Recently I came across a psychological assessment test on the Web--I don't remember what it was for, but before you could take the test, you had to provide some background information. One of the questions had to do with how religious one is. Possible answers, as one might imagine, ranged from Not At All to Very. If one clicked on Not At All, one then proceeded to the next background question. If one clicked on Very, however, more information on religion was requested. Were you 1) Christian; 2) Jewish; 3) Muslim; 4) Buddhist or 5) Hindu? I was amazed to find that not only was there no Other Religion category, but there was no Unaffiliated category either. Those who devised the questionnaire obviously did not imagine the possibility of being religious without belonging to an organized religion.
I immediately thought of Walt Whitman. He would, no doubt, have clicked on Very and would have left the next question unanswered.
There is no doubt that he was a deeply religious man; his poetry is suffused with a sense of transcendence. A close friend of his, in fact, wrote that she was convinced that a religious sensibility was behind everything he wrote. Whitman would certainly not have denied this.
This little essay will present Whitman's vision, the religious views of a deeply spiritual man. I think they provide a good role model for those who are estranged from creeds, yet have religious yearnings nevertheless.
1.
To those who read poetry collections it is well known that a poet will tend to put one of his best poems at the beginning and another one at the end. Although a brilliant innovator, Whitman was very much concerned with the content of this poems. He had something to write about and refused to obscure that content with verbal fireworks. If Whitman's friend was correct, we would expect to find a specific reference to religion at the beginning of his greatest poem and at the end of it. (The poem, Song of Myself, is actually a collection of 57 poems.) This is indeed the case, as we shall now see.
At the beginning of Song of Myself, Whitman establishes that this work will be about him--and, at the same time, about everyone else. The poem is a celebration of human consciousness, a source of eternal wonder and the highest good of which Whitman is aware--as is made evident from the following lines from section 48 of the poem:
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
The emphasis is obviously on an inner religion without any need of external revelation.
Whitman makes perfectly clear that he is unaffiliated with any particular religion with the ending of the first poem::
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
It is important to note here that Whitman's mother, to whom he was very close, was much influenced by Quakerism. This "religion" emphasizes the search for, celebration of, and acting upon, the "inner light." Conscience suffused in this light, rather than an external deity, is the Quakers' highest good. One day, when Whitman was ten, living in Brooklyn, his father took the family to listen to a famous Quaker, Elijah Hicks. Hicks had been a friend of Whitman's grandfather and, at the time, was over eighty. The young Whitman was quite impressed. His speech has not been preserved, but one can get the gist of it from a famous sentence of his: "The blood of Christ is no different from the blood of a goat." He said this not as a flippant secularist, but as a deeply innately religious man who eschewed all dogma.
To the poet Whitman religions are more like poetry than prose; taking them literally is just as ridiculous as believing the line "My luv is like a red red rose" means that the woman being referred to is full of thorns and infested with aphids. They are "never forgotten" because as poetry they have great spiritual significance.
Now let's proceed to the religious reference, specifically the notion of immortality, at the end of the poem:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
One of the chief beauties of poetry is its subtlety. its inability to be pinned down, its accessibility to multiple interpretations. I will give two interpretations of this passage. The first deals with consolation from the cycle of nature; the second deals with the consolation from some sort of individual immortality. (That the passage deals with consolation, of this there can be no doubt.)
Whitman found much solace in the cycle of nature. In section 6 of Song of Myself he famously writes:
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
Beautiful lines that basically state that life goes on, and as modern physics teaches us regarding the event horizon around a black hole, information is somehow conserved. Whitman was a great admirer of the Swedish scientist Justus Liebig, who had a very optimistic view of nature and emphasized the natural process of the incorporation of dead matter into a new generation of living matter. He asserted that decomposition was also a way of purification; he believed that diseases and impurities were broken down after burial into a purer substance from which new life arises. (Semmelweiss and the discovery of microbes was not far away in time, but still eons away in concept.) Whitman obviously took much consolation in this view. It cheered him when he felt there was no form of individual immortality at all. He once wrote, for instance, that "life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crepe and tears."
