68 PA RT O N E
than a nobler Ralph Waldo, Henry David, Henry Wadsworth, along with Wil-
liam Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier, fine poets in their way and
citizens. This man must “attract his own land body and soul to himself and
hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his semitic muscle into its
merits and demerits.” In his excitement Whitman means “seminal,” for a new
American poetry must seed the body of the land together with its people.
So much happens in this prose, it ’s a wonder anything’s left for the poems. Yet
something is, above all what ’s oddly absent from his Preface, the word “I.”
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.“Song of Myself,” the core of Leaves of Grass, starts on “I” and moves through
earth and sky, animal and human, humor and pathos, to end after fifty-two
sections on “you.”
More boisterous than Emerson, Whitman takes over Eden:
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
From this baseline a sunrise breaks out:
To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.As if our poet were the first to see such an event:
The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!...
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.A mutual force, not dominion, yokes us to nature—though that force may
equal the sun.
“Walt Whitman, a kosmos” begins section 24, and how does a cosmos begin?
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
A stimulating fellow but you wouldn’t want him dropping in often. Whitman
was derided for haphazard enumeration, but “Through me” his prophet-like
Hebraic breath lines marshal a motley crowd, make up a universe:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,