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PARTISAN REVIEW
late elegies seemed to be, all too obviously at first, touchstones of the
"mature" Whitman. The great achievement of Jarrell and Chase is to
have righted the balance in favor of the earlier poems but not at the
expense of the later.
Of the ideologizing efforts of Messrs. Hindus, Murry and Allen'
I'm afraid the less said the better. Murry employs the word Democracy
and its cognates some forty and more times; Hindus, were he not master
of ceremonies, sounds as though he would dearly like to follow suit. This
is no time to be cynical about such important matters, nor to imply that
Whitman's homosexual streak somehow ruins his democratic idealism.
I agree entirely with Mr. Chase that we can't "finally" have the poet
without the prophet nor the substance of Whitman without most of the
spirit. He is indeed "the supreme poet of American optimism and prag–
matism, the rhapsodist of our material and spiritual resources, the un–
abashed celebrant of the self at home in an open, dynamic universe."
He often convinces when he doesn't persuade, offers us a memorable
phrase or line or episode to treasure against the time he falls into bathos.
But to judge Whitman's poetry according to how well it illustrates a
philosophy or even a poetic method-this lands us, in Mr. Allen's book,
not with the poems that every reader instinctively feels to be great, but
with "Passage to India" and "Salut au Monde!" Mr. Daiches agrees
that "None of Whitman's poems repays a careful analysis of its struc–
ture more than 'Passage to India.' " Thus do the great bronze doors, so
ponderous and so hard to set in motion, catch only the dragon's tail.
Kenneth Burke, at roughly this point, takes the creature in hand and
plies his linguistic scalpels with great thoroughness and fervor to see if
some
sort of "overarching" idea-scheme,
some
rhetorical ground-plan,
some
kind of subtle symbolic play can't be isolated without playing fa–
vorites among the poems. My impression, alas, is that he honorably fails,
that his essay is of an exemplary dullness and random implausibility–
a dilution instead of the longed-for revelation. Somewhere in the back–
ground, to be sure, we glimpse the famous problem of the One and the
Many; we watch the dialectical counter-weights rise and fall; we note
the devices of expansion, amplification and merger; we may even wel–
come a new bridge between East and West in Whitman's mystical
reverence for everyday life. All well and good. But the fact of the mat–
ter seems to be that the redoubtable topical-rhetorical-symbolic approach
grinds to a halt well short of any interesting or worthwhile goal. Either
the symbolic structure, as in the elegies, is so overt that any schoolboy
could trace it as well as Empson, or else there just isn't any organized
4
The Solitary Singer,
by Gay Wilson Allen (Macmillan, $8.00).
