PARADOX OF IDENTITY
397
speaker on a platform-or an operatic soloist intoning a recitative
(Whitman's own perilous analogy) -and a solitary "soul" standing
up to speak in the silence of a Quaker meeting, and whose impas–
sioned speech may, as 'the spirit moves,' modulate into rhapsodic
rhythms of song. The first poems, moreover, had been written almost
conversationally, .addressed as an intimate letter to a personal and
private "you"; but Whitman's "you" had now become essentially
plural, the collective democratic conscience of America. And moti–
vating this new "vocalism" was a change in Whitman's conception
of his book: it was no longer simply the testament of an individual
"modern," but "the new Bible"-a democratic missal and
vade
mecum
for the entire nation, but especially for teachers,
"mediums,'~
"savans," "oratists." And since the "leader of leaders" was, as the
prose Whitman had written, the native bard, he was now being true
to his word:
Chanter of Personality, outlining a history yet to' be,
I project the ideal man, the American of the future.
Throughout the nineteenth century much of the impulse to
poetry was by way of overt or secret reaction to an abstract human–
ism or to bourgeois rationalism; and when he began
Leaves of
GTaSS,
Whitman, too, had been reacting to an overexposure to ideology:
like Wordsworth, like Mill and Carlyle, his "soul" had protested:
"But where am I in all this?" Yet in seeking a freedom from the
slavery of abstractions, his "soul" sought also to satisfy its craving
for love; and by 1860 Whitman had found a way to anneal both
his biological and his ideological compulsions into the single program–
matic purpose of creating an American "Stock-Personality," a na–
tional comradeship, a "One Identity" for "ye partial, diverse lives."
And so intense was this will that Whitman remained unaware that,
in
substance if not in form, his poetry was slowly receding to his
habitual prose-an attrition of imaginative power that might, in
fact, be demonstrated almost wholly in terms of the progressive so–
cialization of his once unconscious "soul."
Emerging from the oceanic dream-world of "The Sleepers,"
"soul" first becomes immediately identified with democratic feeling
in the homosexually haunted "Calamus" poems; is elevated to an
abstract identity with "America" in the "Chants Democratic" of
