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4 / Writing the Metempsychotic Text While there is a propensity to interpret Whitman’s poetry in the poetically secular terms of the twentieth century, a number of critics have come to emphasize the mystical and religious tenor of Whitman’s writing. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, scholars sought to uncover the Hindu influences in Whitman’s poetry;1 in recent decades, critics, like David Kuebrich and Arthur Versluis, have understood it in terms of a “new American religion.”2 Versluis touches upon a major obstacle in assessing the spiritual, mystical, or esoteric underpinnings of Whitman’s writing. Such influences, he argues, “were utterly subordinated in Whitman ’s poetry to Whitman himself and to his own religious perspective.”3 Whitman’s art of absorption and expansion, with its roots embedded in diverse metaphysical traditions from ancient Greek and Hindu thought to Christian esotericism and German Idealism, announces such an unusual compound of psychic and bodily union that Harold Bloom equates it with a new American religion “so original we as yet have not assimilated it.”4 Whitman, Bloom declares, is “the American bardic Christ, self-anointed to strike up the cognitive and spiritual music for the New World.”5 Whitman largely understood his own poetic mission in this way: he was attempting “the Great Construction of the New Bible.”6 In 1872, he wrote that “one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since—and that has been the religious purpose.” Michael Robertson argues that “critics have explained away [this] statement ,” even though during his own time, Whitman’s disciples and admirers “insisted that Leaves of Grass should be interpreted in primarily moral and spiritual terms.”7 The spiritual ethos of Whitman’s poetic project has writing the metempsychotic text / 105 not been fully understood; particularly lacking is any systematic treatment of the metempsychotic self in Whitman’s poetic project. Indeed, much as Emerson’s desire “to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America” (W 3: 41) has been interpreted as a process of negotiating constitutional identity,8 so Whitman’s revolutionary visualization of the poetic process is repeatedly understood as a type of individual and national negotiation, “similar to the Constitution in being an outline, a projection forward in time of the conditions of democratic personality and experience, just as the Constitution is a permanent frame.”9 Whitman imagined his mission in slightly different terms, adapting Emerson’s metempsychotic vision of history’s series and doing so in relation to Emerson ’s hope for an emergent American poet able to speak for his nation. While Emerson looked forward to an American poet capable of true creation, he was also keenly aware that his own work failed to achieve anything close to such a feat. He was simply the one who could apprehend or hear “this new, yet unapproachable America,” but could not articulate its greater proportions. The “fruition is postponed,” he laments in “Experience .” By contrast, Whitman announces himself as the future poet, a poeticized adaptation of Emerson’s metempsychotic self, imbued with the powers of perception and proclamation. What was always unsettled and proleptic for Emerson—the future poet enacting the metempsychosis of nature to arrive at the end of being’s series—becomes for Whitman, as his 1855 preface and “Song of Myself” indicate, the visual site upon which the incarnational drama of the divided self unfolds. While Emerson’s depictions are often intellectual and abstract, Whitman draws into the metempsychotic process the visceral characteristics of biological, sexual urges along with their joys and torments, liberations and oppressions. This drama of the divided self with its metempsychotic structure underpins Whitman’s poetic vision throughout his entire poetic career, from the boundless enthusiasm of his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass to the isolated spiritualism of his later years. “A Sort of Emerson Run Wild” Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass10 with its ambitious preface and twelve unnamed poems holds the distinction of being the most unexpected and mysterious creation of the poet’s career, perhaps of American poetry in general. Whereas scholarship has been able to map much of the historical context and detail for the later editions, Whitman’s 1855 achievement remains all the more spectacular, since it arrives seemingly out of nowhere, rejecting the refinement of past poetry and seeking, as Whitman himself insisted, “to put a whole living man in the expression [3.16.76.43] Project MUSE...

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