384
PARTISAN REVIEW
from what seems to me the constant enigma of his career-his
as–
similation in imagination, and at times his identification, of poetry
and democracy-is to turn our backs on the peculiar dualism of
American consciousness that was both Whitman's fact and his theme.
By resting content with his paradox of self as a finally ironic con–
tradiction of poetry and ideology, we are,
it
seems to me, ignoring or
denying its organic coherence as the dialectical fact of Whitman's
being and becoming,
as
paradox. Fascinated by the image of "two
men and a book," we seem to have lost sight of the original
one
Whitman, and of that rare and ultimate unity of contradictions
within the self that makes possible the acts of mind we recognize
as "genius" in poetry.
At once the most personal and impersonal of modern poets,
only rarely does Whitman confess any anxieties that might belie
his
pragmatic faith ("You shall assume what I shall assume") that
all
human contradictions are but phases of counterpoint in some ultimate
music of hope. One of these rare moments occurs in an early poem,
"The Sleepers"-a passage the vatic Whitman later deleted from
his book-when almost imperceptibly the thematic major wavers,
and a half-muted troubled undertone is heard:
Pier that I saw dimly last night when I looked fro'm the windows,
Pier out from the main, let me catch myself with you and stay .
..
I will not chafe you;
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world,
And am curious to know where my feet stand .
..
and what
is this flooding me, childhood or manhood
...
and
the hunger that crosses the bridge between.
Nothing else that remained in
Leaves of Grass
suggests so much
of the original existential Whitman that criticism must continue to
recover and understand, particularly since this is the first poet who
ever insisted that his book was in reality no book: "Who touches
this touches a man." "Childhood or manhood"-presumably the
emotions of the bachelor Whitman never crossed the phallic bridge
between them; and perhaps
his
book, like
The Bridge
of Hart Crane,
a poet with similar conflicts, should be regarded as his imaginary
marriage of worlds: in Whitman's case, a kind of spiritual Brooklyn
Ferry (he once called ferries "streaming, never-failing, living poems")
