Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle

2 The American 1848

2 : the american 1848 i celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass. (LG 25) So begins “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily presumptuous, poem. Leaving aside the many layers of presumption for a moment, I want to draw attention to a muted but nevertheless insistent conflict between competing language systems in these opening lines, a clash of tongues that reverberates throughout “Song of Myself.” These di∂erences in linguistic register form a central, if underacknowledged, part of what Whitman famously told Horace Traubel was his “language experiment” (AP viii). They also relate to the political conflicts in which the poem engages at a subterranean level. The wager I make here is that a detailed explication of the stratified layers of language that comprise “Song of Myself” will force these conflicts into the light of day. The first three lines of the poem are quite unremarkable : the tone is relatively even, the diction formal and Latinate. An educated reader of the mid-1850s would have had little di∑culty recognizing to “celebrate” and to “assume” as literary language. That reader might have been jarred somewhat by the starkly scientistic “atom” arriving in the third line, but the specialized vocabulary of chemistry was becoming more di∂used as a result of the antebellum interest in popular science. Whitman himself had reviewed Justus Liebig’s Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Agriculture (1847), made available in a “handsome new edition, by Wiley & Putnam , New York, for seventy-five cents,” relaying to the Brooklyn Eagle’s readers the information that chemistry involved “the essences of creation,” their “changes,” their “growths,” “formations, and decays” (J2 288). Perhaps another minor disturbance might have been felt in the passage from the lofty “I celebrate myself” to the blunt vernacular of “as good belongs to you,” where a self-consciously “poetic” opening gives way suddenly to the curt, abrupt tone of someone bargaining in the street, anxious to clear away equivocations and clinch a deal. Since everyone in their corporeal being is composed of atoms, the speaker seems to insist, individuals are near enough equivalent to each other: we are all woven of the same essential stu∂. It’s in the fourth line, though, that the trouble really begins for a reader of poetry accustomed to evenness of tone (and I will argue shortly that Whitman ’s readers would be so accustomed). To “loafe” (from the German laufen, to run) is a verb with an established vernacular usage. The noun, “loafer,” meant, according to Webster’s Dictionary, “[a]n idle man; a vagrant who seeks his living by sponging or expedients” and was heard originally in the New York markets. The word made an early appearance in print in 1835, in Cornelius Mathews’s “The Late Ben. Smith, Loafer,” the story of “a metropolitan loafer, and a phenomenon,” who functions as the “ruling luminary of a whole shoal of shag-tailed comets that used to shoot madly about the terrestrial firmament of New York.”1 It gained major currency with the 1837 Panic and the depression that followed, when “loafing” became associated with the enforced idleness of mass unemployment.2 To loaf, then, is not an expression that sits easily in a poem alongside high-flown talk of atoms and the soul. An idea of just how high-flown this language was may be gained from Whitman’s likely sources in Emerson and the Eastern mysticism that appealed to the Concord transcendentalists. In the Eagle for December 15, 1847, Whitman quoted a “striking paragraph” from “Spiritual Laws,” which had appeared in Emerson’s Essays: First Series (1841), reprinted that year. In reflecting on our past life, the quoted paragraph argues, we find that things “familiar and stale,” as well as things “tragic and terrible,” have a kind of “grace.” Once it achieves this kind of detachment, “[t]he soul will not know 30 : the american 1848 either deformity or pain” (J2 281). Emerson’s essay develops the idea that the “mechanical actions” of our merely social existence are not what counts in life: what counts is our natural “power” or “vital energy.”3 In perfecting ourselves, we should follow the calm superiority of “external nature...