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Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman It’s important to stress, however, that no matter how congenial Unitarians find Walt Whitman, he wasn’t a Unitarian. He came from Quaker stock, but he didn’t have any formal religion. The more one reads his work, the more one realises how inconceivable it would be for this free spirit to sit down in a stuffy church on a Sunday morning and listen to a preacher, Unitarian or orthodox. Walt would have taken spiritual sustenance elsewhere. But he did mix in Unitarian circles. Ralph Waldo Emerson, called the Father of American Literature, to whom he sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, had been a Unitarian minister, and the Transcendentalist movement, to which Whitman belonged, was firmly rooted in the Unitarian tradition. Bank Street Unitarian chapel in the Lancashire town of Bolton has connections with a local Whitman society, which has been in existence, on and off, for over a century. In 1887 two Bolton men, J.W. Wallace and Dr. John Johnston, sent birthday greetings to Walt, and to their great surprise and delight, he responded, and a regular correspondence – over one hundred letters – ensued, until the poet’s death five years later. Now, on the nearest Saturday to Walt’s birthday, 31st May, there’s an annual Whitman walk, in which participants wear sprigs of lilac, Walt’s favourite flower, and make frequent stops to read from Leaves of Grass and to drink from a ‘loving cup’. On the Sunday following there is a service in Bank Street Chapel, to commemorate the Whitman Society’s association with the Unitarian movement. What is it in Whitman’s poetry that was so appealing to the Unitarians of 19 th century Lancashire, and to contemporary Unitarians worldwide? One reason is his independent, almost revolutionary, spirit. His poetry, in both style and content, is radically new. His verse is free, direct, accessible, untrammelled by conventional decorative features such as rhyme and rhythm. Emerson recognised that Whitman’s was the first authentically American poetic voice. Before him, American writers, including Emerson himself, had copied European models, but Walt struck out on his own. ‘Resist much, obey little,’ his words of advice to the American states, could be taken as the motto of his own life and his own work. Whitman was an innovator and a freethinker. He espoused ideas which were way ahead of his time. He was almost certainly bi-sexual, and many of his poems celebrate sexual love in ways which would have seemed pornographic to Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, one early reviewer of Leaves of Grass called it ‘a mass of stupid filth’ and another thought that the author was rooting ‘like a pig through the rotten garbage of licentious thoughts’. In 1865, Whitman was fired from a job because his employer thought his poetry to be outrageous, offensive, and ‘in violation of the rules of decorum and propriety prescribed by the Christian religion’. 2 I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around my bowels as around my head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and its appetites,
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
Read the whole of Song of Myself, from which these few lines are taken, or I Sing the Body Electric, and you will get some idea of why Whitman so outraged the polite society of his time.
I see male and female everywhere ... ...
Whitman is the great poet of democracy, of the strength, power and wisdom of ordinary people; he declares that he wants nothing that others ‘cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms’,5 and he says that the only thing that makes him envious is not the status and wealth of the general or the President, but how ‘friends and lovers stick together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, and how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were.’ 6 When someone mentioned to him that his correspondents in Lancashire were not intellectuals, but just ordinary men, Walt said something like, ‘Yes, just ordinary men, simple men, the best kind of men.’
Whitman had no illusions about his own virtue. When some of his Lancashire admirers came to visit him in America he said to them, ‘Are you ready to be disillusioned?’
You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs or obscene in your rooms,
Inside these breast bones I lie smutch’d and choked,
In another poem, To a Common Prostitute, he displays the same kind of tenderness that Jesus shows in his encounter with the woman taken in adultery, and there have been many attempts to portray Whitman as a semi-divine figure, as an elevated soul on a par with the great visionaries of the human race such as Jesus and St. Francis, and not without some justification. Maurice Bucke, in his book Cosmic Consciousness, considers that the human race throws up spiritual geniuses from time to time, men and women who achieve a higher level of understanding and insight than the rest of us. Bucke, who knew Whitman personally, thought that he was probably the highest manifestation of spiritual genius that the human race had produced so far.
This was Walt’s epiphany. He doesn’t say when it occurred, but his poetry is suffused with a mystical vision which obviously stems from this experience, and his life is coloured by the gentleness, modesty and self-sacrificing love which characterises all the human race’s greatest heroes. During the American Civil War, he went to the front to help nurse the wounded.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
This may be pantheism, deism, panentheism, it may even to some be considered blasphemous, but it is certainly not atheism. Whitman has no belief in a static revelation; the genius behind all the great religions is the inexhaustible genius of the human race which is as active now as ever it has been. He doesn’t object to special revelations, but, he says he considers ‘a curl of smoke or the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation.’ 10 The simplest creature is a manifestation of God, a miracle, a revelation:
Whitman is wonderful. He has given me dozens of sermons and helped me through difficult times. When I was sick eight years ago, Leaves of Grass was my only reading. I do recommend him to you, although I also appreciate that he’s not to everyone’s taste, and I advise you not to try to read it all at once. Start with Song of Myself, which is one of the early sections of Leaves of Grass, or The Song of the Open Road (extracts from which we read earlier) and dip into it, savour it, reading a few lines at a time; and read it with a pen or a pencil in your hand because you’ll find yourself underlining memorable bits all the time.
Rev.Bill Darlison May 9th 2010
1 The Guardian , 6th May 2010 |