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By Root 745 0

is to enthusiasm. In the old joke, a Unitarian comes to a fork in the road; one sign points to Heaven and the other to a Discussion About Heaven. The Unitarian goes to the discussion. The enthusiast, of course, knows his spiritual knowledge cannot be discussed because it cannot be received intellectually. Like Whitman, he testifies, he does not argue. And the ceremonies of enthusiastic religions tend to include the body, rather than talk. The celebrants dance and sing, they quake and tremble. But no one dances ecstatic dances in the churches of the rich. Nor do they speak in tongues or raise their hands in the gesture of epiphany the way the Christian enthusiasts do. The rich would seem to sense that the more you feel the spirit move in the physical body on Sunday, the harder it will be to trade in cash on Monday. Better to sit in one’s pew and listen to a talk. The Unitarianism that men like Chauncy developed called for no enthusiastic flights of fancy; it was, as others have pointed out, a religion with which the merchants of Boston could be at ease.

I have offered these remarks about enthusiasm partly to introduce the element of “bodily knowing” into my description of Whitman’s gifted state, but also to help us place Whitman in the spirit of his times. We might say that Whitman was Emerson’s enthusiast, Emerson with a body. The sage of Concord stands midway between the crew-cut deist and the hairy-necked Whitman. Emerson left the Unitarian Church, to be sure, but he remained a curious mix of Chauncy’s caution and the passion he prefigured for Whitman. In his own well-known epiphany, Emerson felt himself to be a “transparent eyeball… I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” And not Charles Chauncy, then. But still, the lens of the eye is our only bloodless organ of sense. “I was born cold,” Emerson confided in his journal. “My bodily habit is cold. I shiver in and out; don’t heat to the good purposes called enthusiasm a quarter so quick and kindly as my neighbors.”

It was for Whitman to read Emerson’s “Nature” and take it to heart, to feel the soul’s tongue move in his breast, an epiphany of animal heat. Emerson was moved by his first reading of Leaves of Grass, but in 1860 he walked Whitman around Boston trying to persuade him not to speak so frankly about the body in his poems—reading him, that is, a caveat against enthusiasm.* Apparently, Whitman found Emerson’s reasoning sound and compelling. “Each point… was unanswerable,” he wrote in his memoir of their talk, “no judge’s charge ever more complete and convincing.” Emerson was the greater intellectual and the greater critic. But Whitman was the greater poet, and faithful to his genius. He did not debate the master’s caution, but when Emerson asked in conclusion, “What have you to say to such things?” Whitman replied, “Only that while I can’t answer them at all I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory and exemplify it.” Or, as he used to tell the story in old age, “I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.”

Whitman begins “Song of Myself” with a description of the delight of the passage of “stuff” through his body: “my respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs.” (Or later, sounding like a true enthusiast: “Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and the index.”) The “self” that Whitman’s song presents to us is a sort of lung, inhaling and exhaling the world. Almost everything in the poem happens as a breathing, an incarnate give-and-take, which filters the world through the body. Whitman says of a long list of people and occupations, “these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them … / And of these … I weave the song of myself.” Upon hearing a noise, he says, “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen, / And accrue what I hear into myself…,” and he then presents us with a long catalog of sounds. When he describes this material respiration