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and William Carlos Williams's Paterson

presented by

 

 

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THE ANXIETY OF METAMORPHOSIS: A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN'S

SQNG_QE_MXSELEI HART CRANE'S IHE_BBID§E: AND
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS'S EAIEBSQN

BY
Young Min Hyun

AN ABSTRACT OF A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1990

ABSTRACT

THE ANXIETY OF METAMORPHOSIS: A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN'S

SQN§_QE_MXSELE, HART CRANE'S IEE.BBIDGE: AND
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS'S EAIEBSQN

BY
Young Min Hyun

This study attempts to show the centrality of the Christ
figure both as an epic hero and as a viSionary poet in
Whitman's Song_of_Myself, Crane's Ihs_BIidg£, and Williams's
Eatersgn in the belief that the concept of Christ as the New
Man and as the authentic visionary poet has been one of the
most distinctive aspects of the American literary
imagination. It also seeks to explore their differences,
similarities, and their dynamic interrelationships.

The hero of Whitman's epic poem experiences his spiritual
metamorphosis through ordeals of consciousness and he finally
attains visionary reality. This Whitmanian epic hero is
centrally placed in the poetic vision of Crane and Williams,
but these three poets are all different in their poetic
techniques. Crane reached Whitman's poetic vision through
his paradoxical exploitation of the poetic techniques of
Eliot and of French symbolism; Williams turned to Whitman by
rejecting his poetic form of free verse, insisting on the new
poetic measure based on the theory of relativity. While
Crane sees everything in terms of the spiritual, Williams
physicalizes the spiritual in the way of confirming
spirituality.

These three poets are all alike in personifying America
itself both as the hero of their epic poems and as the bride

of the Word. In this way, they secularize a Christian
symbolism of marriage between man and the Word as the union
of physical and spiritual, profane and sacred, and whore and
virgin. Reacting against the spirituality of the inveterate
Puritan mind and its alienation from the American wilderness,
these three epic poets see the metamorphic theme of classical
epics from a radical Christian perspective heavily influenced
by Neoplatonic exegesis of the Bible, and they transform the
traditional epic quest of physical prowess into that of
intellectual and spiritual power, not revoking the epic
tradition but completing it.

Copyright by
YOUNG MIN HYUN
1990

In memory of my grandmother

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am especially grateful to the Korean-American
Educational Commission for four years' Fulbright grant for my
PhD program; to Mr. Frederick P. Carriere, Director of the
Commission, for his constant encouragement by letter; to
Chungnam National University for my study leave; and to my
colleagues in the English Department of the university for
their generous support.

It is my pleasure to thank Dr. Sam 8. Baskett for his
reading of part of the early draft and his valuable
suggestions. Special mention must be made of Dr. M. Teresa
Tavormina for her interest in my idea of this project and her
stimulating criticism. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Linda W.
Wagner-Martin for her initial guidance and encouragement
until she left this university; to Dr. William A. Johnsen for
his assistance and criticism; to Dr. Michael R. Lopez for his
- teaching of early American literature which contributed to
the early formation of this study; and to Dr. Barry E. Gross
for his initiating of my PhD program at this universtiy, his
understanding and help at various stages of my study, and his
sensitive criticism.

To Dr. Roger K. Meiners I owe the greatest debt of thanks
for his erudite supervision, his unfailing kindness, and his
sympathy which enabled me to complete this study. It was my
great fortune to benefit from his teaching of literary
interpretation of the Bible, classical and modern literary
criticism, and twentieth century English and American poetry.
This study would be impossible without his wide scholarship
and poetic sensibility, which saved me from helplessness.

My special thanks are due to my mother and my wife for
their understanding, and loving dedication and to my three
children, Sook Kyong, Jong Jin, and Bun Kyong, for their
exellent job at school which relieved my burden.

vi

Acknowledgement to New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Williams Carlos Williams: Raterson, copyright.C)
1958 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by
permission of New Direction Publishing Corporation

o F)

5—4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page
I. Introduction ---------------------------------------- 1
II. Walt Whitman's Sgng_gfi_M¥§el£ ---------------------- 26
A. "Finally shall come the poet worthy that name"- 26
B. "Speech is the twin of my vision" ------------- 37
C. "I wash the gum from your eyes" ---------------- 70
III. Hart Crane's Ihe_Bridge --------------------------- 76
A. "Cruelly with love thy parable of man" --------- 76
B. "O harp and altar, of the fury fused" ---------- 82
C. "One Song, one Bridge of Fire"-- --------------- 120
IV. William Carlos Williams's Eatezsgn ----------------- 124
A. "Say it! No ideas but in things" -------------- 124
B. "Rigor of beauty is the quest" ----------------- 137
C. "Love, the sledge that smashes the atom" ------- 172
V. Conclusion ------------------------------------------ 177
Works Cited --------------------------------------------- 189

vii

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9.. 9. am e

Chapter I
Introduction

The early American Puritans were consciously preoccupied
with the Bible and they were so thoroughly allegorical-minded
that they interpreted everything as a symbol of a certain
spiritual value. "In the Puritan world," Henry Bamford
Parkes holds in The_Amgrigan_Experignge, "nothing was trivial
or accidental, and every happening was to be interpreted in
terms of the cosmic battle between God and the devil. All
material events were signs and symbols of supernatural
realities, and should be regarded as rewards for the
righteous, as warnings to the wicked, or as omens and tokens
of divine purposes" (72). For them, the New World was ”a
state of mind and not merely a place" and the civilizing
process of the New World "was not merely a geographical
expansion; it was also a psychological development by which
Europeans were transformed into Americans" (7, 39). They
envisioned their exodus out of England to America as their
destiny or mission to build "a Citty vpon a Hill" in the New
World, as John Winthrop expressed it in his sermon entitled
"A Modell of Christian Charity" to the emigrants aboard the
A:hella.in 1630 (295).

This Puritan vision of the New World became a "legacy" of
American literary imagination which ”translated geography
into Christiano-graphy"; the descendents of the Puritans
"enshrined their forebears in scriptural tropes and types,
re-cognized them as giants of a golden age, like Virgil's
legendary Trojans entering upon the future site of Rome"
(Bercovitch, "Puritan Vision" 34, 39). Cotton Mather, for
example, describes the Puritan vision of the New World in his
Magnalia_flhristi_Amerigana (1702); he likens the mission of
the American Puritans both to the Israelites' journey out of
fallen Egypt into the Promised Land of Canaan and to Aeneas'

1

2

journey to Rome through the description of the "'exemplary
heroes' . . . not only as Christians but as seafarers and
conquerors of hostile pagan tribes" (Bercovitch, American
Jeremiad 87). Christ himself is the hero of Mather's
Magnalia, who does "the wonderful displays of His infinite
Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, wherewith His
Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian Wilderness" (1:
25). The great acts of Christ, indicated in the title,
”elevate the pristine New England venture to its highest epic
and mythical proportions" (Bercovitch, Amerinan_fieremiad 87).

This Puritan vision of the New World also became in later
American writers "variously a symbolic battleground, an ideal
to which they could aspire because it could never be realized
in fact, and an alternative cultural authority through which
they could denounce (or even renounce) the United States"
(Bercovitch, "Puritan Vision" 43). Seventeenth century
American poetry generates such epic poems as Michael
Wigglesworth's Ihe_nay_gf_nggm (1662), and Edward Johnson's

1000‘ “.0 . 0° . 0 0 O 0 00" . 0 0 K‘ " 0. 0..

(1654). Of these, Johnson's flQnder;wgrking_2rgxidence is the
most concrete expression of the two modes of Puritan
consciousness: a justification of the Puritans' emigration
and a celebration of their founding of "Christ's Kingdom."
This is an epic of Puritan consciousness, written in prose
and verse, celebrating the Puritans' mission to the New
World, fulfilling Providence's guidance "to re-build the most
glorious Edifice of Mount Sion in a Wildernesse" (52): "[New
England] is the place where the Lord will create a new
Heaven, and a new Earth in, new Churches, and a new
Common-wealth together" (25). In Wgnder;wgrking_2rgyidgnge
Johnson uses a rhetoric of war, with Christ as King and the
Puritans as the soldiers of Christ, in order to give the
sense of a great adventure associated with the traditional
epic: "Christ the glorious King of his Churches, raises an
Army out of our English Nation, for freeing his people from
their long servitude under usurping Prelacy; and

creates a New England" (23).
The eighteenth century, with the dawn of the essentially
optimistic spirit of the Age of Reason, also sees the

transformation of this American epic impulse in such works as

Philip Freneau's IhaJiainsLGlanaLAmanna (1772). Timothy
Dwight's Tha_Cnnnnaat_nf_Canaan (1785), and Joel Barlow's The
Calumhiad (1807). Freneau's W. a

collaboration with Hugh Henry Brackenridge, evokes the
American epic potential and anticipates Barlow's The
Celnmhled, the first really distinctively American epic.
Preneau sings: "'Tis but the morning of the world with us /
And science yet but sheds her orient rays. / I see the age,
the happy age, roll on / Bright with the splendours of her
mid-day beams, / I see a Homer and a Milton rise / In all the
pomp and majesty of song . . . / A second Pope . . . may yet
/ Awake the muse . . . / And bid new forests bloom . . . /
Shall yet remurmur to the magic sound / Of song heroic, when
in future days / Some noble Hambden rises into fame" (78-79).
Barlow, in fact, might be seen as fulfilling Freneau's dream.
Barlow deliberately revised his Tha_!iaian_nf_calnmhns (1787)
and renamed this poem Ihe_gelnmhled (1807) to make it
comparable to Homer's lliad and Virgil's Aeneid. The
Celnmhiad, however, is intended to be different from these
traditional epics in both "the peetieal object" which is "the
fictitious design of the action" and the moral object" which
is "the real design of the poem" (377-378).

The poetical or fictitious object for Homer, Barlow
insists, "is to kindle, nourish, sustain and allay the anger
of Achilles" (378) and for Virgil it is to make "the
settlement of [Aeneas] in Italy" (380); the moral or real
object for Homer and Virgil is to inculcate the "false
notions of honor and erroneous systems of policy" (848).
According to Barlow, the epics of Homer and Virgil "implanted
in the minds of men . . . the pernicious doctrine of the
holiness" of war (389), which "led astray the moral sense of
man" (847). On the other hand, Ihe_£elnmhlad attempted to

4
direct the minds of men to "the necessary aliment of future.
and permanent meliorations in the condition of human nature"
(389). The poetical or fictitious design of The_£elumblad
"is to sooth [ale] and satisfy the desponding mind of
Columbus; to show him that his labors, tho ill rewarded by
his cotemporaries [ale], had not been performed in vain; that
he had opened the way to the most extensive career of
civilization and public happiness; and that he would one day
be recognised as the author of the greatest benefits to the
human race" (381-382). The moral or real object of the poem
is "to celebrate the useful arts of agriculture and
navigation; to build the immortal fame of his heroes and
occupy his whole hierarchy of gods, on actions that
contribute to the real advancement of society, instead of
striking away every foundation on which society ought to be
established or can be greatly advanced" (848).

The_gelnmblad evolved into a visionary poem describing
the whole history of mankind from the time of God's creation
of the universe to the time of man's complete conquest of the
world, which is, as John Griffith sees, "symbolized in a
great Assembly of Mankind resting on American soil and
American principles" (238). The vision of this American epic
is the vision shown to Columbus in jail by Hesper,-a symbol
of light or human intelligence; Columbus himself symbolizes
the light which dispels the darkness of human ignorance by
his discovery of America, the New World. The heroic figure
of Columbus is progressively developed as a collective hero,
a strong man of vision who is representative of such figures
as Manco Capac, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac
Newton, Francis Bacon, Hume, Jefferson, Hancock, John Adams,
and George Washington. Each of these religious men,
philosophers, scientists, and political leaders symbolizes
"Man the Enlightened," for each of them has "the ability to
reason clearly, and a position in history which sets him over
against superstition and oppression" (Griffith 239). From
this perspective, we can see Columbus's mission to the

5
unknown world as the "errand into the wilderness" of human
ignorance to build the "city upon a hill," the city of light
for all mankind. Thus, Columbus, the hero of this epic poem,
is a New Man, a man of vision, or a liberating god who frees
man from the land of his ignorance and leads him to the land
of the knowledge of truth. In fact, The_§elnmbiad is a poem
which expresses man's anxiety of spiritual metamorphosis, the
movement from alienation and estrangement to the achievement
of unity and reality.

Even though most critics say that Tha_Canmhiad is a
failure, it paved the way for the appearance of the modern
epics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially
in its transformation of epic energy into intellectual power
rather than physical prowess. The nineteenth century sees
epics like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiauatha (1855),
Herman Melville's Clazal (1876), and walt Whitman's Seng_ef
Myeelf (1855). And in the twentieth century there are many
long poems which participate in various ways in this American
epic impulse, such as T. S. Eliotis Tha_flaata_Land (1922) and
W (1943), Ezra Pound's W (1970),
Hart Crane's Ihe_Brldge (1930), William Carlos Williams's
Eetezeen (1958), Charles Olson's Maximua.£nama (1953-1975),
Allen Ginsberg's Haul (1956) and Tha_Eall_nf_Amarina (1973),
and John Berryman's Tha_Draam_Sanga (1969). The Puritan
epics of the seventeenth century remain close to the
classical epic mode, glorifying physical strength in
describing the epic hero as a triumphant Christ, the warrior
who destroys the grip of sin by his heroic death in the
battle with human depravity and by his resurrection builds
the eternal city of New Jerusalem for his followers. The
vision in these epics is spiritual: these epics, abandoning
the merely earthly, aspire to reach the realm of the heavenly
kingdom, as in Johnson's flender;nerking_£reyldenee. On the
other hand, the epics of the eighteenth century, with their
more intellectual and visionary emphasis, show Christ not_as
a leader who establishes eternal life but as a man of

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6
vision—-even as a visionary poet able to see the secret of
the world--transformed into a new being who through his
vision exemplifies the process of intellectual metamorphosis.
The vision of reality in them is earthly and the figure of
Columbus in Barlow's Ihe_£elumblad is entirely typical of
their protagonists.

Of the modern American epics, Whitman's Seng_ef_Myeelfi,
Crane's Ihe_Bridge, and Williams's Petersen, which are the
major concern of this study, find ways of combining the two
epic traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and developing them. Whitman's Seng_ef_Myeelf, which is
treated in chapter 2, is a visionary epic; it explores the
perpetual metamorphosis of the hero who moves from the
prophetic annunciation of "myself" toward national
experience, and ultimately toward a cosmic realm of
spirituality. This process of the hero's transformation is
surely the legacy of the Puritan imagination, but it does not
offer so much an alienated vision of reality as a unitive
vision of the physical and the spiritual, a harmony of the
body and the soul, the profane and the sacred. Chapter 3
discusses Hart Crane's Iha.flzidga, an epic which was written
in the tradition of Whitman's vision of America in Seng_ef
Myself. America for Crane is the amalgam of the past and the
present, the West and the East, the material and the
spiritual. Ihe_Brldge describes the Brooklyn Bridge as a
symbol of America which embodies American aspiration to build
a spiritual bridge between man and God. The bridge in the
poem emerges as a symbol of Christ, the Incarnation of the
Word who restores man's broken relationship to God. Chapter
4 deals with Williams's Eataraan, in which Williams describes
the struggle of Paterson, the hero of the poem, in his
constant search for a redemptive language. Such a language
will redeem both sexual failure and estrangement from the
earth in all its physical thinginess, a redemption signified
in Paterson's quest for the "Beautiful thing." It is a quest

for a transformed sexuality, perception, and language which

Williams undertakes.

Each of the heroes of Seng_ef_Myeelf, Ihe_Bridge, and
Petersen is both a New Man, or an epic hero, and a man of
vision, or a visionary poet. This New Man is cast in the
image of a Christ figure, based on readings of the New
Testament where Christ is seen as the prototypical new man,
epic hero, and visionary poet. Reacting against the
spirituality of the inveterate Puritan mind and its
alienation from the American wilderness, these epics
transform the epic quest. This study attempts to show the
centrality of the Christ figure both as an epic hero and as a
visionary poet in these modern epics and seeks to explore
their differences, similarities, and their dynamic
interrelationships.

To clarify my position that the Christ figure is the
center of the American literary imagination from the
beginning of this tradition of American poetry to the
present, we will need to trace certain aspects of the
American literary imagination to its root in an allegorical
hermeneutic tradition of great antiquity. The allegorization
of the Bible began very early; one might even argue that it
began in the time of Christ and perhaps even with Christ
himself. The time Christ lived in was the very flowering of
Neoplatonic Judaism with its mixture of Judaic religion and
Greek philosophy. Neoplatonic Judaism had as one of the most
important sources the work of the Alexandrian School, from
around 310 B. C. until the destruction of the Alexandrian
library in 640 A. D. The Alexandrian exegetes developed
their interpretations on the work of Homer and other
classical writers. Later this allegorical hermeneutic was
turned on the Judeo-Christian Bible by such prominent Jewish
Biblical exegetes as Philo Judaeus, who opened the way to the
allegorical interpretation of the Bible in an attempt to
reconcile Judaic religion and Neoplatonic philosophy. Just
as the Neoplatonists interpreted Homeric myths as allegory
because the literal meanings of the myths were no longer

8
reasonably acceptable to them, so Philo of Alexandria saw the
Scriptures in this new perspective. Philo regarded some
persons and events in the Scriptures as the symbols of a
certain spiritual value. As Robert M. Grant holds, "In his
mind many of the insights of Judaism, properly understood, do
not differ from the highest insights of Greek philosophy"
(53). This mode of thinking enabled Philo to solve the
vexing problem of "the apparent anthropomorphism of God" in
the Scriptures (54).

This intellectual environment and "the bi- or probably
tri-lingual nature of first-century Palestine" are crucial
factors which shaped Christ's attitude toward the Scriptures
(Longenecker 64). Christ "normally spoke in Aramaic but
could also use Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew to some extent,"
Richard N. Longenecker argues, and "at times engaged himself
in textual selection among the various Aramaic, Hebrew and
Greek versions then current, and some of the Septuagintal
features in the text-forms attributed to him actually arise
from him" (65-66). Christ's interpretation of the Scriptures
is mainly allegorical. Christ often warned his followers
against narrow Pharisaic literalism which forgets the spirit
of the Scriptures or their inner meanings (Mathew 5: 20; 23:
23). This Judaic tendency of literalism may have directed
Christ to adopt exclusively the parabolic discourse in
teaching his followers: "In all this teaching to the crowds
Jesus spoke in parables; indeed he never spoke to them except
in parables" (Mathew 13: 34). As to the question of the
reason for his use of parables in teaching, Christ answers
that "'To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the
kingdom of Heaven, but not to them'" (Mathew 13: 11).

Luke 4: 16-30 illustrates how easily Christ's parabolic
discourse employed its own symbolic interpretation of the
Scriptures. Here Christ is described as interpreting his own
coming as the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Scriptures.
The writer of this Gospel says that Christ, after reading
Isaiah 61: 1-2, "rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the

9
attendant, and sat down; and all eyes in the synagogue were
fixed on him" and then he "began to address them: 'Today,' he
said, 'in your hearing this text has Come true'" (4: 20-21).
The Gospel of John specifies this attitude of Christ toward
the Scriptures: "You study the scriptures diligently,
supposing that in having them you have eternal life; their
testimony points to me, yet you refuse to come to me to
receive that life. . . . If you believed [Moses] you would
believe me, for it was of me that he wrote" (5: 39-46). Both
Christ's view of his coming as the fulfillment of the
prophecy of the Old Testament and his parabolic discourse are
regarded by many people as more authoritative than the
scribes' literalism: "The people were amazed at his teaching,
for, unlike the scribes, he taught with a note of authority"
(Mark 1: 22). Christ's Scriptural view is not a rejection of
the literal facts of the Scriptural narratives, but a
re-interpretation of them in terms of their spiritual, or
symbolic contexts. Christ set the tradition of symbolic
interpretation of the Scriptures. Most of the writers of the
New Testament and later Christian interpreters of the Bible
followed his example in their writings.

The New Testament writers interpret the Jewish Scriptures
in terms of Christology, seeing Christ as a Moses figure, for
example. They developed the typological interpretation of
the Scriptures, "regard[ing] the events described in the Old
Testament as prefigurations of events in the life of Jesus
and of his Church" (Grant and Tracy 37). This trend of
Biblical interpretation of the first century of the Christian
era led Irenaeus to see the Old Testament and the New as one
unified book whose central message is "the coming of the Son
of God as man . . . a treasure, hidden in the field but
revealed by the cross of Christ" (qtd. in Grant and Tracy
49). The Biblical exegetes of the Alexandrian School such
as Clement and Origen are quite similar to Irenaeus in their
views of the Bible, that "all scripture speaks in a
mysterious language of symbols" (Grant and Tracy 55). Not

10
only did they argue that the Old Testament is the
prefiguration of the New, but also they extended their
argument to their reading of Greek writings, where Clement
especially finds the prefiguration of the Gospel.

This typological and allegorical interpretation of the
Bible was severely criticized by such literal-minded or
historically oriented interpreters of the Antiochene School
as Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, and Jerome and
later by Thomas Aquinas. However, this tradition of
allegorical or typological interpretations of the Bible was
powerfully legitimated in later Western Christianity by such
orthodox theologians as Augustine and by his major influence
on Christian tradition. Augustine, who was steeped in
Neoplatonic philosophy, admitted in his Cit¥_nfi_find, on the
one hand, that the Biblical story is "a faithful record of
historical fact" but suggested the "figurative" reading of
the Bible when its literal meaning is difficult to accept
(qtd. in Rogers and Mckim 32). In spite of the strong
presence of the Aristotelian modes of thinking and of
historical interpretations of such medieval Scholastic
interpreters as Andrew of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas, the
tradition of allegorical or symbolic interpretations of the
Bible enjoyed its vitality in the hands of Anselm of
Canterbury and William of Ockham during the Middle Ages. In
the Middle Ages, the events and the figures in the Old
Testament were regarded primarily as the prefigurations of
those in the New Testament, especially foretelling the coming
of Christ. It should be noted that, as Grant says, even
"Aquinas does not reject the allegorical interpretation, and
in a way both Alexandria and Antioch can claim him as their
heir" (88). This typological interpretation of the Bible in
terms of the Christological prefiguration was inherited by
the sixteenth century Puritans, who found the prefiguration
of the contemporary events or their own personal experiences
in the Bible. John Milton, for example, saw the blind Samson
as the prefiguration of his blindness and wrote Samsen

11
Annniataa.

The hermeneutical principles of the Middle Ages and the
sixteenth century were finally handed down to the American
Puritans, in whose minds, according to Charles Feidelson,
"the symbolizing preeeee was constantly at work” (78)., The
Puritan hermeneutic was later transmitted into secular
American culture through Ralph Waldo Emerson and other
transcendentalists. In SxmbQliam_and_AmaziQan_LiLazaanar
Feidelson discusses "an American tradition" of the
symbol-making minds from such early Puritan settlers as
William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Thomas Shepard through
such eighteenth century theologians as Jonathan Edwards to
such nineteenth century transcendentalists as Emerson
(77-118). "The unfolding drama" of the everyday life for the
Puritan settlers "was at once human and divine; physical life
was simultaneously spiritual. Every passage of life,
enmeshed in the vast context of God's plan, possessed a
delegated meaning” (79). Even though they believed that the
Biblical truth was "not aesthetic but propositional," the
American Puritans "gingerly preserved" the medieval tradition
of the Biblical interpretation "as the science of 'typology,‘
a system of correspondences between the Old Testament and the
New" and made ”an effort to carry typology one step further,
from the New Testament into the New world" (88-89). Their
legacy to American writing was "a conflict between the
symbolic mode of perception, of which our very language is a
record, and a world of sheer abstractions certified as
'real'" (90). The eighteenth century saw the rehabilitation
of "the old typology in a new context” in Jonathan Edwards,
who saw the Biblical language as "not propositional at all,
but a functional rhetoric" and argued that "nature as well as
the Bible is radically figurative" (100). Edwards, Feidelson
holds, "brought to the sense-world of empiricism a symbolist
tradition that Emerson was to rediscover after empiricism had
worked itself out" (101). In the nineteenth century, such
American transcendentalists as Emerson, "spiced with the

12
local religious tradition and with Platonic, Neo-Platonic,
oriental, and Swedenborgian ideas," developed Cartesian
philosophy "in the direction of symbolism" in terms of the
dialectic of Kantian idealism and Lockean empiricism (105,
116). In this way Emerson identifies ”poetry with symbolism,
symbolism with a mode of perception, and symbolic perception
with the vision, first, of symbolic structure in the real
world and, second, of a symbolic relationship between nature
and mind" (120).

Let us look then at the representation of Christ himself
in the Bible from a perspective of secularized or literary
symbolism, for the symbolical representation of Christ is
going to become most important in that Christian context
which has influenced the development of the American epic.
The Biblical Christ claimed to be the Messiah; in allegorical
hermeneutics this role has often been transformed into that
of the visionary poet who tries to restore man's alienated
relation to God through redeemed language or as the epic hero
who delivers man from the old world of sin to the new world
of salvation. Christ is a visionary poet-hero who creates "a
new heaven and a new earth" and makes "all things new"
(Revelation 21: 1, 5). The re-creation of "a new heaven and
a new earth" or the making of "all things new" signifies not
the re-creation of the universe itself but the restoration of
our fallen, dull vision into the fresh vision of the first
creation, for the fall of Adam signifies the loss of his
vision.

Genesis describes God revealing himself as the Word,
whose speaking creates the universe in the sensual form. All
creation in this first revelation of the Word seems to be in
harmony with the Word. Man talks with every living creature,
being able to call its name; he also talks with God without
any restriction. This is a naked world where, as Milton
writes in Bazadlee_Leet, "all mist from thence / Purge and
disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to
mortal sight" (3: 53-55). It is particularly noticeable that

13
the creation story in Genesis emphasizes Gadla_aaaing: "God
saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Genesis 1:
31). In the first creation, everything for God was good to
see, pure to see, and clear to see. Significantly, Genesis
describes God as a light-giving God, whose first creation is
light. In Psalm 19, the presence of God in the universe is
described primarily through the image of splendid light
across the universe. And this concept of God as light is
also central to New Testament theology. In 1 John 1: 5-7,
the author of the epistle argues that "God is light, and in
him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to be sharing
in his life while we go on living in darkness, our words and
our lives are a lie. But if we live in the light as he
himself is in the light, then we share a common life, and the
blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."

The narrative of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden, according to Mircea Eliade's "two modalities
of [human] experience--sacred and.profane" (14), is a
marvelous illustration of man's sense of space between the
profane world of man and the sacred world of God. The story
of building the Tower of Babel is an astonishing metaphor for
man's desperate struggle to reach the sacred world which is
separated from their profane world, a metaphor for the
struggle to bridge the sacred and the profane. Adam's
expulsion from the sacred world is his alienation from light,
which is described ironically as an awakening of his eyes to
the two realms of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.
Adam's choice of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge signifies
his alienation from the Tree of Life, perpetuating his vision
of reality as the invisible world of God and the visible
world of man, or the sacred world of Life and the profane
world of Death. It signifies the Fall of man, his blindness,
or sin. His alienation from God is dramatized in the
depiction of his being cast out of the Garden of Eden, which
symbolizes, in turn, his descent into the darkness of

ignorance or blindness.

a.
LG

14

This dichotomized vision of man desacralizes human
consciousness, codifying the word of God, the Law, in the two
tablets of stone: "When he had finished speaking with Moses
on Mount Sinai, the Lord gave him the two tablets of the
Testimony, stone tablets written with the finger of God"
(Exodus 31: 18). This codification of the divine Law is the
second revelation of the Word, signifying man's separation
from God. The sense of distance or separation of man from
God is noted in the dramatic scenes of Moses' encounter with
God on Horeb and of the Israelites' confrontation with God at
Mount Sinai. The Israelites, who take their stand at the
foot of the mountain, are forbidden to approach God, who
comes down upon the top of the mountain covered with smoke
and orders Moses to "let neither priests nor people force
their way up to the Lord, for fear that he may break out
against them" (Exudus 19: 24). They fear even to hear the
word of God: "'. . . do not let God speak to us or we shall
die'” (Exodus 20: 19). The word of God is mystified as "a
peal of thunder," so that they cannot apprehend it and are
terrified (Exodus 19: 18-19). Even the face of God is
concealed from them, even from Moses who can communicate with
Him: "My face you cannot see, for no mortal may see me and
live" (Exodus 33: 20). Their alienation from God is also
suggested in their ignorance of the name of God. Even after
the name is revealed to them as "Lord" by God himself (Exodus
34: 5), it is still mystified and is not called freely
(Exodus 20: 7). Anyone who utters His Name is stoned to
death (Leviticus 24: 16). In short, man's vision comes to be
completely veiled by this codification of the Word, which
distances man from God and man from man as well.
Furthermore, even the tablets of stone cannot be touched by
common Israelites, and.they are contained in the Ark of God
(1 Chronicles 13). God disappears from His creation in the
second stage of His revelation.

Therefore, Paul argues in Romans 3: 20 that "no human
being can be justified in the sight of God by keeping the

15
law: law brings only the consciousness of sin." He is
convinced that "nothing is impure in itself; only, if anyone
considers something impure, then for him it is impure”
(Romans 14: 14). "Everything is pure in itself," Paul argues
repeatedly (Romans 14: 20). Paul's argument is that man's
conscious act of distinction between good and bad or pure and
impure is his sin or spiritual blindness. Titus is also in
agreement with Paul's view in that man's consciousness is the
barometer of his blindness: "To the pure all things are pure;
but nothing is pure to tainted disbelievers, tainted both in
reason and in conscience" (Titus 1: 15). The blindness of
man's consciousness is dramatically described in Acts, where
Peter is presented as confronting God in a vision when he was
hungry:
[Peter] saw creatures of every kind, four-footed
beasts, reptiles, and birds. There came a voice which
said to him, 'Get up, Peter, kill and eat.‘ But Peter
answered, 'No, Lord! I have never eaten anything
profane or unclean.’ The voice came again, a second
time: 'It is not for you to call profane what God
counts clean.’ This happened three times, and then
the thing was taken up into heaven. (10: 12-16)
Also, the author of Ephesians says that because men's "minds
are clouded, they are alienated from the life that is in God,
because ignorance prevails among them and their hearts have
grown hard as stone. Dead to all feeling, they have
abandoned themselves to vice, and there is no indecency that
they do not practise. But that is not how you learned
Christ" (4: 18-20).

In 1 Corinthians 13: 12, Paul sees our fallen state as
the loss of our clear sight and compares the distorted
reflection in the polished bronze or silver mirrors produced
in ancient Corinth to our dim, distorted vision and compares
our "puzzling reflections" with the face-to-face vision of
divine knowledge which will do away with our present
distorted human way of knowing: "At present we see only

16
puzzling reflections in a mirror, but one day we shall see
face to face. My knowledge now is partial; then it will be
whole, like God's knowledge of me." The power to see is
metaphorically the ability to know. Thus, the event of the
Incarnation of Christ signifies the restoration of man's lost
vision of God who is light. Isaiah clearly states that to
see is to be saved: "From every corner of the earth / turn to
me and be saved" (45: 22), describing the coming Messiah as
”a great light" which "has dawned" on "those who lived in a
land as dark as death," "a light for peoples, / a lamp for
nations, / to open eyes that are blind, / to bring captives
out of prison, / out of the dungeon where they lie in
darkness" (9: 2; 42: 6-7). This Messiah is identified with
Christ in the Gospel of Luke by Christ himself (4: 16-21).

In the New Testament Christ is depicted as participating
in human experience at the critical time of the complete
division of the sacred and the profane worlds in human
consciousness (Mark 1: 15). Christ comes to human history as
the Word and the Light to the profane world, as the visionary
poet who restores man's original perception which will
consecrate the profane world. The Gospel of John describes
Christ as proclaiming himself as the Incarnation of God: "I
am what I am" (8: 24). Christ is the Word that created all
things: "He was with God at the beginning, and through him
all things came to be; without him no created thing came into
being. In him was life, and that life was the light of
mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
has never mastered it" (John 1: 2-5). Thus, Clement of
Alexandria proclaims: "Receive the Christ; receive power to
see; receive thy light" (241). The man who receives Christ
is the child of light. Christian theology developed the
Incarnation of Christ into a metaphor of God's entrance into
the universe, the third revelation of the Word: "So the Word
became flesh; he made his home among us" (1: 14).

Christ reveals himself as the Light itself both by the
'symbolic miracle of the opening of the eyes of a man who was

17
born blind and by declaring that "I have come into the world
as light, so that no one who has faith in me should remain in
darkness" (John 12: 46); and that "While I am in the world I
am the light of the world" (John 9: 5). The central metaphor
of the New Testament is the proclamation of the dawning of
the new era, the era of new creation of man's vision with the
birth of Christ: "The people that lived in darkness / have
seen a great light; / light has dawned on those who lived in
the land of death's dark shadow" (Matthew 4: 16). In this
way, the words of Christ become metaphorically the vision to
the truth of the universe. Space and time for Christ are no
longer divided into the sacred and the profane, for he
demolishes man's feeling of space and time between the sacred
and the profane, encouraging his followers: "There must be no
limit to your goodness, as your heavenly father's goodness
knows no bounds" (Matthew 5: 48).

The writer of Ephesians declares to the sleeper who is
deeply entrenched in the consciousness of sin, the darkness
of his own ignorance: "Awake, sleeper, / rise from the dead,
/ and Christ will shine upon you" (5: 14). Christ himself is
the Light who awakens the sleeper in the bed of consciousness
of sin and he is the Word, the voice of the spirit who
enlightens the ignorance of man. Human consciousness is
restored into its original state in Christ, in whom, as
Whitman sings in Seng_ef_Myeelf, "Speech is the twin of my
vision" (L5 55). The mission of Christ is then the religious
act to arrest the space and time of the profane in the moment
of the permanent "here and now" of the sacred, making the
profane the sacred in space and time.

The Word of the third revelation is metaphorically a Man,
whose speech is itself a living being like a person.
Therefore, it is the language of "hearing" and "seeing."
God's "speaking” is objectified in the "visible" Word: The
Word "gives life. This life was made visible" (1 John 1:
1-2). The Christians assimilated the Greek philosophical
concept of the Logos with its attendant metaphors of "seeing"

18
to the Hebraic reverence for the Word and its rhetoric of
"hearing." Walter J. Ong provides a relevant explanation
about this aspect in The_£zeeenee_ef_the_flerd: "It has been a
commonplace that the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks
differed in the value they set on the auditory. The Hebrews
tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing,
whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing,
although far less exclusively as seeing than post-Cartesian
Western man generally has tended to do" (3).

The Greek foundations of the Christian preoccupation with
the Logos, the potentially visible Word, go back at least to
Heraclitus's metaphorical speculations on the divine
principle inhabiting all things. The Heraclitean concept of
the Logos was transmuted by the Stoics into that rational
power which linked human reason with the very constitutive
principle of reality. In the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo of
Alexandria one can see this abstract concept becoming
personalized, and it is this concept of the Logos as a
Person, which is the immediate antecedent to the Christian
incarnation of God in Christ, the very Word made "visible."
The first call of Christ's disciples described in the Gospel
of John is significant in this respect. To the two seekers
who ask him where he is staying, Christ gives a simple
answer: "Come and see" (John 1: 39). And the two seekers
become his first disciples. Since Christ is the Word itself,
He does not need to be explained. It is enough for his
followers just to ”come and see" him, for the Word himself is
"here and now" revealed in the visible form. In the Gospel
of Luke, Christ himself clearly claims that his coming is
also the coming of the kingdom of God: "You cannot tell by
observation when the kingdom of God comes. You cannot say,
'Look, here it is,‘ or 'There it is!’ For the kingdom of God
is among you!" (Luke 17: 20-21; 11: 20; John 1: 26). God is
no longer present far beyond the reach of creation, but with
it here and now, for Christ "among them" is the presence of
the Kingdom of God here and now. The action or speech of

19
Christ is the action or speech of reality itself. The Gospel
of John crystallizes this point by describing Christ as
identifying himself with God: "Anyone who has seen me has
seen the Father. Then how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in
me?" (John 14: 9-10).

