PARADOX OF IDENTITY
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Whitman's worst failures, moreover, are in part redeemed by
their American inevitability. His later poetry may be said to have
succumbed to that "void" in American style that Tocqueville de–
scribes as a condition of the democratic consciousness-that hiatus we
continually recognize in Whitman, widening as his career progressed,
between "minute and clear" images of individualized perception and
his "general and vague" ideas. But if Whitman still remains the most
obvious victim of that void in our literature, perhaps he is so only
because no other writer before or since has experienced those con–
tradictions so immediately and so inwardly.
In his sexual loneliness, isolated in a society composed only of
other egos, in an America no longer consistently Puritan-without
absolutes, without a patriarchal tradition to mediate between self and
world, Whitman found his only pragmatic salvation in the trick
most Americans since have learned to play on the tininess and im–
mensity of their egos: he saw but one way to mediate between ego
and others- between fact and desire, idea and circumstance, present
and future- and that was to assume "personality," to make the self
an image of life (a 'life-style') in its own consciousness, at once the
symbol of its conditioned reality and of its chosen possibilities. But
being the poet he was, Whitman was finally content with no other
image of personality than the whole of life as he saw it. He wanted
every American to be a "kosmos"- to live in the macrocosmic whole–
ness of the life-process his poetry envisioned; to be capable of adapt–
ing all human diversities as potentials of thought and feeling in them–
selves; and for Whitman that meant, as a test case, to be as much
in
love with death as with life. That such ego-transcendence could
not only be realized but made average; that the void of modern
individualism could be "absorbed" by a sympathetic "merging"; that
the spiritual
unitas multiplex
of his poetry might be commuted into
life; that "America" means the consummation of history and a
mil–
lenarian liberation from the evils of the past-all this is the sublime
"innocence" in Whitman that our criticism has justly sought to dis–
credit as the most extreme manifestation of the perilous optimism
that pervades so much of our literature. And yet this very extremism
should remind us that Whitman's dream, as his "I" never ceases to
tell us, was only his "assumption"-and an "arrogant" one at that.
His chosen "personality" is not finally, then, to be defined by the
