “imperial self,” an ego spreading outward—Whitman appears in “This Compost” and in several poems and passages from the 1855 and 1856 Leaves as a poet of limits. This chapter considers particularly the limits of language as the poet understood them. Drawing upon recent ventures in what has somewhat whimsically been called “thing theory,” as well as theories of ecological communication, I identify in Whitman’s response to the earth three crucial incapacities—cognitive, moral, and metaphysical—associated with knowing the objects of the earth through human language. In readings of such poems as “A Song of the Rolling Earth” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” I attempt a sketch of Whitman’s metaphysics as an emerging mysticism of earthly attachment, anticipating the “deep ecology” of the late twentieth century. In many of the early poems, Whitman prefers resonance and indirection to a more thoroughgoing transcendent knowledge and confident representation as a model for human interaction with the earth.

But Whitman’s tendency to see the things of the earth as resonant spirits, available to human consciousness only indirectly, is balanced by the tug of a different poetical impulse, the tendency to see nature as a resource. This impulse informs a venerable tradition of nature poetry in nineteenth-century American literature, which takes an object of nature—a spider, a seashell, a water fowl—as a point of reflection upon some aspect of the human condition. This genre, with its tangled history and its problematical but pervasive central trope of personification, occupies center stage in chapter 2, which shows how, depending upon the context, personification can be allied with any one of three politically rich attitudes toward the natural world: nature as object, nature as resource, and nature as spirit. A study of Whitman’s late-career poem “Song of the Redwood-Tree” demonstrates his struggle with these various attitudes and the trouble he had, despite his seemingly confident alignment of his poetic program with the reprehensible politics of manifest destiny, in resolving his doubts about the materialistic development of America’s land and people.

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of manifest destiny in an exploration of what I see as the globalizing impulse in Whitman’s work. The argument is that, from the ecocritical perspective, Whitman’s concept of spiritual power takes on a sinister aspect in poems that try to extend the poet’s reach beyond the local to national and global contexts, as in the 1871 poem “Passage to India.” The globalizing ambition in Leaves of Grass, as in American culture generally, is associated with technological development, imperialist politics, abstraction and distance with respect to the natural world, and a spiritualistic pretension to religious superiority. This chapter follows the recent trend to explore “the larger problems that [both] post-colonialism and ecocriticism grapple with,” most especially “problems of identity and representation” (O’Brien 145).

Chapter 4 goes the other way, looking deeper into Whitman’s success as a local poet—even a “regional” poet—a term of belittlement in the nationalistic and imperialistic culture of modernity, which distinguishes sharply between poets whose appeal is merely regional and poets whose appeal is “universal.” An ecopoetical rethinking of such categories favors the view of Walt Whitman as an island poet of the northeastern coastline of America, a poet belonging to a special location, for him a sacred place. Most of Whitman’s masterpieces feature scenes of the shoreline and the wetlands of America—encounters between the poet and his “lover, the sea” in “Song of Myself,” “Spontaneous Me,” and “This Compost”; the ocean as the powerful death-speaking mother of the boy on the beach in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” or the force that threatens the “beautiful gigantic swimmer” in “The Sleepers”; the flood tide of the sea-going river that separates the great cities in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; and the swampy retreat of the mournful “solitary singer” in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Through readings of scenes where water meets land in Leaves of Grass, this chapter reveals the significance of sacred places for ecopoetics in general and for the metaphysics of Whitmanian soulfulness in particular.

Chapter 5 considers the effects of modernization upon Whitman’s thinking and poetry, focusing on two dominant forces of modern life—urbanization and war. I begin with a modest revision of the view that sees Whitman as America’s first urban poet, considering him instead as an urbanizing poet, a powerful representative of the generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans who, in ever greater numbers, left homes in country villages and small towns to become city dwellers. His vision of a city life built on natural models and preserving an ecologically rich exchange of natural energies among people and places—a vision celebrated in the 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—gradually gave way to doubt about the sanity of urban existence. As early as the 1860 Leaves, the poet is inclined to retreat to “paths untrodden” to seek renewal of his energies in communion with the earth and with a select few beloved companions rather than the masses of the great city. In the middle of Whitman’s adjustment to city life, the Civil War intervened. The weight of critical opinion suggests that the poems written after the war lack the vitality and power of the poems of the 1850s. Recently, biographical critics have suggested another view: that the war in fact “saved Whitman.” ¹⁴   Both views acknowledge that the war brought a great change in the poet’s work. A corresponding change swept over the whole of American life, the social world and its natural environment. Urbanization, technological advancement, and globalization, in rhetoric and in reality, were bound to leave their mark on poetic life. This chapter considers the curious fact that Whitman’s direct treatments of war are nearly always loosely packaged with writings about nature—poems such as “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” and “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” placed alongside poems of the battlefield, camp, and hospital in Drum-Taps and the prose memoranda of the war included alongside rambling accounts of nature in Specimen Days. I argue that the war undermined Whitman’s confidence in his earthly mysticism and his faith in the redemptive cycles of nature. The wartime poet added modernism to his repertoire, experimenting with imagistic genres that abandoned the prophetic mode in favor of something closer to a reportorial objectivity. When the prophetic muse did overtake him, he began to write a very different kind of poetry, extending the martial spirit he admired in the young soldiers he met to the nationalistic goals of westward expansion. A poem like “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”—which first appeared in Drum-Taps—foreshadows the political and aesthetic trends of the big poems published in the 1870s, notably “Passage to India” and “Song of the Redwood-Tree.”

