Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 211Whitman, then, attempts to solve the problems of isolation and audience
confronting the American poet, and the debate between individualism and
community endemic in American literature and culture, by turning his poem into a
gesture of relationship, a bridge between “I” and “you.” And it is a relationship that
is essentially open, the arc described by this bridge is intended at least to span past,
present, and future. This comes out strikingly in the closing moments of “Song of
Myself.” “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me
again look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman declares; and then later, in the
final two lines of the poem, he adds, “Missing me one place search another, / I stop
somewhere waiting for you.” Whitman identifies himself, in these lines, with the
“spear of summer’s grass” that, at the beginning of the poem, offered him a medium
of mystical insight: a means of achieving a sense of transcendent unity with the
given world. The implication is clear: Whitman and his “Song” will, ideally, act as a
source of continuing inspiration and contact for the reader each time he or she reads
this poem. They will be an agent of vision and communion quite as inexhaustible as
the leaf of grass was for the poet. The poem is transmuted, in effect, into an open
field, a process – a journey that the reader is required to take on his or her own
terms. Each reading becomes an act of co-production, joint creation, a reinventing
or fresh making of the text. And not only of the text. “The Poet,” William Wordsworth
insisted in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, “is ... an upholder and preserver,
carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.” To which Whitman might well
have added that, in an American setting, the reader is as well. Under the pressure of
the lessons learned while reading such poems as “Song of Myself,” he or she joins
with the poet in the making of community – or, to use Wordsworth’s term,
“relationship and love.”
Whitman once referred to Leaves of Grass as “a language experiment.” What is
experimented with, in particular, is the possibility of an American epic. Attempts
at an epic writing of the nation had, of course, been made before – by, for instance,
Cotton Mather and Joel Barlow. It was, however, Whitman who discovered, or
rather invented, the form epic would assume in the New World: a form that would
be imitated and developed by Ezra Pound, HD, and William Carlos Williams,
among many others, in the twentieth century. The form is, essentially, that of the
Romantic epic: as in William Blake’s Jerusalem, there is more concern here with
spiritual possibility than historical achievement and, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude,
the poet himself or herself is at the center, and the growth and development of
the poet’s mind supplies the narrative substance. The great American epics, a
poem like “Song of Myself ” indicates, would follow the great Romantic epics in
being plotless and without a conventional protagonist. Their strategy would be
to create a hero rather than celebrate one, and to make rather than record a
significant history. They would, in effect, jettison the third-person hero of
traditional epic, the prince or aristocratic warrior whose deeds are itemized as a
way of articulating and fixing the values of a culture. And, in his place, they would
set the poet as a representative, democratic person who discovers his or her
identity and values in the course of writing, on their own and on our behalf.GGray_c02.indd 211ray_c 02 .indd 211 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM