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PARTISAN REVIEW
into an evolutionary American "fruition." The irony of the "un–
translatable" mystery begins to disappear in the very year of publi–
cation, for in the performance of 1856 Whitman has already begun
to lose the delicate balance of his paradox. The first
L eaves of Grass,
the actual book, seems to have served Whitman as a kind of mirror,
in which the
persona,
having acquired objective reality, saw itself for
the first time; and from that moment, as it were, Whitman's love
was less for his democratic mystery than for its American image.
It
is almost as if Whitman had looked too long at his own frontispiece,
and had then begun primping to make good on his specifications for
an "athletic bard," forgetting that this new "self" was not its own
reality but an attitude, an imaginative way of speaking, a "language
experiment." What was happening, of course, was what Nietzsche
describes as the "typical velleity" of the artist: "tired to the point
of despair of the eternal 'unreality' and falseness of innermost being,"
he is tempted to think that he actually
is
the object he is able to
represent, imagine or express; and then, attempting to have real
existence, he "trespasses on the forbidden ground" of actuality. Al–
most from the moment of his first creativity- in
his
attempt to some–
how convert his "mystery" into a reclamation of ego; in his effort
to put on the musical power of his imaginative experience and
be
the "personality" of his liberating Eros; in his necessity to find an
epic American significance for his rebellious lyrical impulses- almost
at once Whitman's career begins confirming the truth of Nietzsche's
warning.
This American self-consciousness, first stylistically apparent in
1856, in the third (1860) edition became overwhelming. The writer
of most of these new poems is trying manfully to be the poet of his
Preface; and Whitman was, in fact, so enamoured of the Preface
that one of the new additions, "Poem of Many in One" (later re–
titled "By Blue Ontario's Shore"), is almost literally a paraphrase
of it-a poem filled with almost nothing but self-exhortations. This
poem really inaugurates a change in Whitman's style and intention
that has never been sufficiently remarked; for in almost all the new
poems, even when not explicitly "Chants Democratic," some form
of incantation has become the dominant stylistic mode. The differ–
ence between Whitman's voice in the later editions and the "I" of
the first
Leaves
might be described as the difference between a
