Walt Whitman, circa 1870. Photo: United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division / Wikimedia CC.
‘He might well be curious about the radically unfenced Quakerism of today.’
Two hundred years after his birth, what are we going to do with Walt… when he turns up at Meeting? Philip Gross revisits ‘the good grey poet’.
Here he is, this Sunday, in the doorway of the Meeting house. He is wearing his hat, the grey sombrero he kept on indoors in what people saw as the Quaker manner, and the clothes that led an admirer to describe him as the ‘Good Grey Poet’. Will we greet him with ‘Welcome back, Friend’? Or shake his hand with the usual polite mutter… and hope against hope that he’ll keep quiet for an hour, for a change?
Walt Whitman was never a Quaker, but he grew up among the ferment of religious groups in early nineteenth century New York. The school he attended was based on the strictly rational principles of an English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster. At the age of ten Walt’s parents took him to hear a thrilling sermon by the elderly Elias Hicks, whose liberal theology was shaking the foundations of US Quakerism, splitting it apart. Ten years later he was seriously considering becoming a Hicksite Quaker. Though he came to a clear conclusion – ‘I was never made to live inside a fence’ – something of that universalist vision fed into his poetry. This year, the bicentenary of his birth, he might well be curious about the radically unfenced Quakerism of today.
In body
It’s not that we would be fazed by his frank sexuality, in the way his Quaker contemporaries might have been. Even now, his erotic celebration of the body, the male body in particular, comes as a surprise – if only to think that this was 1855, when the first edition of his life’s-work Leaves of Grass appeared. But his sexuality is welcome; from this distance, he is a pioneer, an inspiration. It’s true that his diaries show him being wary, as we might expect; close scholarship reveals him self-editing some of the more passionate references from ‘he’ to ‘she’. The poetry, though… if anything was hidden, it was hiding in plain sight. His appetite extends to everything, human and natural. Nor is this an abstract sentiment. What he appreciates, he appreciates in individual detail. He takes in the panorama of the continent, its wild places and its cities, and especially its people – male and female, of all races, ages, classes and occupations. He watches people at menial jobs with delight and respect. ‘A sense of all conditions’ has never had such physical expression as in Walt Whitman’s verse.
‘I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs…
‘I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken…
‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there.’
Does this all-embracing fellowship seem like a failure to state his own sexual identity, or is it something larger? Let’s consider that he might be on the track of a broader vision in which the categories that so matter to us fall away.
In sound
Still, I sense an unease as this big man looms into the room. The problem may be that he is simply… too loud. Whole pages are peppered with exclamation marks and the vocative ‘O!’ He lives and breathes the rhetorical style of great preachers, with Old Testament cadences in long lines that roll off the edge of the page. Where is the space to hear the still, small voice? Again, maybe he has a question for us: is it silence, in itself, we’re after when we sit together? Or is silence a means towards the end of radical openness, a state of attention that is wider and deeper than is normal for our busy lives and selves?
Oh, yes: self… What do you say to someone who can write a poem of 1,346 lines called ‘Song of Myself’? ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself…’ it begins. But look at what this ‘self’ consists of. It is the sum of every observation or sensation, every sympathy. If the problem with ‘self’ is its partiality, its self-serving-ness, Walt Whitman offers a way out, not through ascetic self-denial but its opposite.
We live in an age that often seems to equate self-hood with opinions. On the internet forum, we are only what we say we think. Does Walt Whitman have opinions? You bet he does. He can make a passionate assertion… then in an instant make the opposite.
‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes).’
So twenty lines beginning ‘Give me the splendid silent sun’ are followed by another twenty, ‘Keep your splendid silent sun, / Keep your woods… Give me the streets of Manhattan’. In a time when to accuse someone of a ‘U-turn’ is deemed a killer punch in politics, we need to re-learn this capacity, the ability to grasp the truths in differing points of view.
In Meeting
But in the Quaker Meeting…? His challenge is to say the whole created world, both natural and human-made, demands our celebration. He won’t stand for counterposing the material to the spiritual, or dismissing the ‘secular world’. He asks us to stretch our sympathies and our imagination, to know we contain the possibility of all we admire and reject, all we love or oppose. He hurts with the wounded, from direct experience as a wound-dresser for the Union army in the civil war. He witnessed amputations. But he celebrated military virtues too. Does this all-angled sympathy undermine our judgment, in the necessary taking of a stand against obvious wrongs? Maybe it equips us better to grasp the complexities of conflict, and to envisage, hope and work for a more generous world?
Of course we have to read him with an understanding of the language of his time, as with any writing of another age, and not bridle at words and gestures we would avoid today. We might wince at the style when our energy flags but his voice thunders on. We might ask him to keep it down a bit. But Walt, old friend, please do come in. n
Walt Whitman: born 31 May 1819, died 26 March 1892.
Philip is a member of Cardiff Meeting. ‘A Few Words for Walt Whitman’ (above) first appeared in Changes of Address: Poems 1980–1998, published by Bloodaxe Books. His latest book, A Part of the Main, published by Mulfran Press, is a conversation in poems with Lesley Saunders exploring belonging and migration.
