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By Root 799 0

as an apprentice in a print shop. Like many printers, he developed an interest in journalism. In his late teens he taught school for several years; in the 1840s he wrote for and edited, with some success, newspapers in and around New York. He wrote sentimental fiction and conventional poetry. The mystery of this life, or at least its surprise, was that in 1855 this previously run-of-the-mill writer came to publish Leaves of Grass, a book remarkable both in content and in style. The turn in Whitman’s life has been explained in many ways—that he was inspired by a trip to a phrenologist, that he cribbed it all from Emerson, that he fell in love on a trip to New Orleans, that he’d been reading Carlyle on heroes, that he became enthusiastic over a modern version of Hermes Trismegistus found in a George Sand novel, and more. Each of these explanations is true to some degree (except for the New Orleans love affair). After Whitman died, a friend of his, Maurice Bucke, put forward yet another—that in June of 1853, when Whitman was thirty-five, he had an awakening, a rebirth, a moment of “cosmic consciousness.” Whitman himself never explicitly corroborated Bucke’s thesis, but he does describe such an epiphany in Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” Having invoked his soul, he addresses it:

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

It is of little account for the story I wish to tell whether this infusion, this lovemaking between the self and the soul, happened in fact or in imagination; either way we may begin. We have two gifts already. The sequence of events implies that Whitman shared the bread with his soul, and now the soul has given him a return gift, its tongue. Their commerce is an exact parallel to the one I described earlier between the Roman and his genius, an interior give-and-take between a man and his tutelary spirit. In this case, though, the man is a poet and the spirit is a poet’s soul. Whitman’s account of their commerce constitutes the creation myth of a gifted man. In the circulation of gifts Whitman becomes a poet, or, to put it another way, through the completed give-and-take he enters a way of being, a state, in which an ongoing commerce of gifts is constantly available to him.

Whitman’s hunger fantasy differs from all later accounts of his intercourse with the soul in its underlying tension. And one of the first things we can say about the gifted state which his epiphany initiates is that this tension, the “talk of mine and his,” falls away. As gift exchange is an erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things. Readers are usually struck by Whitman’s bolder, more abstract assertions of unity—“I am not the poet of goodness only, / I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also”— but the real substance of the state Whitman has entered lies in the range of his attention and affections:

I … do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,

And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

One of the effects of reading Whitman’s famous catalogs is to induce his own equanimity in the reader. Each element