Chapter 6 shows how, in his final writings, Whitman struggled to recover his soulful connection to the earth and thereby renew his inspiration. But in the practice of life review that he undertakes in works like Specimen Days, he tends not to recover so much as to transform his Romanticism, ending up with a perspective ironically closer both to earlier poets like Wordsworth and Emerson and also to the later environmentalists whose political program depends upon a strong sense of humanity’s alienation from nature. Now Whitman appears to us in layers, his profoundly original experiment with dramatizing poetically the resonant and indirect communion with nature still active but competing for attention with a more modern realism that suggests the objectivity of a scientific observer or the photographic gaze of the ecotourist, an aggressive view of nature as a resource for humanity’s development, and a Romantic outlook that in passive states sees nature as a retreat from urban mania and a benchmark for human development and in its activist version uses nature as a perspective for critiquing the human world.

In his many moods, Whitman appears, in the reading I offer here, not only as one of our most powerfully creative poetic experimenters but also as a representative figure in American culture. His difficulty in sustaining a vision of nature is not so much a personal failure as an indicator of the immensity and difficulty of the task he set for himself. We continue to struggle with the same issues, above all how to create a discourse worthy of the earth—our home, our mother, our what? And we can continue to profit from retracing the steps of our poetic forebears, none of whom is more problematic, or more rewarding, than Walt Whitman.

Things of the Earth

Troubles in the relationships among physical objects, people, and abstractions haunt American ecopoetics from the nineteenth century down to the present time. For his part, Whitman follows Wordsworth in resisting the personification of abstractions—treating ideas as if they were people. ¹   And like Marx, he resists the treatment of people as if they were objects—the property of slave owners or cogs in the industrial machine—as well as the treatment of abstractions as reified objects.

But problems arise in Leaves of Grass with the status of natural objects. The poet’s inclination to see himself reflected in nature frequently leads him into an Anglo-American poetic tradition in which the status of an object appears to depend upon its metaphysical or psychological value. The spider of Jonathan Edwards, the waterfall of Henry Vaughan, the waterfowl of William Cullen Bryant, the marsh hen of Sidney Lanier stand as signs of God’s power, glory, and grace. Their standing as earthly beings is sacrificed on the altar of allegory and metaphor. Even Wordsworth’s daffodils, the bees of Emerson and Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s chambered nautilus, Marianne Moore’s paper nautilus, and Theodore Roethke’s rose ultimately serve as grist for the metaphysical mill, representing some aspect of the poet’s identity, some imposition of ego upon the face of nature. Notwithstanding strictures against the pathetic fallacy in literary theory and against anthropomorphism in science, personification and other tropes of imposition persist not only in twentieth-century poetry but even in scientifically informed nonfiction prose, in such influential works as Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for which the central metaphors of the earth’s body and the health of the landscape are keys to an activist rhetoric (see Killingsworth and Palmer, Ecospeak, chapter 2).

Such tropes no doubt reinforce human identity with the earth, but we might do well to recall that the etymology of the word trope suggests “a turning” and that turning away is the characteristic action of hysteria, according to Freud, a neurosis in which something is denied that eventually comes to haunt the hysterical subject. What may be denied here is that in extracting personal meaning from earthly objects or treating them as poetic property upon which to build the “more stately mansions” of metaphysics, nature poetry turns away from the earth. It aligns ideologically with the extractive industries that overexploit precious minerals, water, and soil, only to find the “environmental problems” of toxicity and scarcity cropping up later like the return of the repressed in the psychoanalytic model (see Killingsworth and Palmer, “The Discourse of ‘Environmentalist Hysteria’”).

To some extent, as a human art poetry cannot avoid participating in this kind of extractive or acquisitive discourse. Perhaps the most we can ask is that ecopoetics seek a heightened consciousness, a reconsideration of verbal practices that involve categorizing, naming, or identifying with natural objects. At several moments in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856), Whitman arrives at this point, pausing to consider his relationship to the earth as a poet and a human being. He comes face to face with certain phenomena in nature that cause him to admit his puzzlement and incapacity, even terror. His poetic response anticipates a recent theoretical trend in literary and cultural studies—the consideration of things as a category distinct from physical objects, abstractions, and people.

It is the unspeakableness of things that Whitman most commonly dramatizes during these arresting moments. Things suggest the unspeakable in at least two senses that many of us learned directly from our parents. For the unspeakable in the sense of cognitive incapacity, for example, I had in my own household my stepfather’s endless stream of fumblings for the right word—the thingamabob, the whatchamacallit, the doohickey—the thing whose name cannot be recalled in the heat of activity, as in “Hand me that thing on the work bench.” For the unspeakable in the sense of unfit to be named for fear of moral or social impropriety, I had my mother’s usage. For her, as for the parents of many American children, “thing” was a euphemism for the body’s “private parts,” as in the hesitant instruction to “tell the doctor about your . . . ah . . . thing.” The “thingamabob” and the “ah . . . thing” form an ironic pair in a memory I have of my mother stifling a laugh when a woman pulled in next to us at a gas station, the lid of her car’s trunk swinging wide open, and complained loudly to the attendant, “I can’t get my thing down.”

A third sense of the unspeakable thing is one I gleaned not from home but from excursions into Eastern mysticism and Beat poetry. I mean the ineffable, as in “the thing experienced during deep meditation that is beyond words”—the One, according to Hindu metaphysics, “before whom words recoil” (Shankara, qtd. in Huxley 24). In an introduction to the classic of Chinese mysticism, Lao Tzu’s The Way of Life (Tao Te Ching), R. B. Blakney writes that the mystics of Lao Tzu’s time came upon a “problem of communication”: “They had discovered, they said, a unique Something for which there was no word or name. It did not belong to the world in which language is born” (17). ²   If you know it, says the Zen master, you can’t speak it; if you can speak it, you don’t know it. Jack Kerouac provides a fine example in On the Road. Recalling the performance of a jazz saxophone player in San Francisco, the ecstatic protagonist Dean Moriarity says, “Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.” The narrator, Sal Paradise, asks him what he means by this thing, by “IT”:

“Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables—ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling and soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT—” Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it. (Kerouac 206)

All three of the linguistic limits or incapacities associated with thingish phenomena—the cognitive “thingamabob,” the moral “ah . . . thing,” and the mystical “It”—intertwine in Whitman’s poems. He dramatizes the cognitive incapacity with the frequent use of words like “something”—especially in the early editions of Leaves of Grass in which the poet seems eager to get at states of mind, instinctual relationships, and earthly conditions that have no definite name, as in the line “Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs, / Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven” (LG 1855, 30). For the same purpose, he often resorts to the vague demonstrative “this,” as in the never-answered question from the 1855 version of “Song of Myself,” “Is this then a touch? . . . .quivering me to a new identity” (LG 1855, 32). Compare the first line of Holmes’s poem “The Chambered Nautilus”—“This is the ship of pearl” (Holmes, in Ellmann 139)—in which “this” merely connects the name in the title to the first image of the poem in what becomes a virtual slide show of metaphors, the way a lecturer uses a pointer. In contrast, Whitman’s “this” hangs like a question mark in the air. Like the pronouns “I” and “you,” the demonstrative “this” is what the linguists call a shifter, or deictic. It shifts attention or points to a context, which in this case is unspecified and thus leaves the reader searching (see Benveniste; see also Jakobson).

As for the unspeakable in the sense of morally unfit to be mentioned in public, we need only remember that a contemporary reviewer of Leaves of Grass invoked the old legal formula for sodomy as the crime too horrible to be named among Christians. “In our allusion to this book,” wrote Rufus Griswold in the New York Criterion of November 10, 1855, “we have found it impossible to convey . . . our disgust and detestation . . . without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite; but it does seem that some one should . . . undertake a most disagreeable, yet stern duty. The records of crime show that many monsters have gone on in impunity, because the exposure of their vileness was attended with too great indelicacy. Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum” (Hindus 33). ³   Whitman himself hesitated to name the emotion that he felt for other men. In the 1860 version of the notorious Calamus poems, the poet wonders “if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?” (CRE 596). The word “like” in this context functions as a thing, “a place holder for some future specifying operation” (Brown 4). In Calamus, as in conversations with friends like Horace Traubel, Whitman seemed to be guarding a secret, hinting toward his homosexuality without confessing it directly. ⁴   But he could also have been incapacitated by his uncertainty over the emotional turmoil he felt about other men or about his own sexual “nature.” It was a thing he had trouble naming. “Manly love” and “adhesiveness” and “comradeship” never quite covered it. “I often say to myself about Calamus,” he told Traubel, “perhaps it means more or less than what I thought myself—means different: perhaps I don’t know what it all means—perhaps never did know” (Traubel 1:76). ⁵   Whatever we may think about Whitman’s disingenuousness, his “foxiness,”we need not discount his struggle over the right language and his worries about the “unspeakable.” ⁶  

At the third point of incapacity, Whitman dramatizes what seems to be a version of the mystical ineffable in metaphors mingling things sexual, sentimental, and metaphysical. “I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning,” says the poet in the 1855 “Song of Myself,” ostensibly addressing his soul: “You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart” (LG 1855, 15). Losing their ordinary functions and anatomical coordinates, the heart and tongue in this passage become uncannily thingish. The images “hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable” (Brown 5).

One of Whitman’s most powerful dramatizations of thingish incapacity occurs in the poem “This Compost,” which dates from the second (1856) edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem stands as perhaps the most remarkable nineteenth-century contribution to the poetry of ecology in America. It gathers up the threads of the rhetorical and poetic tradition known as “the sublime,” the expression of awe that inheres in “human beings’ encounters with a nonhuman world whose power ultimately exceeds theirs,” inspiring a sense of humility and mortality (Hitt 609–610). ⁷   And it anticipates the conjunction of science, activism, and spirituality that would become known as “deep ecology” in the nuclear age of the late twentieth century, a worldview that aims toward a reintegration of subject and object, human and nonhuman, but begins with an acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth, autonomy, and power of the more-than-human. ⁸   In my reading of “This Compost,” the poem’s ecological power depends upon its treatment of earthy thingishness. To capture fully the nature mystic’s view of the earth as the “Wholly (and Holy) Other" (Graber 2), the poet must engage the limits of human language and being, understanding the earth not only from the perspective of identity but primarily as a thing unto itself. In thus encountering the “Other” in nature, “This Compost” qualifies as an early instance of both an “environmental poem” as defined by Patrick D. Murphy (11) and a “sustainable poem” as defined by Leonard M. Scigaj; it stands as “the verbal record of an interactive encounter in the world of our sensory experience between the human psyche and nature, where nature retains its autonomy” (Scigaj 80).

The poem begins with a scene in which the poet catches himself in the moment of turning away, confronted with “something” he refuses to name, categorize, or tame with a trope. He starts not with affirmations of identity or kinship, or with abstractions and distance, but with a nearly physical repulsion. Out to refresh himself in fine Romantic form, he is confronted with a thing unspeakably offensive:

SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest,

I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. (LG 1891–92, 285)

The implication is that before this “something” intrudes, the poet enjoys a physical intimacy with the earth. He “renews” himself by allowing his naked flesh to touch the land or the sea with a sense of likeness and recognition: “as to other flesh.” The phrase “where I thought I was safest” suggests a place like home, a familiarity amounting to a familial relation. Indeed, a manuscript for the poem suggests that Whitman once considered beginning with an invocation of the mother, perhaps Mother Earth: “O Mother, did you think / there could ever be a time / when I might not”—the manuscript breaks off before completing the question (Faint Clews and Indirections 9). The likeness of the mother—one’s own “flesh and blood”—hints at an intimacy beyond all others that is destroyed in the hysterical moment of turning away from the thing that was once the source of renewal.