Now man is free to call the name of the Word, and,
through invoking His name, he can restore his broken
relationship to God: "Anything you ask in my name I will do,
so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask
anything in my name I will do it" (John 14: 13-14). "So
far," Christ says to his disciples, "you have asked nothing
in my name. Ask and you will receive, that your joy may be
complete" (John 16: 24). The Word is light, which does not
allow darkness and death in reality: "In him was life, and
that life was the light of mankind" (John 1: 4). He is the
voice of life: "In very truth I tell you, the time is coming,
indeed it is already here, when the dead shall hear the voice
of the son of God, and those who hear shall come to life"
(John 5: 25). Christ is "a spring of water within him,
welling up and bringing eternal life" (John 4: 14), "the
bread of life" (John 6: 48), the victory over death (John 11:
25). There is no darkness and death in the Word. There is
only light and life in Him. There is no longer a dualistic
vision of reality in this third revelation of the Word.
Everything in Him is redeemed to become a new being which is
complete, divine, and holy, just like the Word Himself.

The death of Christ is, then, symbolic of the burial of
our old perception or mind: "when we were baptized into union
with Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death" (Romans 6:
3), for baptism is "a ritual of dying to live anew" (Alter
and Kermode, 409). Thus, "as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glorious power of the Father, so also we might set out
on a new life" (Romans 6: 4). Christ makes "all things new"
(Revelation 21: 5), making us "renewed in mind and spirit,
'and put on the new nature created in God's likeness"

20
(Ephesians 4: 23-24). By his death, Clement says, Christ
"has made clear the mind [of man] that lay buried in
darkness, and sharpened the 'light-bearing eyes' of the soul"
(241). Therefore, "For anyone united to Christ, there is a
new creation: the old order has gone; a new order has already
begun" (2 Corinthians 5: 17), for he is "released from the
law, to serve God in a new way, the way of the spirit in
contrast to the old way of a written code" (Romans 7: 6-7).
Having "died to the law and set free" "through the body of
Christ" (Romans 7: 4), man has "discarded the old human
nature" and has "put on the new nature which is constantly
being renewed in the image of [his] Creator and brought to
know God" (Colossians 3: 9-10). This new man is no longer
the child of darkness but the child of light, as Clement
says, "the true man" who has "pass[ed] from ignorance to
knowledge . . . from godlessness to God" (203): "For 'the
image of God' is His Word . . . and an image of the Word is
the true man" (215). The child of light is a whole man whose
mind is not divided, for ”the whole Christ, so to speak, is
not divided; there is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek,
neither male nor female, but a new man transformed by the
Holy Spirit of God" (239; Galatians 3: 28). This new man is
a man of vision, who is set free from the old bondage of
ignorance and returns to the new life.

For a radically Christian perspective such as that seen
developing in Clement, Christ's interpretation of the Law is
not the dualistic vision of reality as separated into the
realms of God and man but the monistic vision of reality as
united in one realm of love. The love of God and the love of
man are one inseparable love: ”God is love; he who dwells in
love is dwelling in God, and God in him. . . . In love there
is no room for fear; indeed perfect love banishes fear. . .
We love because he loved us first. But if someone says, 'I
love God,’ while at the same time hating his
fellow-Christian, he is a liar. If he does not love a
fellow-Christian whom he has seen, he is incapable of loving

21
God whom he has not seen. We have this command from Christ:
whoever loves God must love his fellow-Christian too" (1 John
4: 16-21). The codified Word is liberated and completed in
Christ, the Incarnation of Love (Mathew 5: 17; Romans 10: 4,
l3: 8; Galatians 3: 24; John 3: 16). The Word of the third
revelation is no longer an agent of fear.

One of the fundamental differences between Hebraic and
Christian views of reality lies in the two different
metaphors of reality imagined as the Tree in both the Old
Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament
dichotomizes reality into the Tree of Life and the Tree of
Knowledge. The New Testament, however, sees reality as one.
The Tree of Knowledge, on the one hand, becomes the Tree of
Death on which Christ was crucified. On the other hand, it
becomes the Tree of Life which redeems the Fall of man by the
death of Christ on it. For Christians the Tree of Life and
the Tree of Knowledge become one Tree in the Incarnation of
the Word. The Bible is then an epic which tells a
progressive narrative from man's alienation from God to his
union with God by Christ's redemption, a metaphor of man's
descent into the darkness of ignorance or blindness to his
ascent into the light of knowledge or vision of truth by
dwelling in the light of Christ. In this sense, Christ is
not only a visionary poet who enlightens the darkness of
man's mind, but also an epic hero who leads man to the New
Heaven.

In Ihe_Litezary_Gnlde_te_the_Blhle, Robert Alter places
the two stories of Abraham in Genesis 12: 1, and of Ruth in
Ruth 2: 11, into an allegorical parallelism, where they
become the founding father and the founding mother,
respectively, of the new vision by the "returning" to the new
life:

What is the point of the allusion? It sets Ruth up as
a founding mother, in symmetrical correspondence to
Abraham the founding father. . . . we are reminded
that her "going" from Moab is, paradoxically, a

 

22
"returning" to a land she has never before seen, a
return because it is now by choice her land. Thus,
taking up the destiny of the covenanted people, for
Ruth as for Abraham, means putting behind one the
filiations of geography and biology, replacing the old
natural bonds with new contractual ones, as Abraham
does with God, having left his father's house, and as
Ruth does with the clan of Elimelech and the land of
Judea. The patriarchal text, trumpeting the departure
from father and birthplace, announces a new relation
to God and history; the text in Ruth, with a less
theological and ultimately more political frame of
reference, adopts the language of the earlier writer
to define its own allied but somewhat different
meanings: the tale of the foreign woman who becomes
staunchest of kin through her acts of love and
loyalty. (14)
This theme of "returning" to the new land or the Land of
Promise in the Old Testament is central to the early
Christian's typological view in the New Testament. For such
early Christians as Tertullian and Augustine, Erich Auerbach
argues in his classic essay "Figura," "the Old Testament,
both as a whole and in its most important details, is a
concrete historical prefiguration of the Gospel" (44). This
"figural interpretation changed the Old Testament from a book
of laws and a history of the people of Israel into a series
of figures of Christ and the Redemption” (52). This
interpretation of the Old Testament "as a prefiguration of
Christ," Auerbach continues, gave Europeans "a basic
conception of history . . . which for almost a thousand years
remained the only accepted view of history" (53). In the
work of Philo and Origen, this typological interpretation
expanded to include a morally allegorical interpretation,
which sees "the various events of the Bible as phases in the
development of the soul and its relation to the intelligible

world" (55).

23

This allegorical interpretation establishes Christ as an
epic hero of the journey of spiritual life and all epic
heroes as potentially assimilable to Christ. This
allegorical interpretation in turn further developed into a
highly developed symbolic or mythical interpretation, such as
that employed much later by Vico, in which "the thing
represented must always be something very important and holy
for those concerned, something affecting their whole life and
thinking" (56). For example, the Israelites' crossing of the
Red Sea into the Promised Land is the symbol of the Christian
baptism into the new life of eternity, into the New
Jerusalem. Christians must be new men who are newly born,
freed from the old nature of sinfulness in order to enter the
New Jerusalem of eternal life. This symbolic interpretation
once again leads us back to the figural interpretation of
Christ, a New Man, a Second Adam, as a representative figure;
that is to say, the life of Christ in the Gospels is a
prefiguration of the struggle of all Christians.

All of these motifs are gathered up into such a romantic
text as Emerson's "The Poet." The nature and the function of
the Emersonian poet are similar to those of Christ in the
Bible. The poets are "the highest minds of the world,"
Emerson says, the minds of insight who are capable of seeing
. and expressing the beauty in nature (3). The poet's
"insight, which expresses itself by what is called
Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not
come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it
sees" (15). The poet is "the man of Beauty" who is "the
creator of the universe" (4, 5). The poet is "the sayer, the
namer," the Christ figure who "stands among partial men for
the complete man . . . who sees and handles that others dream
of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is
representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power
‘to receive and to impart" (5, 4-5). The function of the
poet.is also that of Christ who is a savior or a ”liberating
[god," for the poet "has yielded us a new thought" (18-19).

24

The poet "unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene"
(19). He is an epic hero who delivers us out of the prison
of blindness, the shackles of ignorance, as Christ has been
sent as an epic hero "to announce good news to the poor, / to
proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the
blind; / to let the broken victims go free, / to proclaim the
year of the Lord's favour'" (Luke 4: 18-19). Emerson's
identification of the poet with the Christ figure who is "the
sayer, the namer, and represents beauty" is parallel to the
Genesis story of Adam, an antetype of Christ, as a namer.
Just as the first act of creation of God is utterance, so the
first act of creation of man is the naming of animals. The
act of naming is the act of creation. The writing of the
poet, then, is the second creation of Christ, the second
Adam, a visionary poet who makes "all things new" (Revelation
21: 5). "The condition of true naming, on the poet's part,"
Emerson says, "is his resigning himself to the divine aura
which breathes through forms, and accompanying that" (15).

Emerson's aesthetical interpretation of the Christ figure
as the poet belongs in "a metaphysical tradition that, from
Augustine to Hegel, interpreted the Trinity as the most
profound of all the mysteries of being" (Pelikan 5). "[TJhe
Universe," Emerson contends in "The Poet," ”has three
children, born at one time, which reappear, under different
names, in every system of thought" (5). Then, Emerson offers
his own classification of the triad of "the Knower, the Doer
and the Sayer," each of which corresponds respectively to the
scientific triad of "cause, operation, and effect"; to the
Greek philosophical triad of "truth," "good," and "beauty";
‘to the poetical triad of "Jove, Pluto, and Neptune"; and to
‘the theological triad of ”the Father, the Spirit, and the
Son" (5). In his Jeene_threngh_the_cennnrlee, Pelikan
develops the Emersonian analogy between the Greek
gflnilosophical triad of beauty, truth, and good and the
Christian triad of Christ ”as the Way, the Truth, and the
Inife," arguing that "This formula from the Gospel of John

25
became the motif for a striking image of Jesus in the
Archiepiscopal Chapel at Ravenna: 'EGO SUM VIA VERITAS ET
VITA," which "summarized Christ as the Way, the Truth, and
the Life, and at the same time it epitomized Christ as the
Beautiful, the True, and the Good" (7).

"As Jesus was the Poet of the Spirit," Pelikan writes of
Emerson's poetic appropriation of the Trinity, "so now the
poet was to be the Second Person of the Trinity, through whom
the Beauty that was the creator of the universe would shine
through, manifesting its essential unity with Truth and
Goodness" (200). In this respect, Emerson's concept of the
poet as the Christ figure is a secular version of the
Christian concept of Christ as the Word in the Gospel of
John: Christ was "the Word" through whom "all things came to
be. . . . No one has ever seen God; God's only son, he who is
nearest to the Father’s heart, has made him known" (1: 1-18).

From the beginning of the American poetic tradition to the
twentieth century, this concept of Christ as the New Man and
as the authentic visionary poet has been one of the most
distinctive aspects of the American literary imagination. It
is variably and persuasively present in those modern American
epics--Whitman's Seng_ef_Myeelf, Crane's Tha_Bridna, and
'Williams's £atarann--which are to be detailed separately in
the following chapers.

Chapter II

Walt Whitman ' s W

A. "Finally shall come the poet worthy that name"

The American imagination, which has been symbolically
oriented from the beginning, has been fixated on the image of
the new man in the New World. In the chapter entitled "What
Is an American?" of Lettere_frem_en_Amerlean_£ermer, J.
Hector St. John de Crévecoeur writes: "Here individuals of
all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours
and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
. . . The American is a new man, who acts upon new
principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form
new opinions" (70). This American idea of the new man takes
on a new metamorphosis in Whitman's concept of the new man as
Christ. Behind this synthesis there lie such previous
versions as Winthrop's symbolical articulation of America as
"the place where the Lord will create a new Heaven and a new
Earth," in Edward Johnson's terms (25), and Emerson's
principle of "the infinitude of a private man" (Jenrnale
342). The common element of these concepts of the new man is
that the new man is an epic hero who has been involved in the
spiritual battle in the process of creating an American

civilization.
This concept of the new man as an epic hero runs through

Whitnmn's Leaxee_ef_fireee, which was intended to be "The Epos
of a.Life" (Werkehep 174). In an introduction intended for
.Amemican editions, Whitman says that the poem was meant not
only'to be comparable to Homer's epic poems but also to be an
"entirely modern" epic, an epic which would be congenial with
‘the realities of the New Age and the New World (Werkehen
136). In "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" Whitman
‘mrites: "Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old

26

27
World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism,
conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional
characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New
World needs the poems of realities and science and of the
democratic average and basic equality, which shall be
greater" (Ereee_mezke 721). Despite this definition,
however, Whitman believes that the common goal of all epic
poems, whether of the Old World or the New, is to suggest the
"heroic and spiritual evolution" of "a large, sane, perfect
Human Being" or "a great Person" who is eternally the New Man
(Exaaa_flarka 721; flazkfihnn 136).

Just as Christ embodies the trinity of the Father, the
Son, and the Spirit, so the new man of the New World for
Whitman should comprise the trinity of Democracy, Love, and
Religion. American Democracy, Whitman asserts, should "be
fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and
air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds,
sun-warmth and free skies" and "the whole politics, sanity,
religion and art of the New World" must be founded on this
principle of nature (Ereee_merke 294-295). Whitman may not
be the first to formulate this idea of natural democracy, but
he inaugurates the idea for American literature. The
American mind from the beginning has been imbued with this
idea of natural democracy by its confrontation with the wild,
vast natural surroundings of the New World. As Parkes
observes in Ihe_Amerinan_ExnarianCa, "Coming to a country
where there was no elaborate social organization, and where
the individual must constantly do battle with the forces of
nature, the American came to see life not as an attempt to
realize an ideal order, but as a struggle between the human
will and the environment" (9). Consequently, American
society "was based on the natural man rather than on man as
rmolded by social rituals and restraints. . . . The genius of
.American life lay in its unprecedented capacity to release
for constructive purposes the energies and abilities of

28
common men and women" (10-11).

Steeped in this tradition of the American imagination,
Whitman thought of democracy as "the unshakable order of the
universe forever" (Erasa_Wnrks 381). Whitman maintains that
democracy consists of two qualities: "individualism" and
"adhesiveness or love" (Ereee_flerke 381). First, democracy
is founded on "the idea of the sovereignty, license,
sacredness of the individual" (Werkehep 171), the principle
of equality of each individual being. The "life-blood of
democracy" is "the idea of the pride and dignity of the
common people" (Eraaa_flerka 388). The whole universe has its
meaning only when it is "in reference to a human personality
and for identity and needful exercise" (Werkshep167). "But
the mass, or lump character . . . is to be ever carefully
weigh'd, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and
from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other,
comes the chance of individualism. The two are
contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them" (Ereee
,flerke 373). Individualism can be meaningful only when it has
the unifying power of "adhesiveness or love" which "fuses and
combines the whole" (Werkehee 169). The opening lines of the
poem, "One's-Self I Sing," clearly reveal Whitman's concept
of democracy: "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person, /
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse" (LG 1).
Thus, democracy becomes whole when it comprises both "a
simple separate person" and "En-Masse." It is to be noted
that Whitman's democracy is "not confined to politics" but
"extended to all departments of civilization & humanity, &
include especially the moral, esthetic, & philosophic
«departments" and Whitman says that "If indeed the various
parts of W demanded a single word to sum up &
characterize them, it would seem to be the word Democracy
that was wanted" (Weekehep 152) . Edward Dowden is quite
:right in his consideration of Whitman as "the poet of

democracy":

29
The principle of equality upon which the democratic
form of society is founded, obviously opposes itself
to the exclusive spirit of the aristocratical polity.
The essential thing which gives one the freedom of the
world is not to be born a man of this or that rank, or
class, caste, but simply to be born a man. The
literature of an aristocratic period is distinguished
by its aim at selectness, and the number of things it
proscribes; we should expect the literature of a
democracy to be remarkable for its comprehensiveness,
its acceptance of the persons of all men, its
multiform sympathies. The difference between the
President and the Broadway mason or hodman is
inconsiderable-—an accident of office; what is common
to both is the inexpressibly important thing, their
inalienable humanity. . . . [The] temper of the
democracy accepted by the understanding heart,
favour[s] only such prides as are founded on
nature--that is, on the possession, acquired or
inherited, of personal qualities, personal powers, and
virtues, and attainments. . . . Walt Whitman in these
particulars is what he claims to be, a representative
democrat in art. (Dowden 106-107)

Whitman's concept of "En-Masse" leads us to his notion of
Love as "a kelson of the creation" (LG 33) which "can bind,
and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however
various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family
making the races comrades, and fraternizing all" (Ereee_flerke
381). Love is a creator who makes a man "a great composite
damanratinindixidual, male or female" (BmsaJlnrka 463).
ILove changes his vision of the whole universe and man can
identify everything with himself in the belief that all
beings--a natural being, a human being, and the Supreme
Being--are closely interrelated with each other and become an

.inseparable one and that every being everywhere is equally

30
good ("Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all
that is not my soul. . . . / Welcome is every organ and
attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, / Not an
inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest") (LG 31) and divine ("I hear and
behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the
least . . . . / I see something of God each hour of the
twenty-four, and each moment then") (LG 86).

Whitman's idea of love as a binding power is expressed in
terms of sexual symbolism throughout his poetry. Section 5
of Seng_ef_Myeelf is a metaphor of the binding power of love
presented in terms of the sexual union of the body and the
soul. For Whitman love is a wonder which enables the body to
become one with the soul: the mystical contact of the
physical with the spiritual, the seen with the unseen. In
sexual union with the soul the body mysteriously reaches
dramatic understanding of the whole mystery of the universe.
.And in this sexual union of body and soul in this fifth
section the very democratic poet, Walt Whitman himself, is
.born as "the spirit of God" "parted the shirt from my
ibosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart"
(LG.33).

Whitman declares that "at the core of democracy, finally,
is the religious element" (Ereee_flerke 381). Democracy and
:Love, Whitman insists, "are to be vitalized by religion,
(sole worthiest elevator of man or State,) breathing into the
proud, material tissues, the breath of life" (W
381). The individual, who has only these two qualities of
Democracy and Love, is not a whole or representative man
imithout his sense of Religion, for the idea of Religion
'Nswallows up and purifies all other ideas and things--and
gives endless meaning and destiny to a man and condenses in
him all things" (W171) . Whitman's attitude towards
religion, as Furness says in When, seems

tr) have been formed by "a careful investigation of all known

31
systems of religious thought or philosophy" (194). And
Whitman reached the conclusion that "any one religion is just
as good as another" in that it realizes "the divine of man"
(Weekehep 44). However, the Bible had a permanent influence
on Whitman's religiosity. Whitman writes in "A Backward
Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" that he "went over so thoroughly
the Old and New Testaments" (Ereee_flerke 722) and in his own
introduction to the London edition of Leeyee_ef_firaee he
describes himself as "the most thoroughly rellglene being"
whose "interior & foundation quality" is "Hebraic, Biblical,
mystic" (HQLKShQD 153-154). In "American National
Literature” Whitman claims the superiority of the Bible above
all other religious writings: "The books of the Bible stand
for the final superiority of devout emotions over the rest,
and of religious adoration, and ultimate absolute justice,
more powerful than haughtiest Kings or millionaires or
majorities" (Ereee_flerke 664).

Furthermore, Whitman identifies religion with poetry: "In
its highest aspect, and striking its grandest average,
essential Poetry expresses and goes along with essential
Religion" (Preee_flerke 707). And Whitman regards "the Bible
as a poetic entity," as the "epic display" of the "finest
blending of individuality with universality": "Nowhere else
the abnegation of self towering in such quaint sublimity;
nowhere else the simplest human emotions conquering the gods
«of heaven, and fate itself" (Ereee_flerke 548, 546, 547). The
IBible is "thick-studded with human emotions, successions of
fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of our own
(antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on
which, phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably
depends--our ancestry, our past" (W 548) . Whitman
has an unfaltering belief in the "divine and primal poetic
structure" of the Bible which "No true bard will ever
contravene," for the collected narratives of the Bible are
"the fountain heads of song" (mm 549, 548, 549) .

32
This belief led Whitman to sing "Of life immense in passion,
pulse, and power, / Cheerful, for freest action form'd under
the laws divine, / The Modern Man I sing" (LG 1).

It is the singer of this "Modern Man" who is the hero of
Whitman's poetry, and the hero's own life is characteristic
of Democracy ("immense in passion, pulse, and power"), of
Love ("Cheerful"), and of Religion ("freest action form'd
under the laws divine"). In his 1855 Preface to Leayee_ef
Greee, Whitman asserts that "The known universe has one
complete lover, and that is the greatest poet" (Preee_flerke
441). The poet as "one complete lover" of the universe is
the new man in whom the true God is typified, and who becomes
the hero of his own poetry; he creates and celebrates the new
beginning, singing "the poems of the morning" (Ezeee_flerke
722). The poet is then "the true son of God" by whom
"Trinitas divine [of Democracy, Love, and Religion] shall be
gloriously accomplish'd and compacted" and "The whole earth,
this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely
justified" (LG 415).

Whitman's concept of the poet as "the true son of God"
inaugurates his poetic vision of America and proclaims the
coming of the new age to readjust "the whole theory and
nature of Poetry" with the dawn of "the American Democracy"
(Ereee_flerke 719, 416). In his 1855 Preface to Laaxafi_Qfi
(Graee Whitman contends that "The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem," an epic of "a new earth and a
new man" (Ereee_flezke 434, 390). Whitman's poetic vision
goes beyond America, enfolding all nations and all humanity.
‘Whitman sees "the peculiar glory" of the United States "not
in their geographical or even republican greatness, nor
wealth or products, nor military or naval power, nor special,
euninent Names in any department . . . but more and more in a
‘vaster, saner, more splendid COMRADESHIP, typifying the
People everywhere, uniting closer and closer not only The
Inherican States, but all Nations, and all Humanity" (Harkahnn

33
163). "I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose,
new formulas, international poems. . . . While my pieces,
then, were put forth and sounded especially for my own
country, and addressed to democratic needs, I cannot evade
the conviction that the substances and subtle ties behind
them, and which they celebrate . . . belong equally to all
countries. And ambition to waken with them, and in their
key, the latest echoes of every land, I here avow" (ngkfihgp
164). For Whitman "the crowning growth of the United States
is to be spiritual and heroic" (B:QS£.WQLKS 729).

Whitman's poetic vision of America contributed to the
formulation of his concept of "an epic of Democracy," which
is ”a new Poetry" whose "altitude . . . has always been
religion--and always will be" (Preee_flerke 458, 416, 417).
"The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression,
and its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in
metaphysics, including the mysteries of the spiritual world,
the soul itself, and the question of the immortal
continuation of our identity" (Brnsa_Hnrks 417). In
,Demeeratle_yletee Whitman insists:

America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and
all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It
must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but
inspire itself with science and the modern. It must
bend its vision toward the future, more than the past.
Like America, it must extricate itself from even the
greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to
them, must have entire faith in itself, and the
products of its own democratic spirit only. Like her,
it must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards,
the banner of the divine pride of man in himself, (the
radical foundation of the new religion.)
(ErnsaJinrks 412)
lRegarding "the words America and democracy as convertible
terms" (Writs. 363), Whitman believes that "a new

1.

Fat

1414

M

34
Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new
Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy
supports and expressions of the American Democracy" (Preee
Herke 416). In an essay "American National Literature,"
Whitman differentiates the poetry of the Old World from that
of the New World: "The poems of Asia and Europe are rooted in
the long past" and "celebrate man and his intellections and
relativenesses as they have been," but "America, in as high a
strain as ever, is to sing them all as they are and are to
be" (Ereee_flerke 668), for America, being "the custodian of
the future of humanity," is the "inheritor of the past"
(Ernaa_flazks 513). America itself is "essentially the
greatest poem" (Preee_flerke 434) which embodies "the old
hereditaments, legends, poems, theologies, and even customs"
as well as "our New-World circumstances and stages of
development" (Ereee_flerke 667).

"In the domain of literature loftily considered," Whitman
says in "An Old Man's Rejoinder," ". . . 'the kingdom of the
Father pass'd; the kingdom of the Son is passing; the kingdom
of the Spirit begins'" (Ernaa_flarks 655). Here Whitman
suggests that his poetry is that of "the kingdom of the
Spirit" which might be seen as the fulfillment of generations
of radical Christian exegesis, as typified in Joachim of
IFlora's prophecy that "the Old Testament [is] a book of the
iFather, the New Testament a book of the Son, and the future
.age, not yet arrived, the age of the Holy Spirit" (qtd. in
(arant and Tracy 87). In Seng_ef_Myeelf, Whitman tries to
*write such a poem of "the kingdom of the Spirit," a gospel of
‘the Holy Spirit for a new Christian age. Whitman was
consciously absorbed in a version of the idea of trinity; it
tuuderlies his poetic theory; and the trinitarian schema has
been figured in various ways by Whitman critics. Whitman's
'Nmonsciousness," Allen writes, is composed of "a trinity of
self, fancy, and soul, which is to say, biological organism,
(areative faculty, and metaphysical essence" (Whitman_ee_men

 

uC

35
5). For Floyd Stovall, Whitman's trinitarian inclination is
realized in a poetry that "is consequently a trilogy, showing
how freedom may be secured for the body through democracy,
for the heart through love, and for the soul through
religion" (xxv). Hence Seng_ef_Myeelf is a song of a new Man
who embodies the trinity of Democracy, Love, and Religion,
the major enterprise of a poetry which Whitman regarded as
"the Great Construction of the New Bible" (qtd. in Miller,

W 190). "as {his} definitive nar_ta

yleine to the coming generations of the New World" (Preae
Werke 712).

Whitman believed in the spiritual growth of each religion
which "means exactly the state of development of the people":
"I say to you that all forms of religion, without excepting
one, any age, any land, are but mediums, temporary yet
necessary, fitted to the lower mass-ranges of perception of
the race . . . and that the developed soul passes through one
or all of them, to the clear homogeneous atmosphere above
them" (flankshfln 44). This belief, as Allen contends,
stimulated "Whitman's desire to found a new religion for the
modern age" (Walt_flhitman_aa_Man 67). "The new theologies"
of a new religion are centered on "the divine pride of man in
himself" (flszShQn 43, 127). Whitman maintains in "Notes for
Lectures on Religion" that they "bring forward man-—There is
nothing in the universe any more divine than man. All
gathers to the worship of man. . . . Why has it been taught
'that there is only one Supreme?--I say there are and must be
xnyriads of Supremes. I say that that is blasphemous petty
land.infidel which denies any immortal soul to be eligible to
.advence onward to be as supreme as any--I say that all goes
CH1 to be eligible to become one of the Supremes" (Werkehep
43). This is the gospel of the poet of a radical religious
democracy which believes in "the common average man" as a
divine being (may 43)

Unlike the epic poems of the Old World, Leayee_ef_firaas

36
aims to offer a "different relative attitude towards God,
towards the objective universe, and still more . . . the
quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or
talking, towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity"
(Ezeee_flerke 715). Seng_ef_Myeelf, especially, is "The Epos

of a Life" (Workshop 174), a gospel of "a Person" whose
poetic model is Christ the true son of God and the true poet.

Just as Christ was God's emissary of "living Good-will" to
all the nations and the whole race, so Walt Whitman declared
that he himself was a poetic emissary commissioned "with only
Poet's right, as general simple friend of Man" (Werkehep
164). The hero of Seng_ef_Myeelf is then a visionary poet
himself whose "Speech is the twin of my vision" (LG 55),
transforming our whole perception of the universe by washing
"the gum from your eyes" (LG 84), like Christ healing the
blind man. He is the word and the light and becomes "the
way, the truth, and the life." The greatest poet, Whitman
says in his 1855 Preface to Laaxaa_a£_fizaaa, "is a seer--he
is individual--he is complete in himself" in whom "the
curious mystery of the eyesight" is incarnated (Ereee_flerke
438). "The metaphor of the eyesight," Miller remarks in his
Ibook.flaln_flhitman, "suggests that the poet, in his role as
;prophet, sees into the spiritual heart of things for the rest
of mankind" The poet, endowed with a transcendent sight,
serves as humanity's eyes of the spirit" (66). The poet
"sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and
'women as dreams or dots" (LG 348). This poet-hero of Seng_ef
annual: declares that "You must habit yourself to the dazzle
of the light and of every moment of your life" (LG 84) . Sang,
W is the epic of the Incarnation of the Word as Light
tn: transform man's vision of the world, so that the prophecy

in quseage_te_lndia is fulfilled: "Finally shall come the
poet worthy that name" (LG 415) .

37
B. "Speech is the twin of my vision"

In "Notes for Lectures on Religion" Whitman mentions that
the underlying lesson of his poetry is the principle of
nature, the principle "of continual development, of arriving
at any one result or degree only to start on further results
and degrees," and continues that "Invisibly, inaudibly, after
their sorts, all the forces of the Universe, the air, every
drop of water, every grain of sand, are pulsating,
processing" (Weekehep 53). In Seng_ef_Myeelf and "Starting
from Paumanok" Whitman declares himself to be "the poet of
the Body" and "the poet of the Soul," the poet of the woman
and the poet of the man, or the poet of materials and the
poet of the spirit (LG 48), regarding "all the things of the
universe" as "perfect miracles" which reveal the ultimate
spiritual reality (LG 23). The statement in "Notes for
Lectures on Religion" suggests that Whitman's poetic idea of
metamorphosis was influenced by the Darwinian scientific
theory of evolution, Heraclitean and Hegelian philosophy of
flux, and Romantic-transcendentalist organic theory (Allen,
(Whitmen_flandheek 161-260; Smuts 60-65; Crawley 12-27; Reed
147-155). It is easy to see how a version of spiritual
metamorphosis, with strong Christian tendencies, would
flourish in this context as seen in the statement in Seng_ef
jMyeelf and "Starting from Paumanok." The influences of the
concept of evolution on Whitman have been widely discussed,
but such an idea of spiritual metamorphosis in Whiman's
[poetry has not received sufficient attention, even though a
generalized "Christ symbolism" in his poetry is discussed by
such critics as Thomas Edward Crawley and F. DeWolfe Miller.

In Ihe_SLrneture_ef_Leayee_ef_Graee, Crawley argues that
"The Christ-symbol . . . has a unifying effect reaching far
Ibeyond the fact that it is the most fully developed and
:frequently recurring symbol in Leeyee_ef_firaee" (78), but
even.in his later discussion of Leaxee_ef_sreee the insight

38
is not developed much beyond this stage. Crawley thinks of
Seng_ef_Myeelf as "preparatory to the gospel of Leayee_ef
Greee in much the same way that the prophecies of the Old
Testament are preparatory and essential to our full
understanding of the Christ who actually lives and proves
himself among the peoples and events of his age" (91). This
is a good enough insight, but he ends his structural analysis
of Seng_ef_Myeelf simply with the list of the numerous
allusions to Christ in the poem. In his essay "The
Partitive Studies of 'Song of Myself,'" F. DeWolfe Miller,
insisting that "Similarities between Whitman and the Bible
serve throughout as a background or the structure" of Seng_efi
Myeelfi (12), mentions briefly "the messianic content and the
Christian influence" on the structure of Seng_ef_Myeelfi (12),
but most of his essay is devoted to the examination of other
critics' arguments on the structure of Seng_ef_Myeelf
(ll-17). My study intends to explore the
democratic-Christian bases of Seng_efi_Myeelf, the unifying

center of Leayee_ef_fireee, in much more detail.
Whitman's use of the Christ figure as the hero in his

poetry was deeply influenced not only by an immersion in the
Bible which is the equal of any early American Puritan, but
also in those Greek literary and philosophical writings which
led the Alexandrian Biblical exegetes to interpret the Bible
in terms of spiritual symbolism. This version of spiritual
allegorizing has found literary expression in the American
imagination from its beginnings. Everywhere in Whitman's
poetry as well as in his prose, we can find the influence of
Neoplatonic philosophy (Allen, Whitmen_fiendbeek 161-181). In

(nemeereele_yletee, Whitman remarks that the value of the
seen, material world reflects that of the unseen, spiritual

'world, which is always the barometer of the physical world:
"[Tlhe personality of mortal life is most important with
reference to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the
only permanently real, which as the ocean waits for and

39
receives the rivers, waits for us each and all" (Ereee_Werke
403). In Geng_efi_Myeelf, he regards even the smallest thing
as the marvelous revelation of divine reality and sees the
grass, for example, as "the handkerchief of the Lord," or as
"a uniform hieroglyphic" (LG 33, 34). Under the influence of
the Bible and Neoplatonic philosophy, Whitman regarded
everything in terms of spiritual symbolism. He had the
desire to sacralize space and time, to use Mircea Eliade's

terms, "the_desireute_liye_in_a_pnra_and_th¥_nQaszl_aa_iL
”as in the beginning When it came fresh from the Creator's
hands" (65) and to live "in the tima_afi_anigin" (105), the
desire for a spiritual journey to "a new birth" or "access to
Spirituality [which] was adopted and valorized by Alexandrian
Judaism and by Christianity" (200-201).

As the coming of Christ signified a new awakening of
human consciousness (Mark 1: 15), so for Whitman, the rise of
American democracy and the growth of modern engineering and
technology in the nineteenth century signals man's shaking
off his old cultural tradition and inaugurates the dawning of
a New World and the birth of a New Man. It is this
consciousness that prompted Whitman "solely to drop in the
earth the germs of a greater religion," to "strike up for a
New World" the song of the New Man who is "held to the
heavens and all the spiritual world" (LG 21, 16, 21). This
New Man begins his song, "Starting from fish-shape Paumanok
where I was born, / Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect
mother" (LG 15); he embodies "The greatness of Love and
Democracy, and the greatness of Religion" (LG 21). The hero
of "Starting from Paumanok" declares that "I too
inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena," feeling
that "I am destin'd to utter the loudest cries there, the

winner's pealing shouts" (LG 20). "Starting from Paumanok"
insists that "the whole earth and all the stars in the sky
are for religion's sake. / . . . Nor character nor life

worthy the name without religion, / Nor land nor man or woman

 

40
without religion" (LG 20). His "poems of materials," as he
holds, ". . . are to be the most spiritual poems," so that
his "poems of my body and of mortality" are "the poems of my
soul and of immortality" (LG 18).

Since Sang_af_M¥aalf traces the gradual progress of the
hero's spiritual metamorphosis, which is similar to the
spiritual transformation of Christ from his birth to his
ascension, my discussion of the poem accordingly emphasizes
the spiritual metamorphosis of the hero and its structural
development. "The progression in the poem," as Ann Clearly
asserts, "moves from a natural, exterior sun to a poetic and
interiorized source of light" (96) and from the ordinary
voices of nature and of men and women to the words of
Spiritualized language. Just as Christ "advanced in wisdom"
as he grew up (Luke 2: 52), so the hero of Geng_ef_Myeelf
grows as a visionary poet. In other words, the structure of
Sene_ef_Myeelfi is the progressive movement of the hero's
recognition of his speech as the twin of his vision.

Sections 1-6 are the prelude to the hero's quest for a
condition in which "speech is the twin of my vision." Just
as the New Testament begins with the annunciation of the
birth of Christ, Section 1 proclaims the advent of the "I"
who will be the word and the light. This section introduces
the hero as the word whose "tongue" will "speak at every
hazard, / Nature without check with original energy," "Hoping
to cease not till death" (LG 29). That his first act is to
observe "a spear of summer grass" is very significant, for
the grass will later be identified with the word, the hero of
the poem. Therefore, his observing of the grass signifies
the first act in his search for his identity, an identity of
the "I" (the physical "I" or the body) and the "you" (the
spiritual "I" or the soul), an identity of subject and
Object. The opening line of this poem, as Albert Gelpi
Observes, "established the connection with and distinction

frxnn all previous epics," confirming that this poem is a

41
"transcendent and new" epic, an epic of "not the swordblade
of Aeneas but 'a spear of summer grass,'" an epic that "would
take as its theme the drama of identity and would have to be
'indirect' to tap the unconscious sources of identity"
(169-170). In this earliest stage of the hero Whitman
creates the image of the hero as a quester, a traveller who
always desires to move, to loaf, or to wander.

