Whitman, the American Redeemer

Ed Ayers: Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaims in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” we have yet had no genius in America, yet America is a poem in ours. Its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters. Emerson was write. America did not wait long. Walt Whitman heard and responded to Emerson’s call. Literary critic Harold Bloom believes that Walt Whitman remains unsurpassed in American letters today.

Harold Bloom: A few figures who could compete, the Herman Melville of Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter, and elsewhere Mark Twain, Emerson, Emily Dickinson. No single writer that we’ve had is anywhere near as powerful, original, influential, and deeply poignant and moving as Walt Whitman.

Ed Ayers: What I’d like to do is, if we can, is to put ourselves back in the moment when Whitman emerged.

Harold Bloom: Let us do that immediately. He goes home after years of journalism. He joins his father and his brothers. They’re all carpenters. They build houses. He turns his back on the kind of dandy he had been and reinvents himself, and the early notebook fragments, which are tremendous, flower into the great poem “Song of Myself,” which is still the greatest American work of art.

Ed Ayers: One of those fragments reads, I am your voice. It was tied in you. In me, it begins to talk. I celebrate myself to celebrate every man and woman alive. I loosen the tongue that was tied in them. It begins to talk out of my mouth. I celebrate myself to celebrate you. I say the same word for every man and woman alive, and I say that the soul is not greater than the body, and I say that the body is not greater than the soul.

Harold Bloom: Oh, that is astonishing. This is the only poet who could have written as he did. In one of the 1856 poems, called “To You, Whoever You Are,” he actually says in it at one point, “I place my hands upon you, that you may be my poem.” I mean, Shakespeare is of course the greater poet, Dante, but they have nothing like that amazing immediacy in which the poet is actually putting his hand on you and saying, “Of course I’m touching you. You may be my poem.” There is something Christlike about that. But then I think there was a kind of deliberate attempt to be a kind of American Christ or redeemer on Walt’s part. He was brought up a Hicksite, or radical Quaker, and he always remained one, sort of Evangelical Quakerism, the original kind practiced by George Fox. But he really, as he said, wanted a new bible for Americans, and amazingly he tried to write it. Obviously, you can’t do that, but he did as much as anybody could have done.

Ed Ayers: Bloom says that “Song of Myself” is suffused with Whitman’s biblical sensibility, most notably in constructing the poem’s central trope. Whitman borrowed from a verse in the First Epistle of Peter, for all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fall off the way. Through Whitman, that verse famously became-

Harold Bloom: A child said, “What is the grass?” Fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child? I do not know whether it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition out of hopeful green stuff woven, or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, “Whose?” Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Harold Bloom: Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, and it means sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff. I give them the same. I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. 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, and from women and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps. And here you are, the mothers’ laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. Darker than the colorless beards of old men. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. That’s astonishing. In the entire history of literature, there’s nothing that direct. He’s really beyond praise.

Ed Ayers: When his book first came out, it was not universally admired. Is that right?

Harold Bloom: Oh no, far from it. He said that he was writing for the average working man or woman, but he’s actually a rather difficult poet. He invents a new metric, which is very delicate. He has rethought things for himself. You have to be a considerably educated person, even though he didn’t want to hear that. He would not have wanted to have any elitist or university [inaudible 00:21:07]. He wanted people in the streets and on the farms.

Ed Ayers: And while it wasn’t necessarily despised and rejected, “Song of Myself” was in general initially met with a kind of tepid indifference, except by one prominent author.

Harold Bloom: He sent a copy of it to Emerson, and Emerson in I think the greatest critical act of any American writer got this strange poem, reacted to it with a tremendous enthusiasm, and wrote a famous grand letter to Whitman, saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. I think this is the finest piece of wits and would that has come out of America,” which was true. And then the two men met, and essentially Emerson is the father of Whitman. Even though I’m a fierce Emersonian, I think Walt surpasses him.

Ed Ayers: And yet, according to Bloom, it is not through the written word that Walt Whitman reaches the height of his greatness.

Harold Bloom: The thing that I think makes him the greatest American, beyond even say George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, is what he did during the American Civil War. The hospitals were horrible. They were just unpainted shacks, and in it, there were in Washington DC thousands, untold thousands of soldiers, some Confederate, mostly Union, mostly white but also black. Walt Whitman went there and for years, from dawn until midnight, he served selflessly, beautifully, as an unpaid wound dresser and nurse. He did everything for these pour maimed and dying and frequently desperately illiterate people. He read books to them. He wrote letters home for them, and read the letters. He did everything he could to buy little things that would make life better for them. You know, some fresh fruits or a little brandy or something. And hundreds and hundreds of them died in his arms. It had a permanent effect on him. It broke his health. A stroke followed. His great poetry really ends in 1865, though he lives on until the 1890s. So that really makes him a kind of ministering angel, almost the great secular saint of American civilization.

Ed Ayers: And even today, Walt Whitman, this American saint of vitality, angel of perpetual life, continues to sustain Harold Bloom and urge him onward.

Harold Bloom: I’m 89 years old. I still teach. I still write. My whole life long, I’ve been reading Whitman. I still don’t feel I’ve reached a full understanding of him.

Ed Ayers: Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the Anxiety of Influence, the Western Canon, and most recently Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. As Harold Bloom just said, Whitman became a kind of visiting angel in Civil War field hospitals. But what initially prompted Whitman to leave New York during the Civil War? In 1862, Whitman received word that his brother George had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. During the worst, he traveled down to the Virginia battle site. Much to Whitman’s relief, he found that his brother had sustained only minor injuries. While he was there, Whitman was moved by an especially brutal scene.