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transcend the received logic of
his
metaphors. With part of his mind,
of course, Whitman took Emersonian mysticism seriously, but here
again the value to the poetry lay in his having found a philosophical
authority for regarding the contradictory depths in himself as a
microcosm, not of human nature only, but of all reality: he was
thus able to accept as an elemental power the essentially androgynous
demands of his imagination. Thus assured of an absolute anonymity,
his "soul" could now freely wander forth in the infinitudes of ima–
gination, not only as a spirit "maternal as well as paternal, a child as
well as a man," but as the vagabond "touch" of Eros and death, as
the dynamic Itself of the universe. Now, too, with such a universal
soul in its body, the "rough" male
persona-the
incarnate "I" of
this "kosmos"-was free to vicariously love and caress not only its
own but all bodies and all souls. And if the prose ideologue in Whit–
man was still troubled by this monstrous indulgence- and the self–
defense of the Preface indicates that he was-there was always, as
an ultimate justification, the glorious image of the Poet that the in–
toxicated humanism of the time afforded him. The Poet, wrote the
Scottish poet, Alexander Smith-some of whose lines Whitman once
quoted as a "grand announcement"- must "reflect our great hu–
manity," must "sprout fragrantly green leaves" like the life-giving
Spring, must "sphere the world" with his "heart of love": and
in
Leaves of Grass,
thanks to the literalism of Whitman's imagination,
this romantic rhetoric became amazingly incarnate- so much so, in
fact, that most of Whitman's humanist contemporaries never re–
covered from their shock of recognition and were never to avow this
giant bred by their own idealism.
However much indebted to the existing tradition for his mes–
sianic image of the poet-prophet, Whitman knew that he could never
adapt the diction and manner of the contemporary romanticism to
the vast expressive needs of his "kosmos"-necessities that proved
revolutionary enough to overthrow ultimately in English literary cul–
ture the pious notion of poetry as a ritual dedicated to an ab–
solute Protestant Good and its ministering angel of Beauty. The
literary liberation of Whitman's "soul" became complete-and his
persona
may be said to have properly come into being-when his
generalized reaction to conventionality still inchoately represented
in
the compensatory
imago
of the "rough" ("Washes and razors for