Section 2 informs us that the breathing of the hero is
"the fragrance" of "Nature without check with original
energy," which will replace the intoxicating "distillation"
of "perfumes" of "houses and rooms" (LG 29), the perfumes of
"the schools, religions, philosophies, literature . . . the
swathing, suffocating folds and mental wrappings derived from
civilization" (Bucke 161). It should be noted that here are
introduced the two worlds of the inside (houses and rooms)
and the outside (the wood and the bank), which contribute to
the development of the metamorphic theme of Sang_nf_M¥salf.
The hero expresses his desire to be released from the
confinement of the inside world and to "contact," or "possess
the good of the earth and sun": "I am mad for it to be in
contact with me" (LG 29-30). This anxiety to "contact" the
outside world, Denis Donoghue says, is "Whitman's ideal human
image. It will blur the distinction between man and God,
thus setting up yet another equation, the largest in
intention," an equation between man and God; "This divinity
flows and sanctifies, by contact, everything it sees, hears,
touches, or smells; it is Whitman's version of the laying on
of hands" (33). And the song of the hero will be "The sound
of the belch'd words of my voice" which will be "loos'd to
the eddies of the wind" (LG 30), "rising from bed and meeting
the sun" (LG 30). This cosmic vision leads to the
contention that the hero is the possessor of "the origin of
all poems," the secret of the universe (LG 30). It echoes
the image of Christ as the WOrd through whom "the good of the
earth and sun" was possessed, originated, or created out of

42
chaos or darkness in the beginning, the Word who liberated
man from "the eyes of the dead" and "the spectres in the
books," the tyrannies of the Law, the symbol of symbols of
"the origin of all poems" (LG 30). He embraces the whole
world in "a reaching around of arms" (LG 30), like Christ in
the New Testament who "longed to gather your children, as a
hen gathers her brood under her wings" (Matthew 23: 37; Luke
13: 34).

In Section 3 the power of speech of the hero is balanced
by the power of his vision as the light, for hero's "eyes"
are granted the power to "cipher" the secret of eternal truth
by God, "the hugging and loving bed-fellow [who] sleeps at my
side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day
with stealthy tread" (LG_31-32). God is no longer a
transcendent being, but incarnates himself as a "loving
bed-fellow," the Word who impregnates the hero with the bread
of life ("Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels
swelling the house with their plenty" (LG 31)). The hero is
impregnated with the power of vision which will open his eyes
or heal his blindness and lead to his realization that "the
unseen is proved by the seen," a new knowledge of "the
perfect fitness and equanimity of things" (LG 31). For him,
"Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none
shall be less familiar than the rest" (LG 31). With this
knowledge, he is satisfied and comes nearer to "see, dance,
laugh, sing" as a visionary poet (LG 31). He is ready to "go
bathe and admire myself," to possess timelessness in time,
and to live in a perpetual "now": "Urge and urge and urge, /
.Always the procreant urge of the world" (LG 31). For him,
there is only a perpetual evolution or transformation, for
this "procreant urge" of the hero, as Robert D. Faner says,
"conveys the slow, deep, eternal desires which make 'endings'
impossible" (190). For him, there is no beginning and no
ending in the universe: "I do not talk of the beginning or
the end" (LG 30).

43

In Section 4 the hero appears to be the Word and the
Light. He, as the Word, looking "Backward . . .in my own
days where I sweated through fog with linguists and
contenders," is convinced that "I have no mockings or
arguments" anymore and declares that "I witness and wait" (LG
32). As the Light, he views such human experiences as
sickness, poverty, joys, sorrows, and battles, but he is
shown to be not yet mature because he cannot identify himself
with such people as the trippers and the askers who are all
involved in these human sufferings and agonies: "These come
to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are
not the Me myself" (LG 32). He stands "Apart from the
pulling and hauling" of humanity (LG 32). Like Christ who
witnessed human sufferings and waited for thirty years, he
also needs time and for now he is witnessing and waiting for
the time to do his mission.

Even though the impregnating power of sexuality is
implied in Section 3, Section 5 elaborates "the procreant
urge" as the power which enables the hero to reach the
insight that "the unseen is proved by the seen, / Till that
becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn" (LG 31). The
sexual union of the soul and the body is Whitman's
identification of the spiritual and the physical, or what
James E. Miller says "the enobling of the physical through
the spiritual" (Hhlemenle_1seng_ef_Myeelf1 137). It is a
metaphor of the birth of the visionary poet, who will
identify the body with the soul, as Edwin Haviland Miller has
put it, seeing the scene of this union as "the pictorial form
of a cross" (Walt_flhitmanle_£eetry 22). Miller writes:

It is understandable why Whitman, perhaps unknowingly,
chose to dramatize the scene in terms of a
crucifixion. For at least in one sense the old
Whitman dies and a new one is born: the conventional,
prosaic Walter Whitman is succeeded by the [poetic]
Walt Whitman announced in the first edition of Leeyee

44
ef_Greee. The crucifixion also suggests the death of
the ancient dualism (body and soul) and the
resurrection of a single whole being. The body is
reborn without the Judaeo-Christian mortification of
the flesh: the soul accepts the entire body . . . for
all organs of the body are equally important and all
sensations are equally good. . . . Whitman resurrects
the body, or, to put it another way, makes the soul
sensual once again, as it was in the beginning of the
child's life before society imposed conscience and
"thou-shalt-nots." (Walt_flhiLmanL§_EQaL£¥ 22-23)

This birth metaphor is to recapitulate the Incarnation of
the Word in secular terms. As Galway Kinnell points out,
"Whitman climbs down the Platonic ladder. The direction is

a motion from the conventionally highest downward toward
union with the most ordinary and the least, the
conventionally lowest, the common things of the world" (224).
After his sexual union with the the soul, the hero (the body)
admits that "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth" (LG 33).
The hero, however, has not yet reached the full vision which
enables him to articulate his own speech: "Not words, not
music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the
best"; he may enjoy only "the hum" which is appropriate to
the ear of a child: "Only the lull I like, the hum of your
valved voice" (LG 33). The spiritual awakening of the hero
signals his start on a journey toward his spiritual growth.

The newly-born child in Section 5 seeks to find his
identiy in Section 6, asking, "Whe;_le_the_graeel" (LG 33).
After several attempts to "guess" the articulate meaning of
"the seen," the grass, the hero is able to "perceive after
all so many uttering tongues" in grass and to "translate" the
grass as the words, as "the flag of my disposition," "the
handkerchief of the Lord," or "a uniform hieroglyphic" (LG
34). George Y. Trail's perceptive observation of "the grass

45
as a metaphor for the tongue" is relevant here (122).
Connecting the fifth line of Section 1 of Seng_ef_Myeelf ("I
lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass")
with the lines 119-120 of Section 6 of the poem ("O I
perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / and I perceive
they do not come from the roof of mouths for nothing"), Trail
interprets the grass as "the lingual penetration" (124) of
the soul who "parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart" (LG 33).
Trail's interpretation of the grass as the tongue suggests
that the grass symbolizes the power of the speech of the hero
which penetrates the body, the heart of the hearers and the
"spear" of the grass corresponds to "the parallel tongue as
the epic weapon of the poet/hero" (124). The grass is
finally identified with the hero, who perceives himself after
the manner of Christ the Word, whose speech penetrates the
heart of man, transforming his blindness into a clear vision
which finds everything divine like "a uniform hieroglyphic."
In Section 6, the hero, "observing a spear of summer

grass," longs for a never-ending journey toward its spiritual
renewal: "I wish I could translate the hints about the dead
young men and women, / And the hints about old men and
mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps" (LG
34). He finds his identity in the ever-growing grass, as he
reiterates in the final section of Seng_ef_Myeelf that "I
Ibequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, /
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" (LG
89):

The smallest sprout [of the grass] shows there is

really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does
not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

46
And to die is different from what any one supposed,and
luckier. (34-35)

The grass is a symbol of this mysterious perpetual becoming,
the sorts of life for which Whitman reaches. Even after his
departure, his words will live on like the ever-returning
grass, like Christ's words sown into the world for those who
can hear.

Sections 7-13 are dominated by the light image and the
herols awakening. In Section 7, by "pass[ing] death with the
dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe," the hero's eyes
begin to open, seeing everything as "good" (LG 35). He
begins to feel that he is part of the others and declares
that he is "not contain'd between my hat and boots" (LG 35).
Now his sympathy with the others "cannot be shaken away" (LG
35). The hero's act of seeing continues in Section 8 where
the panorama of the human life cycle, from birth to love to
suffering to death, is presented. By looking at the
newly-born child who "sleeps in its cradle," by viewing "the
youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy
hill," and by witnessing "the corpse with its dabbled hair"
sprawling "on the bloody floor of the bedroom" (LG 35-36),
the hero recognizes that he is the poet who captures the true
meaning of the words, voices, cries, and howls that he hears.
He listens to "What living and buried speech is always
vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum" (LG 36),
for in his mission "I mind [all human experiences of birth,
love, suffering, and death] or the show or resonance of
them--I come and I depart" (LG 36).

The urban scene of Section 8 is juxtaposed with the rural
scenes of Section 9, in which light plays upon the closed
"big doors of the country barn" and keeps it open (LG 36).
"The clear light plays on the brown gray and green
intertinged" (LG 36). Section 10 emphasizes the open-air
life of the hero. The hero enjoys hunting "in the wilds and

mountains," living in the sea, and seeing "the marriage of

47
the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a
red girl" (LG 37). The marriage of the trapper and a red
girl is the hero's vision of harmony among the races, which
leads him to understand "perfectly well" the meanings of the
"revolving eyes" of the "runaway slave" who is "bruis'd",
"limpsy," and "weak" (LG 37-38). Like Christ, the hero
becomes a comforter for the suffering.

The closed life of a lady confined in her own house in
Section 11 presents a striking contrast to the open air in
Section 10. The image of her sexual desire is increasingly
heightened by the tension between the inside world and the
outside, where "twenty-eight young men" play. The young men
are "bath[ing] by the shore" but the lady is confined in "the
fine house by the rise of the bank" (LG 38). The young men
are "all so friendly" but she is "all so lonesome" (LG 38).
The young men are naked but she is "richly drest" (LG 38).
The young men are free of their consciousness, "Dancing and
laughing along the beach" (LG 38). Even though "the unseen
hand" of a woman who is a stranger to them "pass'd over their
bodies," "tremblingly from their temples and ribs," "They do
not think whom they souse with spray" (LG 39). On the other
hand, the lady is imprisoned in her own consciousness. Even
though she "splash[es] in the water there, yet stay[s] stock
still in your room" (LG 38). .

The powerful sexual desire of Section 11 is of course not
merely physical; nothing in Whitman ever is. It has powerful
spiritual significance, this yearning for openness and
metamorphosis. In Section 12,it is connected with an image
of the dynamic strength of the butcher-boy "at the stall in
the market" and the blacksmiths "with grimed and hairy
chests" (LG 39). Their energies are powerful enough to crack
down the strong wall or the window of "the fine house" of the
lady, the prison of human sexuality and human consciousness
and to release her from her prison to the open-air world. In
Section 13 the image of the light is dominant; the light

48

penetrates the clothes of the body, the imprisoned human
consciousness. The negro driver "tosses the slouch of his
hat away from his forehead, / The sun falls on his crispy
hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish'd and
perfect limbs" (LG 39-40). The light of the eyes of the oxen
"that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade"
seems to the hero to tell "more than all the print I have
read in my life" (LG 40). The look and colors of the world
are transforming him: "the look of the bay mare shames
silliness out of me" (LG 40).

In Section 14 the hero is summoned into the sounds and
words of nature which are awakening him to his identity as
the Word. The wild gander, who "leads his flock through the

cool night," cries "Xaehenk" (LG 40). "[L]istening close" to
the gander's cry, the hero imagines that the "purpose" of the
cry "sounds . . . down to me like an invitation" (LG 40). He

finds "the same old law" in the sounds of "the grunting sow"
and of the "half-spread wings" of the turkey-hen (LG 41).
Awakened by the sounds of nature, he is more and more
"enamour'd of growing out-doors, / Of men that live among
cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and
steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the
drivers of horses" and he can "eat and sleep with them week
in and week out" (LG 41). And he realizes that "What is
commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me" (LG 41).

The introduction of the image of the bird flying in
Section 14 leads the hero not to ask "the sky to come down to
my good will," but to scatter "it freely forever" and to
observe in Section 15 the outside world, the whole range of
American experiences from coarse frontier life to the refined
world of musicians and artists, from the insane world of the
"confirm'd" lunatic at the asylum to the sane world of "The
President holding a cabinet council," from the secular world
of the prostitutes to the pious world of the deacons (LG
41-44). These worldly scenes "tend inward to me," the hero

 

49
says, "and I tend outward to them" (LG 44). All of these
worlds are equally identified with the hero: "And such as it
is to be of these more or less I am" (LG 44). "The lengthy
catalogue," Edwin Haviland Miller observes, "ends in a quiet,
delicate coda, as city and country, living and dead, aged and
young, husbands and wives, and the I merge, diversity
momentarily giving way to harmonious union" (Walt_flhltmanle
"Sang ef Myself" 81). Here we can find the beginning of the
dynamic interaction between inside and outside which enables
the hero to "weave the song of myself" (LG 44).

Section 16 reiterates the theme of the identification of
the hero with the others catalogued in Section 15: "Of every
hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, / A farmer,
mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, / Prisoner,
fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest" (LG 45). The
hero grows; everything is so divinely ordained and nothing is
without its purpose. Everything is in its own place as he is
in his place: "The moth and fish-eggs are in their place, /
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in
their place, / The palpable is in its place and the
impalpable is in its place" (LG 45).

In Section 17 the hero insists that this idea is rooted
in "the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands" (LG 45).
_As James E. Miller argues in his essay "'Song of Myself' as
Inverted Mystical Experience," Whitman "inverted" the
traditional religious concept of man as a sinner who is
isolated or separated from the mystical source of life and
attempted to reinterpret the human position in the universe
in an effort to "purge this false sense," a false vision of
man (WhitmanlsJSnnLnLstalf'l 140-141). In Wall
the hero's vision is purified; it grows as the grass itself
grows in a continual metamorphic analogue for that experience
Whitman identifies as Christlike, the growth toward divinity
in all men. The grass is ubiquitous; it "grows wherever the
land is and the water is" (LG 45). The "common air," the

 

50
breathing of the grass, "bathes the globe" (LG 45).
Likewise, the song of the hero is to be sounded "wherever the
land is and the water is."

Section 18 begins with the sounds of the cornets and the
drums, the sounds of the battlefields, which will be sounded
again in Sections 34-36. These sounds, together with the
accompaning catalogues of Sections 15-16, 24, 31, 33, 41, and
47, insist on the poetry's epic ambition. These marches are
played not "for accepted victors only," but "for conquer'd
and slain persons" also (LG 46): for both the slaughtered
Texans as in Section 34 and the victors, living and dead, in
Sections 35-36 whom he regards as "equal to the greatest
heroes known" (LG 46).

Section 19 defines "some intricate purpose" of Seng_ef
Myeelf in terms of the "yearning" for the word and the light
(LG_46). The song of the hero is "the meal equally set" for
"the natural hunger" of "the wicked just the same as the
righteous," for the natural desire of man for the words and
light (LG 46). Here for the first time Whitman explicitly
connects with the hero such words or phrases as "the touch of
my lips to yours," "the murmur of yearning," "twittering,"
and "the daylight" to signify his nature and function in the
poenlas the word and the light (LG 46-47). The hero asks in
the later part of this section: "Does the daylight astonish?
does the early redstart twittering through the woods?" (LG
47), but, in spite of the listeners' astonishment, he
realizes his role as he announces that "I will tell you" (LG
47) as he identifies his messianic role with the minute
utterances of nature.

In Section 20 the hero seeks to identify himself and
(asks; "What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you" (LG
47)? He finds himself as a representative man, identifying
*with.any man: "All I mark as my own you shall offset it with
your own" (LG 47) . He proceeds to identify with the creative
Word itself: "In all people I see myself, none more and not

51
one a barley-corn less / . . . To me the converging objects
of the universe perpetually flow, / All are written to me"
(LG 47). "Since he is the Word, this poetry is identified
with the timeless: "I know I am deathless . . . . / I exist
as I am"; he knows "the amplitude of time" (LG 48).

In Section 21 the hero defines his function as an
interpreter who can "translate into a new tongue" the secret
(LG 48), true meanings of the universe in terms of "a
hierogamy of heaven and earth," to use Eliade's terms (165).
Here the heaven is personified as the male, the Soul, the
hero of the poem and at once described as the "bare-bosom'd
. . magnetic nourishing night" of "south winds," which are
symbolic of the spirit (LG 49); the earth, as the female, the
Body. The soul of heaven visits the body of the earth, the
"voluptuous cool-breath'd . . . rich apple-blossom'd" earth
waiting with her "Far-swooping elbow'd" arms stretched and,
"[half-holdingJ" her, nourishes her with his "unspeakable
passionate love" (LG 49). In his "Notes for Lectures on
Religion" Whitman expresses the same_idea, seeing "the Soul
of the Universe" as "the Male and genital master" who is "the
impregnating and animating spirit" and the body or "Physical
matter" as "Female and Mother" who "waits barren and
bloomless, the jets of life from the masculine vigor"
(Werkehep 49). Initiated by this sexual union, the hero of
the poem is now able to "translate into a new language" the
"pleasures of heaven" (the poems of the Soul) and "the pains
of hell" (the poems of the Body) which have puzzled him so
far (LG 48). Whitman also invests the hero with the bisexual
attributes: "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man"
(LG 48). This bisexual attribute, Ernest Lee Tuveson
asserts, signifies that the hero is "the counterpart of the
divine being" (213).

From the beginning section up to Section 21, land-related
imagery is prevalent, but from Section 22 water-related

imagery becomes dominant. In Section 22 the hero of the poem

 

52
"resign[s]" himself to the "crooked inviting fingers" of the
sea beach (LG 49). The hero, being naked, runs to the sea to
"have a turn together," and cries in an irresistable voice:
"Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, / Dash me with
amorous wet, I can repay you" (LG 49). Here the hero's
immersion "in billowy drowse" of the sea signifies his
disintegration into the primordial mode of existence, "a
temporary reincorporation into the indistinct, followed by a
new creation, a new life, or a 'new man,'" just as,
"According to Justin, Christ, a new Noah, emerged victorious
from the waters to become the head of another race" (Eliade
131, 133-134).

In Section 23, after this quasi-baptismal re-entry into
the primordial state, the hero proclaims himself an "Endless
unfold[er] of words of ages" (LG 51). His word is "a word of
the modern, the word En-Masse. / A word of the faith that
never balks" (LG 51). His words are such offsprings of
"Time" that they have the material body of "Reality," which
no one dare question (LG 51). Through this material body the
hero enters into "an area of my dwelling," the world of
naming things (LG 51). "The physical fact," John T. Irwin
argues, "is not the dwelling place because for Whitman the
physical is the path to the metphysical ('path' not in the
sense that the metaphysical is located elsewhere, but in the
sense that the metaphysical is a radically different way of
experiencing the physical)" (22).

Section 24 is very significant in that the hero of the
poem finally recognizes his identity as a visionary poet.

The meaning of the celebrated birth of "I" in the first line
of Section 1, which has been a baffling mystery both to the
hero himself and the reader of the poem, is suddenly
clarified in Section 24 by the sudden revelation of the name
of the hero. Just as Christ was officially christened by God
"my beloved Son" (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11), so the hero is
christened by the author of the poem "Walt Whitman, a kosmos,

53
of Manhattan the son" (LG 52). "Like Odysseus crowing his
name to the blinded Cyclops," Paul 2weig notes, "Whitman's
singer has made a name for himself" (257). The hero's
revealing of his own name, like Adam's act of the naming of
the animals in Genesis, is the act to possess the secret of
the universe, to possess the sacred (spiritual reality) in
the profane (sensual world). "Names," Whitman says in An
Ame;leen_2rlmer, "are a test of the esthetic and of
spirituality" (34). And Whitman, believing in the mysterious
power implied in the name, says in reference to the name of
Christ that "Names are magic":
Out of Christ are divine words--out of this savior.
Some words are fresh-smelling, like lilies, roses, to
the soul, blooming without failure.--The name of
Christ--all words that have arisen from the life and
death of Christ, the divine son, who went about
speaking perfect words, no patois--whose life was
perfect,--the touch of whose hands and feet was
miracles--who was crucified--his flesh laid in a
shroud, in the grave. (Primer 18-19).
By revealing his name, the hero of the poem is consecrated
and realizes that "Divine am I inside and out, and I make
holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, / The scent of
these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, / This head more than
churches, bibles, and all the creeds" (LG 53). Just as
Christ is a "perfect" man because he is the embodiment of the
"flesh" and the "holy," so the hero of the poem, transcending
"churches, bibles, and all the creeds," becomes a complete
man, a poet of "the Body" and "the Soul" (LG 53, 48). And
just as Christ, after being baptized, was convinced of his
identity as the Word whose mission was to proclaim the Gospel
of God, so the hero of the poem, after being baptized
(Section 22), is convinced of his identity as a Word, who
should "speak the pass-word primeval" and "give the sign of
democracy" (LG 52). The hero feels that "the afflatus" or

54
"the current and index" is "surging and surging" through him:

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners
and slaves,

Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves
and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of
wombs and of the father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove
the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.
(LG 52-53)

The "many long dumb voices," which have been "the deform'd,
trivial, flat, foolish, despised, / Fog in the air," are
animated like "beetles rolling balls of dung" (LG 52),
"roll[ing] the great ball of the Sun across the heavens" as
in the Egyptian myth (Mabbott 43); the "forbidden voices" are
unveiled. All these voices are converged into him to be
"clarified and tranfigur'd" into a fresh meaning. The
"locks" are unscrewed from the doors and the doors themselves
are unscrewed from their jambs (LG 52). All the barriers to
communication between all beings are unscrewed; the secret
meaning of "the threads that connect the stars" and connect
"wombs" with "the father-stuff" is to be clearly revealed
like "a miracle."

The voices converging into the hero's mind are presented
in sexual imagery in the open air, in such images as
"Trickling sap of maple," "Vapors," "sweaty brooks and dews,"
"Winds whose soft-tickling genitals," and the light of the

55
"Sun so generous," and like (LG 53). The poet feels
impelled to be "A morning-glory" at the windows of all
mankind: "To behold the day-break!" (LG 54). This is
paralleled by sexual imagery: "Something I cannot see puts
upward libidinous prongs, / Seas of bright juice suffuse
heaven" (LG 54). The hero of the poem fully realizes that he
is a visionary poet.

In Section 25, the light of the sun becomes the power of
visionary expression. "All life to him," Malcolm Cowley
writes in the introduction to his edition Walt_Whitmanle
W, "is such a miracle
of beauty that the sunrise would kill him if he could not
find expression for it--'If I could not now and always send
sunrise out of me'" (Miller, ' " " 184).
The hero's voice soars high to "ascend dazzling and
tremendous as the sun": "My voice goes after what my eyes
cannot reach, / With the twirl of my tongue I encompass
worlds and volumes of worlds" (LG 54-55). Finally, it finds
the light of the sun: "We found our own O my soul in the calm
and cool of the day-break" (LG 54). In the long run, for
Whitman "Speech is the twin of my vision" (LG 55) as it was
for Christ. Thus the hero ejaculates in "prophetical
screams": "WWW
Lhanl" (LG 55). However, this is the critical moment for the
hero, for if he fails to overcome the tempation of his pride
with a correlative prudence he will never be a visionary
poet: "Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too
much of articulation, / Do you not know O speech how the buds
beneath you are folded? / Waiting in gloom, protected by
frost" (LG 55). Just as Christ overcame the temptation of
Satan, the Incarnate Pride, so the hero, with "the hush of my
lips," is triumphant enough to "wholly confound the
skeptic"(LG 55), the personified Satan who "comes and carries
off the word which has been sown" in the minds of people
(Mark 4:15). '

56

Section 26 continues this metaphor of temptation and
describes the trial period of the hero's final preparation.
The hero appears not to be a voice but to be a listener to
the voice. There are two kinds of voices here: natural and
artistic. The hero resigns himself to silence and only to
listening to the voices of the human world of joy and agony,
the sounds of the natural world of birds and plants, and to
cosmic sounds: "Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue
what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward
it" (LG 55). All these voices and sounds constitute the
characteristics of "'heart-music'" that Whitman thought of at
first as "'something original and beautiful in the way of
American musical execution'" (Cavitch 21-22). Later the
hero finds himself "Steep'd amid honey'd morphine" (LG 56) of
what Whitman calls "the divine art of music" (qtd. in Faner
43), after he listens to the sounds of such musical
instruments as "Violoncello" and "the key'd cornet," the
chorus of an opera performed by "A tenor large and fresh" and
"the train'd soprano," and in the orchestral ensemble of a
symphony (LG 56). Being "cut by [the] bitter and angry hail"
of the opera, the hero feels "mad-sweet pangs through my
belly and breast" (LG 56) and his "windpipe throttled in
fakes of death" (LG 56). "At length," the hero cries, "let
up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, / And that we call
Being" (LG 56). The hero is now the poet of "Being," who is
to "get in touch with humanity . . . [and] retire to the very
deepest sourses of life--back, back, till there is no farther

point to retire to" (Gamden_Genyereatiene 135). For Whitman,

as Rober D. Faner says in his Welt_flhitman_end_flpera, music
"had come to be the key capable of unlocking the deepest

secrets of man and the universe, the force powerful enough to
transform a man into a poet" (42-43).

Sections 27-29 can be read as a sort of parallel to the
three temptations of Christ: the artistic question in Section
27, the sensual question in Section 28, and the question

57

about poetic policy in Section 29. Section 27 begins with an
artistic temptation, alluding to the poetic or other form:
"To be in any form, what is that? / (Round and round we go,
all of us, and ever come back thither,) / If nothing lay more
develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough" (LG
57). The poem, the hero answers, is not "the qauhaug in its
callous shell," a simple form, but it is a refined, artistic
form like opera music which is to "seize every object and
lead it harmlessly through me" and it is to "touch my person"
(LG 57). In Section 28 the hero is asked whether the "touch"
of the word has been "quivering me to a new identity": "Is
this then a touch?" (LG 57). The hero "went myself first to
the headland, my own hands carried me there" (LG 58), as
Christ was carried to the desert by the imperative of the
Spirit. "Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight
and pasture-fields," the "prurient provokers" of the senses
"bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges
of me" (LG 57). The hero cries in a bitter agony:

The sentries [of the senses] desert every other part

of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist
against me.

You villain touch! What are you doing? my breath is
tight in its throat

Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

. ' (LG 57-58)
The agony in Section 28 leads to Section 29, in which the

hero wrestles with the implications of such visionary poetry.

The hero is tempted with the offer of "Rich showering rain,

and recompense richer afterward" (LG 58). This section

suggests that poetry is no simple natural outpourings of

heart like "rich showering rain"; expression is more vital,

like "Sprouts [which] take and accumulate, stand by the curb

58
prolific and vital" or like the "[llandscapes" which are
"projected masculine, full-sized and golden" (LG 58).
Sections 27-29 test the hero's resolve, the determination to
see the messianic burden of his poetry through to its
conclusion.

Surviving the three temptations, the hero reaches his
vision that "All truths wait in all things" (LG 58). The
thing is "a compend of compends [which] is the meat of a man
or woman" and that "The insignificant is as big to me as any"
(LG 59, 58). This vision of the bodily world, the hero is
convinced, can never be convinced by "Logic and sermons," but
it is verified and sanctified by the "omnific" vision which
is achieved by the complete union of the body with the soul
(LG 58, 59). This bodily world is specifically envisioned in
Sections 31-33. The hero's visionary journey evolves from
the lowest world of minerals, insects, and vegetables in
Section 31 to the world of animals in Section 32 to the whole
world of human beings in Section 33. Section 31 offers "a
sort of microsc0pic vision" of the lowest world, to use
Malcolm Cowley's terms (Miller, ' ' ' '
184), the vision of such seemingly insignificant objects as
"a leaf of grass," "the pismire," "a grain of sand," "the egg
of the wren," "a mouse," "gneiss," "coal," "moss," "grains,"
"esculent roots," and the like. Each object in this world is
"miracle" and "equally perfect" enough to "adorn the parlors
of heaven" because it is "the journey-work of the stars" and
"a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest" (LG 59). In Section 32 the
hero envisions the "placid and self-contain'd" world of
animals as the "tokens" of himself:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the
mania of owning things,

59
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
No one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
(LG 60)

In the later part of Section 32 he images himself as a
"flexibly moving" stallion which is powerful, dynamic, and
beautiful and transcends it: "Even as I stand or sit passing
faster than you" (LG 61).

His visionary power leads to the sweeping long catalogues
in Section 33. These catalogues encompass the whole universe:
"I am afoot with my vision" (LG 61). The visionary journey
includes all "Space and Time" (LG 61). He is Space itself:
"I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents" (LG_6l). He
travels from "the city's quadrangular houses" through the
whole continent of America, the whole globe, the entire
universe, "crossing savannas, trailing in forests," sailing
from "the arctic sea," speeding through the cosmic realm of
"heaven and the stars" (LG 61-65). He is Time itself: "I am
the clock myself" (LG 67). His time moves from day to night,
from spring to winter, from past to present to future. He
walks "the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God
by my side" (LG 64); he enters both "some vast and ruin'd
city" of old and "all the living cities of the globe" at the
same time (LG 65). He is a man and a woman: "I am a free
companion" (LG 65-66). He is the bridegroom and the bride at
once. He is the body and the soul: "I help myself to
material and immaterial" (LG 65). In short, he is a
complete man who, "tak[ing] part," is able to "see and hear
the whole," and all things become "holy" by the touch of his
palms which "cover continents" (LG 67, 53, 61).

After finishing his visionary journey, the hero suddenly
draws our attention to the field of human sufferings: "We are
approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to
be engaged" (LG 65). The whole vision converges to create a
single image of man's solitary battle as the sufferings of

60

"the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the
sharp-lipp'd unshaved men"; the agonies of "the bounded
slave" whose "gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin,"
of the "mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry
wood, her children gazing on" (LG 66). The vision of human
sufferings leads the hero to his realization of his identity
with all humanity: "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there";
"I am the hounded slave"; "I myself become the wounded
person"; "I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken"
(LG 66-67). In the poem "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak
Gray and Dim," Whitman sees "the face of the Christ himself"
in the face of a wounded soldier dying in the hospital tent
in camp (LG 307). Whitman's imagination in this poem
implies that every human being, regardless of his status, is
to be regarded as having his own eternal value because he is
also the image of God. In this regard, the hero of Geng_ef
Myeelf, by participating in human sufferings and agonies of
all times and places, is not "outside both space and time,"
as James E. Miller argues in his interpretation of this
section (Hhitmanla.2$ang_af_M¥sal££ 146), but in time and
space as Christ was. In other words, he transcends or
possesses space and time in the moment of "here and now,"
freeing humanity from its suffering. He is everything (time
and place; a man and a woman; the material and the
immaterial): "All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it
well, it becomes mine" (LG 66). Now everything is clarified
and transparent for him:

Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd

at,

What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass,

What I guess'd while I lay alone in my bed,

And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars

of the morning. (LG 61)
The image of suffering in Section 33 serves as the

prelude to Sections 34-36 in which two battles, one on the

61
land (Section 34) and the other in the sea (Sections 35-36),
provide Geng_ef_Myeelf with the sense of epic struggle.
Section 34 tells "the tale of the murder in cold blood" on
the land between Mexicans and Texans (LG 68), which echoes
Homer's lllad in the scene of "the burning of the bodies" of
the slaughtered Texan heroes, adding an epic dimension to the
poem (LG 69). The story of defeat on the land in broad day
in Section 34 is balanced in Section 35 by the story of
victory in the sea in the dark night. The victory of the
American BenHemme_Riehard over the British Gerapia at the sea
battle in Section 35 is ruefully colored by the sinking of
the American battleship and the aftermath of the battle in
Section 36. The two events of this sea battle in Sections
35-36, however, are very significant. The first event is a
symbolic victory in the American struggle with the British
Empire. The second event, the submerging of the American
battleship in Section 36, is symbolic of America's burial of
her old burden and the birth into "a new identity." These
two events are poetically employed by Whitman as a symbol of
the hero's liberation and death, from all his misgivings and
terrors. Therefore, the movement of the hero's imaginative
experiences from the land to the sea is comparable to his
spiritual journey toward his new birth. Sections 35-36 also
emphasize the image of the newly-born hero as the word ("his
voice is neither high nor low") and the light ("His eyes give
more light to us than our battle-lanterns") (LG 70). The
hero is the word and light which guides mankind in the midst
of ordeals in the world, in the darkness and leads to
spiritual victory, to a bright world of new life.

Section 37 continues the theme of the inwardness of the
hero. The hero is "In at the conquer'd doors": "Embody all
presences outlaw'd or suffering, / See myself in prison
shaped like another man, / And feel the dull unintermitted
pain" (LG 71). Human sufferings and agonies are no longer
regarded as not-the-Me-myself but as the-Me-myself. He does

62
not stand "Apart from the pulling and hauling" of human
struggles (LG 32). He is no longer "Both in and out of the
game" but now is "in" the game (LG 32). He is ubiquitous:
he is at the Alamo where the massacre "commenced about five
o'clock and was over by eight" (LG 68); he is at the sea
where the battle is waged "by the light of the moon and
stars" (LG 69); he is "let out in the morning and barr'd at
night" (LG 71). He is not "out of time and space" but fully
"in time and space." He decides to be humiliated like a
beggar ("I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg") (LG
72).

This movement culminates in Section 38 in which the hero
is crucified and resurrected. In this "climactic" section,
as Thomas Edward Crawley observes, the hero "identifies
himself and all men with the crucified Christ" (64). Section
38 is comparable to Christ's Passion on Golgotha, his
crucifixion and resurrection. In the first stanza of this
section, the hero is tempted to abandon his mission,
discovering himself "on the verge of a usual mistake":
"Enough! enough! enough! / Somehow I have been stunn'd.
Stand back!" (LG 72). The phrase "the verge of a usual
mistake" echoes the crisis of Christ's Passion. He accepts
the cup of death, uniting men and their language. In the
second stanza, he is crucified, hearing the mocking,
corrupted words. The "corpses" of the words are revived into
a new life and the "gashes" of the words are healed by the
"supreme power" of his "crucifixion and bloody crowning" (LG
72). All words become "the blossoms" (LG 72). The
crucifixion of the hero does not mean that he is "out of
time, out of space" (Miller, flhleanle_:$eng_ef_Myeelf1 148),
but indicates that he is "in time and in space" because he
rises from death. His resurrection signifies his
repossession of time and space in the moment of the here and
now: "Continue your annotations [of the words], continue your
questionings [about them]" to keep them from their

63
corruptions, to keep the freshness of their meanings (LG 72)
which provides "an undemonstrable nourishment that
exhilarates the soul" (Whitman, Primer 34). This is the
outcome of Whitman's belief that "All words are
spiritual--nothing is more spiritual than words" (Prime; 1).

In Section 39 the hero is resurrected; his words
themselves, which "are wafted with the odor of his body or
breath," emanate from "the tips of his figures," and "fly out
of the glance of his eyes" (LG 73). His words are "simple,
cast in the common language and the homely figure which all
can understand" (Miller, Whltmanle_1$eng_ef_Myeelf1 149). He
is the master of the words, the Incarnate Word which
everybody desires to "accept," to "touch," to "speak to," and
to "stay with" (LG 73).

