394
PARTISAN REVIEW
And the pismire is equally perfect J and a grain of sand J and the
egg
of the wren J
And the tree-toad is a chef dJoeuvre for the highestJ
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven .
..
Such lines as these were not, however, mere somersaults of verbal
bravado, a witty indemnification for a sentimental pantheism or a
mindless anarchic innocence-"a wild soft laughter," as Carl Sand·
burg would have it. The more we attend to them, in fact, the more
we observe that they represent in their tonal inference nothing less
than the meaning Whitman has found for the contradictions of the
world. What the playful irony of
his
voice establishes for us as we
read is the medium of feeling that Whitman imagines as existing
between all beings in the world; for in line after line we learn that
what it primarily means to have being of any kind- to have any sort
of identity, animate or inanimate- is to be a manifest challenge, a
"mocking taunt" to all other identities. This irony, however, remains
playful because it expresses not only the oblique point of view of
identity, of "each," but the loving irony of the poet who, from the
omniscient vantage of the "all," represents the experience of being
in all its continuity. From the point of view of each identity, existence
is essentially ironical: there is nothing quite like itself in the whole
world. But although there is a constant chaos and struggle of identi·
ties- and consequently suffering, death and defeat (which do
not
go unrepresented
in
Whitman's world) - the "mocking taunt" is not
finally ironic because no identity, whether destroyed or destroying,
"countervails" another. Everything has its
thereness J
is "in its place";
has its own body, its own involvement with itself, its own perfection,
and is therefore "great." And in having absolute joy or possession of
itself, in being individual, it obeys the common "law of perfections" :
that law of "precision and balance," as he says in the Preface,
which was Whitman's own way of enjoying himself and which be·
came, therefore, his principle of perception- the ontology of his vi·
sion and the individualistic aesthetic of his "free verse."
What is it, then, to be a self in such a universe? Like all
ani·
mate identities, Whitman's self finds its positive life in the "dilation
and pride" of being, in the will to power; and even love, having
its
roots, like all emotion, in sexual energy, partakes of this challenge
