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the same year (1860); then acquires perhaps its most intensified pa–
triotic assimilation in
Drum-Taps
(1865); and at last achieves its
apotheosis-and returns to its original seas-as it disappears over
the ethereal "deep waters" of "Passage to India." In the democratic
"personality" as first adumbrated in the Preface of 1855, Whit–
man's elegiac "soul" had been scarcely perceptible; but by 1860 the
"American Soul" had developed "equal hemispheres" that hence–
forth remained constant: not only the "Dilation and Pride" of the
male
persona,
but "Love." "I believe," he wrote in this edition, "the
main purport of these states is to found a superb friendship, exalte,
previously unknown"-an aspiration that might have barely recom–
mended itself in Whitman's editorials, but coming as it does in one
of the "Calamus" lyrics, its vapid flaccidity of statement succeeds
only in rendering suspect the honesty and force of a sentiment whose
sole credentials are such bathetic words. Yet to this manifest deteriora–
tion Whitman remained blind, perhaps because he now sought for his
effects less in the single line than in the cumulative hypnosis of his
chants; his obsessive concern now was almost literally to
enchant,
to conjure the disguised fiction of his "soul" into an evolutionary
actuality: "These States, what are they except Myself?" And the
more, of course, Whitman instinctively recognized that his ideal of
"the manly love of comrades" was politically absurd or even sexually
perverse, the more he was forced to abandon the "indirection" of
ambiguous but concrete images and resort to the rhetoric, sentimental
and declamatory by turns, of his redeeming Logos. Thus we soon
witness a resurrection in the verse of the old pre-poetic identifica–
tions: the dandy with his pseudo-French, the editor with a fatal fond–
ness for the orotund phrase. Exclamation points now become rife;
Soul and Body are honored with capital letters-as they never were
in the first edition; such "orbic flexes" of Whitman's mouth as
Americanos! conquerors! marches-humanitarian!
Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
-these begin to lard the pages.
History itself came to the rescue of his incantatory style; if
there had been no Civil War, as he himself once remarked in old
age,
Leaves of Grass
might never have been continued. What the
war gave Whitman was nothing less than a world of human sub-
