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PARTISAN REVIEW
the condition, namely, that "America," being a world of selves, has
no value or meaning apart from the separate and subjective "I":
One's-Self I sing, a simple, separate Person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
It was once an unchallenged assumption in our criticism that,
unlike James, Whitman had no quarrel or struggle with America–
or, rather, that his sole quarrel with America was over its not being
American enough. Recent criticism, however, has discovered that the
paradox Whitman's thematic inscription represents is in every sense
real, to be understood not as a Transcendentalist "idea" derived
from Emerson, but as a radical opposition within
his
sensibility–
an agonistic conflict reconciled in the balanced ambiguities of a
style that is at all times both a self-dramatization and the imagina–
tion of a world. And with this discovery of an enigmatic darkness
beneath its benign simplicities,
Leaves of Grass-as
its centennial in
1955 made clear-has quite suddenly been restored to sophisticated
favor: Whitman and
his
book are no longer the exclusive critical
property of ideologues of the Left or of academic Levites of our
official culture or of popular hucksters of Americana. Back in 1935,
in
an article called "Walt Whitman, Stranger," Mark Van Doren
had warned that future criticism of Whitman would have to awake
to the fact of "two men and a book," would have to set about
studying the complex interrelation of "himself and the man he
wanted to be" and the strangely ambivalent poetry that resulted
from his necessity to conceal and reveal both simultaneously. The
Whitman legend, of course, was already then in the process of being
rejected as fact-the legend, established by the poet himself, that
he in his own person was the incarnation of populist Democracy, a
renascent Adam of health and potency, the charismatic progenitor
of a New America. But only within the past few years have the as–
sumptions bred by the myth in criticism been fully discredited as
well. Today, just as Whitman's biographers no longer confuse (so
arrantly, at least) his actual self with his life-ideal, so
his
imagina–
tion is no longer being confused by his critics with the thing
it
ima–
gined: "the 'Walt Whitman' of
Leaves of Grass,"
as Leslie Fiedler
aptly puts it, "is a
persona
really created by the poems it fictionally
creates." The style of
Leaves of Grass,
then, is not "the man"--or
