PARADOX OF IDENTITY
383
is
so only if the paradox is recognized that Whitman has a quirky
and
often contrarious wit as well as a visionary rapture in his an–
thems of cosmic democracy. "His center," Mr. Fiedler goes on to
explain, "is a pun on the self; his poetry is a continual shimmering
on the surfaces of concealment and revelation that is at once pathetic
and
comical." Similarly, Whitman's bravado in the face of contra–
dictions, his pride in the mystery of his "I"-attitudes which once
so
exasperated critics like Winters and Blackmur as evidence of vague–
been reappraised by Mr. Fiedler as a neo-Mannerist "playing with
ness of sensibility or of self-heroic complacency-these have now
illusion" and by Richard Chase as the subtle "guile" of a great
poet's "negative capability." Clearly Whitman's enemies, and espe–
cially those among the New Critics, have been hoist with the petard
of their own principles: the poet whom Ezra Pound once grudgingly
acknowledged as the "pig-headed father" of modern verse has now
come to inherit at least some of the virtues of his progeny.
But the central paradox, the American paradox in Whitman,
has so far, it seems to me, been ignored and even obscured. Intent
on affirming the poetry as independent in value of ideology or meta–
physics, recent criticism has managed to be least articulate on the
crucial issue of the continuity-or discontinuity-of Whitman's po–
etic power with his democratic doctrines. Generally the tendency
has been to loosely identify Whitman's politics with the
persona
or
"mask," and then to ironically dismiss those ideas as,
in
Mr. Fiedler's
phrase, "rhetoric borrowed or misunderstood." And even Mr. Chase
-author of the best book yet written on Whitman-while reminding
us that we cannot "finally" separate the poet from the prophet,
nevertheless concludes that "the public figure and his democratic
program (valuable as these are in themselves) were the massive ir–
relevance and waste required for the indulgence of the essential Whit–
man-the young comic god and the profound elegist." But what, one
is
tempted to ask, of a work like
Democratic Vistas-is
that not,
though in prose, an "essential" expression of Whitman, and if so,
was that written by "the young comic god and the profound elegist"?
In what sense is that, too, "a pun on the self"? To ask such ques–
tions may seem like semantic quibbling or an arrant leaping of con–
texts; but certainly to further isolate a Whitman of poetic "art"