There is. however, a second interpretation of the last lines of Song of Myself. Whitman also wrote these lines: "I am not prepared to admit fraud in the scheme of the universe--yet without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature." In the last poem of Song of Myself Whitman seems to be writing about more then the wheel of natural processes. Let us examine more closely the final eight lines of the poem. It uses the first person pronoun, either as "I" or as "me" referring to no one else but the narrator, an astonishing nine times. To me this is a good indication that the "I" not only becomes the grass at death but somehow also transcends it. The addressed member of a future generation might find him by "looking under his boot-soles" but what he might find seems to be a lot more personal than grass. In "fact" the narrator has been waiting for him both as grass and as something completely transcendent.. This gives credence to the assertion that Whitman believed that consciousness somehow survives death.
If these two interpretations seem to contradict each other, I refer the reader to Whitman's famous lines: "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself? (I am large; I contain multitudes.)
Remember that these two views which I believe Whitman held simultaneously do not indicate fuzzy thinking; in contrast they indicate a profound and poetic view that reflects the subtleties and apparent contradictions of life.
2.
A rabbi recently told me that she and many Jews do not waste their time talking about God. The more religious ones do not doubt that something wonderfully unfathomable lies behind everything; it's just better to act upon it rather than talk about it. Trying to put God into a catechism is extremely unproductive according to this view. God is thus a poetic hint rather than a prosy fact. I do believe Whtiman shared a similar view, as evinced by the following lines from Song of Myself:
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God about death.)
A line that follows, quoted before, I re-quote here:
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
For Whitman human consciousness is the supreme wonder and mystery, not God. I think that he would have agreed that the "image of God" refers more to consciousness itself, rather than to a deity beyond it. Some modern physicists--as well as many Hindus-- believe consciousness underlies, that is, creates everything, thus adopting the mantle of an external creator-God. Like the traditional deity, consciousness is both very close, since it is ourselves, and very distant, since it remains the ultimate mystery. Thus Whitman may have been referring to this mystery in the line that immediately anteceded the last quote: "I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least/" Whitman in this respect, as in many other respects, was way ahead of his time.
3.
Walt Whitman was an optimist, no doubt about that. He certainly had empathy for the unfortunate, yet even his exposure to immense suffering while tending to victims of the Civil War could not, in the long run, affect his upbeat view of life. The following lines from section 44 of Song of Myself demonstrate both his optimism and empathy for others:
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation?
(What have I to do with lamentation?)
This does not mean at all that Whitman did not have his share of sorrow. He left school at age 11 and was on his own for the rest of his life. He had to commit his elder brother to an insane asylum; his youngest brother was severely cognitively impaired; there was alcoholism in his family; his sister married an unstable artist and wrote many desperate letters to her brother, etc.
How did Whitman manage so well to overcome the stress of living? This is an important question if we are to hold Whitman's vision as an example to follow, since it is often the case that optimism, if challenged enough, often wanes and even turns into its opposite. We will illustrate Whitman's ability to remain largely unfazed by adversity with two examples. The first poem, "All Poverties, Wincings, And Sulky Retreats," written long after Song of Myself, appeared in the 1881 collection, From Noon to Starry Night.
All poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
(For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes, the old, the incessant war?)
You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah, wounds the deepest of all!
You toil of painful and chocked articulations, you meannesses,
You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of any;)
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd ennuis!
Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth,
It shall yet march forth o'erwhelming, till all lies beneath me,
It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.
These strikingly beautiful lines illustrate that Whitman's abilities did not decline with age. Their intensity is virtual proof of their sincerity. Here he is not trying to reform America by administering the medicine she needs. (He once wrote that his poetry was designed "to lead America, to quell America with a great tongue.") Here his great tongue is dealing with inner demons. We should not doubt that these demons sometimes presented a formidable challenge.
Mozart loved dissonances but always resolved them. Whitman was no different; he was as incapable of ending a poem in despair as Mozart was able to end a composition with a twelve tone row. His nature did not allow it. The determination to triumph over negativity is expressed in the last three lines of the poem. Note that it is "his real self" that will provide the victory. Thus it is not only his nature but his vision that will prove victorious. Whitman's poems provide ample attestation to Whitman's vision that there is a "real self" that transcends the individual self, remaining unaffected by personal vicissitudes. Thus at the beginning of Song of Myself he can write, "I celebrate myself and sing myself" without being at all egotistic, since he is writing about the "real self." (A further illustration of this lack of egotism is that Song of Myself contains few personal references, and when it does, they are always part of a much larger context. Whitman is anything but a confessional poet.)
Notice in the last two lines the impersonal pronoun, it. He does not write "I shall yet march forth," or "I shall yet stand up," but "It shall yet march forth" and "It shall yet stand up..." This is further proof that Whitman saw his real self as something objective, something eternal. Here he sounds much like a Hindu guru. Gurus are acquainted with sorrow, but their vision prevents despair.
The second poem illustrates Whitman's best defense against negative thinking, a basic attitude and behavior without which wisdom might well run dry. It is part of his collection entitled "Calamus."
I immediately thought of Walt Whitman. He would, no doubt, have clicked on Very and would have left the next question unanswered.
There is no doubt that he was a deeply religious man; his poetry is suffused with a sense of transcendence. A close friend of his, in fact, wrote that she was convinced that a religious sensibility was behind everything he wrote. Whitman would certainly not have denied this.
This little essay will present Whitman's vision, the religious views of a deeply spiritual man. I think they provide a good role model for those who are estranged from creeds, yet have religious yearnings nevertheless.
1.
To those who read poetry collections it is well known that a poet will tend to put one of his best poems at the beginning and another one at the end. Although a brilliant innovator, Whitman was very much concerned with the content of this poems. He had something to write about and refused to obscure that content with verbal fireworks. If Whitman's friend was correct, we would expect to find a specific reference to religion at the beginning of his greatest poem and at the end of it. (The poem, Song of Myself, is actually a collection of 57 poems.) This is indeed the case, as we shall now see.
At the beginning of Song of Myself, Whitman establishes that this work will be about him--and, at the same time, about everyone else. The poem is a celebration of human consciousness, a source of eternal wonder and the highest good of which Whitman is aware--as is made evident from the following lines from section 48 of the poem:
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
The emphasis is obviously on an inner religion without any need of external revelation.
Whitman makes perfectly clear that he is unaffiliated with any particular religion with the ending of the first poem::
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
It is important to note here that Whitman's mother, to whom he was very close, was much influenced by Quakerism. This "religion" emphasizes the search for, celebration of, and acting upon, the "inner light." Conscience suffused in this light, rather than an external deity, is the Quakers' highest good. One day, when Whitman was ten, living in Brooklyn, his father took the family to listen to a famous Quaker, Elijah Hicks. Hicks had been a friend of Whitman's grandfather and, at the time, was over eighty. The young Whitman was quite impressed. His speech has not been preserved, but one can get the gist of it from a famous sentence of his: "The blood of Christ is no different from the blood of a goat." He said this not as a flippant secularist, but as a deeply innately religious man who eschewed all dogma.
To the poet Whitman religions are more like poetry than prose; taking them literally is just as ridiculous as believing the line "My luv is like a red red rose" means that the woman being referred to is full of thorns and infested with aphids. They are "never forgotten" because as poetry they have great spiritual significance.
Now let's proceed to the religious reference, specifically the notion of immortality, at the end of the poem:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
One of the chief beauties of poetry is its subtlety. its inability to be pinned down, its accessibility to multiple interpretations. I will give two interpretations of this passage. The first deals with consolation from the cycle of nature; the second deals with the consolation from some sort of individual immortality. (That the passage deals with consolation, of this there can be no doubt.)
