THE
LIVING WHITMAN
393
"music of concepts" of the sort that Knight and Spurgeon have found
in Shakespeare. The lilac, the bird and the star are images or portents,
but are they symbols? except in the minimal sense of symbolizing the
poet and his poem? The essence of Whitman's art, after all, at least
in "Song of Myself," is a continual interchange of roles between the Self
and the World. When Ahab becomes the Whale, and the Whale Ahab,
where
then
is the symbolism? The dramatic organization of "Song of
Myself" is as primitive as one could well imagine. This wonderful, un–
even poem may swallow us up on our first reading and perhaps on our
fifth, but its very nakedness is surely its great virtue as well as its sur–
prising difficulty, leaving nothing between us and the perception (or
non-perception) that Whitman, in Jarrell's words, "is a poet of the
greatest and oddest delicacy and originality and sensitivity, so far as
words are concerned." And poems, as someone reminded somebody (in
Paris! ), are made of words.
We must conclude that the harpoons of the newer criticisms seem
not to sink very far; but neither are we able, as once seemed possible,
to draw Leviathan out with an hook. The irony and ambiguity are
there, but diffused in a sort of psycho-drama, deployed by phrase, sen–
tence and episode rather than by verbal compression and allusion. The
subtlety and variety of texture are also there, as irregularly as possible,
in a fabric so loose and erratic that one can only point to
generally
su–
perior poems, "Song of Myself," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Song of
the Open Road,"
"As
I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," etc., poems in
which the pressure of feeling and perception is strongest. Mr. Cowley is
probably right in claiming three main pulses in Whitman's art-1855-
1856 with the first edition, 1859-60 with
Calamus
and "Out of the
Cradle ...," and 1865-73 with "When Lilacs Last.. . ."; but if I learned
anything while preparing for this review, it is the necessity of submitting
to the often irksome chore of reading all the poems, of letting yourself
be
buttonholed and generally blown about by the rougher winds of Whit–
manian prophecy. I found myself reaching, first, a stage of numbness,
and finally a stage of more or less indiscriminate enjoyment. Whitman
had a most genial way of taking the sting out of his preachments, of
shifting his weight sheepishly onto the wrong foot at the critical mo–
ment; and this is something you have to "get" as you "get" a new and
strange piece of music.
"0
culpable! I acknowledge! I expose!" Peculiar
certainly, and embarrassing as such things may be at first, after a while
they begin to look like the workings of an unconscious wit, a delightful
nolo contendere
aimed specifically at Emerson.
If
Chase is right, as I'm
sure he is, that Whitman is among other things a "comic poet," then
