means to an end. In the sermon that Whitman
had remembered for such a long time, Hicks had
said that the end of man is ‘‘to glorify God, and
seek and enjoy him forever.’’ For Whitman the
words and the inspiration in themselves became
the end and justification of his life. He became,
in short, a poet.
Whitman had wanted to write something
about Hicks for a long while—thirty to fifty
years, he said in 1888. This puts the original
idea squarely into the period of Whitman’s
beginning as a serious poet. During this same
period Whitman was absorbed with the idea of
being an orator, and he jotted down ideas for
lectures or ‘‘lessons.’’ One of the first notes under
the heading of ‘‘Notes for Lectures on Religion’’
inWalt Whitman’s Workshopreads, ‘‘Change the
name from Elias Hicks / make no allusion to him
at all.’’ It is implied in this that the original con-
ception had been a lecture on Elias Hicks. What-
ever may have entered into Whitman’s mind to
change it, his ideas on religion were originally,
and no doubt fundamentally, associated with his
memory of Elias Hicks. The notes show the fun-
damental relationship between the two men and
the way in which Whitman secularized and went
beyond the insight of the Inner Light.
The ‘‘spinal cord’’ of the lecture was to be the
idea that investigation of religion should be
released from all authority, it should be scien-
tific, and each age should study religion for itself.
Underneath all religious form (churches, scrip-
tures, ritual, authority) is the ‘‘deep, silent,
mysterious’’—this is the real essence of religion.
Whitman then introduces, probably for the
first time, the image that later developed into
‘‘a noiseless Patient Spider’’: the little worm on
an isolated promontory sending its filaments
out into space, like the soul trying to make con-
nections in the immensity of the spiritual and
unknown. There is much of the negative corol-
lary of the Inner Light in the notes. Beware of
priests, churches, ritual, prayer, says Whitman—
all this stands in the way of real religion. ‘‘There
is nothing in the universe more divine than
man.’’ Whitman makes no claim to settle reli-
gious questions, he can only stimulate thought
by asserting that all religions serve their purpose
in their time, all are equally valid.
Taking them all for what they are worth and
not a cent more,
Admitting they were alive and did the work
of their days....
(‘‘Song of Myself,’’ sec. 41)The basic concepts of Whitman’s ideas on
religion can be found in Elias Hicks. He was well
aware of this in later life when he wrote on Hicks
and George Fox. The difference lay in the fact
that Whitman’s ideas were uprooted from reli-
gious form, even from Quaker form, which, with
its discipline of silence and purity, is in a way the
most binding of all forms of discipline. Through
some miracle of sublimation he managed to
translate the inspiration of the Inner Light into
poetry. It may well have been a kind of spiritual
defeat for the man, but it was an immeasurable
gain for the poet and for literary culture.
It is interesting now to look back from the
modern point of view at the doctrine of the Inner
Light. Brand Blanshard has noted four ways in
which elements of truth in the Quaker doctrine
have persisted into modern language and ways
of thinking:
The doctrine of the Inner Light was... an
insistence, and a justified insistence, on first-
handedness and genuineness in religious and
moral experience....
As against the whole tribe of relativists and
subjectivists, the early Friends were thoroughly
right in maintaining that we had knowledge, as
certain as knowledge can be, about good and
evil, right and wrong and duty.
They were correct, once more, in holding that
the Inner Light does not apply merely to the
moral and narrowly religious spheres.... The
Light gives guidance on matters that we should
now call metaphysical....
They were sowing seed whose natural flower-
ing was in a religious cosmopolitanism and a
theological charity which were far wider than
they knew.
The chief difficulty from the modern point
of view, according to Brand Blandshard, lies in
the Quaker dualism: the tendency to keep up the
partition between the natural and the superna-
tural, the human and the divine. It is precisely
from the modern point of view that we can
understand both the likenesses and the differ-
ences between Elias Hicks and Walt Whitman.
Whitman was modern in his tendency to break
down the partition and to escape from the
obscurantism that resulted from the otherworldly
emphasis. Yet he maintained from his childhood
a sense of the divinity and genuineness of indi-
vidual experience which could lead to a demo-
cratic unity and brotherhood. Whitman’s poetry
is to a large extent an attempt to synthesize the
natural and the supernatural, and it is not tooA Noiseless Patient Spider