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PARTISAN REVIEW
stars; suicides and murders and childbirths and shipwrecks; me–
chanics, sopranos, trappers, prostitutes, slaves, Indians, and Broad–
way buses and their drivers-but though the creatures of this world
may often as it happens be Americans, we are always within a time–
less and "primeval" democracy; we never find ourselves transported
to transcendental realms called "America" or the "New World": we
are never in a world of nationalism and ideology. It is only
in
the
Preface that we encounter the familiar prophetic utterance we had
been led to expect; only there are we told that "the United
States themselves are the greatest poem," only there do we meet
Whitman in the public phase of his new identity-as the would-be
national bard.
This is not to say, of course, that the animus of the Preface
differs radically from the spirit and style of the poetry; but the shift
in focus and intention is clearly there, and indicates the duality of
poetic motive that soon reveals itself as the dialectic of Whitman's
career. For it is always, I think, the habitual
prose
Whitman-the
aggressive editor, the would-be potent male, "of Manhattan the son"
-who compulsively wills his meanings into ideology, who "pro–
mulges" vast generalizations, who "strikes up for a New World" and
in doing so compensates for
his
ego in the real America. This was
the Whitman who by printing his book accomplished his personal
"realization"; but the sensibility with which it came into being be–
longs to the anonymous woman and child in him, to the lonely
spirit of "Paumanok," of the earth and the sea and the darkened
beach: the "soul" who "accepts" and "is satisfied," who sympathizes
and particularizes and remembers, who knows only dumb rhythmic
images and mutely caresses them. It would be wrong, however, to
identify this recessive self as essentially "the poet" in Whitman; on
the contrary, his poetry owes its expression, and even, in a sense, its
imagination-its unity of word and image-precisely to the tenden–
cies of his prosaic "I" to dominate with his pragmatic will in lan–
guage, as he did politically in the Preface, this otherwise indetermi–
nate lyricism of his "soul." Whitman, we remember, once called his
book a "language experiment"; and like all successful revolutions
in
the language of verse- like the stilnovists' and Dante's, like the Eliza–
bethans', like Dryden's and Wordsworth's-Whitman's represented
a new and necessary assimilation of the modes of poetry and prose:
