with the duty it devolves, is rounded and apparently completed, it
still remains to be really completed by suffusing through the
whole and several, that other pervading invisible fact (is it not the
largest part?) of life here, combining the rest, and furnishing for
Person or State, the only permanent and unitary meaning to all,
even the meanest life, consistently with the dignity of the Uni-
verse, in Time.^14 (emphasis added)The “Spiritual Law” Whitman invokes in “Preface 1876” (and as “the law”
in numerous poems) posits the existence of an unbroken continuum en-
compassing the material and the invisible worlds and further assumes
that this unifying spirit pervades “the moral universe” and operates within
the soul of each man and woman to create a nobler existence. And it is
the poet, says Whitman, who is charged with illustrating how this “Law”
operates in life and in death. One who perceives “the endless process of
Creative thought” and sees beyond life’s apparent contradictions under-
stands that the universe has “one consistent and eternal purpose.... As
life is the whole law and incessant effort of the visible universe, and death
only the other or invisible side of the same, so the utile, so truth, so
health, are the continuous-immutable laws of the moral universe, and
vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are but transient, even if
ever so prevalent, expressions.”^15 Whitman felt certain that a cosmic
master plan governs all phases of existence as a moral imperative that
can be ascertained, or at least sensed by the poet. The in®uence of East-
ern thought strengthened what became a downgrading of the material
world—poetically, at least—in favor of some sort of pure spirituality. An
extreme version of this view occurs in the twenty-one quatrain stanzas of
the poem “Eidòlons” (1876), which denies the primacy of physical reality
in favor of the “eidolon,” or soul image, which pervades everything and
inspires everything. The visible, tangible world is labeled the “ostent
evanescent”—the world of ®eeting appearances. The “eidolon” world is
the immaterial force that inspires noble deeds and noble souls. The
“prophet and the bard” (recognizable identities of the poet) propose to
interpret “God and eidòlons.” Not “the mountains and oceans” or “this
world” or the visible “universes” are the ultimate reality, he tells them, but
these “eidolons” that pervade the soul and inspire its self-discovery and
its quests for godliness. The poem rejects outright the idealization of the
12 / Introduction