What was motherly is now “otherly.” ⁹   The “something” intervenes to disturb the identity, much as the dirt on a window destroys its transparency. The window becomes something to be reckoned with (to be cleaned or cursed). It emerges from transparency to become a thing. “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested” (Brown 4). When we have to protect air or buy water in plastic bottles, they become things that have stopped working rather than the transparent media of life.

One thing that stops working for Whitman in “This Compost” is the metaphorical network that mediates his relationship with the earth. The nature lover finds the object of his affection fouled. What was once beautiful and comforting becomes hideous and disturbing; what was familiar, strange. In his revision of the manuscript, he rejects the apostrophe to the mother, refusing kinship with a thing so alien, so toxic. He is left with a crisis of identity, the health of the landscape now suspect, his own confident safety threatened by an obsessive concern with infection in a kind of antipastoral gothic fantasy:

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

How can you be alive you growths of spring?

Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?

Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?

Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,

I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the

      sod and turn it up underneath,

I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. (LG 1891–92, 285–286)

Another thing that has stopped working in this first movement of the poem, which encompasses the entirety of Section 1, is the Romantic or transcendental attitude according to which the poet understands himself as the confident son of the earth. He worries that “perhaps I am deceived” and resorts to the experiment with the plough. If he is “sure” of anything, it is that he will produce a horrifying result.

His doubt ultimately yields to the recovery of confidence in Section 2, which begins with an abrupt shift when the poet realizes that in turning the ground with the plough, no “foul meat” is exposed but rather the rich fertile compost of the living soil. “Behold this compost!” he lectures himself as he recovers his voice, “behold it well!”

Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,

The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,

The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,

The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on

      their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,

The new-born animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the

      colt from the mare,

Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the

      dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata

      of sour dead. (LG 1891–92, 286)

“What chemistry!” he goes on to say, completing the poem’s second movement with an appreciation of the earth’s healing powers and a recovery of his sense of safety: “the winds are really not infectious,” he marvels; “this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,/ [. . .] it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues.” The tropes of identity—notably the personification of the earth, which now has a body to respond to the poet’s own—signal a return to the safety of belonging, kinship, home.

In the third movement, enacted in the last stanza of the poem, the poet adjusts to his new realization and stands in awe before the mystery of the earth’s resurrecting powers:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless success-

      sions of diseas'd corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous

      crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from

      them at last. (LG 1891–92, 287)

From the initial arresting moment, with its anaphoric negatives (“I will not [. . .] / I will not [. . .]”), to this grand affirmation (“It grows [. . .] / It turns [. . .] / It distills [. . .] / It renews [. . .] / It gives”), one of the finest instances of the Whitmanian sublime, we arrive by way of the quasi-scientific concepts of “compost” and “chemistry.” The thing that had disturbed him at the start of the poem, transformed by the processes of composting and chemistry, has virtually vanished, leaving only the beautiful nameable objects of the familiar earth—the wheat, the willow, the calf, the colt, the corn, the lilacs. The terror of the initial shock yields to the “terrifying” wonder of the sublime.

And yet the voice of the poet remains tempered by the experience; the confident transcendentalism seems never completely recovered once it is broken. In this sense, the poem differs from other passages in the early editions of Leaves that take up similar themes, such as the following lines from the 1855 “Song of Myself ”:

And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality . . . . it is idle to

      to try to alarm me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not

      offend me,

I smell the white roses sweetscented and growing,

I read to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons.

And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. (LG 1855, 54)

These brave lines anticipate the “resurrection” theme of “This Compost,” which in the 1856 edition was titled “Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of the Wheat,” but they fail to capture the drama of the movement toward wonder from an initial state of “alarm,” the very possibility of which is denied here. The seemingly easy access of the poet to his lover, the earth (“the leafy lips [. . .] the polished breasts of melons”), gives no hint of the struggle to grasp and appreciate the powerful processes of compost and chemistry. The casual encounter with death and corruption in these lines does not give the poet a moment’s pause. The line “as to you corpse I think you are good manure” sounds something like an anticipatory summation of the first two movements of “This Compost,” but it differs not only in the lack of dramatic development but also in the use of the word “corpse.” The thing that the poet finds so offensive in the opening lines of “This Compost” may well be a corpse, but it is never named, and the significance of this studied omission cannot be overstated. By refraining from naming, the poet suggests a repositioning of natural things just beyond the reach of human intelligence and control. The Comprehensive Reader’s Edition of Leaves points to a similar passage from the “Spring” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden: “There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my home which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this” (CRE 369n). ¹⁰   The idea that the transcendental realization is not free or easy, that it exacts a cost, is captured here, but the confident tone (along with the personification of the abstraction Nature as healthily hungry), more like “Song of Myself,” doesn’t touch the near hysteria of “This Compost.” The naming of the corpse is tantamount to knowing it and “getting around” it—literally and figuratively. As long as it remains unnamed, it remains to a large extent unknown and thus continues to block the path of the knower, a thing unaccounted for, which persists in demanding attention.

“We don’t apprehend things,” writes Bill Brown, the leading exponent of “thing theory,” “except partially or obliquely (as what’s beyond our apprehension)” (Brown 4, n.11). If we think of the verb “apprehend” in the connotation of “to capture” and “things” as beings that resist capture, then whole worlds of possibility open for ecopoetics, in the “story of objects asserting themselves as things,” which becomes, as Brown says, “the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). And that’s precisely what we’re looking for in ecopoetics: a new way of confronting the linguistic limits and courting the possibilities involved in thinking about the human relation to the things of the earth.

The poetic act of negation associated with the unspeakableness of things in “This Compost” and dramatized in the act of turning away—“I will not go now on the pastures to walk, / I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea” and so on—thus distinguishes that poem from the more positive approach to the earth in “Song of Myself” and other transcendental texts. The positive approach does not necessarily preclude a treatment of the thingish incapacities, as we will see when we return to the rich and varied world of “Song of Myself” later in this chapter. But first, Whitman’s recourse to negative forms in the early editions of Leaves deserves fuller attention.

