Whitman’s Tangled Roots: The Problem of Sources

Whitman's TangledRoots: The Problemof Sources Harold Aspiz.Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Chicago: Universityof Illinois Press, 1980. 290pp. Roger Asselineau.The Transcendentalist Constant inAmericanLiterature. New York: NewYork University Press, 1980.189pp. Martin Bickman.The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies inAmerican Romanticism. Chapel Hill: The Universityof North Carolina Press, 1980. 182 pp. Betsy Erkkila. Walt Whitman Among the French. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296pp. Lorelei Cederstrom Inthe fourth section of "Song of Myself" Walt Whitman envisions both the questionsthat the future would ask of him as well as his ability to transcend thosequeries. He depicts himself as standing firm though surrounded by "trippers and askers" who are inquiring about "people I meet, the effect uponme of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,/The latestdates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new." In the faceof all this "pulling and hauling" Whitman asserts the consistent core of himself,a dynamic center which is unaffected by the ephemeral events which otherscall history or reality. "These come to me days and nights," he writes, "andgo from me again/But they are not the me myself." Howevermuch the jaded reviewer may wish merely to remind the literary historianof these words and let the case rest there, the profusion of recent booksinvestigating Whitman's sources and Whitman's influence demands a moreprecisely articulated response. Each of the books under review here isan attempt to pin Whitman down to a particular social or historical point ofreference. Metaphorically speaking, each of the authors tears at one of theroots of Whitman's Leaves searching for an answer to the child's question, "What is the grass'?" On occasion the laborious research illuminates some element of Whitman's poetry or the works of some of his followers, but, more frequently, the detailed comparisons and the historical references remainirrelevant. The essential Whitman, like the grass, eludes explanation. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 1982 350 Lorelei Cederstrom Whitman, after all, preaches a doctrine of cosmic consciousness andanallembracing self-hood, both of which are based upon a principle of timeless universality. Whitman's perception of himself as a "uniter of here andhereafter /Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them" ("Sea Drift," l. 20) remains the most accurate description of his relationship tohis sources. As far as Whitman's influence on later writers is concerned, hewrote of a "divine rapport" which he has "around the whole earth .. .in all lands" ("Salut Au Monde" 11. 211-13), a rapport which is reflected in the kinshipwhich critics Aspiz, Erkkila and Asselineau have noted between Whitman andsuch diverse figures as nineteenth-century phrenologists, writers of the French Enlightenment, and the American naturalists Dreiser and Hemingway.The very diversity of these "kin" points, once again, to the fact that Whitman'sis an a-historic message, a special vision of archetypal truths which have sounded invarious cultures before Whitman and willbe heard in many places afterhim. The primary criticism which can be levelledagainst Harold Aspiz' book, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful, is his lack of consideration of the possibility of a universal or archetypal body of knowledge which may be a common source for Whitman and the various medical cults which share his ideas. Aspiz narrowly focuses upon several of the popular ideas of Whitman's day, claiming that various fads which Whitman investigated as a newspaper reporter are the source of many elements of Leaves of Grass. Aspiz relates Whitman's poems to certain nineteenth-century health practices and pseudomedical doctrines in order to "clarify" Whitman's "poetic treatment ofsuch matters as physical beauty, sexuality, personal magnetism, or even the nature of poetry." In exploring Whitman's relationship to science and quasi-scientific medical lore, Aspiz hopes to illuminate "the personal, social, and philosophical relevance of his writing about the body and his achievement in making the body an exalted poetic theme" (p. x). Unfortunately, many of the areas which Aspiz investigates do little to increase our understanding of Leaves of Grass. He draws parallels between passages in the poetry and medical lore of the time, but similarities in imagery do not prove that Whitman used these materials as...