Section 40 confirms the hero as the Light itself, for his
light is more powerful than the sunshine, the created light:
"You [the sunshine] light surfaces only, I force surfaces and
depths also" (LG 73). This section also confirms the hero as
the Werd: "Behold, I do not give lectures or a little
charity, / When I give I give myself" (LG 73). His breathing
raises the dying man "with resistless will"; he can "dilate"
the despair "with tremendous breath" (LG 74). Just as Christ
invited those "who are weary and whose load is heavy" and
gave them "rest" (Matthew 11: 28), so the hero of the poem
invites the sufferers to "hang your whole weight upon me" (LG
74). The hero finally destroys the space between the inside
and the outside: "Every room of the house do I fill with an
arm'd force" (LG 74). There is now no space between the
sacred and the profane. The profane is possessed in the
sacred by the power of his words: "I have embraced you, and
henceforth possess you to myself, / And when you rise in the
morning you will find what I tell you is so" (LG 74), and the
possession is sexual as well as linguistic: ". . . I am
jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics" on "women
‘fit for conception" to have "bigger and nimbler babes" (LG

64
74). The hero is not a passive sufferer, but an aggressive
male lover.

The messianic image of the hero is more developed in
Section 41 into the image of the creator, who, "Accepting the
rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself," bestows
"them freely on each man and woman I see" (LG 75). The hero
is "waiting my time to be one of the supremes," assuming that
he is "becoming already a creator, / Putting myself here and
now to the ambush'd womb of the shadows" (LG 76). He does
not accept any particular traditional belief, "Outbidding at
the start the old cautious hucksters" (LG 75). Like Christ,
he is the beginning of Time: "I heard what was said of the
universe, / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years"
(LG 75). Rather, he takes "the exact dimensions" of Jehovah,
Kronos, Zeus, Hercules, Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
Manito, Allah, Odin, Mexitli, and others. He draws the names
of gods the world over into his heterodox Christian
syncretism: "I take all the old forms and faiths and remake
them in confirmity with the modern spirit, not rejecting a
single item or the earlier programs" (Gamden_Genyereaelene
164). He enunciates a new religion which absorbs all prior
experience and faces the democratic future.

In Section 42 the hero encounters the petty and greedy
aspects of democratic citizenry, "dimes on the eyes" and
"tickets" which "feed the greed of the belly" rather than
"the feast" of life (LG 77), and such images as the "little
plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail'd
coats" (LG 77). But he declares:

I am aware who they are, (they are positively not
worms or fleas,)

I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest
and shallowest is deathless with me,

What I do and say the same waits for them,

Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders
in them. (LG_77)

65
This awareness leads the hero to sing his song. His
religion, "this song of mine", he declares, is "Not words of
routine" (LG 77). It is not the worship of the images but
the worship of the human "reason," "love," and "life." It is
"abruptly to question" the image itself formulated by
"Sermons, creeds, theology" and "to leap beyond" it and "yet
nearer bring" it to its substance, to the reason, love, and
life of its owner:

This printed and bound book--but the printer and the
printing-office boy?

The well-taken photographs--but your wife or friend
close and solid in your arms?

The black ship mail'd with iron, her mighty guns in
her turrets--but the pluck of the captain and
engineers?

In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture--but
the host and hostess, and the look out of their
eyes?

The sky up there--yet here or next door, or across the
way?

The saints and sages in history--you yourself?
Sermons, creeds, theology--but the fathomless
human brain,

And what is reason? and what is love? and what is
life? (LG 77-78)

"My faith," the hero says in Section 43, "is the greatest
of faiths and the least of faiths, / Enclosing worship
ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern" (LG
78). His religion is for all ages, including the future: "I
shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years"
(LG 78). His religion is not "the sea of torment, doubt,
despair and unbelief" but the sea of peace even with the
"bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers" because it
embraces anybody and "any thing in the earth, or down in the
oldest graves of the earth" and "any thing in the myriads of

himse
indic
eterr
"Afai
mount
acme

encl<

ten

66
spheres," excluding nothing: "Each who passes is consider'd,
each who stops is consider'd, not a single one can it fail"
(LG 79-80).
Sections 44-45, as James E. Miller points out, are the
sections that envision the hero of the poem as "Time" and

"Space” (Whitmanls_:Sann_af_Mysalf1 151). Section 44 begins
with the dramatic declaration of his desire to reveal
himself: "It is time to explain myself . . . . / The clock

indicates the moment" (LG 80). He reveals himself as the
eternal Time who has been mounting "the stairs" of time from
"Afar down . . . the huge first Nothing" and is "still"
mounting its steps (LG 81). He is the time of the past ("an
acme of things accomplish'd") and the time of the future ("an
encloser of things to be") (LG 80). He is the Time of the
eternal now. In Section 45 the hero is envisioned as
"Space." He is the Space of the whole universe spreading
"wider and wider" and "expanding, always expanding, / Outward
and outward and forever outward" (LG 82). Since he is
"limitless time" and "limitless space," "the best of time and
space" which "was never measured and never will be measured,"
he is able to meet "on perfect terms, / The Great Camerado,
the lover true for whom I pine" to see (LG 82-83). The hero
is now lifted to the level of God, the possessor of Time and
Space.

In Section 46 the hero invites everybody of every city
and every nation to "a perpetual journey" not to "a
dinner-table, library, exchange," but to "a knoll," the world
where there is "no chair, no church, no philosophy" (LG 83),
a New World preserved for those from whose eyes "the gum" has
been washed (LG 84). Anyone who is able to see this new land
must become habituated "to the dazzle of the light and of
every moment of your life" (LG 84). This is the land for
those who have renewed themselves in the clothes of a new
vision: ". . . as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in
sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the

67
gate for your egress hence" (LG 84). This is the land for
those who have been through their own spiritual
metamorphosis: "Long have you timidly waded holding a plank
by the shore, / Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, / To
jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me,
shout, and laughingly dash with your hair" (LG 84). The hero
is not a superior leader but a Christlike friendly companion:
"If you tire, give me both burdens, rest the chuff of your
hand on my hip" (LG 83).

In Section 47 the hero becomes a teacher whose tongue
"begins to be loosen'd" and "act as the tongue of you,"
itching "at your ears till you understand [his words]" (LG
85). He swears that he "will never again mention love or
death inside a house," insisting that "No shutter'd room or
school can commune with me" (LG 85). He swears that he will
"translate" himself "only to him or her who privately stays
with me in the open air" (LG 85). The words of "roughs and
little children" are better than those of the "shutter'd room
or school" (LG 85). His words sound sweet to "the farm-boy
ploughing in the field"; they sail "in vessels," march in the
battle fields, whistle in the hunting grounds, will be heard
in the jolt of the driving wagons, and captivate the minds of
the mothers and of the wives. And all of the people in the
open air, the hero hopes, "would resume what I have told
them" (LG 86).

In Section 48 the hero is now not "becoming" the Word,
but has "become" Him and teaches "mankind" to open their eyes
before the mystery of the universe: "Let your soul stand cool
and composed before a million universes" (LG 86). And he
continues to teach not to be "curious about God" (LG 86), for
God can be seen everywhere at each moment (LG 86). He says:
"I hear and behold God in every object. . . . / I see
something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each
moment then" (LG 86). He sees God "in the faces of men and

women" and in his own face as well; he finds "letters from

.u e a». a» . . a» DC I v. v. Ce vi ‘1‘ :4 J . t. t . -

A I Mm v . a“ a. v . .3 I -1 s . e 1.. c z 3 ”I .3 mm .1. t . 3 C. E o» -l C a
C :m L.-. 3 ”a “a L“ C O a no; 4. am“ e e 3 k1. L C O f U S e C C -. .. ha. .3. a c I am.“ cw.
Co v: 5 ,r . c . :1 i t r u no PC 5 1 1 Lu W I l i C. S W S O 0 -l -a . r 1 st +t .1 rt 9 H u

‘c

"m.

68
God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's
name" (LG 87). Without this perception, no one can be in
sympathy with other beings as well as his own being, in order
to enter the mystery of the universe. "And whoever walks a
furlong without sympathy," he continues, "walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud" (LG 86). And the final goal of
the hero is to teach "any man or woman" that none "can be
more wonderful" than himself or herself: ". . . nothing, not
God, is greater to one than one's self is" (LG 86). As C.
Carroll Hollis points out, "we all waste too much time and
spiritual energy searching for God, for something beyond
life, instead of participating and enjoying life itself,
where God is revealed in everything we experience, low as
well as high, common as well as rare, vulgar as well as
refined" (16). Central to the hero's message is an
insistence on the identity of the body and the soul, the
physical "I" and the spiritual "I," matter and spirit,
subject and object, the profane and the sacred, man and
woman, and man and God.

Whitman has been singing the songof the body and the
soul so far, but in Section 49 he suddenly brings in the idea
of trinity of Death, the Corpse, and Life. Death is "the
outlet . . . the relief and escape" to eternity (LG 87); it
is the door to spirituality and the hero is not alarmed by
it. The Corpse is "good manure" which "smell[s] the white
roses sweet-scented and growing" and "reach[es] to the leafy
lips" and "to the polish'd breasts of melons" (LG 87); it is
the fertilizer of life and he is not offended by it. Life is
the "stars of heaven," the "grass of graves," and the "suns";
it is "the leavings of many deaths" (LG 87). Thus, this
trinity signifies the "perpetual transfers and promotions" of
each one from Death to the Corpse to Life and back again to
Death to the Corpse to Life (LG_87).

Whitman begins Section 50 with an enigmatic statement:
"There is that in me--I do not know what it is--but I know it

69
is in me" (LG 88). What is it then? It is not the body and
it is not the soul, for both of them have been sung. The
relationship of the body and the soul are specifically
defined in Section 48 : "I have said that the soul is not
more than the body, / I have said that the body is not more
than the soul" (LG 86). What is the third one then? In
Section 50 the hero deliberately avoids mentioning its name:
"I do not know it-- it is without name--it is a word unsaid"
(LG 88). However, he says that "To it the creation is the
friend whose embracing awakes me. / . . . it is form, union,
plan--it is eternal life--it is Happiness" (LG 88). It is
"that invisible spiritual results [which], just as real and
definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all
material, through Time" (Preae_flerke 729). This introduction
of the concept of the spirit completes Whitman's poetic idea
of trinity of Democracy, Love, and Religion, which is derived
from the Christian trinity of the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit. In the universe of Whitman, there is no beginning
and no ending and there is only an endless metamorphosis of
beings from Life to the Corpse to Death and back again, from
the body to the soul to the spirit and back again.

Section 51 prepares us to see the hero off because he
mentions that he is approaching the final stage of his drama
"to fill my next fold of the future": "I have fill'd [the
past and present], emptied them" (LG 88). Once again the
hero identifies himself with eternity, with the past, the
present, and the future. The hero is "a solitary singer,"
who, leaving for somewhere, asks his listeners whether there
is any one to take a journey to eternity with him: "I stay
only a minute longer. . . . / Who wishes to walk with me? /
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?" (LG 88-89). He continues to ask: "Do I contradict
myself?"; so are you confused?; are you not sure?; but it is
because "I am large, I contain multitudes" (LG 88). In this
voice there is an irresistibly lonesome pathos which is

70
ringing out from the heart's core.

In Section 52 the hero, holding "the last scud of day,"
sounds a "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" to
capture the heart of the human mind, to wash "the gum" from
the eyes of all mankind (LG 89). He departs "as air," as the
spirit, shaking his "white locks at the runaway sun,"
effusing his "flesh in eddies," and drifting "it in lacy
jags" (LG 89). Therefore, his words, transformed into the
"white locks at the runaway sun," into the "flesh in eddies"
and "in lacy jags," and into the "grass" in the dirt, can be
seen everywhere at any time:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I
love,
If you want me again look for me under your

boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you. (LG 89)
Section 52 is the final confirmation that the hero is forever
- present in the world in words, in the leaves of his speech or
poetry bequeathed to the world by himself. This is
symbolized as the grass which grows everywhere, confirming
that "Speech is the twin of my vision."

C. "Now I wash the gum from your eyes"

Geng_ef_Myeelf seems to be the song of the beginning and
end or the past and the future but it is even more truly the
song of the present or "now," for the whole life cycle of the
hero implies not so much the beginning and the end of his

71

life as the perpetual "now" of his life. Even after his
departure we can find him "somewhere"; he encourages us to
keep searching him because he is "somewhere" waiting for us
after his departure. There is no beginning and no ending in
life, for both the past and the future "curiously conjoint in
the present time" of life; "there is the meaning to us of all
that has ever come of races and days, or ever will come" (LG
241). For Whitman there is always only the eternal "now":

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is

now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. (LG_30)
In Geng_ef_Myeelf Whitman employs a journey motif as a

metaphor for spiritual metamorphosis. Whitman views "the
universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
traveling souls" and human life as "a perpetual journey"
"along the grand roads of the universe . . . toward the
best-~toward something great" (LG 157, 83, 157). The
metaphor of the road, as Paul Zweig says, is for Whitman
"already the connective thread of his vision, turning the
world into a panorama for the traveling mind. The road
becomes a figure of change, growth, and learning" (242).
Whitman interweaves a sexual motif with a journey motif as a
metaphor for a spiritual metamorphosis in the belief in "the
sacredness of sex," as Allen contends: "Even the erotic poems
are explained by this journey motif, for the very thought of
the 'countless germs waiting the due conjunction, the
arousing touch'--in other words, waiting for the 'arousing
touch' to start them upon their lap of the journey--this
thought is sufficient to convince Whitman of the sacredness
of sex" (Whitman_ae_uan 67). Quoting Floyd Stovall's
observation of Whitman's belief that sex is "the most
spiritual part of man's nature, the physical counterpart of
the divine creative mind, and an integral part of the soul,"

 

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582

72
Crawley interprets Whitman's idea of sexuality as a symbol of
"a transcending of all fixed forms in our most natural,
exalted act of pure reality" (100). These two motifs then
serve as a symbol of the process of life or of the awakening
of vision which signifies a new birth.

Just as "Openness to the world enables religious man to
know himself in knowing the world" (Eliade 167), so Whitman's
description of sexual union in the open world signifies his
way to know himself and the world, or the way to his
spirituality, to a new birth. On the other hand, for Whitman
the human experience of indoors usually signifies death or
the separation from the world of life: "The suicide sprawls
on the bloody floor of the bedroom, / I witness the corpse
with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen"
(LG 36). The "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the
shelves are crowded with perfumes" and are symbolic of the
origins of "Creeds and schools" which force man to "take
things at second or third hand," to "look through the eyes of
the dead," or to "feed on the spectres in books" (LG 29, 30).
Thus, Whitman writes in Section 47:

If you would understand me go to the heights or
water-shore,

The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or
motion of waves a key,

The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.

No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,
But roughs and little children better than they.
(LG 85)
For Whitman, to deny the inside world of human experiences is
the: first step towards spiritual rebirth, toward "the origin
of £111 poems," which is "the good of the earth and sun," the
"Play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs

W39"’ (LG_30). The newly-born hero of Geng_ef_Myeelf cannot
be inmprisoned in the room "full of perfumes," whose

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"distillation would intoxicate" him and longs for "Nature
without check with original energy" (LG 29) because "It is
for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, / I will go to
the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, / I am
mad for it to be in contact with me" (LG 29).

"In the earliest times," Mircea Eliade says, the
landscape of the mountain and water was considered "the
narfant_nlana," "a privileged space, a closed, sanctified
world, where the youths and girls met periodically to
participate in the mysteries of life and cosmic fecundity"
(153-154). Likewise, the outdoor world of the human
experience in Geng_ef_Myeelf signifies the creative world of
life, so that Geng_e£_Myself usually describes the sexual act
as happening in natural environments such as the field, the
water, the hillsides. The mystical union between the soul
and the body in Section 5 of Geng_ef_Myeelf is described as a
sexual act "on the grass" in the field on "such a transparent
summer morning" (LG 33). In Section 8 the love scene of the
young man and the Indian girl is seen "from the [hill] top,"
for they "turn aside up the bushy hill" (LG 35). In Section
11 Whitman also places the scene of sexual act in open space.
The sexual, though imaginary, union between the twenty eight
young men who are bathing and a lady who "hides handsome and
richly drest aft the blinds of the window" is a happening not
in the lady's secret room of "the fine house" but in the
water where "The young men float on their backs, their white
loellies bulge to the sun" (LG 38-39). In Section 21 Whitman
<iecribes sexual union in the imagery of cosmic sexuality; the
sexual union is not between a man and a woman but between the
(nosmic figures, or between "he that walks with the tender and
growing night" and "the earth and sea half-held by the night"
(1&3‘49). Section 22 presents the hero's sexuality as union
with the sea, which signifies the ritual of his spiritual
regeneration.

Through such triumphant scenes of sexuality the vision of

74
the hero of Seng_ef_Myeelf is purified and he suddenly
reaches the knowledge of the secret of eternal truth. In
Section 3 of the poem, spiritual awakening is vividly
expressed in terms of sexuality which fills the body with a
secret gift of fruit left by "the hugging and loving
bed-fellow," God (LG 31). This mysterious fruit in the
basket symbolizes the "aheelute_reality," a miracle
"conferring immortality, omniscience, and limitless power, a
fruit that can change men into gods" (Eliade 149). Even the
smallest insects and plants are considered part of his divine
brothers and sisters. The "grass" is regarded as "the
handkerchief of the Lord, / A scented gift and remembrancer
designedly dropt, / Bearing the owner's name someway in the
corners, that we may see and remark" (LG 33). And "Knowing
the perfect fitness and equanimity of things," Whitman
refuses the notion of distinction of good and bad, which has
always vexed human consciousness: "Showing the best and
dividing it from the worst age vexes age . . . / Not an inch
nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less
familiar than the rest" (LG 31).

In Geng_ef_Myeel£, whenever the hero signifies the word,
there appear such nouns as speech, voice, song, word, music;
such verbs as sing, listen, hear, cry: the words that join
the human and natural worlds, which are in turn related to
the sexual motif which symbolizes the metamorphosis of the
bodily world into spirituality. Similarly, images of light
and color are usually associated with the journey motif. The
sound-light images and the journey-sexual motifs dynamically
interact with each other. They anticipate Whitman's
”Trinity," where the visionary poet is a complete man who
embodies the trinity of Democracy, Love, and Religion and who
is a man of Platonic "Happiness." The hero of Meal:
firs a visionary poet, who is at once a poet of the body and of

the soul .

Thus, the hero of Geng_ef_Myeelfi, a new man, is not

75
Whitman himself, but anyone from whose eyes the gum is washed
(LG 84), just as Christ says to Nicodemus who visits him by
night that anyone who is born again by spirit is a new man
who sees the kingdom of God. Gay Wilson Allen contends that
Whitman shared the nineteenth century Romantic concept of
man, "the Divinity innate or immanent in humanity," with
Goethe, Heine, Emerson, and others (Whitman_ae_Man 7). He
evokes Heine's definition of Romantic philosophy, where "God,
therefore, is the real hero of world history, the latter is
His perpetual thought, His perpetual act, His word, His deed,
and of all humanity, one may rightly say! It is the
incarnation of God!" (qtd. in Hhitman_ae_Man 34-35). It is
sure, whether Whitman's concept of the hero as a new man is
from the Bible or from philosophers, that in Geng_ef_Mmaelf
Whitman symbolizes the divinity of man in the figure of
Christ who is "the real hero of world history."

This new man for Whitman is the visionary poet, master of
Word and Light. Geng_ef_Myeelf is an epic of man's
aspiration to become the Whitmanian "new Man." Whitman's new
gospel in Seng_ef_Myaelf is then the song of the mystery of
life, of the constant evolution of all beings. The heroic
struggles of the hero of Send_ef_Myeelf to "wash the gum from
your eyes" is comparable to those of Christ who declared
himself to "have come into the world as light" (John 12:46),
struggled to open the blind eyes of mankind, and was
crucified for that effort because of the blindness of man.
This epic struggle was Whitman's conscious preoccupation,
founded on his own reading of the Bible and its philosophical
interpreters, captivated by the central figure of a heroic

poet-Christ, and expanded in W.

Chapter III

Hart Crane's The_Bridge

A. "Cruelly with love thy parable of man"

Hart Crane's The_Bridge was inspired by the Brooklyn
Bridge, which was created by John A. Roebling, a German
immigrant civil engineer and student of Hegelian philosophy.
The Brooklyn Bridge, according to Alan Trachtenberg, is
Roebling's expression of the Hegelian idea of "actuality,"
the idea of "the unity of essence and existence, of the inner
world of life and the outer world of its appearance" (68).
Roebling asserts that "our mind is one with the Great
Universal Mind" and that "spiritualising nature is the aim
and end of creation" (qtd. in Trachtenberg 60, 61). The
philosophical argument of Roebling's engineering proclaimed
life to be a spiritual journey toward harmony with the
infinite Mind: "the great stream of life is rolling along
. toward the great Ocean of Universality" (qtd. in
Trachtenberg 62).

Such attitudes reinforced Crane's own beliefs, his
tendency to "search into the heart of things for spiritual
meanings" (Weber 39). Crane was raised in a Christian
Scientist family and Christian Science's "exaggerated
idealism continued to exercise a strong influence over him
for many years to come" (Weber 8). At first, Crane deviated
from the doctrine of Christian Science, but later returned
‘to it, as he wrote in a letter to his mother: "I have a
revived confidence in humanity lately, and things are going
'to come very beautifully for me--and not after so very long,
I think. The great thing is to Live and NOT Hate.
(Cfluristian Science, in part, I think; and a very important
dcuztrine of belief. Perhaps the most important)" (180).
Acczording to Brom Weber, the Bible and Christian Science were

76

77

Crane's major "spiritual resources" for his development as a
poet: "In December 1916, Hart Crane arrived in New York City
determined to be a poet and bearing in his baggage such
spiritual resources as the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy's
SniannannsLHaalthJitLKauaJhLSnnntma" (3). In Tha
W, Robert L. Perry
says that Christian Science, along with Platonic philosophy,

was "instrumental in laying the foundation for the
metaphysical poetry of Crane's maturity" (20).

Christian Scientists seem to see everything in terms of
spiritual value; they belong in the major tradition of
radically spiritualized allegorical interpreters of the
Scriptures. According to Mary Baker Eddy's Geienee_and
Health, the authorized textbook of Christian Science, they
regard the Bible as "the chart of life" (24) and the "central
fact of the Bible" as "the superiority of spiritual over
physical power" (131). Since God, the creator of the
universe, is "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind,
Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love" (465), creation
is "the infinite image or idea emanating from this Mind"
(256-257). Thus, the universe is not material but spiritual
because "Mind creates His own likeness in ideas, and the
substance of an idea is very far from being the supposed
substance of non-intelligent matter. Hence the Father Mind
is not the father of matter" (257). In other words, "The
universe reflects God. . . . [And] that infinite space is
peopled with God's ideas, reflecting Him in countless
spiritual forms" (502-503). Man in reality is also a
spiritual being, "the true image of God," "the idea of God,
not formed materially but spiritually" (259, 200). In sum,
"man and the universe are evolved from Spirit, and so are
Spiritual" (69). "All things are created spiritually" (256)
and "The true theory of the universe, including man, is not
in material history but in spiritual development" (547).

Eddy argues that the human material consciousness
eexpresses a false concept of reality, which results in sin,

78
sickness, and death which are unreal because they "belong not
to the Science of being," but "presuppose the absence of
Truth, Life, or Love," the omnipresent or the true reality
(207). Thus, the scriptural description in Genesis of mortal
man's fall from Grace is allegorical, rather than factual;
man's alienation is what Paul Tillich says "the symbol of the
Fall of Man, which points to the tragic estrangement of man
and his world from their true being" (qtd. in John and
Canham, Ghrietian_$eienee 50). The Incarnation of Christ is
the expression of the human and divine coincidence. Christ
Jesus, Eddy writes, "threw upon mortals the truer reflection
of God and lifted their lives higher than their poor
thought-models would allow,--thoughts which presented man as
fallen, sick, sinning, and dying. The Christlike
understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes
a perfect Principle and idea,--perfect God and perfect
man,--as the basis of thought and demonstration" (259).
Christ is symbolic of a new man who is spiritually reborn.
Christian Science is the faith in and the understanding of
God as revealed through Christ, a perfect man, who is "the
true idea of God" (54). In other words, Christ for Christian
Scientists is a man of vision to enlighten man's eyes and
ears to remove his ignorance or blindness which has alienated
man from God; he is the Light and the Word who destroys man's
"incarnate error," his belief in sin, sickness, and death,
delivers him from his blindness, leads to "the reality of
man's existence," and as a result heals and restores his
physical body and saves him (583; 13).

Roebling's Hegelianism and Crane's somewhat amorphous
Christian Science were easily joined to formulate his poetic
vision of the Bridge as a Christ figure. Crane argued that
poetry must "absorb the machine, i.e., annlimaniza it as
naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles
and all other human associations of the past" (G2 261-262).
And he insisted that "The function of poetry in a Machine Age
is identical to its function in any other age; and its

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79
capacities for presenting the most complete synthesis of
human values remain essentially immune from any of the
so-called inroads of science" (GR 261). According to Robert
L. Perry, Crane learned from Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank
how to "'bring the Machine into the scope of the human
spirit'" (36; Munson 24). In Walde_£rankl_A_GLndy, Munson
asserts that "we are in the childhood of a new age, we are,
by the chronological accident of our birth, chosen to create
the simple forms, the folk-tales and folk-music, the
preliminary art that our descendants may utilize in the vast
struggle to put positive and glowing spiritual content into
Machinery" (25). Waldo Frank, Perry says, "developed some
ideas as to how the machine might be adapted to the human
spirit," as a result of his reading of Gorham Munson's
contention in WaldQ_EIanki_A_SLnd¥ (37). Crane's letter to
Munson on February 18, 1923 testifies to Munson's and Frank's
influences on The_Bridgfip which was intended to be "an epic
of the modern consciousness" (G2 252):
Very roughly, it [The_Bridgel concerns a mystical
synthesis of 'America.' History and fact, location,
etc., all have to be transfigured into abstract form
that would almost function independently of its
subject matter. The initial impulses of 'our people'
will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the
bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique
identity, in which is included also our scientific
hopes and achievements of the future. . . . And I am
even more grateful for your very rich suggestions best
stated in your Erank_SLndy on the treatment of
mechanical manifestations of today as subject for
lyrical, dramatic, and even epic poetry.
(Letters 124-125)
Like Frank, who regarded Walt Whitman as "the one guiding
'Lisght in the American cultural chaos" (Perry 10), it is in
("Iditman that Crane found his "guiding light." In his essay
'Wiczdern Poetry," Crane argues that Whitman is the "most

80
typical and valid" American poet who "was able to coordinate
those forces [of science and machinery] . . . fusing them
into a universal vision which takes on additional
significance as time goes on" (GR 263). Crane's vision is
similar to Whitman's "Passage to India," which was inspired
by the opening of the Suez Canal, the completion of the Union
Pacific Railroad, and the laying of the trans-Atlantic Cable.
In Start_nith_the_5nn, Bernice Slote, insisting that "Both
Whitman and Crane were writing the Myth of America" (138),
interprets Whitman's "Passage to India" and Crane's The
Bridge as the poems of "not material conquest but spiritual
exploration" (139). "In Whitman's 'Passage to India,'" Slote
argues, "the mystical center of the cosmos is seen as 'Light
of the light, shedding forth universes.’ The climax to The
Bridge is a vision of 'Thee, O Love,‘ the 'whitest Flower'
whose 'petals spend the suns about us.‘ Movement to such an
end is a journey of the soul" (140).

The Brooklyn Bridge has stimulated the imagination of
artists since it was completed in 1883. In the first decade
of the twentieth century, impressionists like William Louis
Sontag and Childe Hassam and realistic artists of the Ashcan
School such as Robert Henri and Stuart Davis, tried to create
the powerful image of the Bridge as "the apotheosis of
America's westward march," a symbol of American destiny
(GreaL_EaaL_Ri1er_Bridge 155). However, it was the cubist
paintings of "dynamic fragmentation, overlapping
transparencies, and compressed space" that captivated Crane
(Grear_Eaat_Riyer_Bridge 157). Among these, it was probably
Joseph Stella's paintings of the Bridge which most influenced
Crane. Brom Weber, noting "a striking analogy" between
Stella's paintings and Crane's The_Bridgel argued that both
Stella and Crane "found a suitable symbol to embody the
(essence of America in the Brooklyn Bridge . . . and both were
:imbued with religious emotion and awe before the bridge"
(319). Irma B. Jaffe argued that "Stella's soaring Bridge

ciid play an inspirational role in the genesis of Crane's

 

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poem" (104), contending that "religion is identified with
science and machinery, which, for Crane and for Stella, had
to be absorbed into contemporary art as naturally as the
human figure and landscape had served the imagery of the
humanist tradition, and the two works thus express
contemporary awareness in a context of timeless and universal
experience" (105). Even though he perceived a distinctive
feature in their artistic expressions, Jaffe concluded that
"each found in the bridge 'the shrine containing all the
efforts of the New Civilization of Ameica--the eloquent
meeting point of all the forces arising in a superb assertion
of their powers'" (107).

Even before the Bridge was completed, John Gast imagined
it as a symbol of "American Progress (Manifest Destiny)" in
his 1872 painting. It is true that Stella's paintings
inspired Crane's poetic vision, as Crane himself wrote to

Stella, but Gast's visionary work, American_2regreee
iManifiaSL_DaaLinyl, lends resonance to Crane's vision of

America, his poetic vision of the Bridge which transforms the
wilderness of the continent into civilization. For Crane,
the Bridge became the image of the poet and his work, and in
Gast's painting there had been a perfect visual metaphor of
such metamorphosis from the darkness of ignorance to the
light of knowledge. Gast's painting describes the westward
movement of "American Progress" guided by the angelic figure
with the telegraph book in her hand and the star on her
forehead. It is a parable of America, a parable of its
metamorphosis from wilderness to civilization, personifying
the bridge as the guiding figure. Like Gast's painting,
Crane's The_Bridge renders a parable of "something green, /
.Beyond all sesames of science" (GP 94). While Gast's
Ibainting is a parable of America, Crane's‘The_Bridge is a
"parable of man" (GP 51), a metaphor of "man's aspiration
t:oward the divine: the Gothic arch," symbolized in the harp
51nd the altar (Trachtenberg 81). The hero of The_Bridge has
"a.peculiar type of perception, capable of apprehending some

82
absolute and timeless concept of the imagination with
astounding clarity and conviction" (G2 263). He "dost search
/ Cruelly with love thy parable of man--" (GB 51).

B. "O harp and altar, of the fury fused"

The_Bridge is the culmination of Crane's poetic theory
that the poem must be constructed "on the organic principle
of a 'logic of metaphor,'" which advocates "the implicit
emotional dynamics" of the "metaphorical inter-relationships"
between "the materials used" and the poetic terms "selected
less for their logical (literal) significance than for their
associational meanings" (GR 221). These "dynamics" of "a
logic of metaphor," Crane himself admits, "often result .
in certain initial difficulties in understanding my poems"
(G2 221). But they are for Crane "the only means possible
for expressing certain concepts in any forceful or direct way
whatever," the conception of America as the possessor of "yet
undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of
faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere" (G2 221,
219). This conception of America is Crane's poetic vision to
capture "absolute beauty," to make "a stab at a truth" by
"using our 'real' world somewhat as a spring-board" (GR 221,
220). This "absolutist" poetry, Crane holds, is firmly
rooted in the metaphysical and symbolist traditions of "at
least a dozen poets such as Donne, Blake, Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, etc." (G2 220), which became the modernist tradition
in American poetry.

The principles of the English metaphysical and French
symbolist poets, as T. 8. Eliot says in his essay "The
Metaphysical poets," have "the same essential quality of
transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an
observation into a state of mind," the "telescoping of
images and multiplied associations" (249, 243), a
synaesthetic presentation of their poetic vision of reality
as seen in Baudelairean "correspondences": "Like drawn-out

83
echoes that from afar unite / In a unity mysterious and
profound, / As boundless as the night and as the light, / The
scents, and colors and sounds all correspond" (Peschel 95).
This synaesthetic mode of poetic vision, according to Leo
Spitzer, "is indeed only another manifestation of World
Harmony," a legacy of "the Ancient and Christian tradition of
World Harmony (3: 359, 364).

Some critics have discussed Crane's synaesthesia in The
Bridge_(Leibowitz 135-143), placing Crane in the long
tradition reaching back through Eliot and French symbolism to
Renaissance mysticism and early Christian allegorisis.
However, their discussions of Crane's synaesthesia fail to
clarify Crane's metaphor of the Bridge as the harp and the
altar, complicated by the Christian metaphor of Christ as the
Light and the Word, which permeates Christian Science. In
this reading of Crane's Tha_Bzidg£) therefore, I am
deliberately placing him in a tradition of Christian
allegorisis. The_Bridge can be and has been read
successfully in other ways, but I am arguing here that this
context illuminates his complex metaphorical system of The
Bridge that other approaches slight, revealing the coherent
structural pattern of the poem which has drawn unfavorable
critical responses from the very beginning of its appearance.

"To Brooklyn Bridge"

This first section establishes the two images of the
Bridge as the harp, or the word, and as the altar, or the
light, which, with the metaphorical image of the visionary
hero of the poem, form the major symbolic motifs of The
Bridge. The Bridge is represented as the altar, the light by
which the "night" of man's ignorance is "lifted": "we have
seen night lifted in thine arms . . . . / Only in darkness is
thy shadow clear" (GB 46). The altar is linked with the
"smoking pyres" of sacrifice in the sections of "The Dance"
and "Atlantis." The Bridge is the Light itself, an
emblematic extension of Whitman's appropriation of Christian

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84
imagery for his Democratic vision.

The Bridge is also described as the harp, the word or the
sound of "choiring strings" (GB 46). The cables or harps of
the Bridge "breathe the North Atlantic still," and vibrating
"reprieve and pardon" like "the prophet's pledge, / Prayer of
pariah, and the lover's cry,--" (GB 45-46). When "noon
leaks" down Wall Street, "from girder into street," a
bedlamite, "Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
speeds to thy parapets, / Tilting there momently, shrill
shirt ballooning" (GB 45). In this critical moment only "A
jest falls from the speechless caravan" which carries
multitudes (GB 45). But the suicide implicates the dumbness
and blindness of those multitudes who are summoned by the
tensile beauty of the Bridge from their sleep. The "choiring
strings" of the Bridge become the "swift / Unfractioned
idiom, immaculate sigh of stars" and "condense eternity" (GB
46). The Bridge is the visible emblem of the Word in the New
World.

Significantly, the opening section begins with the
celebration of the coming of light to the human world. The
image of the Bridge as the light and the word is symbolized
in the seagull whose "wings [in the dawn] shall dip and pivot
him, / Shedding white rings of tumult, building high / Over
the chained bay waters Liberty--" (GB 45). The seagull
symbolizes both the bringer of the light to the darkness and
the messenger of the word for those who sleep in ignorance or
darkness. This seagull reminds us of an angelic figure in
Gast's Painting, WW- Crane
originally imagined the Bridge as the "bird" (Weber 440);
this bird becomes "the Great White Bird" in "Ave Maria,"
Columbus who has served as the bridge between the Old World
and the New, the Christ figure who came to the world as the
Word and the Light. This vision of the seagull is contrasted
with the "chained" vision of the "multitudes" who are
hastening to see "cinemas, panoramic sleights" or bending
"toward some flashing scene / Never disclosed" (GB 45). The

Sta:
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85
"inviolate curve" of the seagull's wings "forsake[s] our eyes
/ As apparitional as sails that cross / Some page of figures
to be filed away; / --Till elevators drop us from our day--"
(GE 45):
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! (GB 45)

The Bridge, stretched out through the early light,
compresses the restless energy which is compressed at the
poem's beginning. This is then transformed into another
synaesthetic image of the Bridge as a prophetic threshold,
the very "threshold of the prophet's pledge" (GB 46). The
Bridge for Crane functions as a radical Christian emblem, a
bridge between God and man, eternity and time, heaven and
earth, death and life: "And obscure as that heaven of the
Jews, / Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow / Of
anonymity time cannot raise: / Vibrant reprieve and pardon
thou dost show" (GB 46). Thus, the hero of the poem is
standing "Under [the] shadow [of the Bridge] by the piers,"
waiting for the Word and the Light which "lend a myth to
God":

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God. (GB 46).