In another work from 1856—“Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth,” which eventually would be titled more elegantly “A Song of the Rolling Earth”—the use of negation figures strongly in a meditation on the possibility of communion, or communication, with nature. ¹¹   Whitman scholars have traditionally associated the poem’s interest in the relationship between words and things with the chapter on language in Emerson’s Nature. “A Song of the Rolling Earth” has even been called “a poetic demonstration of the transcendentalist doctrine” (CRE 219n). Recent criticism, however, schooled in the deconstructionist critique of Romantic “naïveté” in matters linguistic, has shown that, if anything, the poem either radically misreads the Emersonian theory of language or intentionally explodes it. ¹²   The usual conclusion is that Whitman creates a big problem that he leaves unresolved. I would argue instead that Whitman explores the possibility of an ecological theory of communication that he does not develop systematically. He explores not as a philosopher of language but as an experimental poet, and what we have in this poem is not a treatise on language and nature, not even a “poetic demonstration” of a philosophical thesis, but another dramatization of the limits of human language and an attempt to use language to approach the things of nature “indirectly and obliquely” in Brown’s words—or as Whitman himself says, by way of “a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections” (LG 1891–92, 14—rather than by a confident and direct declaration in the transcendentalist manner, a claim to have gotten once and for all to the bottom of things.

From the center of a long tradition in American semiotic thinking, stretching from Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan reading of the book of nature to Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatist reinvention of the triadic sign, Emerson transmits the Romantic-transcendentalist party line on language theory in three key claims:

• 1. Words are signs of natural facts.
• 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
• 3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. (Emerson 20)

Emerson’s own development of these claims, as well as the considerable commentary they have inspired, ties into a complex web of philosophical influences and is worthy of closer study than time and space permit here. But one clear implication for ecopoetics is that, used with poetic diligence, language can lead human beings to the discovery of spiritual significance in nature.

The 1856 version of “A Song of the Rolling Earth” undoes the logic of this position in its two opening lines:

Earth, round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these

      are words,

Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances—beings, premonitions, lispings

      of the future—these are vast words. (CRE 218–219n)

Later dropped from the poem, the lines reject the linearity of the Emersonian logic in which human words signify natural objects that in turn signify spirit. Instead, the earth and all the things of the earth past and present are themselves called words. These “substantial words” are more real than their weak human counterparts, as the lines that open the final version of the poem make clear:

A SONG of the rolling earth, and of words according,

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?

      those curves, angles, dots?

No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground

      and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds

      out of your friends' mouths?

No, the real words are more delicious than they. (LG 1891–92, 176)

In this final version, Whitman abbreviated the positive assertion of the original two lines in order to get more quickly to the negation that dominates the poem’s logic. He creates a curious effect, something like the negation in his famous 1860 poem “So Long!” which declares to his readers that they are holding in their hands not a book but a man. In both cases, he addresses the reader directly and offers a surprising assertion. In “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” a dealer in words, a poet, is telling “you” that written and spoken words are not “the real words,” that there are “substantial words” that are “more delicious.” One way of reading the assertion is to say that he simply collapses the relationship of sign (the word) and object (the earth), bringing us one step closer to the ultimate referent, which Emerson calls “spirit.” But the negation forbids that reading. The poem says that “substantial words” are different from the familiar words of print and speech, are part of a system of communication entirely separate from human language.

What we have then is a metaphor in which the figurative element (the word) is named but the literal referent (something the earth has or does) is left unclear, in the form of a riddle or a mystery. The earth has or does something that corresponds to what people do when they communicate with words, but this something cannot be communicated directly in language. With this riddling approach, Whitman seems to be seeking ways to bring the reader into contact with things and states of being for which there are no adequate words. As Ed Folsom says in Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, Whitman is calling for “the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch,” that will give voice to “the things of the earth that language has not yet named, that we have remained blind and deaf to because our language has not yet expressed them” (20). He denies to the earth’s “language” the characteristics classically attributed to successful rhetorical utterances in human speech, such as pathos, organization (arrangement, dispositio), persuasion, and discrimination; instead of an eloquent orator (implied in the negated traits), he gives us the strange image of the earth as a “dumb great mother”:

The earth does not argue

Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,

Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,

Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,

Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,

Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

The earth does exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself, possesses

      still underneath,

Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the

      wail of slaves,

Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young

      people, accents of bargainers,

Underneath these possessing words that never fail.

To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never

      fail,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

With her ample back towards every beholder,

With the fascinations of youth and the equal fascinations of age,

Sits she whom I too love like the rest, sits undisturb'd,

Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her

      eyes glance back from it,

Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none,

Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face. (LG 1891–92, 177)

The rambling and uneven development of the poem, a product no doubt of its method of indirection, makes it difficult to know who the “children” of the “dumb great mother” are (the poets, those who live close to the earth?) and how they proceed to know her. But hints throughout the poem suggest the possibility of a kind of communion. Like the denizens of Plato’s cave, people may know the earth’s reality indirectly by catching glances of her face’s reflection in “what has the character of a mirror” (in a figure that has the character of a metaphor but stops short of a full identification)—an action that may imply the work of science, which studies effects of the earth, secondhand signs, brief reflections from which a sense of the whole may be construed. But mostly, we see only her smooth broad back turned to us and must wonder at the true nature of the face.

