2
By the mid–nineteenth century the meaning of time had changed. As
American society became industrialized, time was measured in ever more
¤nite units in the manufacturing and scienti¤c processes, thus acquiring
new connotations in the popular mind. Meanwhile, the traditional con-
cept of time was vastly expanded by the discoveries of astronomers, geolo-
gists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The labors of Lyell, Chambers,
and Darwin radically broadened the concept of time, whose unlimited
capacity for expansion is a cornerstone of Whitman’s faith.^22 Both these
tendencies are evident in Leaves of Grass, where time is assumed to be
dichotomous, spanning both the chronometricals and the horologicals, as
Melville called the ¤nite and in¤nite measures of time. So the persona’s
references to time generally assume the continuum of limited, worldly,
time and cosmic, or boundless and ever-expanding, time.
A word of the faith that never balks,
One time as good as another time.... here or henceforward it is
all the same to me....
A word of reality.... materialism ¤rst and last imbuing.An 1853 letter to the New York Times that has been attributed to Whitman
declares, “It is dif¤cult to comprehend how the least cultivated mind can
be made acquainted with the beautiful harmonies that pervade every de-
partment of nature without being excited to the highest degree of wonder
and admiration.”^23 And although the persona of “Song of Myself ” con-
cedes that science has reinforced his “faith that never balks,” a faith that
is grounded (at least in part) on worldly evidence, he maintains that the
discoveries of science are still too narrow to unlock the mysteries of ex-
istence. Unlike our contemporary scientists who take their cues from
Einstein’s principle of relativity and from Heisenberg’s uncertainty prin-
ciple, many scientists in Whitman’s day—like Whitman himself—were
attuned to what might be called a “certainty principle.”
Although Whitman was averse to rigid formulas, he was not alone in
seeking a synthesis that included the material and spiritual worlds or in
assuming the existence of an overarching “law” that could apply equally
to both realms. The spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis, who, like Whit-
man, resided in Brooklyn in 1854, called his own synthesis of science and
“Triumphal Drums for the Dead” / 45