Whitman found much solace in the cycle of nature. In section 6 of Song of Myself he famously writes:
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
Beautiful lines that basically state that life goes on, and as modern physics teaches us regarding the event horizon around a black hole, information is somehow conserved. Whitman was a great admirer of the Swedish scientist Justus Liebig, who had a very optimistic view of nature and emphasized the natural process of the incorporation of dead matter into a new generation of living matter. He asserted that decomposition was also a way of purification; he believed that diseases and impurities were broken down after burial into a purer substance from which new life arises. (Semmelweiss and the discovery of microbes was not far away in time, but still eons away in concept.) Whitman obviously took much consolation in this view. It cheered him when he felt there was no form of individual immortality at all. He once wrote, for instance, that "life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crepe and tears."
There is. however, a second interpretation of the last lines of Song of Myself. Whitman also wrote these lines: "I am not prepared to admit fraud in the scheme of the universe--yet without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature." In the last poem of Song of Myself Whitman seems to be writing about more then the wheel of natural processes. Let us examine more closely the final eight lines of the poem. It uses the first person pronoun, either as "I" or as "me" referring to no one else but the narrator, an astonishing nine times. To me this is a good indication that the "I" not only becomes the grass at death but somehow also transcends it. The addressed member of a future generation might find him by "looking under his boot-soles" but what he might find seems to be a lot more personal than grass. In "fact" the narrator has been waiting for him both as grass and as something completely transcendent.. This gives credence to the assertion that Whitman believed that consciousness somehow survives death.
If these two interpretations seem to contradict each other, I refer the reader to Whitman's famous lines: "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself? (I am large; I contain multitudes.)
Remember that these two views which I believe Whitman held simultaneously do not indicate fuzzy thinking; in contrast they indicate a profound and poetic view that reflects the subtleties and apparent contradictions of life.
2.
A rabbi recently told me that she and many Jews do not waste their time talking about God. The more religious ones do not doubt that something wonderfully unfathomable lies behind everything; it's just better to act upon it rather than talk about it. Trying to put God into a catechism is extremely unproductive according to this view. God is thus a poetic hint rather than a prosy fact. I do believe Whtiman shared a similar view, as evinced by the following lines from Song of Myself:
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God about death.)
A line that follows, quoted before, I re-quote here:
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
For Whitman human consciousness is the supreme wonder and mystery, not God. I think that he would have agreed that the "image of God" refers more to consciousness itself, rather than to a deity beyond it. Some modern physicists--as well as many Hindus-- believe consciousness underlies, that is, creates everything, thus adopting the mantle of an external creator-God. Like the traditional deity, consciousness is both very close, since it is ourselves, and very distant, since it remains the ultimate mystery. Thus Whitman may have been referring to this mystery in the line that immediately anteceded the last quote: "I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least/" Whitman in this respect, as in many other respects, was way ahead of his time.
3.
Walt Whitman was an optimist, no doubt about that. He certainly had empathy for the unfortunate, yet even his exposure to immense suffering while tending to victims of the Civil War could not, in the long run, affect his upbeat view of life. The following lines from section 44 of Song of Myself demonstrate both his optimism and empathy for others:
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation?
(What have I to do with lamentation?)
This does not mean at all that Whitman did not have his share of sorrow. He left school at age 11 and was on his own for the rest of his life. He had to commit his elder brother to an insane asylum; his youngest brother was severely cognitively impaired; there was alcoholism in his family; his sister married an unstable artist and wrote many desperate letters to her brother, etc.
How did Whitman manage so well to overcome the stress of living? This is an important question if we are to hold Whitman's vision as an example to follow, since it is often the case that optimism, if challenged enough, often wanes and even turns into its opposite. We will illustrate Whitman's ability to remain largely unfazed by adversity with two examples. The first poem, "All Poverties, Wincings, And Sulky Retreats," written long after Song of Myself, appeared in the 1881 collection, From Noon to Starry Night.
All poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
(For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes, the old, the incessant war?)
You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah, wounds the deepest of all!
You toil of painful and chocked articulations, you meannesses,
You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of any;)
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd ennuis!
Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth,
It shall yet march forth o'erwhelming, till all lies beneath me,
It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.
