PARADOX OF IDENTITY
405
phrase
of Nietzsche, a "transvaluation of values." Nietzsche, how–
ever, was a kind of inverse Emerson; his danger, as he himself con–
fessed, was a "loathing of mankind": his own transvaluation became
a contradiction of humanity. And so, in a vastly different sense,
Whitman's did, too- at that point in his career when he ceased to
transfigure values in speech: when, after 1856, his rhythms lost
touch with the native idiom of communication where the battle be–
tween self and society is first joined; when, intent on being "America"
instead of being simply American, he was forced to resort to the
mythical language of his abstract incantation, whose ideal vision of
men and things could no longer capture the mystery of their mock–
congratulatory signs and bows.
But in the great poems of 1855-56, Whitman remained true to
his instinct for that descriptive law of our literature that Mark Twain
similarly confirmed in our fictional prose- the truth, namely, that
since no "classic" American tradition exists, there can be no signifi–
cant idiom in our literature that is not a personal voice bearing a
personalized vision; and conversely, there can be no personal voice–
no way of even communicating with ourselves-that is not an indi–
viduation of American
speech,
which is incessantly dynamic for this
very reason. "Speech," said Whitman in "The Song of Myself," "is
the twin of my vision" ; and if his later folly lay in confounding self–
consciously his vision and his American
persona
of speech as the iden–
tical "I" of his American "personality," the wisdom of principle in
that failure lay in his recognition that the democratic idiom and the
personal vision of poetry must live together and cohere dialectically, as
they are born together, in the same creative consciousness.
If
not-if
an awareness of modern contradictions is allowed to overcome this
sense of our original paradox, then, as is proverbially said of all twins,
idiom or vision may cease to be itself when the other dies-and this,
as
it was Whitman's burden of truth, was also his fate as a poet.
