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COPYRIGHT 2007 Southern Illinois University
The spiritual dimension of American poet Walt Whitman's work has received no shortage of critical commentary. Whitman himself clearly saw his work as spiritual, going so far as to claim in his 1855 preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass that the work of the poet would soon come to supplant that of churches and priests. At the same time, he envisioned an expanded Leaves as a sort of "New Bible," and by 1872, in another preface to his lifelong project, concluded that his by now massive book of poems had "one deep purpose" above all others, "the religious purpose" (Collect 461). Pondering possible titles early on for what would become Leaves of Grass, Whitman once wrote, "What name? Religious Canticles" (Asselineau 221). Many contemporary readers seemed to agree with Whitman, hailing him as a prophet inaugurating a new religion. Whitman scholars David Kuebrich and David Reynolds both describe how some early readers of Whitman went so far as to found religious groups and, in at least one case in England, a church devoted to following his writings.
But the spiritual aspect of Whitman's project is complex, and it changes over time and in the nine editions of Leaves of Grass. The goal of this essay is not to define spirituality in Whitman specifically or to unravel components of his spiritual vision, but to argue instead that any acknowledgment of the power of Whitman's spiritual message needs to account for the way in which that message evolves through the expanded editions of Leaves, and how the poetry ultimately emphasizes the soul's embrace of the unknown over the known. For Whitman, the very process of questioning, searching, and existing in uncertainty is the vital element of spiritual health, as opposed to certainty of the soul's destination. In gauging his spiritual message, a reader should resist examining any period of Whitman's work, or any edition of Leaves, in isolation from other periods or poems. Tracing the progression of his voice and subjects, so useful to stylistic and historically oriented studies of Whitman, is less effective when considering a central theme such as spirituality, a theme that develops organically and deepens as the book grows in size and scope. Hence, the approach here would claim that the confident, sexually vibrant, ecstatic poet of body and soul in 1855 be read alongside the doubtful Drum-Taps poet who struggles to comprehend and console in 1865, and in turn beside the meditative, at times faltering mode of the death poems spanning 1871-1882. Central to this rationale is the fact that Whitman's treatment of spirituality rejects the temporal and that reading his treatment of the theme as one of phases in a poet's development diminishes the complexity, fluidity, and evolving nature of the theme. The levels of exuberance, reflection, anguish, doubt, and certitude in individual poems modulate as Leaves grows, with new poems speaking to preexisting ones, often demanding that readers reexamine their response to an earlier poem or the poet's overall treatment of the theme. Such a methodology agrees with Kuebrich's assertion that "Whitman did arrive at a unified religious vision during the process of writing the first edition of the Leaves, and he continued to elaborate that vision throughout the rest of his life. The individual poems and sections of the Leaves are informed by this new religion and they cannot be considered in isolation" (4).
A further complexity exists in the fact that the appeal of Whitman's personal spirituality cannot easily be separated from the spiritual component of his political vision. At numerous crucial periods of his writing career, his poems strive to cultivate the individual for the sake of growing and strengthening the democracy, and oftentimes his visionary call is at the service of his political aims. Whitman scholars such as Allen Grossman and Betsy Erkkila have noted how "The 'inner light' of religious spiritualism and the 'outer light' of the revolutionary enlightenment--the doctrines of the soul and the doctrines of the republic--became the early and potentially self-contradictory poles of Whitman's thought" (Erkkila and Grossman 16). Others such as William Pannapacker see the promise of "spiritual democracy" as a result of Whitman's engagement with Emersonian transcendentalism, and account for the seeming inclusiveness of Leaves as the poet's success at "camouflag[ing] a political text in the trappings of a sacred scripture" (31). These contradictory poles of private and public, religious and political, result in the unstable, often uncertain nature of Whitman's spiritualism, and it is precisely this fluid instability of vision that lends the theme such resonance and hold in every edition of Leaves. In an uncollected manuscript fragment, Whitman terms spirituality "the unknown" (Leaves 612), and despite various pronouncements of certitude, especially in the 1855 and 1856 editions, as the poet more deeply engages his personal contradictions and his envisioned democracy's various failures and compromises, his poetry comes to challenge its readers to conceive of spirituality more broadly, but less conclusively.
