PARADOX OF IDENTITY
391
a marriage of mythopoeic or symbolic motives with the trafficking
language of the ordinary world. And
L eaves of Grass
was just such
a success because it "celebrated" a functionally similar marriage
within Whitman: between the compensatory imagination of ego and
the dream-fantasies of his unconscious "soul." The result was to
create in the style the figure that was nominally its author-the novel
persona
or "mask" that gave Whitman his conscious continuity in
conceiving the whole of the first edition: a representative "Walt Whit–
man," in which "soul" and "I" had found a more than public, a
more than private, "identity"; an idea of himself expressible only as
a self-dramatic image, but which, in being dramatic yet unitary as
an image, was also a mythical idea of the world.
In
understanding this
persona
at least three dramatic com–
ponents must always be distinguished- as Whitman himself suggests
when, bowing into
his
book for the first time (which, we remember,
was otherwise anonymous), it takes him three distinct phrases to
properly introduce himself:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a k05mos
The first of these faces we may readily identify as the Whitman of
Manhattan, the democratic ideologue of the Preface; the second we
recognize as his compensatory masculine image of himself-the cocky,
indolent young workingman of the anonymous daguerrotype frontis–
piece (actually, and intentionally so, Whitman here seems much more
"rough" in his costume than in his pose or looks) ; while the third,
the "kosmos," is the most functionally mythical aspect of the
persona
-the furthest from worldly ego and the closest to his dream life–
the fantastic, serio-comic mask of godhead whereby Whitman re–
solved in imagination the contradictions of his conscious identity
into a divinely free and conventionally lawless unity of opposites.
This cosmic "self" suggests, of course, his debt to Emerson; but the
stylistic life of Whitman's "kosrnos" suggests also a rebellious con–
spiracy against the romantic transcendentalism from which it derives.
Actually we find this and other Emersonian ideas serving Whitman
as little more than conscious 'motifs,' while beneath this surface the
value of the divine mask lies precisely in the power it gave Whitman
to escape from Emerson's divine solemnities-from Platonic notions
of the divine; and for a poet this meant a necessary freedom to
