A History of American Literature

210 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

fact that they could be many yet one by compelling them to feel it, to participate in

a series of reciprocal relationships in the course of reading his poems.

The most obvious way in which Whitman dramatizes the process of contact has

to do with self-presentation. In “Song of Myself ” the poetic “I” is presented as being

capable of sympathetic identification with all kinds of people without any loss of

personal identity. “I am the hounded slave,” Whitman declares at one point; “I wince

at the bite of the dogs, /” he goes on, “Hell and despair are upon me, crack against

crack the marksmen, / I clutch the rails of the fence.” The hunted slave, a lonely

woman, a bridegroom, a trapper, a bereaved wife, an “old artillerist” – in the course

of the poem, Whitman becomes all these people and many more, and yet still

remains “Walt Whitman ... of Manhattan the son.” He can, he convinces the reader,

empathize, achieve sympathetic identification with others while retaining his own

distinctive voice with its dynamic patterns of speech and its predilection for the

“fleshy, sensual” aspects of experience. This is not just “negative capability,” to use

John Keats’s famous phrase – a loss of the self in the being of another, an act of total

immersion or projection. It is, as Whitman presents it, a discovery of the self in the

other: like many American poets after him, Whitman was firm in his belief that the

individual is most himself or herself when honoring and imagining – and perhaps

recreating – the individualism of someone else.

The direct address to his audience with which “Song of Myself ” opens, however,

suggests that the relationship Whitman is dramatizing is a triangular one. The

“I” of the poem is there, obviously, the subjects – the slave, the woman, the

bridegroom, and so on – are there, but so too is the reader, the “you” to whom

the poet turns in the third line of the poem. In a manner that, again, was to

become characteristic of American poetry, Whitman invites us, as we read the

lines, to participate in the process of sympathetic identification. We are asked to

share the experiences and consciousness of the poet, and the being he presents,

while nevertheless remaining the readers – people standing outside this world of

words. “Closer yet I approach you,” Whitman says in another of his poems,

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you – I laid in

my stores in advance,

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you

now, for all you cannot see me?

An intimate contact between the “I” and “you” of the poem, the abolition of gaps

temporal, spatial, and cultural between poet and audience, an encounter between

author and reader through the filmy gauze of language – such things are yearned for

in these haunting lines, and Whitman’s work as a whole – and, perhaps, achieved for

a transitory, enchanted moment. At such times, the dilemma of people shut up in

the solitude of their own hearts seems to be temporarily forgotten, or rather

transcended because the poem itself has become an act of communion.

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