PARADOX OF IDENTITY
393
foofoos-for me freckles and a bristling beard") joined with his
ideological compulsions in willing the act of phallic boldness, the
"oath of procreation," that became the metaphor of his "language
experiment": "This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant
republics."
That seminal "stuff" for Whitman was the potency of the Amer–
ican vernacular, and expecially the idiom of the new popular culture
filtering in from the West- not so much its monstrosities of diction
(he preferred his own "kosmos words") but its flair and grotesquerie
and the genius of its slang for symbolic "indirection." Out of the
same Jacksonian
zeitgeist
that had produced in American humor
what Constance Rourke calls "the gamecock of the Western wilder–
ness," Whitman fashioned his primitive "rough"
persona,
and like
the gamecock, the proof of his
charisma
was his ability to talk big,
to swagger with words. "I like limber, lasting, fierce words," he
wrote in his
American Primer,
" ...
strong, cutting, beautiful, rude
words. To the manly instincts of the People they will forever be
welcome." And so, then, of course,
he
would, too: inevitably his
egoistic motive recognizes its opportunity. "Words follow character,"
he wrote; and if he was to show himself a "a great user of words,"
was he not then giving proof that he really had, as the phrenologists
assured him, these "natural propensities in himself"? But when he
wrote his first poetry-before, like a ventriloquist, he had fashioned
the visual dummy of the frontispiece for the 'character' of the voice
he was able to 'throw'-Whitman was primarily interested in ac–
complishing the anonymous release of his "soul": his
persona
was
still only the unembarrassed voice of his "kosmos"-"gross, hankering,
mystical, nude":
Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask-lie over!
I
too am not a bit tamed-I too am untranslatable
The last scud of day holds back for me;
It
flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed
wilds;
It
coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I
believe a leaf of grass is no less than the joumey-work of the stars,
