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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the universe-as perfect and joyous
because
they were insoluble:
"the depths are fathomless and therefore calm." But if the divine
"touch" of Eros "quivers" him, as he wrote elsewhere in the poem,
"to a new identity"-what, then, did his lyrical "acceptation and
realization" of this new and otherwise unintelligible "self" mean to
the world? In a sense, the thematic problem Whitman now faced
was not unlike that of the religious novice: having been converted
to the mystery whose integrity 'passeth all understanding,' he must
now serve his faith, and he can only communicate it to and with
others (and even to himself) as an articulate idea or ritual-which,
of course, the original mystery was not. This is the inescapable irony
of meaning in the paradox Whitman celebrates; and his peculiarly
modem greatness in "The Song" is that he recognizes with an instinc–
tive honesty his enigma for what it is. In his sheer lyrical momentum
he is able to play happily with his mystery as both irony and unity;
at times he even seems to suggest that human happiness, like his own
comic happiness, is revealed by and is even to be saved by this sense
of the ambiguity of reality, this cosmic joke about the self-sufficiency
of our cosmic ignorance- a joke he directed expressly, perhaps
(as
R. W. Flint has recently suggested) at the theological high priest of
his new faith, at Emerson.
Whitman, however, was never consciously prepared to welcome
the ambiguities of poetry as their own justification; and if the joke
of his divine comedy was aimed at Emerson, this was so because it
was chiefly he who gave Whitman the means of resolving his mani–
fold "identity" problem. "Acceptation," being "enough for myself"
-this freedom of sensibility was now the
nece~ity
of his "soul";
but Puritan America had imbedded in Whitman a conscience far
more conventional-in matters of practical prudence-than this
Quakerish Bohemian ever cared to admit, and an ego conditioned
in the Jacksonian age of his youth still felt the need to satisfy wh<lit–
ever it sensed to be the more consciously masculine norms, both in
ideology and in conduct, of the paternal American "Mannahatta."
Whitman both needed and wished to return to the 'unreal city' of
his experience, even though this return meant having somehow to
find or create, to "assume," a new and-however vicarious-more
personalized relation with the American authority across the bay that
had heretofore offered his secret individuality no means of mediation
