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By Root 801 0

in the creation of the work when the artist reckons and discriminates, just as there are times in the life of the successful merchant when he engages with his customers and imagines their desires. But I am speaking of ruling virtues. The salesman may imagine his buyer’s wants, but in the end, to earn his daily bread he needs some “other” who is not made a part of the self by the transaction. This may be an obvious point, but you cannot make money without calculating value and without the distinction between buyer and seller. Commodities are not adhesive riches as Whitman would have art be. And while the artist must evaluate, reckon, and judge at different phases in the creation of his work, such skills are not the ruling motives of art, at least not by Whitman’s model. For Whitman the self becomes the gifted self—prolific, green— when it recognizes the stuff of its experience, its talents, and the products of its labor to be gifts, endowments. And the work of the artist can only come to its powers in the world when it moves beyond the self as a gift—from the artist to his audience or, in its wider functions, as that “image-making work” whose circulation preserves the spirit of the collective and slowly accrues a culture, a tradition.

In Whitman’s prose writings we find his remarks on the functions of the poetry alongside his claims to having “abandoned the business pursuits.” How deeply he felt a conflict between the two may not be clear, but it is clear that he is a man who never exhibited much material ambition. There’s an amusing and typical story from the years he spent in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. When Whitman first arrived in the capital, he intended to find work as a clerk in one of the departments. To this end he wrote to Emerson asking for letters of introduction to the secretaries of state and treasury. Emerson kindly complied, but by the time the letters arrived, Whitman had discovered he could earn his keep by working a few hours a day as a copyist and freelance journalist; his material wants were few and his energies had been quickly absorbed in ministering to wounded soldiers in the hospitals.

Emerson’s letters lay undisturbed in the poet’s trunk until eleven months later, when a friend from Boston, John Townsend Trowbridge, offered to deliver the one addressed to the secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase. Trowbridge happened to be a guest in Chase’s home, “a fine, large mansion,” he tells us, “sumptuously furnished, cared for by sleek and silent colored servants, and thronged by distinguished guests …” The Chase mansion sat diagonally across the street from the house in which Whitman rented his quarters. On visiting this “bare and desolate back room” one winter evening, Trowbridge found it to hold a bed, a cupboard made from a pine box, a few chairs, and a sheet-iron stove; for housekeeping utensils Whitman had a jackknife, a teakettle, a covered tin cup, and a bowl and spoon. Whitman was in the habit of eating from a sheet of brown paper and throwing it in the fire at the end of the meal. The night of Trowbridge’s visit the fire had gone out in the stove. The window was open to the December air, and the men sat in their overcoats, arguing about literature.

The next day, upon learning of Emerson’s letter, Trowbridge persuaded Whitman to let him carry it across the street. He presented it to the secretary that evening after dinner. Chase was impressed to see Emerson’s name, but averred that he couldn’t imagine hiring Whitman. “I am placed in a very embarrassing position,” he said. “It would give me great pleasure to grant his request, out of my regard for Mr. Emerson, but …” But Leaves of Grass, it seems, had made Whitman notorious; he was said to be a rowdy. “His writings have given him a bad repute,” Chase concluded, “and I should not know what sort of place to give to such a man.”

Trowbridge offered to relieve the secretary of his embarrassment by withdrawing the letter. Chase hesitated, glancing at the signature. “No,” he said, “I have nothing of Emerson’s in his handwriting, and I shall