The earth is dumb and yet her words never fail her children. Again we have the riddle, the conundrum, the paradox. Whitman may well intend to present a broad and rolling surface of language, largely impenetrable like the earth itself. As in the sayings of mystics and spiritual teachers, he urges us to understand not with the mind but with the soul. The earth speaks to the soul, not the ear. “The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,” he says. “The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than audible words” (LG 1891–92, 176). Communion with the earth (which can never quite amount to communication) requires a strong and healthy soul: “I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, / The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken” (LG 1891–92, 179). The “rolling” earth is never jagged and broken; it offers a smooth and pleasing surface. Like the rolling earth, the healthy soul is “real” and responds to a similar “language,” which is again described with negation: “No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it” (LG 1891–92, 180). In an affirmation of the soul’s language, Section 4, which closes the poem, begins with the unattached demonstrative “These”:

These to echo the tones of souls and the phrases of souls,

(If they did not echo the phrases of souls what were they then?

If they had not reference to you in especial what were they then?)

I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the

      best,

I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold. (LG 1891–92, 180)

The act of leaving “These” without a clear referent dramatizes the poet’s commitment to leave the best untold. The implication is clear. The soul shares with the earth a system of language and meaning distinct from what we normally understand to be human language and logic. The one may “echo” or resonate with the other without containing or fully comprehending it. The poet may show the way to the experience of the soul and the earth but can never fully capture (“apprehend”) it in written or spoken language. The “song” of the rolling earth communicates as much by resonance as by verbal power, but the “things” of the earth are no less real because of the faintness by which we perceive them:

The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,

It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer,

Things are not dismiss'd from the places they held before,

The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before,

Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before,

But the soul is also real, it too is positive and direct,

No reasoning, no proof has establish'd it,

Undeniable growth has establish'd it. (LG 1891–92, 180)

The subject-object relationship with which Whitman is experimenting in “A Song of the Rolling Earth” thus turns on the idea of the soul, which leads back to the fountainhead of Whitmanian metaphysics, “Song of Myself.” In Section 5, as it is known in the final version, in a passage that changed very little from its original 1855 version, the poet affirms his belief in the soul and gives a powerful view of the soul in action. When it is welcomed, the soul does not rise from within but comes over the poet like a demon or a muse, possesses the poet, ravishes the body, taking control of the senses. ¹⁴   But this metaphysical experience does not distract the senses away from the earth and the body; rather, it turns them toward the earth and the body’s sensitive connection with it. The soul itself is linked to the earth; it is an environmental agent that overtakes the ordinary life of the inspired individual and makes everything strange and new. The body seems as transformed as the earth when the soul descends, anticipating the idea from “A Song of the Rolling Earth” that the body, like the earth itself, communicates by means of “substantial words." Electrified with new feelings and almost painfully aware of the abundance of earthy influences, the poet experiences his body—which here goes unnamed, a thing, “the other I am”—at the center of a web of connections in the earth’s lap, an open meadow:

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not

      even the best,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwardt my hips and gently turn'd over

      upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue

      to my bare-stript heart,

And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that

      pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women

      my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and

      poke-weed. (LG 1891–92, 32–33)

The soul’s tongue, plunged to the bare-stripped heart of the poet, is an organ of speech figured here as the phallic means of impregnating the body with understanding and vision. The heart is the womb of the poet that, inseminated by the soul, delivers the vision of an animated world. The words that pour forth—ironically copious after the poet, following the inclination developed at length in “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” denies the need for words of wisdom delivered in their usual form—custom, lecture, rhyme—wrap the world in the shape of an arc, the chief timber (kelson) of which is the poet’s love for all things that appear before his enchanted eyes. The vibrations of the smallest leaves drooping in the fields, ants with their miniscule movements, weeds growing and spreading, bring impressions to the poet that seem at once full of meaning and difficult to fathom. Meaning accrues (and with it beauty) when the body is understood as replicating the forms of the earth and is thus bound to the earth. The hair, the penis, the testicles, the pores of the skin find their counterparts in the mossy weeds, the leaves stiff or drooping, the heaped stones, the ants’ little wells. The poet’s loving words wrap the world in a sympathetic embrace, build an arc to hold the human family (brothers and sisters) and all creatures and things of the earth.

The transformation or defamiliarization of the body defuses what might otherwise be the typical associations of a nineteenth-century Anglo-American man surveying the things of nature. It opens a creative connection full of new resonance. The association of the heart with the womb resonates with Buddhist metaphysics, for example, as these words from the Lankavatara Sutra suggest: “The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb)” (qtd. in Huxley 8). It also recalls Native American ecopoetics. “The love of a mother,” according to Pueblo thought, “is not, as is presently supposed, a sentimental attachment. Rather it is a way of saying that a mother is bonded to her offspring through her womb. Heart often means ‘womb,’ except when it means ‘vulva.’ In its aspect of vulva, it signifies sexual connection or bonding. But this cannot be understood to mean sex as sex; rather sexual connection with woman means connection with the womb, which is the container of power that women carry within their bodies” (P. G. Allen 24). Much the same could be said of Whitman. In these lines, the “heart” is within reach of the tongue when the soul settles “athwart the hips.” We modern readers, struck by the heat of the trope suggesting nonreproductive (specifically oral) sex, are sometimes confused by the poet’s preoccupation with “procreation.” Sexual desire for him becomes “the procreant urge of the world” (LG 1891–92, 30). The generative quality of sexual contact, even homo- or autoerotic contact, concentrates on the result, the outcome of experience. When the phallic tongue of the soul inseminates the yonic heart of the poet, the result is the vision that arises and spreads around him and that reaches first from beard to toe, the whole length of the poet’s body energized by the experience of integration with the natural environment, and then from heaven (the hand of God) to earth (the ants in the little wells). The great and the small, the significant and the presumed insignificant, are connected by the broad arc-shaped web of the poet’s loving words (the kelson of the creation is love), the poet’s body vibrating with awareness at the center.

