PARADOX OF IDENTITY
399
stance for his emotional solipsism-a theatre, a living libretto, and
a supporting American cast for his arias and recitatives of "One
Identity" and "the Divine Average." The war, however, merely
confirmed him in his own compulsions; immersed in the mystical
unionism of the time, he never recognized what another poetic in–
telligence might have learned: that one cannot be both an epic and
a lyric poet in the same breath, for to be both is to be, as Homer or
Dante were, a consciously dramatic poet also-something that Whit–
man's peculiar constitution forbade. Perhaps only once in the later
Whitman, in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," do the
vates
and the
poeta
unite to produce the masterful "psalm of the
republic" of which Whitman dreamed; but this poem, too, owes
the magnificence of its music and its concreteness of vision to the
spell of a personal theme, the intuition of his own death as prefigured
in Lincoln's. With the sole exceptions of this poem and of "Passage
to India" (which, however, is only incidentally about America),
Whitman in the years after 1856 is able to sustain his moments of
lyrical genius only by reaction from
his
own epic ego-when, as in
"Out of the Cradle" and in other poems of the "Sea Drift" series,
the thought of death or abandonment or loneliness makes him recoil
from the fictional personality that had chanted only perpetual prefaces
to an illusion. And in one of these, in
"As
I Ebbed with the Ocean
of Life," his "soul" seems almost on the verge of renouncing its
mythical synthesis; for a brief moment the mask that the war was
soon to restore to him falls, and we hear again in its fullness-and
for the last time
in
L eaves of Grass- the
original irony of his
"mystery" :
o
baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppressed with myself that
I
have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me
I
have not once had the least idea who or what
I
am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands )Iet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word
I
have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath,
