PARADOX OF IDENTITY
389
or self-knowledge. His rebellion, therefore, had to be both an act of
love and an exorcism of his old
alter ego-a
revolt against American
society only in the name of its own ideal culture. And so it was that
when Whitman had his phrenological bumps read-and learned
that he was a manly specimen after all; when he read Emerson and
George Sand and Carlyle and found in them moral and intellectual
confirmation for his mysterious "self": when he discovered in these
and other sources a way to extend magically and mythologically his
rhythmic fantasies of "my soul and I" into an embrace of America–
then, we may conclude, the poet of the notebooks had found a way
of ordering his mystery and was ready and willing to publish.
What Whitman's mythical "assumption" was we may begin to
understand, not by appealing at once to 'Democracy' or 'Transcen–
dentalism' or 'Panpsychism', but by looking closely at the great struc–
tural paradox of the first
Leaves oj Grass.
We find our revealing
clue, I think, in the simple and astonishing fact that in the verse it–
self
such words as
America
and
democracy
and
en masse
occur only
very rarely-at most once or twice: we find them acquiring their
first significance as
determinin~
concepts only in the famous prose
Preface, where Whitman heraldically announces the coming of the
Cosmic Democratic Poet. This fact is symptomatic of a disparity be–
tween the Preface and the earliest poetry that has never been duly
recognized- probably because, like Emerson (who saw himself in the
Preface) and like all readers since, we begin to read the poetry with
elaborate preconceptions of what Whitman the poet means-a pre–
conditioning Whitman himself was the first to establish.
If,
however,
we read the poetry with an uncommitted eye, we find that we are
really never in a consciously American world, but always within the
purely magical universe of Whitman's "self" and its strange visita–
tions.
1
Whitman reintroduces us kaleidoscopically to what seems
all
the phenomena of the world, yet now somehow all transfigured: we
visit the grass, the sea, oxen, beetles, buzzards, stallions, molluscs,
1 Two of the twelve poems in the first edition-later entitled "Europe"
and
"A Boston Ballad"---constitute exceptions to this statement. Only in verse
fonn, however-not in character and subject-matter-can they be said to be
integral with the rest of the volume. I should add that much of what I say
here
of the early poems is true of them only as they first appeared-not as later
m-ised by Whitman, which is, unfortunately, the variant of the text almost
always reprinted today.
