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Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,

To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally

spooning,

Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never

once going,

Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the

chaff for payment receiving,

A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually

claiming.

These lines have occasionally been misread as an expression of solidarity with the exploited, sweating workers. They aren’t that at all. It’s the man who owns the grain bins by the freight depot who gets the chaff; it’s the mice who get the wheat. The key phrase is “idly owning.” Animals are idle owners, the forest god Wotan is an idle owner, and Whitman is the idle owner of all the lights on Broadway.

Whitman imagined for us an American type I would call the village indolent. The village indolent appears whenever the will to work devours necessary leisure, whenever farmers in the Midwest start plowing at night or cutting down the groves around their homes so as to plant soybeans right up to the windows. Whitman’s idle man stands for the hidden spirit without which no one gets anything from trade. He refuses to do anything but enjoy the fruits of commerce. He eats up all the profits. The harder they work, the lazier he gets. The more money they reinvest in the company, the more he squanders his inheritance. The village indolent, like the religious mendicant, has riches that cannot be distinguished from his poverty. The “poverty” of the mystic is not an absence of material objects; it consists, rather, in breaking down the habit of resting in, or taking seriously, things that are less than God. “‘Blessed are the poor’ is a psychological law,” says the poet Theodore Roethke, “it’s the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers the freedom of the universe.” She gives them the run of the woods. The secret text of the Protestant ethic is this: “You can’t take it with you, but you can’t go unless you’ve got it.” In his detachment from the body of property the village indolent comes into a wealth he will carry after the death of his body. Thoreau still has the run of Emerson’s woods.

Whether by virtue of such an ideological indolence or not, Whitman himself always distinguished between earning a living and the labor of art. “The work of my life is making poems,” he would declare when Leaves of Grass first appeared and, in old age, would claim that he had “from early manhood abandoned the business pursuits and applications usual in my time and country,” obediently giving himself over to the urge to write poems, “never,” adds a later preface, “composed with an eye on the book-market, nor for fame, nor for any pecuniary profit.” Such remarks may seem a touch ingenuous at first glance; Whitman applied himself to business sometimes, and not just in early manhood, and one can watch his eye alight on the book-market from time to time. But his declarations are not meant to be facts of that sort; they are meant to express the spirit in which he worked, and in that sense they are not ingenuous at all.

We need only hold in the background our description of the gifted self—and of the social presence of that self and its works—to see why Whitman would separate the spirit of his art from the marketplace. If the merchant hopes to earn a profit in the sale of his commodities, the transaction cannot be a convivial communion, joining “self” and “other.” Commodities must move between reciprocally independent spheres, and the mercantile spirit therefore necessarily supresses the sympathetic faculty and welcomes the brain that divides. Reckoning time and value, marking and maintaining the distinction between self and other—these are the virtues of the mercantile spirit and of the honest merchant who earns his living by their practice. Understood for their power and for their limitations, they are not necessarily toxic to the virtues of the gifted state, but they are distinct from them. I realize that I overstate my case a little—there are times