There is one final visual transformation of the main
image of this first section as the bridge takes on the
aspects of the ships that move all around it. The Bridge,
too, is a kind of ship which will ultimately carry the hero
of the poem to the vision of Atlantis in the final section of
the poem. In later sections the metaphor of the Bridge as a
ship is successively transformed into images of "a woman," "a
world," and so on. In a letter to Waldo Frank on January
18, 1926, Crane wrote: "The bridge in becoming a ship, a
Ivorld, a woman, a tremendous harp (as it does finally) seems
tzo really have a career. I have attempted to induce the same

feelings of elation, etc.--like being carried forward and

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86
upward simultaneously--both in imagery, rhythm and
repetition, that one experiences in walking across my beloved
Brooklyn Bridge" (Lernere 232).

I "Ave Maria"

The image of the Bridge as the ship in "To Brooklyn
Bridge" is actualized as the ship of Columbus in "Ave Maria."
In this section the hero becomes Columbus who brings "back
Cathay" to the "tao_faithful_nar.tisana_of_his_nuest" (CB 48.
49), a quester who "dost search / Cruelly with love thy
parable of man," a poet of the word and the light who brings
the "incognizable Word / Of Eden" to the world and enlightens
them (GB 51). The hero's vision is tested in "Ave Maria" in
the figure of Columbus who is returning to bring the word of
Cathay to Spain which "no perjured breath / Of clown nor sage
can riddle or gainsay;--" (GB 48).

Crane pictures the coming of Columbus and his crew to
Cathay as the descent of "The Great White Birds," the white
gods for the American natives (GB 48). Crane's description
of Columbus fits well enough into the traditions of America's
grandiose visions of bringing light into dark continents with
Columbus as the foremost light bearer. Thus, Crane's
Columbus is thoroughly in the traditions of American
mythologizing as in Joel Barlow's epic IhG_Ganmhiad, in
which the coming of Cortez to America is depicted as the
descent of the sun god for the American natives. For Crane,
Columbus here returns to the world of night and darkness,
while the Cathay he has discovered is the world of light, the
world of "morning": "It is morning there--" (GB 48). The
word Columbus brings to the old world is the light of the
"White Birds" which is able to restore man's vision of night
into his vision of day. "Hearing the surf near--," Columbus
says, "I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,--saw / The first
palm chevron the first lighted hill" (GB 48). Columbus thus
symbolizes the bridge between the "two worlds" of dark and
light (GE 50). '

87

On his return voyage from Cathay, Columbus is left to the
mercy of the "Invisible valves of the sea" (GB 48). The sea
itself symbolizes the borderland of "death and birth," in
which Columbus is engulfed and reborn. He must survive the
test of the "Invisible valves of the sea," which Helge
Normann Nilsen interprets as a metaphor of "a huge soldier or
warrior, dressed in the mail of an armor that moves and
gleams as he stirs" (43):

Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;

Invisible valves of the sea,--locks, tendons

Crested and creeping, troughing corridors

That fall back yawning to another plunge.

Slowly the sun's red caravel drops light

Once more behind us. . . . It is morning there--

0 where our Indian emperies lie revealed,

Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!

(GE 48)

In this turmoil, Columbus captures a glimpse of the "sun's
red caravel" which "drops light / Once more behind us" and
thinks that "it is morning there" in Cathay. This glimpse of
light prompts Columbus to think of Genoa where he was an
"exile in her streets" and of the "first palm chevron the
first lighted hill" of Cathay (GB 48). However, realizing
that only one of the three ships which he carried on his
first expedition to the New World survived, Columbus suddenly
fears that even this ship will fail: "And later hurricanes
may claim more pawn. . . . / For here between two worlds,
another, harsh, / This third, of water, tests the word" (GB
50). Secondly, Columbus must survive the test of the
"Bewilderment and mutiny" of his crew, which "cuts sleep from
the heart / Almost as though the Moor's flung scimitar /
Found more than flesh to fathom in its fall" (GB 50).

Even "under tempest-lash and surfeitings," Columbus is
able to hear the "incognizable Word" who is "all the eddying
breath" between "death and birth" and "dost search / Cruelly
with love thy parable of man,--" (GB 50, 51): "Some inmost

In

88
sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss, / Merges the wind in
measure to the waves" (GB 50). The Word, flaming "in a
cloud," urges "through night [of ignorance] our passage to
the Chan," the land of the "morning" of knowledge (GB 51).
The "eyes" of Columbus receive light from the Word, the "Hand
of Fire" and are able to see the roundness of the earth,
"This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring" of the earth
in the fulness of vision:
Series on series, infinite,--till eyes
Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete--enclose
This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
Like pearls that whisper through the Doge's hands
(GE 50)
Cathay, the New World which is won after Columbus's epic
struggle is "a land cleared of long war," where "Some Angelus
environs the cordage tree; / Dark waters onward shake the
dark prow free" (GB 50). It is the land where we can hear
the "sounding heel" of "Elohim" within "whose primal scan
consummately / The glistening seignories of Ganges swim;-- /
Who sendest greeting by the corposant" (GB_51). It is the
land of the "far / Hushed gleaming fields and pendant
seething wheat / Of knowledge" (GB 51). Thus, the mission of
Columbus symbolizes the bridge between the world of the
material and the world of the spirit as well as the bridge
between the Old World and the New World. As Brewster
Ghiselin says in his essay "Bridge into the Sea," "The voyage
of Columbus, a journey yielding knowledge of a new world, is
made to stand in The_Bridge as type or pattern of a search
undertaken by Crane's protagonist, a search for the full
meaning of the master image of the poem, the symbolic Bridge"
(45). Crane read widely Columbus's Jenrhal in 1926, and
there cannot be much doubt that he uses Columbus in the way
Ghiselin indicates.
These two metaphors of war in "Ave Maria" prepare us to
see Columbus's epic struggle as reaching "one shore beyond

89
desire" (GB 51). Columbus is tested in his battle against
the sea, the third world between the old and new worlds:
"This third, of water, tests the word" (GB 50). In his
struggle Columbus invokes Mary for a safe return from his
perilous voyage: "O Madre Maria, still / One ship of these
thou grantest safe returning; / Assure us through thy
mantle's ageless blue!" (GB 48). Cathay for Columbus
eventually signifies "an attitude of spirit, rather than
material conquest throughout, of course" (Crane, Lehtera
232). "The theme of 'Cathay' (its riches, etc.)," as Crane
wrote in a letter to Otto H. Kahn, "ultimately is transmuted
into a symbol of consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity.
A rather religious motivation, albeit not Presbyterian"
(Lerrere 241). Identified with Columbus, the hero of the
poem is destined to prophesy the dawning of a new age as
referred in the Senecan epigraph to this section: "A time
will come in distant years when Ocean will loosen the bonds
of things and the whole earth's surface will be open to view,
and Tiphys will discover new worlds; and Thule will no longer
be the outer edge of the world" (GB 47).

II "Powhatan's Daughter"

In a letter to Otto H. Kahn, Crane wrote that Part II of
The_Bridge, "Powhatan's Daughter," presents Powhatan's
daughter or Pocahontas as "the mythological nature-symbol" of
"the physical body of the continent, or the soil" of America,
in order to create "the Myth of America" (Letters 305). "The
five sub-sections of Part II," Crane continued, "are mainly
concerned with a gradual exploration of this 'body' whose
first possessor was the Indian" and assimilate "this
experience, a more organic panorama, showing the continuous
and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance
of the present" (305); the "architectural method" of his
poetry adopts "the Sistine Chapel as an analogy" (306, 305).

While "Ave Maria" is the preparation for the birth of the
hero, "The Harbor Dawn" is "the sowing of the seed" of the

C3

ff

90

word and the light (Crane, Lattfina 306). In "The Harbor
Dawn" the hero jumps "right across the four intervening
centuries--into the harbor of 20th-century Manhattan,"
becoming the twentieth century American (Crane, Lettere 305).
By the light of the dawn, the "window-eyes" of towering
buildings begin "aglitter" and the seagulls are released from
their sleep, flying "aloft" over "Manhattan waters":

The window goes blond slowly. Frostily clears.

From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters--

Two--three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk

The sun, released--aloft with cold gulls hither.

(GE 56)

The images of the "bright window-eyes" and the "released" sun
signify the awakening of the hero of the poem as the light,
which will in turn awaken the sleeping American continent,
the body of Pocahontas who is waiting for the informing
"seed."

Meanwhile, "Insistently through sleep" is flooded "a tide
of voices" from the "Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded
wails, / Far strum of fog horns" to the "throbbing" of "winch
engines" to "a drunken stevedore's howl and thud" for BAGG
W," to
the ears of Pocahontas (GB 54-55). When "Soft sleeves of
sound / Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay" (54),
the "League," the word of the hero, informs his "seed" of the
light into his woman whose "fleah_eur_feer_haye_meyed_upen"
and thereby the "eyee" of his woman also "drinh_rhe_dauh" (GB
56, 57, 56):

And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens
Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day--
Serenely now, before day claims our eyes

Your cool arms murmurously about me lay.

While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the panes--
| I] l-- . .

LfnrastJhuddarannnnnhain (GP. 54-56)
The informed body of Pocahontas is vibrating like a
shuddering forest. "The love-motif (in italics) carries
along a symbolism of the life and ages of man (here the
sowing of the seed)" (Crane, Letters_306). "The Harbor Dawn"
ends with the anticipation of the new order signified by the
hero's impregnation of Pocahontas and the light beckoning him
into the west:

The fog leans one last moment on the sill.

Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star--

As though to join us at some distant hill--

Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep. (GB 56)

In "Van Winkle" the hero grows old in his identification
with "Van Winkle." Awakened from his sleep in the harbor by
the light of the dawn, Van Winkle is also greeted by the
harbor sounds. Leaving his room with the harbor sounds, he
finds space "filled with the music of a hand organ and fresh
sunlight" (Crane, Letters 306). As soon as he comes out of
the room with the harbor sound and light, the hero walks to
the subway. Since he possesses the whole space of the
American continent from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific in
the action of one leap, the sense of space is completely
demolished: "Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, / Leaps
from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate" (GB 58). Sounds free this
mythological space: "Listen! the miles a hurdy-gurdy
grinds-- / Down gold arpeggios mile on mile unwinds" (GB 58).
The hurdy-gurdy sound reminds the hero of the paper
monoplanes of his childhood, which soar over continental
scales of possession.

Walking to the subway, the hero reminisces "of childhood,
also the 'childhood' of the continental conquest, viz., the
conquistadores, Priscilla, Capt. John Smith, etc." (Crane,
Letters 306). This "symbolism of the life and ages of man,"

92
Crane says, ". . . is further developed in each of the
subsequent sections of 'Powhatan's Daughter,’ though it is
never particularly stressed. In 2 ('Van Winkle') it is
Childhood; in 3 it is Youth; in 4, Manhood; in 5 it is Age"
(Letters 306). Crane identifies the hero with Rip Van
Winkle, a man living in both past and present. The sound of
the grind-organ arouses a memory of the past: "the whip" of
his father and "the Sabbatical, unconscious smile" of his
mother. As familial time is made analogous to continental
history, the hero, as Rip Van Winkle, rides the subway of
poetic myth back into the past and across the continent: "And
hurry along, Van Winkle--it's getting late!" (GB 61).

The subway the hero has taken "is simply a figurative,
psychological 'vehicle' for transporting the reader to the
Middle West" in "The River" (Crane, Letters 306), a vehicle
for the hero's journey back to the past of America. The
sweeping vision of the hero on the 20th Century Limited
Express to the West is "the cultural confusion of the
present--a great conglomeration of noises analogous to the
strident impression of a fast express rushing by" (Crane,
Letters 306). What the hero sees is not the words of "the
HOLYGHOST" but the commercial advertisements:

Stick your patent name on a signboard

brother--all over--going west--young man

Tintex--Japalac--Certain-teed Overalls ads

and lands sakes! (GB 62)
And the modern technology of "Thomas / a Ediford" replaces
the religious spirit of Thomas a Becket (Baker 53; Nilsen
65-66): ". . . the telegraphic night coming on Thomas / a
Ediford--and whistling down the tracks / a headlight rushing
with the sound" (GB 62). The radio news of Richard E. Byrd's
exploration of the Arctic is the gospel for the American
people: ". . . the HOLYGHOST / RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE
HAVE THE NORTHPOLE" (GB 62). "The Trinity--Father, Son, and
the Holy Ghost--Crane translates into a commercial trilogy of
SCIENCE as father, its offspring COMMERCE (TECHNOLOGY, as the

93
direct offspring of SCIENCE, makes a neater trinity, which
Crane may have avoided), and the HOLYGHOST" (Baker 54). And
the commercial news of Wall Street replaces the gospel of the
Virgin birth. The hero can find "no more sermons" or words
in "STONES OR / WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears"
(GB 62). In short, science (the radio news) and commerce
(the commercial news) become for Americans the "connecting
words" of the Spirit. Through the windows of the train
"whistling down the tracks,” the hero hears the "flashing
roar / breathtaking" which confuses the true meaning of life
(GB 62).

The "three men" left after the train has left, three
tramps who are "the left-overs of the pioneers" (Crane,
Letters 306), are "still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly /
watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip- / ping
gimleted and neatly out of sight" (GB 62). They are symbolic
of the hero's journey which ironically traces the wanderings
of these three vagrants. They are "psychological vehicles"
which carry the reader not only into "the primal world of the
Indian, which emerges with a full orchestra in the succeeding
dance" but also "across the country and back to the
Mississippi . . . a great River of Time" (Crane, Letters 306,
307, 303). The wandering of these three tramps signifies the
awakening of the hero's pastoral vision of the Continent,
Crane's own vision of "an outdoor world of streams and open
country and forests, a world that would always be with him
and that, in one way or another, he would attempt to return
to for the rest of his life" (Unterecker 21). The tramps are
"blind baggage," or "wifeless or runaway / Hobo-trekkers that
forever search / An empire wilderness of freight and rails"
(GB 64), but they are symbols of the eternal seekers of
spiritual reality. They are identified with the
rail-squatters the young hero used to see behind his
"father's cannery works" (GB 64); each of them is associated
with the young hero of the poem: "Each seemed a child, like
me, on a loose perch, / Holding to childhood like some

94
termless play" (GB 66).

The second part of this section is filled with sounds
which are meant to evoke the groaning of Pocahontas, who has
been raped or ruined by "the iron dealt cleavage" or the "axe
and powder horn," which are the symbolic tools of American
civilization (GB_66). The hero hears trains wailing into the
American continent and identifies the wailing of trains with
the crying of "papooses" and the screaming of "redskin
dynasties": "Trains sounding the long blizzards out--I heard
/ Wail into distances I knew were hers. / Papooses crying on
the wind's long mane / Screamed redskin dynasties" (GB 66).
This second part is full of fragments of folk song: "Strange
bird-wit, like the elemental gist / Of unwalled winds they
offer, singing low / M¥_Qld_Kentan¥_Heme and Gasey_Jenes, /
Sama_Sunny_nay" (GB 64). Hearing all these sounds or songs,
the tramps "go ruminating through / Ohio, Indiana . . . / To

Cheyenne tagging . . . Maybe Kalamazoo," seeing "The last
bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas" (GB 64). ‘
They are blind to tragedy, to the last bear, to the last
Indian, all wiped out by the westward movement of
"Caboose-like" white men, who "Bind town to town and dream to
ticking dream" with the "wires that span the mountain stream.
/ Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision" (GB 64).
"I'm trying in this part of the poem," Crane wrote in a
letter to Mrs. T. W. Simpson, "to chart the pioneer
experience of our forefathers--and to tell the story
backwards, as it were, on the 'backs' of hobos. . . . You'll
find your name in it. I kind of wanted you in this section
of the book. . . . For you are my idea of the salt of all
pioneers, and our little talks about New Orleans, etc., led
me to think of you with the smile of Louisiana" (Letters
303). Even the "Dead echoes" of trains and hobos prepare the
hero to possess the serpent/river of time and the eagle of
space, which are symbolic of Pocahontas (Nilsen 71): "--Dead
echoes! But I knew her body there, / Time like a sepent down
her shoulder, dark, / And space, and an eaglet's wing, laid

95
on her hair" (GB 66).

As the Pullman train journeys "From tunnel into field,"
the travelers "lean from the window" of the train, touching
"hands with some ancient clown" (GB 68), to the accompaniment
of certain inbred American songs--Staamheet_Bill, Deen_Bi¥er,
and others, as they follow the Mississippi River down through
the heart of the mythological content and toward the Gulf,
the gulf with which Crane was always intoxicated. The hero
is lost in a dream of personal and national ancestry moving
down to the sea where "The Passion spreads in wide tongues,
choked and slow, / Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below"
(GB 69). They drift "Over De Soto's bones" (GB 69), adding
another ancestral discoverer to the inaugurating presence of
Columbus with which the poem began and their deaths
anticipate symbolic death and resurrection of the hero.

The hero's vision captures the true Pocahontas in "The
Dance," which is Crane's effort to "[possess] the Indian and
his world as a cultural factor" of the American past not only
through the description of "the conflict between the two
races in this dance" but also through the identification of
the hero with both the Indian and his world (Crane, Letters
307). "The Dance" begins with the birth of Pocahontas, who
is "the mythological nature-symbol chosen to represent the
physical body of the [American] continent, or soil. She here
takes on much the same role as the traditional Hertha of
ancient Teutonic mythology" (Crane, Letters 305). The
creation of the American continent is described as the sexual
union between Pocahontas and Maquokeeta. Pocahontas was
"squired . . . down the sky" by Maquokeeta, a sky god, and
became the "swift red flesh," an earth-goddess who "ran the
neighing canyons all the spring" (GB 70). Pocahontas became
Maquokeeta's bride, whose "brown lap was virgin May" waiting
"in the autumn drouth" for her lover (GB 70). Maquokeeta, as
a sky god or a rain god, "streamed the mesa sands" and
fertilized her (GB 70). In sexual ecstacy Pocahontas

"spouted arms; she rose with maize--to die" (GB 70).

96
The image of sexual union between Pocahontas and
Maquokeeta is a metaphor for a cosmic marriage of heaven and
earth, a ritual dance signifying "the conflict between the
two races in this dance" (Crane, Letters 307): Maquokeeta's

"blood" remembers "its_firs_t_inraainn_of_har_sanren¥._its

the_lakes_and_hills" (GB 71). By the "burnished hands" of

the white men who invaded "the red flesh" of Pocahontas or
the American continent, the sexual union of Pocahontas and
Maquokeeta became "broken play" and their "Mythical brows"
were "Disturbed and destined, into denser green" and "Now lie
incorrigibly what years between . . ." (GB 70). Thereby,
Pocahontas became "the glacier woman" (GB 70) and Maquokeeta,
"a winter king" (GB 70) who "finally, after being assumed
into the elements of nature . . . persists only as a kind of
'eye' in the sky, or as a star that hangs between day and
night--'the twilight's dim perpetual throne'" (Crane, Letters
307).

This cosmic vision of "the pure mythical and smoky soil"
of the American continent or Pocahontas prompts the hero to
journey "back in time to the pure savage world," to "unlatch
the door to the pure Indian world" (Crane, Letters 307, 303).
The hero's journey starts at the twilight, continues through
the night, and ends at dawn, so that his journey back to the
past is metaphorically the journey to the dawn of the
American continent. Reaching his "Manhood" (Crane, Letters
306), the hero is identified with Maquokeeta, who is united
with his bride, Pocahontas. His leaving of "the village for
dogwood" (GB 70) signifies his search for his bride, his
"passion" to be united with his bride, which is presented in
sexual imagery, the imagery of the cosmic dance of Pocahontas
and Maquokeeta in rhythm of the approaching storm with the
sound of the thunder of the "the padded foot / Within" a
growing "thunder-bud" cloud blanketing the skies (GB 72).

Crane describes the primitive, unspoiled natural body of
the American continent as the figure of Pocahontas, "a

97

glacier woman," the veiled bride waiting for her lover on "a
bed of leaves" who restores their "broken play" (GB 70). In
his journey, the hero sees Pocahontas's "hair's keen crescent
running," learns "to catch the trout's moon whisper," and
watches "that fleet young crescent die,-- / And one star,
swinging, take its place, alone, / Cupped in the larches of
the mountain pass-- / Until, immortally, it bled into the
dawn" (GB 70-72). He reaches the very source of the river,
the "Appalachian Spring" (GB 72), encountering the "Steep,
inaccessible smile [of Pocahontas] that eastward bends / And
northward reaches in that violet wedge / Of Adirondacks" (GB
72). And finally he finds himself "within some boding
shade:-- / Grey tepees tufting the blue knolls ahead, / Smoke
swirling through the yellow chestnut glade . . ." (GB 72).
At this moment, the imagination of the hero captures the
vision of the cosmic dance of Pocahontas and Maquokeeta,
which is presented as a battle of an epic scale: "Spears and
assemblies: black drums thrusting on-- / O yelling
battlements,--I, too, was liege / To rainbows currying each
pulsant bone: / Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the
siege!" (GB 73). The "cyclone" of Maquokeeta "threshes in
the turbine crest" of Pocahontas, "Swooping in eagle feathers
down your back" (GB 72). Pocahontas "grieves" in sexual
ecstacy: "A birch kneels. All her whistling fingers fly. /
The oak grove circles in a crash of leaves" (GB 73). The
thunder, the "twangs / Of lightning," purifies "the black
pool" of Pocahontas, dancing "back the tribal morn" (GB 73,
72, 73) as Crane, in a frenzy of synaesthetic evocation,
seeks to summon a sense of primitive energy and primal unity
into the visionary heart of the poem's quest. This is, of
course, an attempt to conjure the Goddess, the presiding
deities of the American continent, to purify the hero's
vision and enable him to continue the epic search.

The next section, "Indiana," summarizes "the period of
conquest" of the West through the monologue of a pioneer

woman, who succeeds to "the nature-symbolism of Pocahontas"

98
(Crane, Letters 307). In "The Dance" the hero's vision has
been purged through the thunder or the Word and the lightning
or the Light and he becomes "one star" which "bled into the
dawn," the "eye" which can "read_her_lBeeahehtasl_ih_a
nmgxuu;:e_fiaregell_gare" (GB_77). Naturally enough, the
symbolism of the "eye" is dominant in "Indiana," where the
"morning glory" of the American continent described in "The
Dance," "climbing the morning long / Over the lintel on its
wiry vine, / Closes before the dusk, furls in its song" (GE
76).

Sound and light are the central images of this section.
The "bison thunder" is harmonized with the "first cry" of the
newly-born baby, which fulfills the "dreams" of the pioneer
mother: "And bison thunder rends my dreams no more / As once
my womb was torn, my boy, when you / Yielded your first cry
at the prairie's door" (GB 76). When Larry, the boy with the
"eyes" of "engaging blue," was born, the universe sang in
praise of the Word, sang the "golden syllables" of "His
gleaming name":

The pebbles sang, the firecat slunk away

And glistening through the sluggard freshets came
In golden syllables loosed from the clay
His gleaming name. (GB 76)

However, the pioneers, as "Prodigal," "Waved Seminary Hill a
gay good-bye" in search for "God lavish there in Colorado,”
"A dream called Eldorado," mistaking the "God" of gold for
the God of the Word (GB 76, 78). The God of gold has never
yielded the "gilded promise" to them but only "barren
tears"(GB 78): the pioneer woman, having buried his husband
"far / Back on the gold trail," returns to Indiana and Larry,
her boy, drops "the scythe to grasp the oar" (GB 76).

While the pioneer woman is blind to the meaning of "those
eyes' engaging blue" of Larry, the squaw's "violet" eyes
capture the "blue" eyes of Larry who is cradled on his
mother's back on "the long trail back," is "Lit with love,"
and shines "like twin stars" (GB 79, 78). Her vision

99
"suddenly" becomes the revelation to Larry's mother, who
realizes that Larry's "eyes" are "where the stubborn years
gleam and atone,-- / Where gold is true" (GB 79). As this
section closes, her son becomes a sailor going off on his own
quest, and anticipating the voices and visions of the

derelict sailor in the following section.

III "Cutty Sark"

While "Indiana" deals with the period of the conquest of
the land, "Cutty Sark" describes "a phantasy on the period of
the whalers and clipper ships," the period of the conquest of
the sea which fulfilled Columbus's dream in "Ave Maria"
(Crane, Letters 307). Both "Indiana" and "Cutty Sark" show
how much the American imagination has been preoccupied with
the conquest of space. In his study of Melville, Charles
Olson puts in this way:

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born
in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large
because it comes large here. Large, and without
mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land
from the beginning. That made the first American
story (Parkman's): exploration.

Something else than a stretch of earth--seas on
both sides, no barriers to contain as restless a thing
as Western man was becoming in Columbus' day. That
made Melville's story (part of it). (11)

For Melville this large-without-mercy space, Olson argues, is
not the space from which to escape, but the space to
challenge and to possess. Ahab "had all space concentrated
into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick" and "assailed it
as Columbus an ocean, LaSalle a continent, the Donner Party
their winter Pass" (12). Like Melville's Ahab, the hero of
"Cutty Sark" is a spiritual quester in the figure of the
derelict sailor who has attempted to possess space.

The hero's quest is also to possess time. Thus, this

100
section "starts in the present and 'progresses backward'"
(Crane, Letters 307). The sailor has returned from the sea
where he sailed "on time" (GB 82). Though he "ought to keep
time and get over it," now he does not even "want to know
what time is" because "that / damned white Arctic killed my
time . . ." (GB 82). He wears "a nervous shark tooth" on his
neck. The story of his spiritual quest, told in a South
Street bar, as Lewis points out (322), echoes not only the
tragic quest of Melville's Ahab in Mehy_niek in the "Murmurs
of Leviathan he spoke" but also Edgar Allan Poe's The
uarratiye_gt_Arthur_Gerdeh_Bym and the other narratives of
sea quests woven through New England experience.

In a letter to Otto H. Kahn, Crane wrote of "Cutty Sark":
"Two 'voices'--that of the world of Time, and that of the
world of Eternity--are interwoven in the action. The
Atlantis theme (that of Eternity) is the transmuted voice of
the nickel-slot pianola, and this voice alternates with that
of the derelict sailor and the description of the action.

Music still haunts [the] names [of the clipper ships] long
after the wind has left their sails" (Crane, Letters
307-308). The voice of the sailor is paradoxical. His voice
seems to represent the voice of lost time, the voice of
failure to "get over" time (GB 82). He has sailed on board
the "S. S. Ala--Antwerp," the ship of time, but he seems to
have failed to possess time, for "that / damned white Arctic
killed my time" (GB 82). However, the sound of "the
nickel-in-the slot piano" reverberates the voice of Eternity
which he has brought from his voyage (GB 82). The "nickel"
image once again appears as the "coin" in "The Tunnel," as
the toll paid in the Underworld which permits the hero of the
poem to cross the river of death to the land of Happiness or
Atlantis.

These two voices are balanced with the two visions of the
derelict sailor. The sailor's eyes are "pressed through
green grass / --green glasses, or bar lights made them / so--
/ shine-- / GREEN-- / eyes--" (GB 82). The term "grass" is

101
corrected as "glass" by Marc Simon in his 1986 edition of
Crane's Poems, The_Enems_o.f_Hart_Grana, but Brom Weber's
reading is preferred here, for the term "grass" represents
the image of the "land," the land where "life's a
geyser--beautiful" but the hero "can't live on" anymore (GB
83) and connects the entire section with a visionary
evolution of Atlantis mythology. The sailor's shining "green
eyes" ironically reflect the hero's visionary quest, and the
names of the ships on which his version of the quest was
pursued are redolent of the world's mythologies: the
Thermenylae, the Leander, and the Atlantis_Bese. He also
finds the dreams of the pioneers: "I saw the frontiers
gleaming of his mind; / or are there frontiers--running sands
sometimes / running sands--somewhere--sands running . . . /
Or they may start some white machine that sings" (GB 83).
Through the voice and the vision of the sailor, the hero of
the poem listens to the derelict sailor and attends the call
of the bar's tiny pianola (in a passage reminiscent of The
Waste_Land). He turns out of the bar toward the Bridge,
trailing fragments of mythological dreams: "I started walking
home across the Bridge" (GB 84).

The second part of this section describes the hero's
vision of the "airy regatta of phantom clipper ships seen
from the Brooklyn Bridge on the way home" after parting with
the sailor (Crane, Letters 307). This is the vision of the
clipper dreams, the transfiguring vision of Columbus's dream
of Cathay. The cataloguing of the ship names brings epic
scope into this vision at the point where, as Samuel Hazo
suggests, the entire "Cutty Sark" section functions as a
transition between the world of time in the first half of The
Bridge and the world of eternity in the second half: "The
first half of The_Bridge is concerned with the poet's quest
in the physical and historical world; it begins with the
voyage of Columbus and concludes with the spent wanderlust of
a drunken sailor. The second half of The_Bridge . . . is
more concerned with the relation of the world of time to the

of

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0

Ha

th

(I)
{J

102
world of eternity and the spiritual predicament and destiny
of man in the modern world" (95).

IV "Cape Hatteras"

The epigraph from Whitman's "Passage to India" reminds us
that "W
dene . . ." (GB,87). Crane conceived of "Cape Hatteras" as
"a kind of ode to Walt Whitman," consciously allying himself
to "the positive and universal tendencies implicit in nearly
all his best work" (Letters 308, 354). Even at the stage of
his conception of The_Bridge, he was thrilled at "its
symbolical possiblities" which are "directly connected with
Whitman" (Letters 128). Crane's relation to Whitmanian
romanticism is clearly present in "Cape Hatteras." The hero
"return[s] home to our own / Hearths," to the "Years of the
Modern," the twentieth century present (GB 88, 94), after his
journey into the past. He returns home with his vision
cleansed by his experiences in the world of time: ". . . time
clears / Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects / A periscope
to glimpse what joys or pain / Our eyes can share or answer"
(GB 88). The image of prehistory, of vast reaction of time,
driven by elemental energy, opens this section:

Imponderable the dinosaur
sinks slow,
the mammoth saurian
ghoul, the eastern
Cape

While rises in the west the coastwise range,

slowly the hushed land--
Combustion at the astral core--the dorsal change
Of energy--convulsive shift of sand . . . (GB 88)

The hero's vision insists on the peculiarly American
nature of its undertaking, its energy, and its recapitulation
and appropriation of the past where "we, who round the capes,
the promontories / Where strange tongues vary messages of
surf / Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars / The

103
ancient names," establish "that deep wonderment" of the "red,
eternal flesh of Pocahontas" which is "surcharged / With
sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels" and "Is veined
by all that time has really pledged us . . ." (GB 88). After
his journey, the hero "return[s] home to our own / Hearths,"
to this "native clay" of Pocahontas "to eat an apple" (GB
88). The metaphor of eating an apple not only reinforces the
image of the American continent as the new Eden but also
alludes to Adam's attempt to capture the "star-glistered
salver of infinity" by eating an apple (GB 89). Just as
Adam's attempt was so illusory that "Adam and Adam's answer
in the forest / Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool," so
the hero's attempt to "subjugate" time and space is illusory
because they can be "subjugated never" before he, discarding
the "songs of gypsies" or the "strange tongues" which "vary
messages of surf / Below grey citadels," reads Walt Whitman
whose songs are the vision of the word and the light (GB 89,
88).

The hero returns home to read Walt Whitman, who is his
spiritual and poetic guide throughout The_Bridge. Whitman's
poetry is for the hero the "syllables of faith," which serve
him as "Banis_Angelinus," the bread of angels, the words of
Christ which are the "Easters of speeding light" (GB 89, 95).
According to R. W. B. Lewis, "Cape Hatteras" is "so nourished
and permeated" by Whitman's poetry (ten poems counted) that
Crane can be "very nearly identified" with Whitman (328).
Crane, Lewis argues, "is embracing Whitman in much the same
way the 'Younger [Brother],' the human soul, melted in
fondness into the arms of the Elder Brother, God, in 'Passage
to India'" (328-329). The hero's reading of Whitman's
poetry thus awakens him to become "the true son of God, the
poet" by whom "Trinitas divine shall be gloriously
accomplish'd and compacted" and who "shall come singing his
songs" of the "absolute" fusion of "Nature and Man," God and
man, the spirit and the body (Whitman, Leayes_er_Grass 415,
416). Like Whitman, the hero of "Cape Hatteras" is led to

104
"the theme that's statured in the cliff" of the Paumanok
beach (GB 89). With Whitman, he "walk[s] the beach / Near
Paumanok . . . and hear[s] the wraith / Through surf, its
bird note there a long time falling" and finally is awakened
with "Sea eyes . . . bright with myth!" (GB 89). Like
Whitman whose "eyes, like the Great Navigator's without ship,
/ Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt / Of
canyoned traffic," the hero's "eyes" should "[confront] the
Exchange, / Surviving in a world of stocks" (GB 89). Through
Whitman, the hero is able to capture space, see "an atom in a
shroud," and hear "an engine in a cloud!" (GB 89). He
"wake[s] into the dream of act" from "this new realm of fact"
(GB 89).

The hero is tested by the sounds of the power house, the
"Power's script" whose "forked crash of split thunder parts /
Our hearing momentwise" (GB 90). The "velvet hummed / Of
dynamos" strums his "hearing's leash" and is led to "a new
universe," a world of "New verities, new inklings" created or
"whipped" by the "nasal whine of power" (GB_90). And then
his "eyes" are pricked by the light of the "stars," the
"glint" of the bearings which are "As bright as frogs' eyes,
giggling in the girth / Of steely gizzards" (GB 90). He can
now "[harness] jelly of the stars" and is awakened into a
reality "new-set between the stars" (GB 90). He can read the
"New latitudes" of space, the "frosty sagas," the "gleaming
cantos of unvanquished space," the epic poems of the new
universe which are scribbled on his eyes by stars (GB 90).

This leads to an apocalyptic vision of the "prophetic
script," which is parodied in the tragic vision of
destruction caused by the "sinewy silver biplane" of the
Wright Brothers (GB 90): "New latitudes, unknotting, soon
give place / To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!"
(GB 90). "Like Icarus," Hazo writes, "modern man's tragic
flaw is that he has let himself become the victim of his own
inventiveness" (102-103). The hero envisions the sky as the
"War's fiery kennel," the ground of aerial warfare (GB 91).

105
The "bright circumferences, heights" are "threshed,"
"chiselled," "baited," and "marauded" (GB 91). This aerial
combat signifies the epic battle of the modern age, the age
of space: "While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised in pride
/ Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side" (GB
91). This vision of the battle in space becomes a metaphor
of the epic struggle of the hero who desires to capture the
Word, "a Sanskrit charge / To conjugate infinity's dim
marge--/ Anew . . . !" (GB 92). The hero's desire to "ride /
The blue's cloud-templed districts unto ether," to get "into
new reaches" of the divine reality intoxicates him in the
"alcohol of space" (GB 91, 90, 92). His "eyes" are
"bicarbonated white by [the] speed" of the wings of the plane
which "receive / The benediction of the shell's deep, sure
reprieve" and
Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible
brink
Now eagle-bright, now
quarry-hid, twist-
-ing, sink with
Enormous repercussive list-
-ings down
Giddily spiralled
gauntlets, upturned, unlooping
In guerrilla sleights, trapped in combustian gyr-
Ing, dance the curdled depth
down whizzing
Zodiacs, dashed
(now nearing fast the Cape!)
down gravitation's
vortex into crashed
dispersion . . . into mashed and shapeless
debris.
By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!
(GR 92-93)
Crashing into "gravitation's vortex," the hero is reborn,

106
a poet like Whitman who "Has beat a song" which leads man
beyond "Glacial sierras and the flight of ravens, /
past condor zones, through zenith havens / Past where the
albatross has offered up / His last wing-pulse" (GB 93). He
associates himself with Whitman's "pure impulse inbred / To
answer deepest soundings! O, upward from the dead,"
Whitman's vision of "vast eternity" which "has held the
heights" beyond the stars (GB 93). Like the flight of the
albatross, his vision "is shivered back to earth," to the
sufferings of humanity. Whitman is reclaimed in the hero,
who loves the "competent loam, the probable grass," wields
"the rebound seed," and brings "tally, and a pact, new bound
/ Of living brotherhood!" (GB_93). He, too, becomes a
"Mourner," a wound-dresser who has "kept of wounds" in the
"Ghoul—mound of man's perversity," and transforms the bloody
battles of "fraternal massacre" into the "thunder's eloquence
through green arcades" which "Set[s] trumpets breathing in
each clump and grass tuft--'til / Gold autumn, captured,
crowned the trembling hill!" (GB 93, 94).

