demonstrating his artistic and spiritual eligibility to be his nation’s poet,
Whitman boasted of his own superb body. “I do not believe that any one
possesses a more perfect or enamoured body than mine,” he declares in
“Excelsior” (1856). The manner in which physical development nurtures
spiritual development remains vague in his writings, but he puts his own
spin on the contemporary vogue of attaining moral and spiritual re¤ne-
ment through improving one’s physique. The moral-spiritual “law” of
amelioration he implies in “Faces,” operates by gradually erasing hu-
manity’s animalistic traits and, in “a score or two of ages,” making people
more godlike. The process is said to apply to everyone but operates dif-
ferently and at a different pace with each individual:
The Lord advances, and yet advances:
Always the shadow in front.... always the reached hand
bringing up the laggards.These predictions of eventual physical perfectibility in the ¤rst and sec-
ond editions of Leaves of Grass obliquely echo St. Augustine’s assertion
that following the Christian Resurrection all crippled, deformed, and
aborted bodies will become whole and perfect.^23
The sonorous and cadenced catalogs in sections 7 and 8 of “The Sleep-
ers” describe a procession of affectionately paired sleepers—“the Asiatic
and the African,” “the European and the American,” male and female,
parent and child, scholar and teacher, slave and master as they “®ow hand
in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed” and
as they become “averaged.” Their dreams merge with the persona’s own
dream of universal love in which “the suffering of sick persons is relieved”
and the “unsound throat,” the consumption, rheumatism, and paralysis
that ravaged the Whitman family eventually disappear. The vision ends
on a triumphant note:
The swelled and convulsed and congested awake to themselves
in condition,
They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of
the night and awake.And yet, to borrow Langston Hughes’s phrase, this vision is ultimately
“a dream deferred.” For in ®owing “from east to west” the sleepers are
“Great Is Death” / 95