regimen individuals could improve themselves and transmit their im-
proved condition to their progeny. Whitman, who sought to develop
an overarching, or what he termed an “omnient,” approach to science,^8
found these semisciences serviceable. The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass
not only has the outward appearance of a Fowler and Wells self-help
manual but it also re®ects some of the ¤rm’s ideologies.^9 The handsomely
produced volume is the most popularistic edition of the poems. Some
of its new poems picture the Whitman persona as a teacher-confessor
who adopts the pose of a guru addressing a working-class crowd that is
eager to take his hand and hear his reassurance that they, as self-reliant
Americans, are eligible for physical and spiritual advancement. Operat-
ing immeasurably to Whitman’s advantage in these poems is his deliber-
ately ambiguous use of the pronoun “you”—the “you” to whom many
of the new poems are addressed. Sometimes the “you” designates the
American masses who are assumed to be listening to the inspired poet
who has assumed the guise of a folk-orator. Sometimes the “you” seems
to imply a single listener whom the persona addresses as an equal, an
intimate friend, or a lover. And often the “you” refers interchangeably,
and even indistinguishably, to both the individual and the mass. Whit-
man often chooses to make no clear distinction between the many and
the one.
“Poem of You, Whoever You Are” (“To You, Whoever You Are”) is a
compendium of the 1856 volume’s reformist doctrines. The persona urges
his uninitiated compatriots, who are “walking the walks of dreams,” to
realize that they, too, are eligible to achieve their true selfhood: “Your
true soul and body appear before me,” he asserts. By learning to trust
their own instincts as distinct from secondhand ideas, he tells them, they
can “¤nd themselves eternal” and able to master “the throes of apparent
dissolution.” In an intimate gesture, as both lover and guru, he places
his hand on a representative “you” and whispers that he alone perceives
and celebrates his or her potential greatness. Whitman certainly knew of
Karl Ludwig Reichenbach’s theory according to which “sensitives” were
able to receive the emanations of odyllic force (somewhat akin to magne-
tism and/or light) that supposedly ®ows from the bodies, particularly
the heads, of humans.^10 Likewise, the persona claims to see a nimbus—
like that which adorns the crowns of saints, angels, and the deity in
medieval and Renaissance paintings—glowing from the head of each
American, however humble. Therefore he promises that his poems will
“The Progress of Souls” / 103