ADAMIC WALT WHITMAN 67Titanic, inhuman Nature” on Maine ’s Mount Katahdin, or the Algonquin ver-
sion he preferred, Ktaadn, “primeval, untamed, and forever untamable.” At
eighteen, thinking of Shelley and Keats, he frowned on Americans “prone to
sing of skylarks and nightingales, perched on hedges, to the neglect of the
homely robin redbreast, and the straggling rail-fence of their own native land.”
England ’s poets had “not seen the west side of any mountain,” Wordsworth
was “too tame for the Chippeway.”
As if heeding these voices, a Scotsman who’d come to the United States
during the Gold Rush went on to explore California’s Sierra forests, “the most
beautiful on the face of the earth.” John Muir one gleeful day in 1874 clung
to the top of a hundred-foot spruce swaying through thirty degrees in a win-
ter windstorm. Showing Emerson Yosemite, he was dismayed at the aging
philosopher’s reluctance to spend “one good wild memorable night around a
Sequoia camp-fire.” Even Wordsworth dazzled by an Alpine waterfall, Keats
in the Lake District, Hopkins in Switzerland, pale beside Muir running for an
open meadow to witness “Fifty-six new-born falls” and an “outgush of snowy
cascades” thronging the upper Yosemite valley.
Emerson soon backed off from his first flush welcoming Whitman, and Walt
eventually found him artificial. Though Naturesays “radical correspondence”
connects man to the world, and “In the presence of nature, a wild delight”
verging on fear runs through him, Emerson finally sees that “beauty in nature
is not ultimate.” It serves the “wants,” “needs,” “uses” of man. Prophesying
“the kingdom of man over nature,” and “subordinating nature for the purposes
of expression,” the Master smacks of Genesis and man’s dominion. Whitman
dissents: Emerson’s speech “is always a make, never an unconscious growth.”
He ’s not there when we need the “vitalizing influences of abysmic nature,”
Whitman coins a word to tell us.
Finding vital flow in himself as in nature, Whitman prefaced Leaves of Grass
with a manifesto, nine thousand words mapping turf for the new American
poet. “On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar
and.. .”—here follow fifteen trees our native poet will embody, along with
his “flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wildpigeon and
.. .”—here nineteen birds are named.
Bonding wild nature to American voices makes a tall order (à la Paul Bun-
yan’s tall tales). A “bard... commensurate with a people... incarnates its
geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi and Columbia and
Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do
not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into
him.” That “embouchure” is not a verb doesn’t hinder Whitman from claiming
that the country’s spirit flows into this bard. “Walt” would be his name, rather