The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [104]
The initial event of the poem, and of Whitman’s aesthetic, is the gratuitous, commanding, strange, and satisfying entry into the self of something that was previously separate and distinct. The corresponding gesture on Whitman’s part is to give himself away. “Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me.” He “bequeath[s] Poems and Essays as nutriment” to the nation just as, at the end of his song, he bequeaths himself “to the dirt to grow from the grass [he] love [s].” These gestures—the inhalation and exhalation, the reception and the bestowal—are the structuring elements of the poem, the passive and active phases of the self in the gifted state.
In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman calls the two phases of the artist’s labor “sympathy” and “pride”:
The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain.
In sympathy the poet receives (inhales, absorbs) the embodied presences of creation into the self; in pride he asserts (exhales, emanates) his being out toward others. As with any respiration, this activity keeps him alive:
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would
kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.
If either pole of the breath was interrupted, he would cease to exist. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his funeral, drest in his shroud.” The human being is the give-and-take of sympathy and pride:
To be in any form, what is that? …
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous
shell were enough.*
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or
stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
Between the poles of sympathy and pride lie the “secrets of art,” the poet tells us, and if we are to gaze upon those secrets, we must follow the passage of these “objects” through the body, follow the poet’s breath from the sympathetic inhalation through to the out-breath, the pride “out of which,” says Whitman, “I utter poems.”
A poem called “There Was a Child Went Forth” offers a typical description of Whitman’s receptive sympathy. A young boy walks out of doors:
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became …
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white
and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, …
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all
became part of him.
In his sympathetic phase, Whitman preserves the participatory sensuality of childhood. The boy who became the lilac when he saw the lilac survives in the older man. In the poems at least, Whitman seems to feel no distance between his senses and their objects, as if perception in the gifted state were mediated not by air or skin but by some wholly conductive element that permits immediate contact with the palpable substance of things. We believe the poems because he has drawn the scenes with such sharp detail. He spots the runaway slave “through the swung half-door of the kitchen”; he sees how “the young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots.” Imagining himself floating over the nation, he sees below “the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters.” We have all had moments of such contact: lost in the grays of snow blown sideways across the clapboards, or daydreaming in the rain pock-marking the tops of cars, the ants gathered where wisteria leans against the stucco. And we accept that Whitman knew, and wrote out of, such contact because he noticed