The personal pull of Whitman's early poetry is undeniably powerful, a proclamation of the agency of the individual that at the same time invites us to "follow" the poet toward enlightenment, claiming deep insight into the nature of the soul. The largeness of Whitman's voice and personality within the poems has always evoked a disproportionate attention to his supposed confidence at the expense of a sense of self and purpose that becomes more questioning, more ambiguous, and more engaging as his project grows. While the major works of Whitman's final productive decade demonstrate what Erkkila terms "a more traditional religious faith," by the final arrangement of poems for the 1881 edition, the reader of Leaves will move through poems supremely confident of immortality and a mystical oneness of humanity, other poems where the spiritual core of the text seems more based in phenomenology, Civil War poems that recognize the ability of death's sheer physical carnage to at least momentarily eclipse spiritual hope, and the later meditative mode of poems such as those in the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster. Ultimately, Whitman's collective claims across these editions are less for himself as spiritual guide and more for the power of poetry, language, intellectual search, and imaginative empathy as fluid, dynamic, mysterious, and ultimately unknowable components that anchor the spiritual life.
Among the most compelling spiritual efforts in Whitman's poetry are his paradoxical attempts to obliterate temporal, spatial, and personal confines by focusing intently on the present moment and to forge a communal oneness among all people across time by addressing the reader as a specific "you," a private auditor. Both of these endeavors are at the heart of the major new poem of the 1856 edition of Leaves, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (originally titled "Sun-Down Poem"). Whitman begins the poem with one of his evocations of the eternally possible present, an apostrophe to the immediate: "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west--sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face" (CP 1-2). This exclamatory opening instantly creates a sense of intimacy between speaker and surroundings while also, in its gaze toward the west and awareness of the sun's movement, hinting at the flux of time that will play such a key role later in the poem. In his recent ecocriticalstudy of Whitman, M. Jimmie Killingsworth discusses the poem in the context of four "shorelines" associated with either mourning or renewal, and makes the useful observation of how often in Whitman "tides become associated with the availability of certain spiritual forces and states of mind. The change of the tides provides a needed analog to the ebb and flow of the human soul and its susceptibility to different influences" (130). It is just this "susceptibility" and vulnerability of the soul that is so unique to Whitman's spiritualism and the ease with which uncertainty is accepted. In some poems, like 1860's "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," the tide might suggest the beleaguered, empty soul, but in the opening of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" it carries a sense of abundance, a rush of fullness. The ecstatic celebration of the quotidian then turns to include the "hundreds and hundreds" of fellow commuters, the poet's keen interest in them described as "curious," an important word that will return later in the poem (4). Here directed toward the immediate present, the word establishes preference for the process of knowing over possessing the known that is so crucial to the poet's spiritual concept. This curiosity, intense in the moment, is also the catalyst for connecting with the future, leading to the poem's first move to link humanity across generational and temporal boundaries. Whitman boldly declares that those who will also ride the ferry in "years hence" are equally in his meditations, using the familiar "you" to address both his fellow commuters and those who will cross the river far in the future (5).
In the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published just a year before the edition including "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Whitman had intimately connected himself with his readers in several poems, most notably "Song of Myself," where he asserted that whosoever touched his book also touched a man. In one of the poem's most memorable moments, he closes the final section by "bequeathing" himself to the ground beneath him, telling his reader that he can be found "under your bootsoles" (section 52; lines 9-10). But these are isolated moments in the grand proclamations of selfhood, sexual vigor, and the role of the poet that dominate "Song of Myself," whereas "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a shorter, sustained meditation aimed at connecting humankind across time and space. In its focus on human connectedness, the poem becomes more reader-focused than does "Song of Myself." The merger with nature in "Song of Myself" is paradoxical in terms of the poet's relationship with his readers in that while at the end of the poem Whitman positions himself as eternally available to any reader, the largeness of his presence threatens to obliterate the personal invitation. Tenney Nathanson has discussed how Whitman's strong repetition establishes "the poet's apparent power to reproduce himself [. . . which] makes him seem like the magical incarnation of an ideal form, a self-sustaining being immune to interference; unaffected by extrinsic forces or contingent events" (254). In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," however, Whitman's focus on communal unity remains consistently evident and is never subsumed by his huge personality. One of the poem's achievements is the means by which it balances its public element, the celebration of the city, commerce, and democracy in the present and in the envisioned future, alongside the forging of a personal, spiritual bond between generations across time. Whitman uses the tangible, physical present as a means to provoke questions on the ineffable: "What is it then between us?" (5.1). Because the connection transcends the temporal, the physical, and even the confines of the personal, it can be named only as a process of "curious abrupt questionings" (5.6). Hence, what binds people across time attains power by being unnamable. In returning to the word "curious" in this fifth section, the poem recalls the initial link between present and future evoked in the opening section, and in describing the process of questioning as "abrupt" it casts the activity as spontaneous and ongoing.
By the time the fifth section poses the question "What is it then between us?" the poem has built the connection between present and eternal through reconciling the union of extrinsic entities such as the city's buildings rising from the land, the man-made ferry connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the ceaseless river beneath it. Standing still on the ferry, the poet can observe and record the almost overwhelming array of phenomena surrounding him, the "tall...
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