He claims magic power "Beyond all sesames of science" to
create "something green" out of "the loam / Of prairies," the
"mashed and shapeless debris," to transform the physical into
the spiritual (GB 94, 93). He sees beyond "the physical
body" of America and explores "the spiritual body" of
America. Whitman is "Our Meistersinger" who is able to "set
breath in steel," to "[fling] the span on even wing / Of that
great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!" (GB 94). The hero
is further identified with "Vedic Caesar" who kneels to the
"greensward" (GB 95), the "'green word,’ the living word, the
organic 'Multitudinous Verb' . . . of the poem itself" (Sugg
82). Thus he is able to "bind us throbbing with one voice, /
New integers of Roman, Viking, Celt--" (GB 95). He becomes
"Bahis_Angelieus" of "Easters of speeding light," the bread
of an Angel, the poet of the Word and the Light, the Bridge
which "shimmeringly stands / Above the Cape's ghoul-mound" as
"the rainbow's arch," the wound-dresser between God and man

107
and as "a pact, new bound / Of living brotherhood" between
man and man (GB 95, 93). The hero is fully absorbed into
Whitman's "true son of God, the poet" who "shall come singing
his songs" of the union of spiritual and physical, sacred and
profane, God and man (LG 415-416):

My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman--
so-- (GE 95)

V "Three Songs"

There have been two distinctively opposite arguments
about the position of "Three Songs" between "Cape Hatteras"
and "Quaker Hill" in the structural pattern of The_Bridge.

In his essay "The Significance of The_Bridge, by Hart Crane
or What Are We to Think of Professor X?" Yvor Winters argues
that its present position is unjustifiable: "The poems
obviously have no place in this latter half of the sequence,
and they would probably fit but little better into the first
half" (137). Weber follows Winters's opinion, insisting that
these three poems "increase the logical disintegration of The
Bridge" (367). R. W. B. Lewis asserts: "If 'Three Songs'
were removed from The_Bridge, the reader would observe a
smooth and logical development from the end of 'Cape
Hatteras' to the beginning of 'Quaker Hill'" (338). Hyatt H.
Waggoner holds that these three songs "seem unrelated to the
main theme, or at least not clear in their function within
the whole poem" (Amerieah_Beets 505). Because of "the
insertion of the 'Three songs' section, Jeffrey Walker
insists, "Crane's American epic ode . . . becomes
dramatically untenable, at least for his modernist reader.
The text breaks up, taking on the look of a series of lyrical
gestures, a set of reflections within a static, preplanned
arrangement" (143-144). g .

On the contrary, John R. Willingham argues that the three
poems in the section "Three Songs" are "organically sound,"

108
arguing that the device of "Three Songs" is "an_analogy to
that of a symphony" employed by Waldo Frank in his novels and
by Walt Whitman in his poetry, both of whom offer "a double
validity for Crane's purposes in The_Bridge" (69). L. S.
Dembo defends the position of "Three Songs," maintaining that
"the poems are considered in their exact
context--specifically, as part of the latter half of the
sequence--much of their obscurity is dispelled and their
apparent disjointedness justified" (107-108). Samuel Hazo
insists that the "Three Songs" section "is organically
related to the symbol of the bridge as a woman" (105).
Nilsen argues that the "Three Songs" section is placed
logically because in the second part the hero returns to the
starting point of his journey in the first part of The_Bridge
(118). I agree with these opinions, and it is on this
premise--that the "Three Songs" section represents a renewal
to the conditions of the poem's opening and a renewal of
Crane's relationship to Whitman after the experiences of the
first half --that my argument proceeds.

In the beginning of the first poem of this section,
"Southern Cross," the hero yearns for his love, a desire that
is quickly mythologized into an Edenic scene where the
"nameless Woman of the South" becomes radically transformed
into Eve, Magdalene, and Mary, the sensual and the spiritual
as Mother of all things (GB 98). The image of Eve in
"Southern Cross" becomes a "simian Venus," a woman of
sensuality who "takes night / And lifts her girdles from her,
one by one--" (GB 98). This fallen image of Eve signifies
that her sensuality is separated from her spirituality and
coalesces with that of Medusa, whose hair was transformed
into serpents, immemorial feminine images of temptation and
desire.

The "long wake of phosphor" is viewed as the "vaporous
scars," the bleeding light of Eve which "falls vainly on the
wave" on the "iridescent / Furrow of all our travel" (GB 98).
This reinforces the image of Eve as a "simian Venus," for

109

whom the hero should bleed and receive "trailed derison" like
Christ who bled for man's "scars" and was derided. Here is
evoked the vision of the agonized crucifixion of Christ,
whose "Eyes crumble[d]" at the "kiss" of man's "scars" and
"Incite[d] a yell" from the crowd: "Slid on that backward
vision / The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell" (GB
98). The hero's sexual desire is conflated with the agonies
of Christ in a garish crucifixion scene:

I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross

Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.

It is blood to remember; it is fire

To stammer back . . . It is

God--your namelessness. And the wash-- (GB 98)
This fallen Eve and the progeny of her desire are caught in
the light of this strange scene where "Light drowned the
lithic trillions of your spawn" (GB 99). The hero strains to
realize a version of redemption in this nightmarish southern
re-enactment, but it remains profoundly ambiguous.

The Eve in "Southern Cross" becomes Magdalene in the
second poem, "National Winter Garden." This Magdalene is a
dancer, a strip-teaser at National Winter Garden, a New York
vaudeville theater. The very title, Lewis says, "tells us
that we and the entire national scene and culture are again
envisaged as buried in the depths of winter; while the Garden
of Eden from which Eve was ejected ('stumbling gardenless to
grieve')--the American dream and promise, so to say--has
become a scene of cheapest vulgarity" (343). The body of
Magdalene is naked with her "Outspoken buttocks in pink beads
/ . . . No extra mufflings here: / The world's one flagrant,
sweating cinch" (GB 100). Her dancing is sensual enough to
provoke the audience into sexual desire. Her "Outspoken
buttocks in pink beads / Invite the necessary cloudy clinch /
Of bandy eyes"; her "legs waken salads in the brain"; "Her
eyes exist in swivellings of her teats, / Pearls whip her
hips, a drench of whirling strands" (GB 100). She is a
harlot who "pick[s] your blonde out neatly through the smoke"

110
and "Always . . . wait[s] for someone else though, always--"
(GB 100). The image of the snake dance once again connects
Magdalene with Eve in the previous poem. She is a woman of
promiscuity like Eve who has spawned "the lithic trillions"
of her offsprings in "Southern Cross" (GB 99).

Magdalene's burlesque dance is a parody of Maquokeeta's
ritual dance in "The Dance," distorting the natural images of
light and sound into vulgar artificiality. In "National
Winter Garden" we can hear "a tom-tom scrimmage with a
somewhere violin" instead of the thunder and see the
"fireworks" instead of the lightning (GB 100). Every sound
is muffled and every light is shrouded in "smoke" (GB 100).
We can "always and last" hear "Some cheapest echo" of the
thunder (GB 100). And at "the lewd trounce of a final muted
beat! / We flee her spasm through a fleshless door" (g2_100).
The eyes of the audience watching Magdalene's dance are the
"bandy eyes," suggesting the loss of the eyesight, the power
to see through (GB 100). The image of Magdalene is not that
of the woman of the "white snow," but that of the woman of
red and blue, the harlot of vulgar color who is "Sprayed
first with ruby, then with emerald sheen--" (GB 100).
Magdalene has lost her smile and is "Least tearful and least
glad," suggesting that her facial expression takes on the
color of "sandstone grey" (GB 100). But amidst the lust and
sensuality of the scene there is the constraint awareness
that Mary Magdalene has always stood for redeemed sensuality
in the Christian tradition, and in the poem's conclusion
Crane's Magdalene, "the burlesque of our lust--and faith, /
Lug[s] us back lifeward--bone by infant bone" (GB 101).
There is here at least the possibility of redemption.

As Lewis points out, "Southern Cross" evokes "the
autumnal atmosphere" (347), the image of the fallen Eve,
Venus which "falls vainly on the wave" from "the slowly
smoldering fire / Of lower heavens" (GB 98). "National
Winter Garden" is dominated by the image of the winter, the

image of barrenness and emptiness, along with the suggestion

111
of the title itself. In "Virginia" the spring season
returns, and with it the figure of Mary appears. The "rain"
falls and the barren land is tranformed into the "green"
world, the virgin land "Where green figs gleam / By oyster
shells" and into the garden where flowers bloom and "Pigeons
by the million" play and sing on the "nickel-dime" towers,

the modern skyscrapers (GR 102). Everything is reborn "in
the noon of May," at Easter time (GB 102). The hero of
"Virginia" envisions everything spiritually. "The office

skyscraper," as Nilsen observes, "is becoming transformed
into the bell-tower of a cathedral, 'popcorn bells'
functioning as 'Carillon.’ Such a tower and the music of its
bells are symbols of poetry as insight into the essence of
spiritual love" (128).

The Medusa-like hair of Eve in "The Southern Cross" turns
into the "golden" hair of the "blue-eyed" Mary in "Virginia"
(GB 102). Mary in this section is not corrupted, but
innocent, and she "Keep[s] smiling the boss away" (GB 102).
She is "blue-eyed," with "golden" hair and a "claret scarf"
who is waiting for her Saturday date. This virgin Mary lets
down her hair "from the high wheat tower" in order for the
hero, her lover, to climb up to her. The "blue-eyed" Mary
of the "golden" hair "with the claret scarf" works in "the
high wheat tower" and seems to have gathered various images
of feminine desirability, innocence, and remoteness into
herself. She illuminates the grime of lower Manhattan where
"Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign" and other images of a
fallen world remind one of what redemption is for (GB 102).

VI "Quaker Hill"

The "Three Songs" section anticipates the following three
sections, "Quaker Hill," "The Tunnel," and "Atlantis" in
various ways. One can point to the seasonal symbolism, as
Lewis does (338-373). The autumnal season in "Southern
Cross" evokes the autumnal atmosphere of "Quaker Hill"; the
winter in "National Winter Garden" is similar to the coldness

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of "The Tunnel," and the spring in "Virginia" mirrors the
green Paradisal image of "Atlantis." As Nilsen argues, we
might also see "the curve of the imagination from the middle
to the nether world and up again toward the higher regions":
"'Southern Cross' corresponds to the quotidian, middle level
of 'Quaker Hill,‘ 'National Winter Garden' foreshadows the
descent into the underworld of 'The Tunnel,’ and the higher
aspirations of 'Virginia' reach full orchestration in the
massive chorus of 'Atlantis'" (119).

Whether this structural pattern is seen in terms of the
seasonal symbolism or the curve of Crane's poetic
imagination, "Quaker Hill" is a logical development from
"Three Songs." "Quaker Hill" describes America which has
lost its dream of "the Promised Land" (GB 105), in terms
which evoke some of Melville's sense of a Quaker faith gone
badly wrong, where the "trembl[ing] at the word of the Lord"
has dwindled into mere silence (Trueblood 7). According to
Trueblood, the popular images of Quakers as "an exceedingly
mild and harmless people, largely given to silence, totally
unaggressive" are "erroneous at almost every point" (1). .The
early Quaker Movement, Trueblood continues, "was marked by an
amazing vitality," for the early Quakers were ingrained in
the military metaphors of the New Testament and these
metaphors were "so congenial to [them] in general that they
tended to refer to their entire struggle as the 'Lamb's War'"

(1, 5). However, "Quaker Hill" sees the death of this
vitality: "I have seen death's stare in slow survey / From
four horizons that no one relates . . ." (GR 104). The "old

Meeting House" has been abandoned, turned into "old
Mizzentop, palatial white / Hostelry" and "Now the New Avalon
Hotel" where the "volcanoes" of radio music "roar / A welcome
to highsteppers that no mouse / Who saw the Friends there
ever heard before" (GB 104, 105).

As Lewis points out (350), the death of the American
dream is presented in the image of contemporary Quakers who
have forgotten their mission as soldiers of Christ. "The

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Light which strives to reach every man," Trueblood explains,
'"is not some vague general light, but the present
continuation of the Light which shone in Jesus as He called
men by the Sea of Galilee. Here the Logos Doctrine served
admirably, so that the prologue to the Fourth Gospel became

more precious to Quakers than almost any other single passage

of the Bible" (70). Metaphorically, every man is identified
with "'The Inner Light,'" or "'The Light of Christ Within'"
(69). But there is little light in "Quaker Hill." There

are, rather, images of blindness and cacophony. The Quakers
are likened to the cows whose eyes "see no other thing / Than
grass and snow, and their own inner being / Through the rich
halo that they do not trouble / Even to cast upon the seasons
fleeting / Though they should thin and die on last year's
stubble" (GB 104). They are "awkward, ponderous, and uncoy,"
even though they "with pledges taste the bright annoy / Of
friendship's acid wine" and boast of their "store of faith in
other men / Who would . . . stalk down the merriest ghost"
(GB 104). This is matched by the decayed images of the
windows and panes of "old Mizzentop, palatial white /
Hostelry" (GB 104). The "windows" of Mizzentop are "staring
out toward former / Faces" and its "loose panes crown the
hill and gleam / At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience
. / See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream /
Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!" (GB 104).
There is no Word or power here; only decaying restaurants,
hotels, and other trappings of tourism. At the New Avalon
Hotel, formally the Meeting House, one encounters only loud
music and "the Promised Land," not for "the Friends" but for
"the persuasive surburban land agent" or "the woodlouse," who
"mortgages the ancient deal / Table" and "eats the seal, /
The spinster polish of antiquity . . ." (GB 105). This
Promised Land is no longer the New Avalon of "faith in other
men" but the land of the "resigned factions of the dead":
"Where are my kinsmen and the patriach race?" (GB 104, 105).
Through this vision, the hero descends "from the hawk's

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far stemming view, / . . . as worm's eye to construe / Our
love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate" (GB 105), the
Gate of the Hell to tell "His news . . . transmuting silence

with that stilly note / Of pain" of Emily Dickinson (GB 106),
a poet who saw eternity in death, and of Isadora Duncan, an
artist who struggled to capture the vision of the ideal: "I
see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully
successful on this earth" (GB 103). The whip-poor-will sings
just before dawn the "triple-noted clause of moonlight" which
"unhusks the heart of fright" and
Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair--when love forsees the end--
Leaf after autumnal leaf
break off,
descend--
descend--
(GB 106)

VII "The Tunnel"

The hero's descent into the Underworld in "Quaker Hill"
is "literally and symbolically" enacted in "The Tunnel"
(Dembo, 121; Lewis, 354). It is, as Lewis points out, not
only "a traditional epic phase, corresponding to the visit to
the underworld in the eleventh book of The_Gdyssey, the sixth
book of the Aeneid, and the Interns" (354), but is also
associated with the descent of Christ, his harrowing of Hell.
The hero's descent is hesitant: ". . . can't you quite make
up your mind to ride?" (GB 108). He prepares to descend, via
the Manhattan subway, into hell where he expects to find "the
garden in the third act dead" (GB 108). He has to ride the
subway to travel "Up Times Square to Columbus Circle,"
leaving behind all "Performances, assortments, resumes" of
the drama of the American dream, ultimately the human drama
itself (GB 108). This journey through the city and through
the American dream and nightmare is partly a reference to the

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epic tradition, partially a re-enactment of Whitman, partly a
re-capitulation of the structure of The_Bridge itself.

The hero's hallucinatory re-capitulation of the descent
into hell begins by pressing "the coin / Into the slot" for
the fare to ride the subway (GB 109), which is associated, on
the one hand, with the coin paid to Charon for his ferrying
of the spirit of the dead across the Styx and, on the other
hand, with the thirty silver pieces of coin paid for the
betrayal of Christ. This world is haunted by "tabloid
crime-sheets" and "the toothpaste and the dandruff ads" (GB
108, 110). The words he hears have lost their creative
power, simply "recant[ing] like beaten weather vanes," like
the "tunnels that re-wind themselves" like the "phonographs
of hades" (GB 109, 110).

In the subway we encounter one of the most extraordinary
hallucinatory visions in Crane's poetry, as the dismembered
visage of Edgar Allan Poe as a sort of mad Adonis haunts the
subway and daunts the hero's vision. In a letter to Waldo
Frank, Crane wrote that he found William Carlos Williams's In
the_Amerioan_Grain "so intimate to my theme" of "The Tunnel,"
because Williams "puts Poe and his 'character' in the same
position as I had symbolized for him in 'The Tunnel' section"
(Letters 277-278). In the chapter entitled "Edgar Allan Poe"
of Tn_the_Amerieah_Graih, Williams insists that Poe is "a new
De Soto," an explorer of "the conception of the New World as
a woman" (220). Poe is "a light in the morass--which must
appear eerie, even to himself, by force of terrific contrast,
an isolation that would naturally lead to drunkenness and
death, logically and simply--by despair, as the very final
evidence of a too fine seriousness and devotion" (222). He
is a poet "first and last to clear the GROUND," a poet in
whom "American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid
ground" (216, 226). He is a poet in whose hands "words
[become] figures; an old language truly, but one from which
he carried over only the most elemental qualities to his new
purpose; which was, to find a way to tell his soul" (221).

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"His greatness is in that he turned his back and faced
inland, to originality, with the identical gesture of a
Boone. And for that reason he is unrecognized. Americans
have never recognized themselves. . . . Thus Poe must suffer
by his originality" (226). Poe is for Crane the poet of
light whose "eyes" shine "like agate lanterns" (GB 110), the
visionary poet "Tn_Eind_tha_Hestarn_oath_L_Einht_throl_the
Gates_er_nrath" (GB 107). Poe is "the crucified Christ"
(Lewis, 360) or "the crucified poet" (Nilsen, 151) and his
struggle to "deny the ticket" echoes Christ's Passion to
resist his last temptation because it signifies, as most
critics hold, the test of Poe's poetic integrity as a
visionary poet (Dembo, 123; Lewis, 361; Messerlie, 212).

The hero plunges into his journey through the Underworld
where everything is involved in the vortex of the surreal:
the gyring glass doors, the gargling black windows, the
revolving newspapers, and so on. The "rounding" train
through the re-winding tunnels with "a scream" of
"galvothermic" thunder is envisioned as the "demented" Daemon
"Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth / --Or the muffled
slaughter of a day in birth--" (GB 111). This Daemon subway
train takes a "Wop washerwoman" home, to "Mysterious
kitchens," the home of the "mother eyes and hands" (GB 111,
108, 111). This "Genoese" is, as Lewis points out, "a faint
reminder of Columbus and hence of the divine mother," a
visionary voyager who brought home the word of the New World
(362; Butterfield, 204). The hero's subway journey brings
him to the world "where streets / Burst suddenly in rain" (GB
110-111) and where he can hear "--A sound of waters bending
astride the sky / Unceasing with some Word that will not die

!" (GB 112).

At the end of his subway journey the hero emerges from
the hellish tunnel and stands "by the River that is East--"
(GB 112). "Here at the waters' edge," the hero encounters a
tugboat staving up the River (GB 112). He listens to the
"echoes" of "one galvanic blare" of the ship and Sees the

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guiding "lights" of the "coasting" tugboat: "I counted the
echoes assembling, one after one, / Searching, thumbing the
midnight on the piers. / Lights, coasting, left the oily
tympanum of waters" (GB 112). In his journey from Times
Square to Columbus Circle, the hero is symbolically
tranformed into Poe, into Columbus. He is a "wop
washerwoman" who sweeps the "corridors" and the "cuspidors"
of the Underworld, a messiah who cleanses the "interborough
fissures of [man's] mind" (GB, 110). He is, to use Walt
Whitman's phrase in his poem "Passage to India," "the true
son of God, the poet" who completely justifies "the whole
earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth" (Leayes_er
Grass 415; Lewis, 365).

VIII "Atlantis"

In a letter to Waldo Frank, Crane wrote that "Atlantis"
is the last section of The_Bridge, but it was "oddly enough
emergent first" of all sections of the poem, adding that "It
is symphonic in including the convergence of all the strands
separately detailed in antecedent sections of the
poem--Columbus, conquests of water, land, etc., Pokahantus,
subways, offices, etc., etc." (Letters 232). In a letter to
Otto H. Kahn, Crane insisted that there is "a logic" to the
fact that "that final section of the poem has been the first
to be completed," for "it is the mystic consummation toward
which all the other sections of the poem converge" (Letters
240). One may conclude that it was Crane's intent to see the
‘form of this section as "symphonic," that its theme is "the
mystic consummation" of everything explored in the preceding
sections.

Crane's conception of "Atlantis," as Crane himself and
many critics point out, was formed by his reading of Plato's
accounts of Atlantis as the lost ideal community in The
Timaeus and Gritias, Lewis Spence's theory of Atlantis as the
synthetical society of the West and East in Atlantis_in
Amerina, and Ignatius Donnelly's vision of Atlantis as the

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Garden of Eden in Atlantist_The_Antediluyian_Werld. Even
though each of these views is presented in a somewhat
different perspective, the traditional Atlantis myths, in one
version or another, work powerfully in Crane's poem.
"Atlantis" is Crane's song of "a new cultural synthesis of
values in terms of our America" (Letters 223). In Qur
Ameriea Waldo Frank envisions America as "a mystic Word" (10)
and this mystic conception of America as the Word or Atlantis
is reiterated in his The_Be;diseguery_of_Ameriea: "America,
from its historic outset, has had the mystie_traditieh: a
tradition, that is, which rose from consciousness of the
whole of man and of God; which linked the land with all lands
and all men; which identified the self of our land with the
destiny of human kind" (212-213). This is John Winthrop's
theological vision of America as "the place where the Lord
will create a new Heaven and a new Earth," St. John de
Cravecoeur's social vision of America as the land where
"individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of
men," and Whitman's poetic vision of America as the new earth
of a new man.

This concluding section returns to the Bridge in the
first section of the poem. "Atlantis" is the hero's prayer
to the Bridge for its revelation; it is his faith in the
Bridge as the harp and the altar, Christ as the Word and the
Light. The Bridge, which is sustained by the "bound cable
strands" and enlightened by the "Taut miles of shuttling
moonlight," is itself the "Transparent meshes--fleckless the
gleaming staves-- / Sibylline voices [which] flicker,
waveringly stream / As though a god were issue of the strings

." (GB 114). It is a harp, "One arc synoptic of all
tides below," whose "labyrinthine mouths of history" pour its
"reply as though all ships at sea / Complighted in one
vibrant breath made cry,-- / 'Make thy love sure--to weave
whose song we ply!'" (GB 114).

In "Atlantis" the complex synaesthetic image of the
' Bridge gathers light, sound, and form into itself. The

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Bridge is the "Tall Vision-of-the Voyage," the Light which
"lift[s] night to cycloramic crest / Of deepest day" (G2
115). It is the "Choir" which "translat[es] time / Into what
multitudinous Verb the suns / And synergy of waters ever
fuse, recast / In myriad syllables,--Psalm of Cathay" (GB
115), the Word to whose call "seven oceans answer from their
dream" (GB 114). The Bridge is the Incarnation of Christ as
the Word and the Light, who is what Crane calls the
"identification of [himself] with all_gr_life" (Letters 140).
It is the answerer of "all tides" (GB 114), all aspects of
history, for he is the possesser of time and space. It is
the pardoner of "this history" (GB 116).
The hero is now purified by the word and the light of the
Bridge and becomes identified with the Bridge, which can
press
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
--Tomorrows into yesteryear-- and link
What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,
Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears. (GB 115)
The "smoking pyres of love and death" evoke the images of
dead Greek heroes. Mythic and epical time are rapidly
compressed as Crane summons into his own Atlantis a final,
synaesthetic condensation of the Bridge's visionary
possibility. The Bridge is the "steeled Cognizance" of both
the "stitch and stallion glow" of stars and the "sound of
doom," which leads the "sight, sound and flesh" of man "from
time's realm / As love strikes clear direction for the helm"
(GB 116). It is "an organ" of celestial music (GB 116): "The
vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!" (GB 115). In
this sense, the Platonic epigraph to this section is
appropriate to Crane's poetic vision of the Brdige as
"Music," which is "the knowledge of that which relates to
love in harmony and system" (GB 113).
The Bridge is "Everpresence, beyond time" (GB 117). The
hero travels "up the crystal-flooded aisle" toward the "loft

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of vision, palladium helm of stars" (GB 114), to all history
from the beginning or the "cry" of the ancient cities of Tyre
and Troy to the present of their "silence": ". . . up
planet-sequined heights / Some trillion whispering hammers
glimmer Tyre: / Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry / Of
inchling aeons silence rivets Troy" (GB 115). He is
identified with the Bridge itself "lifting night to
cycloramic crest / Of deepest day," the "Choir, translating
time / Into what multitudinous Verb . . . / In myriad
syllables,--Psalm of Cathay!" (GB 115). Now the "eyes" of
the hero begin to "stammer through the pangs of dust and
steel" (GB 115).

The Bridge becomes the "Swift peal of secular light,
intrinsic Myth / Whose fell unshadow is death's utter
wound,--" (GB 116). It is "Deity's young name," the
"Paradigm" of "Love" which pardons "this history" of America,
justifying it (GB 115, 116). Thus, the song of the Bridge
is "Deity's glittering Pledge" which consecrates the serpent
of time and the eagle of space, the "rainbows" of God's
Covenant to man: "Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
/ The serpent with the eagle in the leaves . . . ?" (GB 116,
117). The Bridge is the very emblem of visionary America, a
synthesis of time and space, pardoning, redeeming, and
consecrating all history in its spiritual body.

C. "One Song, one Bridge of Fire"

Hart Crane is a visionary poet, but he himself
acknowledged that his poetic vision "has nothing to do with
factual prediction or with futurity," but with "a peculiar
type of perception, capable of apprehending some absolute and
timeless concept of the imagination with astounding clarity
and conviction" (GB 263). Crane insisted that he "never
consciously approached any subject in a religious mood," but
that his "Messianic predisposition" motivated The_Bridge,
which is structured by "the essential religious motive"

121
(Letters 350). In a letter to Waldo Frank, Crane confessed
his experience of exultation when he walked across the
Brooklyn Bridge: "I have seen the Word made Flesh. . . . in
the ecstacy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful
bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us
upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can
walk with another" (Letters 181).

The mystic conception of America, Crane says, was plain
in "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," in which he
attempted to build "a bridge between so-called classic
experience and many divergent realities of our seething,
confused cosmos of today, which has no formulated mythology
yet for classic poetic reference or for religious
exploitation" (GB 217). But it "figure[s] even larger in The
Bridger" which Crane intended as "the complete renunciation
symbolized in The_flesteland" (Letters 125, 127). In the
early stage of his poetic career, Crane was "more influenced
by Eliot than any other modern" and time after time, even in
The_Bridge, Crane is constantly aware of Eliot's poem, but he
was "disappointed" at the pessimism of The_flaste_Land (Crane,
Letters 114, 105). And Crane went "through him toward a
different_goal" (Crane, Letters 90). In a letter to Gorham
Munson, Crane admired Eliot's poetic "erudition and
technique" on the one hand, but, on the other hand,
proclaimed his "departure" from Eliot's "negative" attitude,
and moved toward "a more positive" vision: "There is no one
writing in English who can command so much respect, to my
mind, as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of
departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction.

His pessimism is amply justified, in his case. But I would
apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb
and assemble toward a more positive, or (if [I] must put it
so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal" (Letters 114-115). He
moved toward Whitman and away from the early infatuation with
Eliot. He wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson: "The more I
think about my Bridge poem the more thrilling its symbolical

122
possibilities become, and since my reading of you and Frank

I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman"
(Letters 128). The_Bridge is Crane's Whitmanian "affirmation
of experience, and to that extent is 'positive' rather than
'negative' in the sense that The_maste_Lahd is negative"
(Letters 351). Whitman is for Crane the "most typical and
valid expression of the American nsxnhosis"; he is "Our
Meistersinger" who "set breath in steel" and who "on the
boldest heel / Stood up and flung the span on even wing / Of
that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!" (GB 263, 94).

Of course, it is not Eliot and Whitman alone who fed
Crane's idiosyncratic Christian vision. He found "the true
idea of God" in the characters of Alyosha and Father Zossima
in Feodor Dostoyevsky's The_Brethers_Karamazgy, who regard
man as "the semblance of Divine Love," "perceive the divine
mystery in things," and "love the whole world with an
all-embracing love" (354-355). Indeed, Crane believed that
in the beautiful young Alyosha and in Father Zossima
Dostoevsky "represent[s] the nearest type to the 'return of
Christ'" (Letters 50). However, as Karl Shapiro says in his
Essay_eh_Bime, it is Whitman's Geng_ef_Myself that became
"the naked seed" of Crane's Ihe_Bridge: "But who / Except
Hart Crane has tasted the pure manna / Of Sehg_ef_Myself, the
naked seed of rime?" (30). Crane's quest in The_Bridge, as
he wrote in a letter to Charlotte Rychtarik, was to search
for "the true idea of God," which is for Crane "the only
thing that can give happiness,--that is the identification of
yourself with all_er_lire" (Letters 140).

Ultimately, The_Bridge has "A rather religious
motivation, albeit not Presbyterian" (Crane, Letters 241).
As I argued earlier, Christian Science provided Crane with
the concept of being, the concept of man as not "material"
but "spiritual" (Eddy 468). This influence led him in The
.Bridge to envision America as what Waldo Frank calls "a
xnystic Word" (Qur_Ameriea 10). The_Bridge is "a dynamic and

eeloquent document" of America which "is transmuted into a

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symbol of Consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity"; it is
"an epic of the modern consciousness" which is comparable to
Virgil's The_Aeheid: "I feel justified in comparing the
historic and cultural scope of The_Bridge to this great work.
It is at least a symphony with an epic theme, and a work of
considerable profundity and inspiration" (Crane, Letters 241,
308, 309). In this poem all phases of American history are
"transfigured into abstract form" of an epic poem, in which
the "initial impulses" of American people are "gathered up
toward the climax of the bridge" (Crane, Letters 124). In
other words, The_Bridge is "One Song, one Bridge of Fire" (GB
117), which, as Crane wrote to Otto H. Kahn, aims to
"enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our
America," adopting the Bridge as "the symbol of consciousness
spanning time and space" (Letters 223, 241).

Chapter IV

William Carlos Williams's Batersoh

A. "Say it! No ideas but in things"

Twentieth century literature, Robert Langbaum says in
The_Beetry_et_Bxperiehee, expresses "the desire to overcome
subjectivity and achieve objectivity" (30). This desire is
handed down from the romantic tradition, which aims to "heal
the breach" between object and subject and between the ideal
and the real (29). Romanticism "conceives of the ideal as
existing only in conjunction with the real and the real as
existing only in conjunction with the ideal. The two are
brought into conjunction only in the act of perception when
the higher or imaginative rationality brings the ideal to the
real by penetrating and possessing the external world as a
way of knowing both itself and the external world" (24).
Romanticism moves "toward objectivity, toward a new principle
of connection with society and nature through the imposition
of values on the external world" (28). Langbaum concludes
that romanticism is "a single developing tradition" of "the
poetry of the last one hundred and seventy-five years or so"
(31).

Against Langbaum's view of romanticism as a modern
tradition is set J. Hillis Miller's argument that the "new
art" of twentieth century poetry departs from the romantic
tradition "toward a poetry of reality," which "reaches full
development in the poetry of William Carlos Williams" (1).
According to Miller, many romantic writers dichotomize their
vision of the world into "subjective and objective realms"
and also into "two realms, heaven and earth, supernatural and
natural, the 'real' world and the derived world" (1). In
the poetry of Victorian writers like Tennyson, Arnold, and

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125
Hopkins, the romantic dualism of subject and object is still
found, but God has "withdrawn beyond the physical world" (2).
The "disappearance of God" in Victorian poetry becomes "the
death of God" in twentieth century poetry (2). Abandoning
the world beyond, the realm of heaven and God, or the
supernatural world, the poetry of the twentieth century
returns to the here and now, the world of reality, or nature.
The death of God in twentieth century poetry also signals the
disappearance of a distinction between the realm of subject
and object, mind and universe, self and the world. And the
poetry of the twentieth century enters "a new region of
copresence" of the mind and the object (9).

This new realm of "copresence," Miller argues, is the
realm of Williams's poetry, "a space both subjective and
objective, a region of copresence in which anywhere is
everywhere, and all times are one time" (288). This poetry
of copresence marks the end of the romantic tradition and
"the rejection of an even older tradition, Christian and
Platonic" as well (291). In the realm of Williams's poetry
"there is no searching for the traces of a vanished deity, no
frantic attempt to find a new mediator between heaven and
earth" (291). The absence of the idea of God and the
disappearance of a distinction between mind and universe,
between subject and object, in Williams's poetry points to
his poetic belief of "no ideas but in things," his belief in
the poetry of reality, the poetry of the here and now. "Here
is everywhere for Williams," Miller says, "and there is no
other world to go to. . . . Words, things, people, and God
vanish as separate entities and everything becomes a unit"
(291).

Miller's argument, making of Williams "a poet of
reality," Carl Rapp says, has been "truly seminal" and
"remains, on the whole, the most stimulating conception of
Williams yet to appear" (4). Rapp, however, in his own book,

_ 126
Williamiarloslilliamsnndiomantinldaalism, attempts to
re-situate Williams in the romantic tradition. Since most
critics like Miller, including Richard Macksey, James
Breslin, and Joseph N. Riddel, think of "The Wanderer" as
"Williams' departure" from the traditions of romanticism and
idealism, Rapp also takes up the poem "as an appropriate
starting point" of his argument to rebut their critical
tendency (6). Aligning Williams with "two major
nineteenth-century traditions: romanticism and idealism,"
Rapp argues that Williams's poetry is the expression of
"Christian theology and Platonic idealism" (6).

Miller sees the hero's plunge into the Passaic River in
"The Wanderer" as symbolic of the surrender of "the ego" or
of the abandonment of the "dramas of the interchange of
subject and object, self and world," which "puts [Williams]
beyond romanticism" (287). Rapp, however, interprets it as
"a merger in that poem between subject and object . . . a
unity or a harmony established between Williams [the hero]
and his world," because the mind of the hero "becomes the
single, transcendent point of unity--the logos, the center,
the coherence" where he "has drawn all things to himself"
(18). "The Wanderer" is not the poem of "an abandonment of
the ego" but that of "an affirmation of it" (19). "Indeed,"
Rapp says, "on the evidence of this first major poem it might
well be said that, instead of abandoning idealism, Williams
actually embraces it" (18). At this point, Rapp points out
"a paradox" of the affirmation of the phenomenal world as a
part of his ego and the negation of it as something
"transcended or used in such a way that it points beyond
itself" (20). "This paradox wherein the phenomenal world is
both affirmed and negated," Rapp continues, "is inherent not
only in Williams' work but in romantic poetry generally"
(20). This paradox is then his idealism, his belief "in the
existence of something like a universal spirit or a universal

127
mind in which all finite minds necessarily participate" (24),
even though he is not "a Christian or a Platonist in the
usual sense" (6).

