The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [98]
Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is the mind’s. What has fill’d, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign … I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.
WALT WHITMAN, 1871
CHAPTER NINE
A Draft of
Whitman
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift
of “Leaves of Grass.”
EMERSON TO WHITMAN, 1855
I • The Grass Over Graves
… I guess [the grass] is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
… I give them the same, I receive them the same.
“SONG OF MYSELF”
In an 1847 notebook Walt Whitman, then about twenty-eight years old, recorded a short fantasy concerning food. “I am hungry and with my last dime get me some meat and bread, and have appetite enough to relish it all.—But then like a phantom at my side suddenly appears a starved face, either human or brute, uttering not a word. Now do I talk of mine and his?— Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”
But in truth he feels no desire to share his meal. He’s hungry. No law forbids a man to feed his stomach. “What is this then that balances itself upon my lips and wrestles as with the knuckles of God for every bite I put between them, and if my belly is victor … follows the innocent food down my throat and turns it to fire and lead within me?—And what is it but my soul that hisses like an angry snake, Fool! will you stuff your greed and starve me?”
I am reminded of the story of Saint Martin of Tours, one of the earliest saints of the Western Church. Martin had a vision as a young soldier serving in the Roman army. Having torn his cloak in half to cover a naked beggar, he saw, the following night, an image of Christ wrapped in the garment he had given away. There are spirits that appear as beggars in our peripheral vision; what we bestow upon them draws them into the foreground and joins them to us. “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s greatest poem, begins with an invitation to the “starved face” of his hunger fantasy. “Loafe with me on the grass,” he says to his soul, “loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.”
Somehow—it is not recorded—he gave the soul its bread. It came toward him as a lover then, not as a beggar or beast. It stretched him on the grass and entered his body. Its throat opened and it began to sing.
Whitman was born in 1819 into a large family. His father appears to have been a man of independent spirit, a devotee of Thomas Paine and the Quaker dissenters. At one time he had been a farmer on Long Island, but he soon turned his hand to carpentry after moving the family to Brooklyn, where he built plain houses for working-class families. He never made much money. The Whitmans moved from house to house as each was finished and sold to pay the mortgage. Whitman himself began to work when he was eleven, first as a lawyer’s boy, then