What, then, does Whitman mean by the soul? Just as he was not a philosopher of language, he was not a systematic metaphysician, so the question will never have a clear answer. To make it even harder to pin down, his understanding of the soul seems to change over time and is different from poem to poem. In the poems dating from the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, the soul frequently appears as it does in the lines I’ve quoted from “Song of Myself.” No doubt, Whitman always owes something to his primary metaphysical source, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. But this 1855 version of the soul is not exactly the Emersonian oversoul, the pool of consciousness that we enter when we seek deep within ourselves and ironically find the connection to nature and all conscious beings. In later writings, Whitman seems to become more and more Emersonian, but in the image of the soul with the voice that hums and lulls and the phallic tongue that plunges into the womb-heart of the poet, Whitman gives us a rather different picture. It is easy to grow frustrated with all the soul talk in Whitman and decide that when he uses the word “soul,” he does so for rhetorical purposes, to intensify what is primarily a materialist understanding of his world. In The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry, for example, Wynn Thomas complains of Whitman’s “prattlings about the soul” (12–13). Thomas sees the recourse to metaphysical language as Whitman’s “trick . . . of turning up the volume of his rhetoric in order to drown out the noise of his doubts” (266). This is more or less the position I took myself in Whitman’s Poetry of the Body, especially in my reading of the 1855 poem that would become “I Sing the Body Electric” in later editions. But if we take the poet at his word when he says “I believe in you my soul,” we cannot stop there.

If we cannot say precisely what the Whitmanian soul is, we can at least follow a pragmatic path and say what it does. Above all, the soul integrates human life, both in the sense of granting integrity and allowing connections within the self and with the outer world. It lines up the forces of the individual human being with the forces of heaven and earth. Lewis Hyde attributes a similar function to the trickster figure in classical Greek and West African mythology. “Before a body can come to life,” Hyde reminds us, “every separation, every boundary, must be breached in some way; each organ must have its pores and gateways through which something (lymph, blood, bile, urine, electricity, neurotransmitters) may flow. Unless they can incorporate internal forces of transgression, organic structures are in danger of dying from their own articulation.” Much like organs, the gods have a tendency to perfect themselves in certain functions; the goddess of chastity prohibits all licentiousness, the god of reason allows no confusion, and so on. The gods tend to have a problem communicating with each other and with human beings. But trickster opens the flow by moving among different systems and realms. Hyde concludes that these stories remind us what can happen if all hope of communication dries up between articulated systems: “First, there will be spiritual hunger (‘the gods were hungry’ is the opening problem of the Yoruba story [in which the trickster Eshu finds a way to get human beings to renew their practices of sacrifice]). Second, when articulation becomes fragmentation the gods don’t just quarrel, they begin to speak languages so distinct as to need a translator” (Trickster 259–260).

The soul serves a trickster function in crossing the boundaries of ordinary life, translating strange tongues, communing with untouchables, queering received categories and prescribed relationships. Like the undammed river, the soul flows and may flood unexpectedly. The person out of touch with the soul feels partial, incomplete, alienated. By contrast, the soulful person, overcoming brokenness and fragmentation, feels the articulated and fragmented elements of being flow together, producing wholeness. As a consequence, awareness expands, inward and outward consciousness joining in a seamless network of information paths. The heart, the seat of emotional life, opens like a womb, receiving influences from without and bringing forth visions from within. Finally, the soul speaks. It is the voice within that animates the world with poetic language. It accomplishes the goal that Whitman sets for the poet in the 1855 Preface: “folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects,” he writes, “they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls” (LG 1855, v). The soul represents the ability of the human mind to perceive meaning and beauty in “dumb real objects,” in things. To those out of touch with the soul, the world seems meaningless and dull, little more than a resource base that serves human utility.

Whitman’s concept of the soul, which seems loosely connected to the ancient philosophies of yoga and shamanism as well as modern psychology, is not only a rhetorical device; it is the function of creativity itself, the motive force of Whitman’s ecopoetics. When I say “loosely connected,” I mean that the Whitmanian soul bears a conceptual and therefore metonymic or metaphorical relationship to those fields of knowledge and practice. I do not mean to suggest that I could never produce good evidence for what we generally count as “influence.” Still, I contend that it is worthwhile to pursue these loose connections, the speculative use of which figures strongly in the work of scholars like Lewis Hyde and George Hutchinson. Hyde and Hutchinson practice a form of interpretive criticism that opens up the concept of influence, meaning to flow in, from many directions perhaps. Flow is a key idea in ecopoetics in general and in Whitman’s poetry in particular (as the readings of scholars ranging from Roger Asselineau to Michael Moon have made abundantly clear). Loose connections, along with ecopoetical patterns of flow, prevail particularly in the tropes of Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” The tropes are riddling; the figurative elements are tangentially connected with literal objects or left unattached entirely. The heart takes on womblike qualities, but the substitution is incomplete; the soul with its tongue is only partially personified or materialized. Contiguous relationships predominate over complete identifications. In a groundbreaking study of Whitman’s tropology, C. Carroll Hollis suggests that Whitman tended to favor metonymy over metaphor in the early editions of Leaves of Grass and that the tendency in the later poems to fall into more conventional uses of metaphor and personifications signals the failure of his early inspiration. While acknowledging the power of this analysis, I want to demur a bit. In my reading, there are plenty of metaphors and personifications in the early poems. What makes the earlier tropes different is the special combination of metaphysical uncertainty, mystical engagement with the earth, and poetic style that Whitman energetically pursues in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, in short his ecopoetics, one strategy of which is the act of incomplete identification mentioned here. The leaves stiff and drooping, the mossy scabs of worm-fence, the ants’ little wells are creatively associated with the human body but are never reduced to human meanings. They maintain an integrity of their own. Energized by the soul, the poet’s body is continuous with the earth but not dominant over it.

