contrast, the third “side” of the square is occupied by a Whitmanlike ¤gure—a
composite of Christ, Hermes, and Hercules—who brings “hope and all-enclosing
charity,” and who declares, “All the world I have given up for my brothers’ and sisters’
sake, for the soul’s sake” and who proposes to speak “with fresh and sane words—
mine only.” The fourth side belongs to Santa Spirita, the universal “breather of life,”
who embodies Whitman’s faith that everything—including ostensible evil—becomes
integrated into the divine plan. The poet implores Santa Spirita to “breathe [her]
breath through these songs.” The poem anticipates Whitman’s later “philosophical”
poems.
See LG, 442–443; LGVar, 544n.; WWC, 1:156; George L. Sixbey, “Chanting the
Square Dei¤c: A Study in Whitman’s Religion,” American Literature 9 (1937), 171–195.
On Cronos (one of the Jupiter grouping) as a symbol of tyranny, “human sacri¤ce,
bloody suffering and even cannibalism, but still revered as a bringer of peace,” see
H. S. Veronel, “Greek Myth and Ritual: the Case of Kronos” in Interpretations of
Greek Mythology, ed. Ian Bremmer (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986), 127–129.
On Jehovah as a warrior God, see Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, 62.
- John Bailey, Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 175–176.
65. See Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whit-
man (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 383. - John Burroughs, Notes on Walt Whitman, Poet and Person (1867; reprint, New
York: Haskell House, 1971), 101–102; italics are mine. - Edward Said, “Musical Retrospection,” The Nation, October 16, 1992, 481. See
also Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera, 154–159, and Robert Strassburg, “Whitman and
Music,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kum-
mings (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1998), 437–439. - “Spirit That Form’d This Scene,” (1881); LG, 486. Perhaps to tweak his critics,
Whitman’s verse included some half dozen examples of iambic hexameter. - Quoted from Bucke’s Walt Whitman in Myerson, Whitman in His Own Time.
On Whitman and the English classics, see Kenneth Price, Whitman and Tradition:
The Poet and His Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990). - Richard P. Adams, “Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’ and the Tradition of the Pastoral
Elegy,” PMLA 72 (1957), 479–487; Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the
Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 316–317; Helen
Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1988), 141–145. - Introduction to Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 5–6; LG, 339.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Abraham Lincoln,” in The Complete Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: William H. Wise and Co., 1929), 1217–1220.
Robert Milder, review of Stanton Garner, The Civil War of Herman Melville in
American Literature 68 (1996), 239, and Hutchinson, Ecstatic Whitman, 156, respec-
tively, refer to Lincoln as “the prairie Christ” and “the American Osiris,” ideas that
are latent in Whitman’s treatment of the deceased President. Lincoln’s death soft-
ened the opinions of some of the president’s critics. Thus the ¤rst two volumes of
Whitman’s Washington friend Count Adam de Gurowski’s wartime diaries are hos-
Notes to Pages 189–192 / 267