212 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865The essential form of such epics would have to be open, as open as “Song of
Myself ” or the whole “language experiment” of Leaves of Grass is, with the reader
exploring for himself or herself the paths the poet has signposted. And, like most
great long poems in the Romantic tradition, they would appear to exist in space
rather than time, since they would not so much progress in a conventional, linear,
or logical way as circle backwards and forwards, supplying workings of form and
language in which the audience could bring their own imaginations to bear: each
individual member of that audience making connections, establishing priorities
and – as any reading of a piece such as “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry,” or an edition of Leaves of Grass as a whole clearly requires – collaborating
with the poet in the creation of meaning.
Whitman was never nervous about duality. On the contrary, he embraced it.
“Do I contradict myself?” he asks in “Song of Myself.” “Very well than I contradict
myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” For him, the opposites that constitute
experience – or, at least, the terms in which most of us think about experience –
could all be synthesized in the dialectics of living and the dialectical processes of
poetry. Soul and body, good and evil, female and male, and so on: these are all
figured, in one short poem, “The Dalliance of Eagles,” as two birds caught for a
moment flying and mating – separate and yet united, “twain yet one.” Whitman was
not nervous about appearing clumsy either, as Pound realized. In fact, he boasted
of his “barbaric yawp” in “Song of Myself,” as well as of his capacity for self-
contradiction, because he saw it for what it was: an accurate social register of the
energy, the plurality and difference of the new republic. Mystic and materialist,
moralist and hedonist, individualist and socialist, spiritualist and sensualist,
celebrant of heterosexual and homosexual love, “the poet of the woman the same as
the man:” as a representative person, a democratic hero, Whitman saw himself, as
he put it in “Song of Myself,” as “an acme of things accomplish’d” as well as “an
encloser of things to be” – and he saw all others, his fellow Americans in particular,
as potentially all those things too. At the end of his life, Whitman wrote a poem of
quiet intensity, awareness of mystery, called “A Death Bouquet, Pick’d Noontime,
Early January, 1890,” in which he described death as “an invisible breeze after a long
and sultry day,” setting in “soothingly, refreshingly, almost vitally.” He also
commissioned an absurdly expensive tomb for himself, costing twice as much as
the house he was living in and much more than he could afford. Both gestures are
characteristic of someone who delighted, as Emerson had hoped the American
Homer would, in the “barbarism” along with the beauty of the times. And to
appreciate both, to see both as not only inevitable but necessary acts of conclusion
for Whitman, is to begin to understand the poet and the man.
“This is my letter to the World /” begins one poem (no. 441) by Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886),That never wrote to Me –
The simple News that Nature told –
With tender MajestyGGray_c02.indd 212ray_c 02 .indd 212 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM