PARADOX OF IDENTITY
403
what we dream rather than what we are is our essential truth." But
to the extent that Whitman's "mask" was not only his "dream" but
his
will and his becoming, the peculiar "doubleness" of his self-con–
sciousness can only be described as the constant interpenetration of
will and imagination-a reciprocity we are likely to forget was re–
sponsible for
both
Whitman's successes and his failures. For just as
his
characteristic failing is the loss of imagination in an excess of
personal will, so what constant greatness he possesses lies in that
power of expression where will and imagination meet, in that aspect
of style we can only call "voice." The quality of
his
style
is
always
that of a personal voice; and at his best Whitman is able not only
to represent uniquely his own will in words and in rhythms but to
make his imagination of the world function as expression, as
speech.
This,
it seems to me, is a secret, if not
the
secret, of all poetic achieve–
ment; and the extent to which this power of voice in Whitman,
manifest even in his "blab," is no longer felt or acknowledged is evi–
dence of that secret's having been already lost to our contemporary
sensibility.
With all our concern today for the plastic "tensions" and "am–
biguities" of "language," we seem to have lost touch with the dra–
matic ambiguity and immediacy of the speaking voice; and the
inevitable consequence has been that we find in the typical verse
of our magazines today style and "mask" without voice: the same
poetic tongue and no tongue; much orchestration of speech phrases,
but no speech; much dedication to 'meaning,' but little or no ima–
ginative
will,
no urgency or insistence, even a quiet insistence, to
make that meaning prevail. One can only dubiously generalize from
a single instance of genius, but Whitman's example should indicate
that the acts of a poet's imagination may always implicate, and their
force may even depend upon, the will to possibility in life; and the
persona
in poetry, therefore, may not be a "mask" to be "dreamed"
by the imagination of "art," but a voice inseparable, however dis–
tinct, from "personality" in life. And the
will
to such "personality"
may not be limited, as we think, to 'Romantic' temperaments like
Whitman's, but may be in some degree indispensable to poetry of
any significance in the modem world-if, that is, the quality of
the animating and mediating voice be admitted as a distinctive attri–
bute of the best modem verse; and we need only look beyond Whit-