This paradox, Rapp says, takes Williams "from a
consideration of his own transcendence of phenomena to a
consideration of Transcendence itself conceived of as a
single, ineffable spiritual power" (24). Williams's poetry
"embodies a spiritual drama wherein the mind comes to an
understanding of itself by using the phenomenal world of
appearances as a means of achieving self-awareness,"
conforming not only to Coleridgean romanticism, "the
typically romantic oscillation between egotism and empathy"
but also to Hegelian idealism, the view of artistic works as
"sensuous manifestations of the Absolute" (25, 26). The
three Hegelian stages of the development of art (the
"symbolic," the "classical," and the "romantic" stages), Rapp
maintains, are recapitulated in Williams's poetry. Rapp
concludes that Williams's poetry has reached "the last and
highest phase of art, the romantic" stage of the spiritual
transcendence over the physical world, even though he has
experienced the "symbolic" phase of the desire to harmonize
himself with the world and "classical" phase of the
aspiration toward perfect form (28-30).

In this discussion of Williams I align myself against
Miller and with Rapp. Let me then also begin with a
consideration of "The Wanderer" to clarify my position toward
Williams's poetic theory. "The Wanderer," Williams says, "is
actually a reconstruction from memory of my early Keatsian
Endymion imitation that I destroyed, burned in a furnace!" (1
Wanted 25-26). This Keatsian period is the period of the
formation of his poetic sensibility, a period in which he
read intensively in Shakespeare, Milton's early poems like
"L'Allegro" and "Lycidas," Coleridge's The_Anoient_Mariner,
Whitman' Leares_of_Grass, Longinus's Qn_the_thlime,

128
Palgrave's Golden_Treasury, Plato's Symposium, Kant's
W, and Darwin's oesnentJLMan. This
Keatsian period is a parallel to his early religious
sensibility, a time of reading the Bible and attending church
services (1_Wanted 3). Even though he insisted that he was
not a "religious" man but "rather a sanctimonious young man"
(T_Hanted 2-3), Williams's poetic sensibility is profoundly
associated with the fundamentally Christian basis of his
earliest life.

Seen in this light, "The Wanderer" itself is a poem of
Christian heroism. The hero appears at the beginning of the
poem as the wanderer, the quester, the seeker of a
radicalized relationship to the world: "How shall I be a
mirror to this modernity?" (Golleoted_Boems 108). The hero
of "The Wanderer" is impelled by the Goddess figure, who is
Williams's grandmother who wanted "to make [him] as her own"
in life (T_flanted 26). Williams idealizes her as a Goddess
of poetry who desires to possess the hero of the poem as her
poetic "son" (Golleeted_Boems 117), identifying her with his
"poetic unconscious" (lnteryieus 76). This poem, Williams
says, is "the story of growing up" (T_flanted 26), the story
of the hero's spiritual metamorphosis from "a disappointed, a
defeated person" into a visionary poet "with a perfect
knowledge of the world" through the help of a Goddess, who is
"the personification of poetry" (Interyieus 76).

Paralleling both Christ's baptism in the Jordan River and
Whitman's mystical journey, the hero of "The Wanderer,"
"crossing the ferry / With the great towers of Manhattan"
before him, encounters a Goddess of wisdom "In whom age in
age is united," a Goddess of "the beauty of all the world,"
a Goddess of poetry who is "recreating the whole world"
(Golleeted_Boems 108, 109). He prays to the Goddess for
"power to catch something of this day's / Air and sun into
your service!" (Golleeted_Boems 110). Leading him then to

129
the Passaic River, the Goddess "bent forward and knelt by the
river, / The Passaic, that filthy river. . . . / Raising the
water then in the cupped palm / . . . bathed our brows
wailing and laughing" (Golleoted_Boems 115). The Goddess, as
"the spirit of the river" (Interyieus 76), enters his heart
"Into the crystal beginning of its days," tortures itself
within him, and finally becomes him (Golleoted_Boems 116).
The hero sees his old self "departing / Forever," and his new
self "Being borne off under the water" (Golleoted_Boems 116).
Then, the hero's baptism by the spirit of the river signifies
his "new marriage" to the Goddess of poetry herself, or the
new birth of his new self endowed with the poetic imagination
(Golleoted_Boems 111). His encounter with the Goddess
becomes a new beginning of his life, "the first day of
wonders" (Golleeted_Boems 109). His new marriage to the
poetic imagination urges him to "the new wandering"
(Golleeted_Boems 117), making him a visionary poet on the
eternal journey, a quester of "the beauty of all the world"
(Golleoted_2oems 109).
Williams's poetic theory of "no ideas but in things" is,

I believe, a secularized version of the Christian concept of
the Word, which is pictured particularly as the hero of
Baterson, the epic poem to be discussed in this chapter. In
his essay "In Praise of Marriage: Kenneth Rexroth's The
Bhoenix_and_the_Tortoise," Williams wrote that "I know
nothing of mysticism, Christian or other--but I am
passionately addicted to the cult of poetry and I do not like
to see the two mixed" (Gomething_to_say 132). However,
Christian theology is indeed assimilated into his "cult of
poetry," as I will show later. It is true that Williams is
not a mystic or a Christian in an ordinary sense, but as Rapp
points out, "he was still impelled to acknowledge the
ultimate source of his own creative power in language
unmistakably associated with religious mysticism" (24).

130
Williams, as his wife says, "accepted" religion (l_Wanted
105) and his religious mind was inherited from his mother who
was a Spiritualist, participating in founding the Unitarian
Church in Rutherford (Williams, Autobiography 14-17; Mariani,
Hilliem.Gerlos.flilliams 5-14). In this church, Mariani says,
Williams was introduced to "a well-developed, self-reliant
intellectual perspective toward matters spiritual," the
tradition which shaped Emersonian transcendentalism (William
Garlos_Williams 12). This Emersonian transcendentalism
became "the bedrock of his beliefs for the rest of his life,
to rise fully to the surface again in his last years"
(William Garlos Williams 47).

In The_Autobiooranhrr originally published in 1951,
Williams Says that "Christ was divine by the spirit that was

in him and not by miraculous birth" (22). Christ is for
Williams the bodily expression of the spirit, or what he
calls in secular terms "the embodiment of knowledge." He is
not a symbol of God but the Incarnation of God himself, a
divine man, "a FULL--not an amputated, cut to horrible
configurations of historical establishments--MAN," in whom
the body and the mind becomes one (Mariani, William_Garlos
Williams 460). Christ himself is for Williams a poet: "Look
at the parables of Jesus--he didn't talk much of God, but he
used simple examples--sheer poems" (Interrieus 65). He is
the very embodiment of Williams's poetic theory, "Say it! No
ideas but in things" (B 9).

To clarify my position toward Williams's poetic theory,
let me look more closely at Williams from the perspective of
that Christian hermeneutic I have explained earlier. There
are three phases or stages of revelation of the Word
according to this version of Christian interpretation of the
Hebrew scriptures and the Gospel experience. The first
revelation of the Word is God's speaking: God speaks and
creation comes into being. In this stage of revelation, God

131
is revealed specially in the image of man, Adam. The second
revelation of the Word is the decree of the Word in the form
of the written word, the Law. The third revelation of the
Word is the Incarnation of the Word in the human form,
Christ, the son of Man, which is the Christian version of
Natural Supernaturalism in the figure of Christ. Each of
these three stages suggests the varying degree of man's
struggle to possess the reality of all beings, his
realization of the relationship to God, the ultimate reality.
It is perhaps relevant to the naming of each of these three
stages of revelation of the Word to use the Hegelian
aesthetic terms of the three phases of the configuration of
the Idea into aesthetic form: the "symbolic," the
"classical," and the "romantic" stages of the development of
art.

The first stage of revelation of the Word is the
"symbolic" stage of the Word because the Word is inadequately
embodied in sensual form as seen in Adam's disobedience to
the WOrd. It can be called, in Williams's terms, the phase
of man's "silence" in the face of "wonder" (Embodiment_or
Knouledge 108). In this stage, "the essence is sight in the
broad sense, to include hearing, but the reality he would
express is silence. . . . Thus we live and eat merely to go
about in the face of wonder in the fullest glory of our
senses only differing from infants in a breadth of
accomplishment and expression. . . . What is the moon to him?
It is a light, a sign. He doesn't even know it is round. To
him it is an unconscious symbol which he used for praise

until perversion sets in through ignorance" (Emhodiment_of
Knouledge 180-181). The second stage of revelation of the
Word is the "classical" phase of art, in which the Word is
completely codified in the formal pattern of writing. In
this stage, as Rapp says of Williams's experience of this
stage, "expression may be simply a matter of mechanics, a

132
matter of verbal engineering" (29). The Word of this stage
lost its generating power of the thing and was codified as
the written word which functions as, according to Williams's
essay "For a New Magazine" in Blues, "a mechanism" (qtd. in
Rapp, 29). This "written" Word is "the symbol of symbols,
twice removed from vitality--on a string like dried apples or
Swedish bread" (Williams, Embodiment_of_Knonladge 181). The
Word of the "written" or "classical" stage becomes the source
not of wonder but of fear or terror. God becomes not a Being
for "wonder" but an idol to be feared.

The third stage of revelation of the Word is the
"romantic" stage of the Word, a new vision of reality, the
reality not of a codification of the spirit into the material
but of a complete harmony between its materiality and
spirituality. It is then what Thomas Carlyle calls "Natural
Supernaturalism" (qtd. in Abrams 68): The supernatural is
naturalized or possessed in the humanized form of the Word.
Just as God is in Christ and Christ in God: "I am in the
Father and the Father in me" (John 14: 10), so Christ is in
man and man in Christ: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my
blood dwells in me and I in him" (John 6: 56). Christ is a
complete Being who is divine and holy, demolishing the sense
of space and time between man and God, between subject and
object, between mind and universe, entering "his own" world
of the here and now (John 1: 11). The coming of Christ
"defamiliarizes" the distorted, "familiarized," or
"habitualized" perception of man and is meant "to make one
feel things, to make stone stony"; it is strikingly similar
to that "ostraneniye," the "defamiliarization," which Russian
formalism sought to isolate as the peculiar marker of
literary discourse (Lemon and Reis, Bussian_£ormalist
Critinism 3-24) .

This Christian concept of the Word is secularized in
Williams's poetic theory, which aims to present the thing

133
itself in poetic form organized by a measure which is
inherent in words. "Heaven seems frankly impossible," for
Heaven is possessed in the Word of the here and now (Geleeted
Essays 147): for Williams no transcendental heaven beyond the
stone's defamiliarized stoniness, the earth's earthiness, is
possible or necessary. As Christ was resigned to existence,
so Williams was resigned to search for the redeeming
language: "The past above, the future below / and the present
pouring down: the roar, / the roar of the present, a speech--
/ is, of necessity, my sole concern" (B 144). Williams
calls his resignation "a sort of nameless religious
experience" which provided him with the "inner security": "It
is something which occurred once when I was about twenty, a
sudden resignation to existence, a despair--if you wish to
call it that, but a despair which made everything a unit and
at the same time a part of myself. . . . Things have no names
for me and places have no significance. As a reward for this
anonymity I feel as much a part of things as trees and
stones. . . . I have no particular hope save to repair, to
rescue, to complete" (Geleeted_Letters 147). This religious
experience is Williams's secularized version of Christian
Incarnation: "Everything exists from the beginning. I
existed in the beginning. . . . I shall make myself into a
word. One big word. One big union. . . . I begin small and
make myself into a big splurging word: I take life and make
it into one big blurb" (imaginations 158-160). It is then
natural that, "In [Williams's] work," as Miller argues to a
different purpose in Boets_or_Beality, "there is no searching
for the traces of a vanished deity, no frantic attempt to
find a new mediator between heaven and earth" (291).

Williams believed that the corruption of language
signifies man's inability to perceive things through
language, for "we smell, hear and see with words and words
alone, and . . . with a new language we smell, hear and see

134

afresh" (Seleoted_flssays 266). "Words," Williams says, "are
the keys that unlock the mind" (Beleeted_Essays 282); "The
poet alone in this world holds the key to their final rescue"
(Thirlwall 254); and the poet's goal is to "find beauty
locked in the mind" (B 3) and rescue it with the "keys" of
"new" words. In this belief, Williams's poet is very like
his version of Christ, who "didn't talk much of God, but
used simple examples--sheer poems" (Intaryiaus 65). Both
redeem the world by making the alienated word fresh.
Williams believed that "Knowledge started with the 'word,' it
might do far worse than to go back to the beginning--with the
addition of the cleansing of the 'word,' which is the work
poets have in hand" (Embodiment_or_KnoHledge 6). His

devotion to a search for new poetic language reaches almost a
religious dimension. Language, he writes in Geleoted_Bssays,
is "the hope of man," but it is "enslaved, fOrced, raped,
made a whore by the idea venders," for example, philosophers
(96).

Just as the Word of the third revelation in His
Thinginess is the source of life and light of all things, so
every word in its thinginess, Williams believed, has its own
intrinsic value associated with nothing because it is "the
secret spring of all our lives" (Autobiography 359). Thus,
Williams tried to strip the words in his poetry naked to
their substance and destroy "a constant barrier between the
reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the
world", insisting that "nearly all writing, up to the
present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep
up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which
distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the
moment" (Golleoted_2oems 177, 178). "To refine, to clarify,
to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live,"
Williams holds, is to redeem the world (Golleoted_Boems 178).

Williams's practice of medicine led him to be convinced

135

that "The only world that exists is the world of the senses,"
which is the "world of the artist" (Selented_Essays 196),
providing him with the "very food and drink, the very thing
which made it possible for [him] to write" (Autobiography
357). It gave him "a wonderful opportunity actually to
witness the words being born," to capture "a moment of
insight . . . a glimpse, an intimation of all that which the
daily print misses or deliberately hides" when "the
inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you,
or with nothing more than a boil on his back is so caught off
balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole
community's pathetic way of thought" (Autobiography 361,
359). The inarticulate word of the patient is the thinginess
of the word. It is the incarnation of its meaning and of the
patient himself as well, for there is no distance or
separation between his word and its meaning and between him
and his word. This naked speech is intrinsically poetic
because it embodies "the underground stream" which has its
own intrinsic form governed by the emotion expressed by the
speaker (Autobiography 359), like "a small (or large)
machine made of words" in which "there can be no part, as in
any other machine, that is redundant" (Seleeted_Bssd¥s 256).

The "poet's business," Williams says, is "Not to talk in
vague categories but to write particularly, as a physician
works, upon a patient, upon the thing before him, in the
particular to discover the universal" (Autobiography 391).
His poetic vision of locality is supported by John Dewey's
aesthetic view that "The local is the only universal, upon
that all art builds" (qtd. in Autobiography 391). This
conviction of Williams led him to his life-long search for
the "living speech" of reality which he raises to the
universal, more specifically the search for "the American
idiom," as distinct from English speech, which reflects the
actual American life of the here and now (l_Wanted 65). This

136
contact of Williams with a sensual reality finds expression
in the whole range of his poetry. Through his intense poetic
imagination, his poem becomes "a field of action" (Geleoted
Essays 281) where the five senses play their predominant role
to create the new world of the imagination. In addition to
the five senses, we can find in Williams's poetry, as Miller
says in Boets_or_Beality, the "sexual sense" which "can be
defined as an attempt to bring into existence, with silly
words, an erotic space inhabited by a woman of the
imagination. His works, taken all together, make a poem
which is a woman" (327). "Somehow," Williams says, "poetry
and the female sex were allied in my mind. The beauty of
girls seemed the same to me as the beauty of a poem" (1
Wanted 14). The sexual sense for Williams is the summing up
of the five senses and, as he said in a letter to Ruth
Jackson, the love of all humanity as well: "A pointed love of
our fellow men and women, particularly women, must occupy us
while we work to clarify our minds about what we have to do"
(Thirlwall 285). Since Williams, as Thirlwall holds,
imagined the woman, "virgin or whore," as "the central fact
of existence" (297), his sexual sense, his loving care of
women, could be easily assimilated into his more overt later
religious sensibility. Thirlwall writes that this
sensibility, being under his atheistic mask, was
"triumphantly asserted in a religious but nonconformist
spirit of 'Deep Religious Faith,'" a poem in The_besert_Musio
(285). "Immobilized physically," Thirlwall insists, Williams
"became active spiritually" (285). Even before "Deep
Religious Faith" was published in The_besert_Musie in 1954,
however, The_Bink_Ghureh was published in 1949 as "a
Christian poem, very definitely," in which "My conception of
Christ as a socialistic figure," Williams says, "related to a
generous feeling toward the poor, also confused many" (1
Wanted 76). Williams's use of the unicorn tapestries in

137
Book V of Baterson, Thirlwall argues, "reflects again his
abiding interest in love . . . but it also reflects his
revived interest in religion" (289).

Just as the sexual metaphor is central to the Incarnation
of the Word, so it is closest to the meaning of Williams's
poem. Williams's epic poem, Baterson, is a secularized
version of this Christian metaphor of the Word as the
bridegroom. In Baterson Williams describes the rigorous
quest of Paterson as a constant effort to search for a new
language which will redeem him and, by being redeemed,
Paterson becomes a visionary poet like Christ, the redeeming
Word. Baterson is the culmination of his poetic theory of
"no ideas but in things." Like the Word, Paterson is "an
image large enough to embody the whole knowable world"

(Williams, Autobiography 391).
B. "Rigor of beauty is the quest"

Since the very beginning of his poetic career, Williams
had been always anxious to become an American unlike his
parents who had decidedly remained Europeans to the last.
Williams envied some poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
who "ran / and could run off / toward the peripheries-- / to
other centers, direct-- / for clarity . . . / loveliness and
/ authority in the world--," but he was interested not "in
the finished product" of European culture but "in the bloody
loam" of American locality and remained in America, "Sniffing
the trees" and digging "a musty bone" like a "lame" dog (B
36, 37, 3). He believed that the poet should be rooted in
the local like the tree and the bone because he "is limited
to the range of his contact with the objective world," which
is "the essential quality in literature" (Selanted_Essays 33,
32).

Williams's love affair with American locality found

138
poetic expression in Baterson, an epic poem which celebrates
"the local material . . . to have no connection with the
European world, but to be purely American" (Thirlwall 307).
In Baterson, Paterson, a typical American city, is pictured
as "a really heroic figure as all epic poems are," "the grand
image of the man whom [he] wanted to celebrate as Paterson,"
"an image which concerns all men, and yet a noble image"
(Thirlwall 307, 308). Baterson is aimed to be "a reply to
Greek and Latin with the bare hands," an American epic which
deals with "particulars" or the local, making them "general,
rolling / up the sum [of them] . . . since we know nothing,
pure / and simple, beyond / our own complexities" (B 2, 3).
In Baterson, Williams "deliberately selected Paterson as
[his] reality," the locality of American reality, because he
believed that "Paterson has a definite history associated
with the beginnings of the United States" (Thirlwall 263).
Baterson is then "a celebration" of "a local pride," "a
confession" of Williams's poetic belief in "no ideas but in
things" (B 2).

Eetersonr as the "Author's Note" to the poem reads, was
originally designed "in four parts--that a man in himself is
a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life
in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody--if
imaginatively conceived--any city, all the details of which
may be made to voice his most intimate convictions."

However, Williams took "the world of Paterson into a new
dimension . . . to give it imaginative validity." And
Baterson "grow[s] and change[s] not with the inevitability of
a preconceived form, but with the unstructured, unpredictable
freedom of a developing sensibility" of the poet (Conarroe
18). Thus, Baterson becomes a metaphor of its hero's
spiritual metamorphosis from a sleeping giant to a visionary
poet, whose words are "the keys that unlock the mind" of men

(Williams, Seleoted_Bssays 282). Book One of the poem

139
delineates the birth of Paterson, which is also a kind of
waking. As Williams says in "Author's Note," it introduces
"the elemental character of the place," the essential quality
of Paterson as the epic hero. Book Two explores the trial of
the heroic quality of Paterson on the Garret Mountain Park
which is "feminine to the city" (B 43). This trial is very
similar to the Passion of Christ on Gethsemane. Book Three
depicts the symbolic death of Paterson, his descent into
Hell, and his purification. Book Four describes the
resurrection of Paterson as the emergence of a visionary poet
with the power to redeem the world. Book Five presents the
vision of salvation in the poetic world, the hunting of the

unicorn.

Book One: "The Delineaments of the Giants"

In the beginning of the first section of Book One,
Paterson is illustrated as a sleeping giant, the Word of the
second revelation who is "Eternally asleep" in the codified
form of stone: "Butterflies settle on his stone ear" (B,6).
The last section of Book One suggests Paterson's waking up to
the search for "beauty" which "is locked in the mind past all
remonstrance" (B 3) as a redeeming language. The birth of
Paterson is "a nine month's wonder, the city / the man, an
identity--it can't be / otherwise--an / interpenetration,
both ways" (B 3). The "overt religious reference" in
Baterson is essential to the understanding of the poem
because the full name of the hero, "Noah Faitoute Paterson"
(B 15), suggests his religious experience (Doyle 96). "Noah"
suggests both "the Biblical Noah's capacity to survive the
Flood" and "Noah Webster's mastery of the American idiom"
(Peterson 19; Matthews 258). Paterson, as Noah, is then
identified with the father of a new race in the new world
after the Flood and with the father of a new language of the
New World. He is the flood of words. Paterson, as

140

"Faitoute," is the father of all beings (Peterson 19;
Matthews 258), the creator, the poet, the redeemer of beauty.
"Paterson" sums the two terms of "Pater" and "Son" or Father
and Son (Thirlwall 267; Matthews 259), which are the puns on
the two terms of "Peter" and "Sun." Paterson, as Pater-son,
is then associated with the rock of the light, the light of
salvation. Paterson is the "temple / upon the rock" (B 23),
"the myth / that holds up the rock, / that holds up the
water" (B 39). Since Paterson is also identified with the
spelling "Patterson," he is a person who "patters on"
(Thirlwall 275). Paterson is "the chatterer, father of all /
speech" (B 39), "the father of sound" (Doyle 89). The whole
name of "Noah Faitoute Paterson," then, suggests that
Paterson is a Full Man, a Christ, the Word who is the light
as the rock and the word as the water of the sound: "Paterson
lies in the valley [of the rock] under the Passaic Falls /
its spent waters forming the outline of his back" (B 6).

Paterson is the waters "filling / his ears with its
sound" (B 17), "the thunder / of the waters filling his
dreams" (B 6), "a speech or a voice" or "the poem" of
Paterson (Williams, Autobiography 392), which is "the roar of
the river / forever in our ears" (B 18), "the river of life"
(Thirlwall 310). The waters of the Passaic Falls are
harnessed as the hydroelectric power plant to light the City
of Paterson, as "'Jersey Lightning' to the boys" (B 15). The
description of Paterson as a man, "only one man--like a city"
and his bride as his "Innumerable women, each like a flower"
(B 7) also echoes the Christian metaphor of the Word as the
only one Bridegroom of His Church, the body of his
innumerable brides, men. It is, therefore, significant that
Paterson is pictured as a dreaming Giant who is embracing his
woman with "his / arm supporting her, by the yalley_of_the
Books, asleep" (B 8), who should be awakened to be a .
redeeming language, a visionary poet to liberate beauty that

141
is "locked" in the mind.

Williams metaphorically describes the citizens of
Paterson as "thoughts" of this dreaming Giant, Paterson, who
are "sitting and standing" in the bus and "alight and
scatter" (B 9). Since "the language / is divorced from their
minds" (B 12), the citizens of Paterson "walk incommunicado"
(2.9). Since "the language / fails them / They do not know
the words / or have not / the courage to use them" (B 11).
The tragedy of all the citizens of Paterson, as Doyle says,
is "the fate of all men not redeemed by the Word" (96). In
their ignorance, they do not know the presence of the Word
among them, still craving "the miraculous" (B 10). They are
metaphorically the dwarfs who mindlessly ruin the two wonders
of Paterson, "the finest pearl of modern times" and a fish of
"a huge bigness" (B 9, 10), which are the traditional
Christian symbols of the Word. In Williams's historiography,
these incidents also have to be seen as parables of the rigor
of the American Puritans, who ruined the Word by the rigid
practice of their religion, "by boiling open the shell" to
recover the pearl, and like the boys who "pelted" the fish
"with stones . . . until he was exhausted, whereupon some of
them . . . waded into the water and clambered on the back of
the huge fish, while another seized him by the throat and
gills, and brought him ashore" (B 9, 11).

The parables of the destruction of the pearl and the fish
are Williams's satire on the failure of the American Puritan
imagination to possess the New World which is, for Williams
as well as for Whitman and Crane, symbolic of the redeeming
language. The dwarf is "a monster in human form" who "cannot
support the enormous weight of his head" and "is constantly
in a large cradle, with his head supported in pillows" (B
10). He is, as Paul Mariani says in William_Garlos_Williamsi
A_Naked_World, the image of Paterson as "the monstrous,
hydrocephalic poet, a water-head obsessed with the

142
down-pouring of words and the dream of an impossible poem
from which he would awaken only in death" (464; Nash 196).
He is symbolic of the American Puritan, who "is peculiarly
fond of the company of clergy-men, always inquiring for them
among his visitors, and taking great pleasure in receiving
religious instruction" (B 10). Paterson desires to possess a
redeeming language, to comb the cascading waterfalls.
However, Paterson's desire is ironically "a wonder" of his
failure of possessing the Word, which is further caricatured
as "a wonder" of the conception of Hamilton's vision of
Paterson as the cradle of American industry, "a wonder" of
the failure of the American imagination to harness the
Passaic Falls, "a wonder" of the divorce of Paterson from a
redeeming language.

Paterson's "divorce" from the Word is exemplified in the
tragic deaths of Mrs. Sara Cumming and Sam Patch. Mrs.
Cumming, charmed with "the sublime curiosities" of the roar
of the Passaic Falls, falls from the rock and vanishes into
"the indifferent gale: male" who fails to impregnate her (B
14, 20). She, who is symbolically "a first wife / and a
first beauty" of Paterson (B 22), a minister of the Word,
becomes a victim of "A false language pouring--a language
(misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without dignity,
without minister, crashing upon a stone ear" (B 15). Sam
Patch, a professional jumper who "toured the country diving
from cliffs and masts, rocks and bridges" (B 15), deluded in
his past marvelous performance of jumping, plunges into the
falls of the Genesee River, but "instead of descending with a
plummet-like fall his body wavered in the air . . . struck
the water on his side and disappeared" with "The water
pouring still / from the edge of the rocks, filling / his
ears with its sound, hard to interpret" (B 17). Sam Patch is
symbolic of those traditionalists who are blind to the Living
Word of the eternal present among them. Sam Patch is also

143
the image of the American Puritan who was rigorous in
religious observations but unable to recognize the language
of the present. Sam Patch should not have been concerned
with the "invisible" language of the past and the future with
"no answer," but with the language of the present, the
"visible" language of the here and now: "The past above, the
future below / and the present pouring down: the roar, / the

roar of the present, a speech-- . . . / The language cascades
into the / invisible, beyond and above : the falls / of which
it is the visible part--" (B 144-145).

Mrs. Cumming and Sam Patch are mere representatives of
those "pure products of America" who in Williams always seem
to "go crazy" (Golleeted_Boems 217). They are "Jackson's
Whites," the transplanted inhabitants of the Ramapos living
between the wilderness and the city, the "two phases" of
"wild and cultured life" (B 13, 12). They are the tragic
flowers which "sink back into the loam / Crying out" because
"the tongue of the bee / misses them" (B 11). They "look at
the torrent in / their minds / and it is foreign to them" (B
12). They "die also / incommunicado" because "The language
is missing them" (B 11). They are alienated, divorced from
the language of the Falls and entirely fail to understand the
Falls as an outpouring of language and spirit.

In the second section of Book One, the vision of the
"semi-naked" women becomes the challenge of Paterson's
"waking" to the living world of the present, the language of
the here and now. This challenge leads Paterson to declare,
as stated in Book Three:

I am its slave,
its sleeper, bewildered--dazzled
by distance . I cannot stay here

to spend my life looking into the past:

the future's no answer. I must

144
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself--'
comb out the language--or succumb

--whatever the complexion. Let

me out! (Well, go!) this rhetoric

is real! (B 145)
However, for the moment, as the language is divorced from his
mind, Paterson loses his "direction": "There is no direction.
Whither? I / cannot say. I cannot say / more than how. The
how (the howl) only / is at my disposal (proposal)" (P 18).
And he becomes "colder than stone" just like

a bud forever green,

tight-curled, upon the pavement, perfect

in juice and substance but divorced, divorced

from its fellows, fallen low-- (B 18)
As a result, he cannot "seize the moment" of a physical union
in spite of the two Easter girls' earnest request: "I wish to
be with you abed, we two / as if the bed were the bed of a
stream / --I have much to say to you / . . . to pass beyond /
the moment of meeting, while the currents float still in
mid-air, to / fall-- / with you from the brink, before / the
crash--" (2.24). Easter, symbolizing rebirth, is degraded
into a time of divorce or death; the "Easter girls" become
green buds fallen upon the pavement, the "sweet breath
suppressed" because of the "stale" breath of Paterson, the
breath of "the university" where "the / language stutters,"
divorced from the reality of the here and now (B 20, 22).

Paterson's encounter with the Easter girls, however,

leads him to find the "direction" he should take. Paterson
Ibegins to feel that he is "frozen in / an ice cake" like the
"silent, uncommunicative" bodies of Sam Patch and Mrs.
Cummdng and "to know, to / know clearly (as through clear
ice) whence / I draw my breath or how to employ it /

145

clearly-~if not well" (B 20, 21). He recalls his vision of
the first wife of the African chief "on a log" who "begin[s]
to know the mottled branch / that sings" (B 21). Paterson,
realizing that "the ground has undergone / a subtle
transformation, its identity altered," rejects the "erudite"
language of the university which is not only part of this
urban setting, but is expert in the disseminating of abstract
languages and ideology: "Certainly I am not a robin nor
erudite, / no Erasmus nor bird that returns to the same /
ground year by year . . . certainly NOT the university" (B
19-22). Williams here suggests that the stale breath or
language of the university is the "brother" of the "stinking
breath" of the "temple upon / the rock" (B 23), which is a
parody of the authentic Word, or the seed falling
indifferently in the parable of Christ. So Paterson sings in
a parable, as Conarroe points out: "Jesus' parable of the
seeds thrown among the good and stony earth is transformed
into 'the snow falling into the water, / part upon the rock

.'" (84). At this point, toward the end of the second
section, Paterson is urged "to submit to your own myths," the
myths of the "warmth" of human love (B 28). He needs "more
warmth," which will melt his cold heart, his sexual and
literary impotence. He is also "an Ishmael," a poet in
”affliction" (B 29), whose warmth fulfills his woman who
seeks impregnation but receives only destruction (B 33).

While the second section puts emphasis on the aspect of

Paterson as the light, the third section describes Paterson
as the sound, or the word. "Music it for yourself,"
exclaims Paterson to himself (B 30). Paterson makes every
effort to hear clearly the sound of the pouring waters
metamorphosed into the falling snow, but he fails to do so.
"He picked a hairpin from the floor / and stuck it in his
ear, probing / around inside--" (B 30). He "heard the /

faint filing sound" of the "melting snow / [which] dripped

 

146

from the cornice by his window," but since "of / earth his
ears are full, there is no sound" (B 30-31). He doubts if he
is one of "the knowledgeable idiots" whose minds are filled
with the "fixed concepts" of the university (2.34, 32). And
for the moment,

Moveless

he envies the men that ran

and could run off

toward the peripheries--

to other centers, direct--

for clarity (if

they found it)

loveliness and
authority in the world--

a sort of springtime

toward which their minds aspired
but which he saw,

within himself--ice bound (B 36)

However, Paterson "shifts his change" through "a large
shock of an earthquake, accompanied with a remarkable
rumbling noise" (B 39). Paterson becomes "the myth / that
holds up the rock, / that holds up the water" (B 39). And
his "Thought clambers up, / . . . upon the wet rocks" of the
Falls and stands, "shrouded there, in that din, / Earth, the
chatterer, father of all / speech" and "has its birth and
death there" (B 39). Paterson is reborn; he is no longer one
of "the knowledgeable idiots" of the university "who prepared
the nets" but could not get "the most fish" (B 35). He
.belongs among "the hoodlums and men who leaped into the mud
and water where the nets could not work" and "rescued from
the mud and water the finest load of fish" (B 35), for he is
interested not in "the finished product," but "in the bloody
loam" (B 37) and he is interested in spirituality and

147
language adequate not for the cultured old world, but for the

brash new world.

Book Two: "Sunday in the Park"

After shifting "his change" at the end of Book One,
Paterson "drives / in his new car out to the suburbs" (B 38),
to the Garret Mountain Park, shouting: "Outside / outside
myself / there is a world" (B 43). In Book Two, he arrives
at the Park which is "feminine to the city" (B 43); "after a
hard climb he, / looks back (beautiful but expensive!) to /
the pearl-grey towers! Re-turns / and starts, possessive,
through the trees, / -- that love" (B 44). "The mountain
quivers" (B 56), as he approaches her to instruct "his
thoughts / (concretely)" upon her body (B 43). The whole
universe participates in the voices of celebrating "the
ceremonial of love" of Paterson and the Mountain (B 48):
"Voices! / multiple and inarticulate . voices / clattering
loudly to the sun, to / the clouds. Voices! / assaulting the
air gaily from all sides. . . . / Sunday in the park, /

a hawk / soars! / --a trumpet sounds fitfully" (B 54-55).
Paterson walks musing through the park, his thoughts and
language echoed and parodied by the sounds of Sunday
picknickers: "The picnickers laugh on the rocks celebrating /
the varied Sunday of their loves with / its declining
light--" (B 58). His walking becomes a sort of visionary
journey on "the mind's wings" (B 48), a journey through what
Robert Edward Brown calls "the poetic space" in which the
three realms of things (Earth or World), thoughts (Self), and
words (Language or Poetry) become one (175-192).

His "entire_ooonodtion" in the first section is
attentiveness to the sounds and voices filling the Park (B
45). First of all, Paterson hears in imagination the voices
of the Falls which are carried to the Park by the wind: "No

sound_of_it_hara_hut_tha_windl" (P. 45) . The voices of the

148
Falls reverberate in the Park with the voices of the Sunday
picnickers. His listening to these voices is his act of
loving: "How do I love you? These! / (He hears! Voices
indeterminate! Sees them / moving, in groups, by twos and
fours -- filtering / off by way of the many bypaths.)" (B
45). He recalls "a fatal day" when the performance of
singing in the Park dissolves into one of Paterson's numerous
journalistic accounts of an act of violence which transformed
the Park's tranquility into a small riot (B 46).

This whole section is a constant process of
transformation. A grasshopper takes flight at Paterson's
feet; its "empurpled wings," flashing "a churring song,"
leads his imagination onward through the scene (B 47).
"Before his feet, at each step, the flight / is renewed" and
he "is led forward by their announcing wings," which become
"the mind's wings" (B 48). Paterson is reminded of the red
stone grasshopper "carved to be / endless flight" by "the
mind's wings": "AND a grasshopper of red basalt, boot-long, /
tumbles from the core of his mind, / a rubble-bank
disintegrating beneath a / tropic downpour / Chapultepec!
grasshopper hill!" (B 49, 47). This red stone grasshopper
stands as the carved image of "Love that is a stone endlessly
in flight, / so long as stone shall last bearing / the
chisel's stroke . . . Love / combating sleep / the sleep /
piecemeal" (B 49). More and more, "the imagination [of
Paterson] soars, as a voice / beckons, a thundrous voice,
endless /--as sleep: the voice / that has ineluctably called
them-- / that unmoving roar!" (B 55):

80 during the early afternoon, from place

to place he moves,

his voice mingling with other voices

--the voice in his voice

opening his old throat, blowing out his lips,
kindling his mind (more

149
than his mind will kindle)

--following the hikers. (B 56).