Coming out of the soul-inspired trance of Section 5, the poet expresses a calm reluctance in Section 6 to specify the meaning of the very thing that appears as the central symbol of his book: “A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he” (LG 1891–92, 33). He proceeds with a disarmingly playful series of guesses, one trope unfolding into another, all designed to show the continuity of individual lives and regional or racial types (“Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff”), people and nature, heaven and earth, human language and “substantive words” (“a uniform hieroglyphic,” the “uttering tongues of grass”) but none claiming the confident authority to interpret things once and for all, and finishing finally with a refusal to overinterpret the “hints” that the grass communicates. Using the grass symbol “tenderly,” the poet arrives at his faith that human beings participate in the perennial renewal of life, thus anticipating the position to which he returns in “This Compost.” Of the grass, he says,

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff

      woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see

      and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegeta-

      tion.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive

      them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use your curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,

It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken too soon out of

      their mothers' laps,

And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. (LG 1891–92, 33–34)

The grass is a flag, a handkerchief, a child; it is language, hair, lap, tongues; it is life itself. The creative principle, the soul, moves blithely among things, connecting and disconnecting in a wide arc of meaning. And yet integration does not overwhelm the integrity of individual things in the ecopoetics of the 1855 and 1856 Leaves, certainly not in the method of negation as used in “A Song of the Rolling Earth” and the first movement of “This Compost” and not always in the affirmative method as used in “Song of Myself” and the second two movements of “This Compost.” In chapter 2, I consider some cases that represent more troubling aspects of the poet’s wild troping in the affirmative method, especially the use of personification as a means to rhetorical identification, a linguistic analog for the human desire to dominate earthly life.

But before leaving the question of how the metaphysical concept of the soul mediates problems among people, earthly objects, and abstractions in Whitmanian ecopoetics, I want to give a bit more attention to the problem of abstraction. Whenever the poet resists naming and specifying objects too closely, he has certainly resorted to abstraction. Thing is a more abstract word than corpse, which is in turn a level of abstraction distant from “the corpse of a horse.” What is interesting about things, however, is that unlike abstractions such as “love” or “justice” or “destiny,” they may well present themselves to our subjective gaze in some detail; they may appeal to the senses. When we persist in refusing to name or specify sensible things, we can only appear to be unwilling to know them intellectually or incapable of placing them in a system of common meaning or utility. When Whitman insists on the integrity of earthly or bodily things, he engages, at least indirectly, in a critique of human knowledge and the use of things as resources. The celebration of things as such represents an acknowledgment of human limits and fallibility. The suggestion is that we can have beauty, communion, and even meaning without having full knowledge and utility.

Utility and knowledge may demand a different level of abstraction, in which the distance between subject and object increases to the point that resonance fails and alienation sets in. If the human being feels too close, the integrity of the object (the other) may be overwhelmed; if the subject feels too distant, sympathy fails and the object loses its animating resonance, its appeal to the senses or its soulfulness. In either case, domination may appear justified. What is fascinating about the poems considered in this chapter is the way Whitman plays with closeness and distance, creating an alternating movement of what he calls “pride” and “sympathy” in the 1855 Preface, by which he means the tendency toward self-absorption or self-distinction (pride) and the contrary or balancing movement toward the integration with other beings, the giving (or disintegration) of the self (sympathy):

The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals . . . he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both and they are vital in his style and thoughts. (LG 1855, vi)

“Mystical” is a good designation for this alternating gestalt not least because of the difficulty the poet had in sustaining it. Like enlightenment, bliss, and inspiration in other mystical traditions, the experience of the soul resonating with the “substantial words” of the body and the earth, pride and sympathy in perfect balance, proves ephemeral for Whitman. The inability to sustain the ecstatic energy of contact accounts at least partly for the “uninspired” quality about which critics have complained in poems written after 1871. Hollis, for example, says that the Whitman of the later poems “covered up his lack of prophetic inspiration by pretensions, by over-‘poeticalized’ language” (26). From an ecocritical perspective, I would hasten to add that part of the appeal of studying Whitman is to see not only his successes but also his failures in what he called his “language experiment”—his attempt in Leaves of Grass “to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech” (Whitman, American Primer viii–ix).

I would also argue that nobody was more sensitive to his failures than Whitman himself. In one of his finest postwar poems, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” he dramatizes the difficulty of completing, much less sustaining, the energetic connections that the soul seeks:

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureles oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to con-

      nect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. (CRE 450)

The ecopoetical problems implicit in this poem become clear when we consider it within the contexts of literary and mythological tradition and the textual history of Leaves of Grass. Traditionally, the spider represents power—the dangerous power of God’s judgment in Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, for example, or in Native American lore the creative power of language and storytelling. The Pueblo Indians give us the figure of Spider Woman not only as the creator of the world but as the original storyteller who weaves and spins and makes living connections among the organic and inorganic elements of the world, animating the inanimate, enchanting the earth. Also known as Thought Woman, she is said to have “finished everything, thoughts, and the names of all things . . . also all the languages” (P. G. Allen 13). We learn of Spider Woman and her creative ways from the oral tradition that in Native American women’s literature comes to be written down, extending though never replacing the old storytelling practices. The web of written words resonates with the stories the people tell. Paula Gunn Allen writes, “Since the coming of the Europeans . . . the fragile web of identity that long held tribal people secure has gradually weakened and torn. But the oral tradition has prevented the complete destruction of the web, the ultimate disruption of tribal ways. The oral tradition is vital; it heals itself and the tribal web by adapting the flow of the present while never relinquishing its connection to the past" (45). In the Cherokee tradition, the spider and its web are also associated with creativity, including the aspects of trickery and deceit. Spider is said to be the figure that brought light to the people’s side of the world by stealing the sun from the other side (see Awiakta; Edwards, Thompson, and Ely; and Erodes and Ortiz). The Laguna Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko begins her book Ceremony with this invocation:

Thought-Woman, the spider,

named things and

as s