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ventions available to him, and inwardly (we remember his author–
ship of a temperance novel) a similarly lazy moral conformity with
the great "They" of society across the bay. In his twenties, for in–
stance, he seems to have taken up the fashionable role of Broadway
dandy, sporting a cane and a
boutonniere;
and as such this shabby–
genteel journalist may have found a satisfying but transient sense
of identity in the
cameraderie
of work, in the Broadw.ay crowds, at
the opera, in debating societies, in Tammany meetings and rallies–
and then in 1846 (the beginnings of his great change) in the confi–
dent stance he develops as the militant "Free Soil" editor of the
Brooklyn
Eagle.
But perhaps all this while-until the seven obscure
years, 1847-55, when
Leaves
began to materialize in his notebooks–
Whitman never knew his latent sexual identity; and if it is true, as
Malcolm Cowley thinks, that what provoked Whitman's poetic meta–
morphosis was some first fully satisfying--or profoundly disturbing–
sexual experience, then what we encounter may be the crucial anom–
aly in a life that seems almost definable as a reversal of the normal
development of sell-consciousness. For perhaps it was only after
reaching maturity in the world that Whitman discovered that sexual
illumination of the life-processes normally experienced-without, of
course, a correspondingly awakened mind-in late adolescence. This
discovery of what might well have seemed to him a kind of renascent
innocence would have been received, again paradoxically, by a mind
of experience; and the images it evoked in the release that became
the poetry were not primarily, therefore, those of some long-lost
adolescent enchantment (as with Sherwood Anderson, perhaps) but
those from the public world itself, from the commonplace life of a
petit bourgeois "failure" already well on in his thirties, his hair
already beginning to gray. And coming, moreover, so late in life, this
revelation of sexual fulfillment would almost certainly have been
conjoined with the first intimations of death. Thus it was, perhaps,
that it became forever impossible for Whitman to dissociate mind
from flesh, sex and death, experience and psyche, body and soul,
one's temporal from one's immortal identity-associations, in fact,
so extreme in Whitman that while they intensify his luminous feeling
for death they nevertheless limit, by their emotional oversimplifica–
tion, his vision of death as personal mortality. Only, I think, by as–
suming some such strangely revolutionary experience, possessing
