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 spiritu-
alism 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 Whit-
man’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 tran-
scendentalism, and account for the seeming
inclusiveness ofLeavesas 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 politi-
cal, 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), and
despite various pronouncements of certitude,
especially in the 1855 and 1856 editions, as the
poet more deeply engages his personal contradic-
tions 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 enlighten-
ment, claiming deep insight into the nature of the
soul. The largeness of Whitman’s voice and per-
sonality within the poems has always evoked a
disproportionate attention to his supposed con-
fidence 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 Erk-
kila terms ‘‘a more traditional religious faith,’’ by
the final arrangement of poems for the 1881
edition, the reader ofLeaveswill 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 ulti-
mately 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 con-
fines 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 ofLeaves, ‘‘Crossing Brook-
lyn Ferry’’ (originally titled ‘‘Sun-Down Poem’’).
Whitman begins the poem with one of his evoca-
tions of the eternally possible present, an apos-
trophe 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.’’ This exclamatory opening instantly creates
a sense of intimacy between speaker and sur-
roundings 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 ecocritical study of
Whitman, M. Jimmie Killingsworth discusses
the poem in the context of four ‘‘shorelines’’ asso-
ciated 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 wordA Noiseless Patient Spider