ideals that transcend the Self. Someday we will perhaps get tired of
living among shadows in a cave.
At a certain point it will again become clear to young people that
they have a choice in what they make of their lives. There are ideals
of the Soul and there are desires of the Self, and young people will
once again have the chance to decide which they will pursue. Some
will be drawn to Soul, but they will see that they cannot commit
themselves all the way. Some defense, some carapace of Self, will
be necessary. So Walt Whitman, greatest of American poets and a
true High Romantic, cultivated the persona of one of the roughs.
He presented himself as a worldly man, full of desires: “disorderly
fl eshy and sensual, eating drinking and breeding” as he puts it.
Without that tough shell of masculinity— that shell of Self—
Whitman’s Soul might have perished early. For one sees quickly
how delicate and tender the poet was. “Apart from the pulling and
hauling stands what I am,” he says.
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain
rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering
at it.If this being, neither man nor woman, neither child nor adult,
had been exposed fully to the world, it would probably not have
survived.
Whitman’s Soul is a being of amazing delicacy, and Whitman
needed to do all he could to protect it. He needed to surround it
with a potent armor of Self, and then his Soul could expand into
the poems and into American life. Socrates and Jesus seem to have
been beings without Self— they were undefended in the world. It is
In the Culture of the Counterfeit 257