These strikingly beautiful lines illustrate that Whitman's abilities did not decline with age. Their intensity is virtual proof of their sincerity. Here he is not trying to reform America by administering the medicine she needs. (He once wrote that his poetry was designed "to lead America, to quell America with a great tongue.") Here his great tongue is dealing with inner demons. We should not doubt that these demons sometimes presented a formidable challenge.
Mozart loved dissonances but always resolved them. Whitman was no different; he was as incapable of ending a poem in despair as Mozart was able to end a composition with a twelve tone row. His nature did not allow it. The determination to triumph over negativity is expressed in the last three lines of the poem. Note that it is "his real self" that will provide the victory. Thus it is not only his nature but his vision that will prove victorious. Whitman's poems provide ample attestation to Whitman's vision that there is a "real self" that transcends the individual self, remaining unaffected by personal vicissitudes. Thus at the beginning of Song of Myself he can write, "I celebrate myself and sing myself" without being at all egotistic, since he is writing about the "real self." (A further illustration of this lack of egotism is that Song of Myself contains few personal references, and when it does, they are always part of a much larger context. Whitman is anything but a confessional poet.)
Notice in the last two lines the impersonal pronoun, it. He does not write "I shall yet march forth," or "I shall yet stand up," but "It shall yet march forth" and "It shall yet stand up..." This is further proof that Whitman saw his real self as something objective, something eternal. Here he sounds much like a Hindu guru. Gurus are acquainted with sorrow, but their vision prevents despair.
The second poem illustrates Whitman's best defense against negative thinking, a basic attitude and behavior without which wisdom might well run dry. It is part of his collection entitled "Calamus."
| OF the terrible doubt of appearances, | |
| Of the uncertainty after all—that we may be deluded, | |
| That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, | |
| That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, | |
| May-be the things I perceive—the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters, | 5 |
| The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these are, (as doubtless they are,) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known; | |
| (How often they dart out of themselves, as if to confound me and mock me! | |
| How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them;) | |
| May-be seeming to me what they are, (as doubtless they indeed but seem,) as from my present point of view—And might prove, (as of course they would,) naught of what they appear, or naught any how, from entirely changed points of view; | |
| —To me, these, and the like of these, are curiously answer’d by my lovers, my dear friends; | 10 |
| When he whom I love travels with me, or sits a long while holding me by the hand, | |
| When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, | |
| Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom—I am silent—I require nothing further, | |
| I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave; | |
| But I walk or sit indifferent—I am satisfied, | 15 |
| He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me. True, Whitman might be emphasizing his doubt in order to better resolve it at the end of the poem, but I am quite sure the feelings of uncertainty in this poem are genuine. The poem is a striking example of the importance of connectedness with fellow human beings as one of the best ways to quell life's anxieties. Research bears this out; those who are isolated tend to die sooner, not to mention the difficulties they face during life. As Whitman biographies and his poems indicate, the poet had a keen ability to make and maintain friendships with people from all walks of life. The first poem in this section deals with wisdom, this one deals with love. Each feeds the other, but Whitman--like St. Paul--would agree that love is the most important of all. These two poems taken together provide the essence of Whitman's worldview. 4. Poems with a didactic message are usually bad. As Frost said, if a young person wants to become a poet because he has something to say, it would be better to write essays. Whitman is the greatest exception to this rule that I know of. He was strikingly able to subsume what he had to say into great poetry. His take on love and wisdom, while immediately understandable, is quite unique. How many other poets can one use as a guide to life? No "mania of owning things," but an aesthetic illustration of the importance of friendship and wisdom. In the best of his writing, expression and content are one, and are of the highest order. Love and wisdom, Whitman's main themes, have always been in too short supply. Isn't his poetry just what we need? The Walt Whitman Series (Thomasdorsett.blogspot.com) 1. Walt Whitman and Equality 2. Walt Whitman and Music 3. My Walt Whitman Moment 4. Five Poems About Death 5. Walt Whitman's Vision |
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