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 What do you hear Walt Whitman? In  Song of Myself,  I and
this mystery here we stand. But mostly the speaker of the poems
is given as  I. Not a name plus a voice: just a voice.
Nor is the voice singular: it is generic. Allen Grossman has
persuasively argued that the impression of a singular voice can be
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achieved in poetry only by having an abstract pattern of meter
and a speaking will playing off against each other, like competitors
without whom there could be no game. The  natural stress char-
acteristics of language then play against  an abstract and irra-
tional pattern of counted positions, and the consequence is a
conviction of identity in the voice.17 I quote a well-established in-
stance from Wyatt:
They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
With naked fote stalking in my chamber.
I have sene theim gentill tame and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remember
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seeking with a continuell chaunge.
Thancked be fortune, it hath ben othrewise
Twenty tymes better; but ons in speciall
In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse
When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her armes long and small;
Therewithall swetely did my kysse
And softely said  dere hert, how like you this?
It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;
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And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
And she also to vse new fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely ame serued,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserued.18
That is a singular voice, as close as print can come to the sem-
blance of a particular man uttering his sense of his experience at
court and in the bedroom over a period, it may be, of years. Read-
ing the poem, we are close enough to hear the speaker. We never
release ourselves from him, his voice, his sense from one mo-
ment to the next of living a life bruised, embittered, ironic, su-
perior, passive, aggressive, punitive, erotic, whimpering. He uses
the vocabulary of the court ( I have leve,  I would fain knowe,
 torned thorough my gentilnes ) as if he could not yet give up its
values, miserable as they have made him. He also knows what
has gone wrong ( new fangilnes ) and how empty the old ways
( kyndely ) have turned out to be. The poem ends with a hapless
question, because the appeal to justice ( deserued ) is the most ir-
relevant one he could make. When all else is broken, he calls for
justice as the system of things that should obtain. This is a poem
to use a distinction of Rosemond Tuve s of  a man having
thoughts rather than of  the thoughts a man had. 19 It is crucial
to our appreciating the poem that we feel we are listening to one
man and that he is not claiming, at least for now, to be a repre-
sentative victim. He is not speaking for mankind. For the time
being, life is as it impinges upon him and is expressed in a partic-
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ular voice that moves from one tone to another. The world beyond
the court, outside the rooms of complaint and love, might as well
not exist. This sense, too, is part of the pressure the poem exerts
upon us. We read it as if we were trying to follow, in performance,
a difficult piece of music.
Grossman s argument is that Whitman s choice of a poetic
line made singularity of voice impossible. Whitman deemed the
meters of English verse to be corrupt, as Grossman says,  in-
delibly stained by the feudal contexts of its most prestigious in-
stances. Besides, the old meters required the suppression of the
natural turns of American speech,  and therefore an abridgment
of the freedom of the speaker. These meters, the degraded min-
istry of iambs, trochees, and dactyls, would have denied Whitman
access to his theme of freedom. So he repudiated them and settled
for  free verse and  open form. As a result, Grossman says:
In the chronology of Whitman s work, the  open line
as formal principle appears simultaneously with the sub-
ject of liberation, and is the enabling condition of the
appearance of that subject. That is to say, his first poems
in the new style are also his first poems on the subject of
slavery and freedom (specifically,  Resurgemus,  Blood-
Money,  Wounded in the House of Friends ).
But the price Whitman had to pay for his new style and his fated
theme was the loss of singularity. He could say  I only by claiming
that  I feel, and my feeling has the privilege of representing yours.
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Even that price turned out to be higher than he could have antici-
pated. As Grossman notes:  Whitmanian celebration by pluraliza-
tion extinguishes all personhood which has only singular form. 20
Even in the elegy for Lincoln, Whitman finds himself writing:
Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for
you O sane and sacred death.21
All he could hope to achieve by vers libre was an endless apostro-
phe to  I and Thou on the basis of the axiomatic transparence
of persons,  reciprocal internality, of persons one to the other
( What I shall assume you shall assume ). 22 We have seen that
that formulation has been interpreted, notably by Quentin An-
derson, as evidence of a totalitarian claim upon the world.
There is also the question: if Whitman s poetic voice must be
generic or representative rather than singular, what can it say,
what values can it live by? No matter how plural its invocations,
the rhetoric of  I, like you, whoever you are, can t be an ac-
knowledgement of differences, it can only be an assertion of the
same. It cannot say anything else but:  I take your point, that you
and I are not, as things stand, the same. Socially, you are a slave,
I am a master. But in spiritual principle and in a future which I
prophesy will fulfill that principle, you and I will be the same. So
even now there is no need to  regard the hovels of those that live
in this land.  Those who find Leaves of Grass, like many of Emer-
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son s essays, chilling do so for that reason. The book seems to tell
the people who live in hovels in the Appalachian mountains, for
example, or the slums of Chicago that they need not fret; spir-
itually, they are the same as the people who live in elegant suburbs
and wash their Jaguars on Sunday mornings. On this principle,
Whitman cannot discriminate between one person and another,
one entity and another. If he is to maintain that all things are one
and the same, he can only declare what Grossman calls  the good-
ness of simple presence as the human axiom, the good of mere
being without further tally,  the presence of the person prior to all
other characteristics. 23 Whitman, speaking in  By Blue Ontario s
Shore of  the poet, says repeating the sentiment from the
1855 preface  He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun
falling around a helpless thing. 24 That is: he doesn t judge at all,
since the sun falls impartially upon a helpless thing and a thug. It
is a rhetoric of parataxis: one thing, then another and another.
There must be no preference, privilege, or discrimination of kind
or degree. If the value to be celebrated is presence-before-identity, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]