PARADOX OF IDENTITY
395
"to be master." The human self, however, is itself a microcosm of
struggling identities, in which "body" and "soul" and all the con–
tradictory powers of Whitman's being contend and conspire to woo
the secret and elusive beloved, "the Me myself." But the self always
escapes from itself as from all other impinging identities, and when
it does, the roles are soon reversed : then Whitman's "I" is the pur–
suer of the miraculous secret of power and love, the mystery whose
"mocking taunt" winks back at him from the manifold interplay of
the universe. (Here we glimpse the ironic relation that obtains in the
poetry between Whitman
in propria persona
and his "kosmos" of
Eros, which can only be imagined as existing in the world, and yet
when felt or experienced becomes a mystery again by passing into
his feeling, into "myself.") The secret thus turns out to be the joy
and the style of its pursuit: unlike the romantic secret in
Faust,
the
secret may only be sought and felt and loved
as
a secret, for all be–
ings may only share the secret they can never know-the miracle of
"touch" or "urge" that "quivers" them all to "identity." To have
the self-experience of "identity," then, is not only to imitate the uni–
versal life in its expression of energy, but to imitate the universe in
its secret balance, to recoil from all extremes and repose upon one's
self as a secret, exactly as the body does. (Perhaps this helps to ex–
plain, too, Whitman's imagination of death as the perfection of
"identity.") Whitman's irony, therefore, being inevitably a self–
expression, rises and falls as only a phase of his balance, and must
finally yield to the higher paradox of love that Whitman as the
poet recognizes. For if "precision and balance"
is
the law of the
body, then there is hope that the power of Eros may also order itself
as a self-redemptive law in the world ("a kelson of the creation
is
love"), exactly as it does in his poetry.
This, then, insofar as it yields to analysis, is what I take to be
Whitman's vision of the organic democracy of all things-and it
will be seen at once how radically American this view of the world
is. But the very intensity of Whitman's awareness of his vision seems
to have bred a confusion of values and of the planes of thought and
being, especially when the same voice modulated into the proselytic
will of the Preface attempted to translate a poet's love into the demo–
cratic ethos of "sympathy and pride" and poetic "laws of perfection"