Walking in the Park, Paterson encounters a "young man"
who "is sitting with his back to the rock among / some ferns
playing a guitar" (B 57). No one except "Mary" listens to
him and dances to the music he plays because "the old
cultures intoxicates them" (B 57). The picnickers turn their
backs on the music of the young man, simply "celebrating /
the varied Sunday of their loves with / its declining light"
(B 58), enacting a degraded ceremony of love. He encounters
the inevitable weekend Evangelist, preaching or "shouting" in
the Park (B 59). The Evangelist "adds his useless voice" to
the helpless scene of love in the Park (B 60). In the next
section, the Evangelist, who gives his name as Klaus Ehrens,
shrieks his version of the Gospel. His harangue / sermon is
woven through the narrative of the next section. The sermon
is a parody of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, as
Williams's notes show (Sankey 94), preparing the way for the
Messiah. All the voices Paterson has been absorbing in the
Park are the sounds which block the vision of truth. The
Word is dissolved into the sounds of the world, the
schismatic churches of the urban diaspora.

Paterson continues to walk through the Park, this "female
to the city," "instructing his thoughts" on her "body." This
body, the beauty of the world which Paterson seeks to redeem
through the crucifixion of his language and flesh, is
everywhere the source and the goal in this section. He is
"nailed / to a tree: Women," to "Make a song out of that [the
blockage]: concretely" (B 63, 62), a song which "instructs
his thoughts / (concretely)" (B 43) upon "those poor souls,"
his brides (B 62). This is Williams's poetic vision that
"Men have given the direction to my life and women have
always supplied the energy," the vision acquired from his

150
experience "as a medical student" who fell in love with "the.
corpse of a young negress, a 'high yaller,‘ lying stripped on
the dissecting table before me" (Autobiography 55).

Paterson continues to hear the cracked Evangelist's
sermon at the observation tower, which plays a role as a
symbolic place where the vision of the "churches and
factories" is given to Paterson, for the sermon is concerned
half with Protestant piety and half with the economic gospel
Williams had been hearing from Pound for years. Klaus Ehrens
speaks of his own transformation in the New World, from a
poor man in the Old Country to a rich man in the New World (B
66-67). Paterson was spiritually a poor man in this world,
but he becomes a rich man by abandoning the riches of this
world. Metaphorically, he was "a pretty small frog in a
mighty big pool" (B_67). The sermon of the Evangelist is
complicated by prose interludes tracing the history of
Hamiltonian Yankeeism, by which America has been transformed
from "a producer of precious metals, pelts and raw materials"
into a manufacturer of goods (B 69). America has been
deprived of its riches by "a private monopoly" of the Federal
Reserve System, "a Legalized National Usury System" (B 73,
74). America becomes "the eagle" who has "made himself /
small--to creep into the hinged egg / until therein he
disappeared, all / but one leg upon which a claw opened / and
closed wretchedly gripping / the air, and would not--for all
/ the effort of the struggle, remain / inside" (B 73).

Just as the sermon of John the Baptist was a cry in the
Wilderness, so the sermon of the Evangelist becomes a voice
"calling to the birds and trees" and "calling the winds,"
disappearing "into the empty blue" (B 64). "Few listen. /
Or, in fact, pay the least / attention"; "nobody wants to
listen" (B 65, 66). The sermon of the Evangelist becomes
"the falls of his harangue" to "the paltry congregation" of
an "orchestral dullness" with "iron smiles," which "hung

151
featureless / upon the ear" (B 70, 64, 62, 63, 70). Even .
though he, like John the Baptist, is not Christ himself, the
"figure / from the clouds," the Evangelist is a forerunner of
Christ, the Light, whose "prismed brow" the "light fondles
as if inclined to form a halo--" (B 65, 64). The
Evangelist's condemnation of the worldly riches becomes a
half-serious half-ironic doxology to "our Blessed Lord who /
died on the Cross for us that we may be saved" (B 73). To
this is added Paterson's own provisional epiphany as the
second section moves to its ending:
The world spreads
for me like a flower opening--and

will close for me as might a rose--

In that I forget
myself perpetually--in your
composition and decomposition
I find my
despair! (B 75)

In the third section, night falls. The voices or the
sounds which have filled the Park have been replaced by the
light of the moon; Paterson is led to an inward meditation.
With "the plunging night," the moon arises and "The descent
beckons [Paterson] / as the ascent beckoned" (B 80, 77).
"Alone, watching the May moon above the / trees," Paterson is
beckoned into memory, "a kind / of accomplishment / a sort of
renewal / even / an initiation" (B 79, 77). His "descent"
into memory is "a new awakening : / which is a reversal / of
despair" (B 78). "With evening, love wakens / though its
shadows / which are alive by reason / of the sun shining-- /
grow sleepy now and drop away / from desire" (B 78). In
meditation Paterson once again hears the sounds of the
pouring water and, "missing the sense (though he tries) /
untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity / of his

152
listening" (B 81). Realizing that "no poet has come" yet who
is able to interpret the sounds of the falls, Paterson cries
for the poet in despair: "Poet, poet! sing your song,
quickly! or / not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out /
your kind" (B 79, 83). This poet is a man of vision to sing
"the poem, the most perfect rock and temple, the highest /
falls," the poem of "the morning of a new age" (B 80).

In his meditation Paterson sees that "the language is
worn out," "divorced / from the insistence of place-- / from
knowledge, / from learning--the terms / foreign, conveying no
immediacy, pouring down" (B 84, 83). The feminine
other--variously symbolized by the women in the Park, the
Park itself, and the hero's erotic muse--insists that she is
entirely "lost among the words" (B 84). Throwing herself

upon a bed, she cries bitterly with "a pitiful gesture": "You
have abandoned me! . . . / Invent (if you can) discover or /
nothing is clear" (B 84). This meditation takes Paterson to

that point of crisis and extremity where he must either find
radically new ways of pursuing his language and vision or
abandon the quest entirely.

This crisis is further exemplified at the end of Book Two
in a long letter of complaint from a young woman poet. Its
narrative themes stand in ironic counterpart to the sexual,
poetic, and imaginative themes which have been developing in
the poem. The poetess, identified as "C," is equated by many
critics with Marcia Nardi who was "a dark, wiry, diminutive,
and bedraggled young woman landed at Williams' office door in
the middle of a cold spring storm" with "her sick boy"
(Mariani, William_Garlos_Williams 461; Theodora R. Graham,
164-193). She is also associated with "a beautiful young
black maid" beating a rug who, observed by Williams from the
window of his attic study in the summer of 1936, found her
way into his early version of Baterson, "Paterson: Episode

17" (Mariani, William_Garlos_Williams 414) . She is also

153
associated with Williams's "memories of Mable Watts, the
seductive patient from his early days as a doctor, a woman
who had had as much sexual success with white men as with
black" (Mariani, William_Garlos_Williams 415). Each of these
three female figures becomes for Williams a Kora in Book
Three of Baterson, who is "drunk and bedraggled to release /
the strictness of beauty / under a sky full of stars /
Beautiful thing" (B 104). She, Mariani says, represents for
Williams "the black plush, the New World beauty, the radiant
stain that would illuminate the dirty white sheets of his

Baterson" (William_Garlos_Williams 415).

Book Three: "The Library"

Book Three is dominated by sexual imagery and by
Paterson's descent into hell, into "the library," and into
marriage. The three catastrophes of the wind (in the first
section), the fire (in the second section), and the flood (in
the third section) which destroyed the City of Paterson in
1902 become vehicles of the metaphor for the marriage of
Paterson and "the Beautiful thing." In the first section,
Paterson is called to the library by the wind, the perfume of
the locust blossoms, the smell of his bride whom he picks up
when he descends from the Mountain. He complains to her that
she smells "like a whore" and asks her: "TAKE OFF YOUR /
CLOTHES! . . . You smell / like a whore. I ask you to bathe
in my / opinions, the astonishing virtue of your / lost body
(I said)" (B 105). In the second section, Paterson is
"overcome" by the naked beauty of his bride lying on "the
holy sheets" of the marriage bed, "lethargic . . . waiting
for / the fire" (B 125). The fire of Paterson's sexual
passion consumes his bride: "Beautiful thing / --intertwined
with the fire" (B 120). The Beautiful thing is "deflowered,
reflowered there by / the flame" (B 118). The third section
depicts the aftermath of their sexual consummation in the

154
imagery of the flood, which covers Paterson the city with
"fertile (?) mud," the mud of Paterson's sperm which
fertilizes his bride (B 140).

Like Book Two, Book Three is an imaginative journey
toward Paterson's past, toward his interior mind. It
inevitably reminds us that Williams was an assiduous reader
of Joyce, especially of Ulysses. "I may have been
influenced," Williams writes, "by James Joyce who had made
Dublin the hero of his book. I had been reading lesses" (1
Wanted 72). "The action of the book," as James Guimond says,
"takes place in his mind as he reads in a library" (189).

The Park is closed at nine o'clock. Paterson descends from
the Mountain and is led to the library by "A cool of books

a wind or ghost of a wind / in all books echoing the
life" (B 95). He is immersed in books in the library. The
book is identified with "the locust tree / in bloom" which
the dog, the poet, barks at (B 95). The "perfume" of the
tree "is itself a wind moving / to lead the mind [of
Paterson] away / . . . back to his own / mind . / in which
a falls unseen / tumbles and rights itself / and refalls--and
does not cease, falling / and refalling with a roar, a
reverberation / not of the falls but of its rumor / unabated
- / --and still the roar in his mind is / unabated" (B
96-97). Led by the scent of locust blossoms, "the wind that
has tripped us, pressed upon / us, prurient or upon the
prurience of our fears," Paterson runs into the library which
"has a smell of its own / of stagnation and death" (B 97,
100). He is oppressed by "a roar of books / from the wadded
library . . . / until / his mind begins to drift," the cry of
the Beautiful thing codified in the dead language of the
books at the library and disseminated into fragments by the
idea vendors (B 100).

His descent is to "comb out the language," the language
of the Beautiful thing in the library, the world of words (B

155
145). In the library, Paterson reads the newspaper stories
of three catastrophes of tornado, the fire, and the flood
which destroyed Paterson. Paterson is shaken by a tornado in
the first section and consumed by fire in the second section
and cleansed by the flood in the third section. "[TJhese
apocalytic events are internalized as moments of violent
emotional liberation in which Paterson's hard egotistical
surface is profoundly shaken" (Breslin 189). Paterson
himself becomes the library, the world of words where "Dead
men's dreams, confined by these walls, risen, / seek an
outlet and where "The spirit [of the words] languishes" (B
100). Like the library, Paterson smells of dead language, as
Roy Harvey Pearce says, "academicism of all sorts which is at
the root of modern man's troubles--the ultimate expression of
his divorce from his world of that split between writing and
living upon which Dr. Paterson's poetess-correspondent harps
so neurotically. The poet hopes to find aid and comfort in
the Library but instead finds only more evidence of language
gone dead, killed off by those who use it" (123).

Williams likens the library to a hell, imagining
Paterson's descent as "a descent into a / hell," as an
earlier version shows (qtd. in Sankey 128). In_the library,
Paterson is immersed in the old files of newspapers and sets
out on another imaginative journey into Hell. His descent is
associated with the descent of Christ into Hell "For what we
cannot accomplish, what / is denied to love" (B 79). Thus,
the descent of Paterson is not only made up of the despairs
caused by the degraded images of love in the Park, but also
signifies "a new awakening" of Paterson to love: "Love
without shadows stirs now / beginning to waken / as night /
advances" (B 78). Paterson sits in the library and reads and
insofar as Paterson functions as a transhistorical
consciousness, his reading becomes a kind of phantasmogoria

of the violence of American history. It recollects the

156
slaughter of Indians, the despoliation of the Wilderness.
For the library is a kind of archive of death, full of the
narratives of the dissemination of the word and the arrogance
of its servants.

Paterson gradually begins to wake up from the nightmarish
rigor of the Word, the descent to and through the New World,
and realizes his identity: "Who am I? /--the voice!" (B 107).
"A tornado approaches" then and "pours / over the roofs of
Paterson, ripping, / twisting, tortuous" (B 111). "Searching
among books; the mind elsewhere / looking down / Seeking" (B
112). In the second section, Paterson reads of the Paterson
fire in newspaper files which doomed the city to destruction.
"Whirling flames, leaping / from house to house, building to
building / carried by the wind" consumed the whole city of
Paterson (B 118). Reading of this fire in the library,
Paterson is imaginatively "intertwined with the fire" (B 120)
and is "deflowered, reflowered there by / the flame: a second
flame, surpassing / heat" (B 118). He becomes "the flame's
lover" (B 123).

The newspapers Paterson reads in the library, "consumed"
by fire, are "scattered to the winds" (B 117). Consumed by
fire, the library is "muffled and dead" and, in the silence
of the library, Paterson hears "an inverted / bell
resounding, a / white-hot man become / a book, the emptiness
of / a cavern resounding" (B 122, 123). The sound of this
"inverted bell" leads Paterson to the vision of "An old
bottle" which, "mauled by the fire / gets a new glaze, the
glass warped / to a new distinction, reclaiming the /
undefined" (B 118). Paterson is burnt down to beauty, the
"beauty of fire-blasted sand / that was glass, that was a
bottle: unbottled," the bottle which is "mauled / by the
flames, belly-bent with laughter: / yellow, green" (B 117).
And he becomes a thing itself like

a leaf, a

157
pebble, an old man
out of a story by

Pushkin

Ah!
rotten beams tum-
bling,

an old bottle
mauled (2 116)

This bottle is symbolic of the Beautiful thing, whose'
"vulgarity of beauty surpasses all their / perfections" (B
119). Her "beauty is / a defiance of authority" (B,119).
The Beautiful thing is "waiting upon me, waiting for / the
fire," the passion of love (B 125). She is the girl he
picked up when he descended from the Mountain. At that time
Paterson was blind to her beauty because he was not yet
purified and thought that she was "a whore" (2.105). Now,
he is awakened to the "rigor of beauty." He is "shaken" by
her charming beauty and can "do nothing but admire / and lean
to care for [her]," whose body is "stretched out negligently
on the dirty sheet" in the damp basement (B 125). She is "a
flame, / black plush, a dark flame" (B 128). "I," Paterson
cries to her, "make a fool of myself, mourning the lack / of
dedication / mourning its losses, / for you" (B 121). The
image of the woman in the basement as a flame is associated
with that of "Persephone / gone to hell . . . a docile
queen," (B_125-126). Paterson desires to be transformed into
a new being; he "pass[es] into the flame, becomes the flame--
/ the flame taking over the person" (B 121).

The first prose passage of the second section describes
‘the religious ceremony of Indians, breathing "acrid fumes" in
a tepee (B 115). This fire ritual serves as a fine parable

158
of Paterson's "breathing the books in," the smells of books
in the library (B 115). Just as the ritual is an .
"antagonistic" dream to "address the Spirit of Fire," so
Paterson's reading of books is his "antagonistic" dream "to
break / through the skull of custom / to a place hidden from
/ affection, women and offspring--an affection / for the
burning" (B 115, 114, 115). Paterson's spiritual
metamorphosis, then, signifies "a defiance of authority" like
the Beautiful thing, a Kora, "Persephone / gone to hell" (B
119, 125). He becomes "a Niké," a winged goddess of victory
who "shall live in his honor" (B 120).

Williams compares the fire destruction of the Paterson
library with that of the Alexandrian library. Sappho's poems
were among the lost manuscripts; they were "the flame's
lover," who survived "old conflagrations"; they "were
unwrapped, fragment by fragment, from / outer mummy cases of
papier maché inside / Egyptian sarcophagi" and remain "a
defiance of authority" as the Beautiful thing to this day (B
123, 119). Paterson also survives the destructive fire and
emerges with the fire of poetic imagination: "The person
submerged / in wonder, the fire become the person" (B 122).
Paterson is transformed into a flame to "BRIGHTen / the cor /
ner / where you are! / --a flame, / black plush, a dark
flame" (B 128).

In the beginning of the third section, Williams uses the
destruction of the Paterson library by fire as the symbol of
the destruction of "all libraries," the centers of "A chance
word," rather than the concrete word of reality, which "may
destroy the world" (B 129). The library is for him the
symbol of the tomb of the Word, which is buried in footnotes
‘upon footnotes and loses its original meaning, its
‘thinginess: "Texts mount and complicate them-/ selves, lead
1:0 further texts and those / to synopses, digests and
ennendations" (B 130). The fire has turned the library into

159

"a sour stench of embers" (B 129). "Rain / falls and
surfeits the river's upper reaches, / gathering slowly" (B
129). The rains fall; the flood rises; texts are dispersed

in all directions; fragments of Pound's letters to Williams
whirl through more official and local texts in a parody of
The_Waste_Land, The_Gantos, the modernist vortex itself.
Paterson himself is submerged

-- to the teeth, to the very eyes

uh, uh

FULL STOP

--and leave the world
to darkness
and to

me

When the water has receded most things have lost their
form. They lean in the direction the current went.
Mud covers them

--fertile (?) mud. (2.140)

James Guimond interprets the flood which has covered
Paterson as the three torrents, the torrents of "the
irresponsible imagination," of "the irresponsible erudition,"
and of "ignorant materialism" (192). As "The stream / grows
leaden within him," Paterson is completely buried under the
torrents of "a pustular scum, a decay, a choking /
lifelessness" (B 130, 140), the torrents of "texts
synopses, digests and emendations" (B 130). He is then
identified with a dog "under water" which is carried
"downstream / on the swift current" (B 131). "Pursued by
the whirlpool-mouths, the dog / descends toward Acheron" (B
132). This dead dog is symbolic of the death of Paterson,
‘who has been pursued by the codified Word with "digests and

160
emendations" (B 130). Paterson's death, then, symbolizes "a.
/ peace that comes of destruction" (B 132). Paterson, as
Noah, survives the flood of books; he, as Faitoute, overcomes
all disasters of the tornado, the fire, and the flood; and he
emerges as a new man, a visionary poet. Paterson realizes
his mission as a visionary poet to "[rebrick] up" the words
or to "comb out the language," as a redeeming language to
save the Beautiful thing from her frustration that "Love is
her sorrow" (B 143, 145, 141) or to prevent "a man's
premature death" (Thirlwall 264). And he proclaims that "a
speech-- / is, of necessity, my sole concern" (B 144). At
the end of Book Three, Paterson decides to leave the hell of
the library:

I cannot stay here

to spend my life looking into the past:

the future's not answer. I must

find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself--
comb out the language--or succumb

--whatever the complexion. Let
me out! (Well, go!) this rhetoric
is real! (B 145)

Book Four: "The Run to the Sea"

After harrowing the hell of the library, Paterson is
purified and recovers from his impotence and is ready to meet
his bride, the Beautiful thing. In Book Four, Paterson
finally meets her in the figure of a young nurse, Phyllis.

He becomes now a participant in the actuality of life, in the
river of life, realizing, like Williams's wife, Flossie, that
"we live on a river, that we are a river town" (Williams,
‘Autobiography,391). Book Four describes a marriage of

161

Paterson and the Beautiful thing, which is suggested in its .
title, "The Run to the Sea." The mock idyllic scene of love
in Book Four implies a lost vision of the pastoral America
Williams has dreamed of creating or restoring through
Baterson, or what Audrey T. Rodgers calls "a poignant
nostalgia for an idyllic past when man and woman, nature and
the creative imagination existed in perfect harmony" (95).

"Phyllis" is a standard pastoral name and one is not
surprised to find her accompanied by "Corydon." The
relationship between Corydon and Phyllis is "a sad picture"
of the pastoral scene of love between a shepherd and a
shepherdess, "a perverted but still recognizable 'happy'
picture" of a Theocritan idyl (Williams, Belented_Letters
305). Unlike Sappho, who wrote poems in the vernacular
language of Lesbos rather than in a literary language,
Corydon, a "cultured" girl, is a poetess who imitates bookish
traditionalists like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats (B 154,
167). Her "place is full of books--in all languages!" (B
152). The idyllic poem of love she reads to Phyllis echoes
Eliot's Prufrock and The_Waste_Land: "Oh Paterson! Oh
married man! / He is the city of cheap hotels and private /
entrances . . ." (B 154). She invites Phyllis to a fishing
trip to Anticosti, and, in case one misses such invitations
to fecundity, her poem also echoes Yeats' "The Lake Isle of
Innisfree": "Come with me to Anticosti, where the salmon /
lie spawning in the sun in the shallow water" (B 167).
Corydon, Williams says in a letter to Marianne Moore,
"represents the 'great world' against the more or less
primitive world of the provincial city" (Geleoted_Letters
304). Mockingly, the idyllic love of Corydon and Phyllis is
not achieved in the pastoral landscape but simply parodied in
the environment full of the "houses placarded: / Unfit for
human habitation" (B 164). And for them "love is begrimed,
befouled" and their love affair gives us a vision of hell (B

162
164) rather than a vision of "Paradise" (B 167).

Against the cultivated world of Corydon, Paterson appears
to contend with Corydon for the hand of Phyllis. He stands
as a localist, a physician from Paterson. Their struggle
symbolizes the battle between the poets of the old tradition,
the dogs who "have run out-- / after the rabbits," and the
poets of the new, the lame dogs "sniffing the trees" and
digging "a musty bone" (B 3). It is, then, no wonder that
Paterson is "Only one" whom Phyllis is "interested in / right
now" (B_153). Phyllis has grown up in Ramapo where "a
strangeness and a bold association of wild and cultured life
grew up together" (B 12). She has been "limited in the
primitive, provincial environment" of Ramapo (Williams,
Geleoted_Letters 305). She is a young girl trained at
Paterson and working in "the Big City as a Professional
Woman" (B 150). As Walter Scott Peterson holds, "her
migration to the city seems emblematic of man's repudiation
of the local. . . . In a specific sense the forces leading
her to destruction are the same forces that Williams sees
leading American poetry to destruction, but in a more general
sense they are also the forces leading to the defeat of
imagination and love" (186). She is symbolic of the
Beautiful thing, "a defiance of authority," the "radiant gist
that / resists the final crystallization" (B 119, 109).

Phyllis resists the sexual temptation of a Lesbian
Corydon. Even though she tells Paterson that "I don't know
why I can't give myself to you" (B 159), Phyllis is
instrumental in reviving Paterson's potency by giving her
fresh body and mind to him. Paterson strips Phyllis naked as
she stands before him "quietly to be undressed" (2 155).
Kissing and talking, he slowly and courteously explores her
body with his hands. He is persistent, taking "her nipples
gently in his lips," but she slightly resists: "No / I don't
like it" (B 164). Paterson's gentle, courteous, and

163
persistent caressing and Phyllis's preservation of virginity.
as seen in her slight refusal show the freshness of their
love affair. Finally, Phyllis becomes active in the affair,
coming upon Paterson who lies "upon his back upon the couch";
she, "half dressed," straddles him and her "thighs are sore
from riding" (B 169).

The second section is full of images of light, and
associated with events like Madam Curie's discovery of radium
and Columbus's discovery of the New World. Paterson is
identified with various images of light. He is endowed with
light by attending with his son a lecture on atomic fission
in the Solarium, "a kind of temple of the sun--a shrine of
Apollo, who is in many ways the presiding deity of the
section" (Peterson 193; Doyle 130). As a counterpart to the
enclosed image of the library which "has a smell of its own /
of stagnation and death" in the first section of Book Three
(B 100), the Solarium in this section is open to the source
of life, the sun in which the patients in the hospital sun
themselves for their healing. The hospital symbolizes the
light itself, for "the glow through the glass roof / seem[s]
ablaze, rivalling night's queen," the moon (B 171).

It is very significant that Paterson attends the lecture
with his young son, for the lecture reminds him of the words
of Norman Douglas, the author of Gouth_Wind, that "The best
thing a / man can do for his son, when he is born, is to die"
(B 171). The birth of his son means his death, just as the
radium discovered by Madam Curie comes out of the ashes of
the smashed Uranium. The birth of his son, signifying the
birth of an idea, is the rebirth of Paterson out of his old
self. Madam Curie becomes the symbol of Paterson's
fulfilled woman. She is pregnant: "Curie, the man, gave up /
his work to buttress her. / But she is pregnant" "with
ponderous belly, full / of thought," who gives birth to "the
radiant gist," the very language inherent in things and the

164

fact of life before us: "Love, the sledge that smashes the
atom" (B 176-177). Madam Curie who discovered "the Gamma
rays that cure the cancer" (B 182) is associated with a
Virgin Mary who is pregnant with Christ. Her discovery of
radium is then properly hailed as comparable to the news of
the birth of Christ, the Redeemer:

Glory to God in the highest

and on earth, peace, goodwill to

men! (B 176)

Curie's discovery of radium becomes analogous to
Columbus's discovery of the New world. Her attempt to
untangle the radiant gist is an ideal of the poet who attemps
to uncover "a rarest element . . . hidden in the very words
which are going in at our ear and from which we must recover
underlying meaning as realistically as we recover metal out
of ore" (Williams, Autobiograohx 362). She is a radiant gist
"splitting the atom of / bitterness," a visionary poet, who
is "waiting for the sun to part the labia / of shabby clouds

playing the words / following a table which is the

synthesis / of thought, a symbol that is to him, / sun up! a
Mendelief, the elements laid / out by molecular weight,
identity / predicted before found" (B 172, 179). Paterson
here imagines the process of Madam Curie's discovery of
radium as his own process of splitting the poetic foot, the
atom of the poetic line, or by finding "the new way of
measuring'" (Williams, Seleoted_Letters 243). Paterson's
struggle to find a new poetic measure is Williams's own
effort to find a new poetic measure. "I," Williams wrote in
a letter to Parker Tyler in 1946, "always think of
Mendelejeff's table of atomic weights in this connection.

It may be that I am no genius in the use of the new measure
I find inevitable; it may be that as a poet I have not had
the genius to do the things I set up as essential if our
verse is to blossom. I know, however, the innovation I

165
predict must come to be. Someone, some infant now, will have
to find the way we miss" (Geleeted_Letters 243).

"Someone, some infant now," who is prophesied by Williams
to use "the new measure," is the son of Paterson who has
attended the lecture on atomic fission with Paterson,
emerging as the young poet "A. G." who sent a letter to
Paterson. Just as radium is the child of Madam Curie's
scientific discovery, so the young poet, "A. G." (Allen
Ginsberg), is the son of Paterson's poetic theory, who
conceives "no ideas but in things," envisioning for himself
"some kind of new speech": ". . . one actual citizen of your
community has inherited your experience in his struggle to
love and know his own world-city, through your work, which is
an accomplishment you almost cannot have hoped to achieve" (B
174). In short, like Madam Curie, Paterson is transformed
into a visionary poet, who is incarnated in the figure of the
young poet "A. G.," who is a redeeming language, the Word in
whom "no ideas but in things" are found.

In the final portions of this section, this redeeming
language and poetry is ranged against the cult of "money" of
modern society, which Williams sees as "crime / under the
circumstances . . . the cancer, usury" to be cured, "joke /
to be wiped out sooner or later at stroke / of pen" (B
182-183). The "Gamma rays" of credit "stalled / in money"
should be let out to cure the cancer of society and establish
"LOCAL control of local purchasing / power" (B 182, 183,
185). Williams associates money with Uranium, split to
release its radiance: "Let out the fire, let the wind go! /
Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer" (B 182). While
money is "the gold, in short, that Phideas stole," the
"squalor of spreading slums," credit is "the Parthenon," the
"splendor of renaissance cities," the "value created and
received, / 'the radiant gist' against all that scants our
lives" (B 184, 186, 184, 186).

166

For his "final somersault" (B 204), Paterson looks back
on his childhood, the beginning of the City of Paterson. His
meditation on the past of Paterson both as a man and a city
is necessary for his emergence as a messiah to save the
world. The stream of his memories is the river, the river of
the serpent, "Knower / of tides, counter of hours, wanings
and / waxings, enumerator of snowflakes, starer / through
thin ice" (B 193). This river runs to the sea, which is then
"the nostalgic sea" (B 201). This nostalgic sea, Williams
says, is "Not the actual ocean" but the metaphorical ocean
(qtd. in Sankey 194-195), "the blood dark sea" of "the shark,
that snaps / at his own trailing guts, makes a sunset / of
the green water" (B 202, 200). Paterson is submerged in the
sea of the bloody scenes of murders, narrated in the prose
sections interspersed with the poetry sections: the
bayonetted Jonathan "from motives of private revenge" (B
188); Fred Goodell's murder of his own baby daughter for the
reason that "her crying annoyed him" (B 196); John Johnson's
"inhuman butchery" of an aged couple just for "money" (B
199).

In the sea of blood, Paterson remembers an Edenic
landscape of Paterson of the past. Paterson was "a place
inhabited only / by straggling trappers and wandering
Indians," a Garden of Eden which was "almost hid / by dense
foliage" in "a deep-set valley between hills," surrounded by
"a beautiful wilderness where mountain pink / and wood violet
throve (B 193). This place was gradually transformed into a
village where "Branching trees and ample gardens gave / the
village streets a delightful charm and / the narrow
(old-fashioned brick walls added / a dignity to the shading
'trees" (B 195). Later, this beautiful village grew into a
nLill town, which was still attractive and primitive like the
zancient Egypt: "In the town candle light / appears. No
Jnighted.streets. It is as dark / as Egypt" (B 195). In the

167
evening, "the town turned out to the circus" (B 197). The
town used to "drink of the water of Dublin Spring," the
"finest water" (B 198).

This Edenic vision of Paterson the city encourages
Paterson the man to heroically resist the cries of the sea,
like Odysseus who ordered his soldiers to "Put wax rather in
your / ears against the hungry sea" (B 201). Realizing that
"The sea is not our home" (B 201), Paterson emerges from the
sea as the "Seed / of Venus," who returns "to / a girl
standing upon a tilted shell, rose / pink" (B 202). His
return to a girl signifies his recovery of his potency, which
prompts him to remember girls of the past: "Margaret of the
big breasts / and daring eyes," Lucille with "gold hair and
blue eyes," the "loving Alma," "the cold Nancy, with small /
firm breasts," and others (B 192). Paterson is awakened from
his sleep in the sea of blood by the singing of the sea
girls, which reminds him of "the water's steady roar, as of a
distant / waterfall"; he picks "some beach plums from a low
bush and / sample[s] one of them, spitting the seed out, /
then head[s] inland, followed by the dog" (2 203). This seed
will reforest the land of Paterson by the sprinkled blood of
the murdered, creating a new world, a new poetic world by a
new form, a new measure, and a new language. Therefore,
Paterson the man, who is "headed inland," is identified with
Paterson the city, the land of America (Williams, l_Wanted
22), which is submerged in the sea of blood and emerges as a
new world, the land of Walt Whitman: "In the end," Williams
says in his Autobiograsraohx, "the man [Paterson] rises from
the sea where the river appears to have lost its identity and
accompanied by his faithful bitch, obviously a Chesapeake Bay
retriever, turns inland toward Camden where Walt Whitman,
much traduced, lived the latter years of his life and died"
(392).

Paterson's heading for the land of Whitman is

168
significant, for Whitman is for Williams "an instrument" of a
new poetic line and a new language or dialect, "breaking
finally with English prosody" and "initiating a new measure"
(Geleeted_Letters 286-287, 332; Autobiography 392). And his
rebirth from the sea of death, then, signifies the death of
his old self and his resurrection: "The old man meets the
young people and lives on" (Williams, l_uanted 22). Paterson
is transformed into the young poet "A. G.," a poet of the
here and now who sings "the look of streets and people,
events that have happened here and there" (B 195). Surviving
the blood sea of the past memories, he becomes a poet of "no
ideas but in things," a poet who finds his "virgin purpose, /
the language" to be newly measured to save the world (B 187).

Book Five

The theme of resurrection is rooted in Williams's
religious feeling that death is not the end of life.

Williams once said that, "as you recollect, as you look back
to find a meaning, nobody knows anything about death and
whether it is an end. It possibly isn't an end. It's a
possibility that there's something more to be said"
(Thirlwall 281). The world where Paterson is headed is a
metaphor for the redeemed land of the Word, the land of the
embodiment of knowledge, the land of poetic imagination. In
Book Five, significantly, "Paterson, from the air / above the
low range of its hills / across the river / on a rock-ridge /
has returned to the old scenes / to witness / What has
happened" (B 209).

All the world hails the return of Paterson to the land.
Paterson finds that the "old scenes" have changed and the new
world is waiting for him. Spring has returned. Looking out
the window, Paterson hears "the song of the fox sparrow /
reawakening the world / of Paterson / --its rocks and streams
/ frail tho it is / from their long winter sleep / In March--

169

/ the rocks / the bare rocks / speak" (B 207). Casting off
his old self, he finds himself transformed into a man of
imagination like "an eagle / from its crag" (2 207), a
visionary poet like the Word. He needs "Not prophecy! NOT
prophecy! / but the thing itself!" (B 208). When "prophecy"
is required, we fail to contact the world, just longing for
the world beyond, the invisible world. His job is simply to
"WALK in the world" (B 213). For Paterson there is no
distinction between here and there: "Anywhere is everywhere"
(B 235). There is no distinction between the sacred and the
profane: "The whore and the virgin, an identity" (B 210).

Book Five of Baterson presents "A WORLD OF ART / THAT
THROUGH THE YEARS HAS / SHBXIYEQ" (2.209), the world which
celebrates an identity of the whore and the virgin. In the
first section, Lorca’s Tha.Loxe_of_Don_2erlimolin and

Soupault's The_Last_Nights_of_2aris center around the theme
that "The moral / proclaimed by the whorehouse / could not be

better proclaimed / by the virgin, a price on her head, / her
maidenhead!" (B 208). In these books, the whore is seen as
the virgin, the "bride eternal," the beauty "in the orchid
stench, in the vulgar" and the hero advises the readers to
"'Loose your love to flow' / while you are yet young / male
and female" (B 215, 214, 216). In the second section, this
eternal bride is associated with Sappho, who is for Williams
the symbol of an ideal poet, the poet who sings an identity
of the virgin and the whore in "a clear gentle tinkling voice

leading [the readers] to the rout of the vocables" (B
217-222).

In the world of art, even white and black become one: "To
be with those guys made me know that any white man if he
thought straight and studied hard, could sing and dance and
play with the Negro" (B 221). Williams believes that the
world of art can be best represented by "a satyric play," a
satyric dance in which the "devout" and "ribald" are

170
exquisitely interplayed (B 221). Mary's dance in the Park in
the first section of Book Two, for example, is also a satyric
dance of Priapus. The vision of a satyric dance is the
vision of poetry as "a complete little universe," the
universe of a satyric dance of the virgin and the whore, the
universe of not the abstract idea but the real thing. Thus,
the poetic world should not be divorced from, but express
"the whole life of the poet" which is not the "idea" but the
"thing" itself (B 224). The poet is a satyr to "dance to a
measure / contrapuntally, / Satyrically, the tragic foot" (B
239).

The third section is also dominated by the world of art:
Brueghel's picture of a Nativity and Unicorn tapestries at
the Cloisters. Brueghel's picture presents the "incredulous"
scene that a Baby is "born to an old man / out of a girl and
a pretty girl / at that" (B 227). In this Nativity picture,
Williams images "the Virgin Mary" as the "glorious whore
adored by the ages, rightly adored by the ages into
perpetuity" (qtd. in Mariani, "Baterson_§" 118). Mary for
Williams is, as Mariani says, an ideal woman, who "had
maintained her secret, making out of it . . . a glorious
fiction, serene and dignified" ("Baterson_5" 119), a fiction
that "no woman is virtuous / who does not give herself to her
lover / -—forthwith" (B 229). The Unicorn tapestry is also
"the living fiction" of an identity of the whore and the
virgin, "both for sale / to the highest bidder! / and who
bids higher / than a lover?" (B 234, 237-8). These works are
what Jerome Mazzaro calls "the secularizing of the
Incarnation" ("The Descent Once More" 297), identifying
Paterson with a Baby and the Unicorn, "the locus / where two
women [the virgin and the whore] meet" (B 110; Woodward,
159).

Williams dedicated Book Five to Toulouse-Lautrec, who,

according to Williams, "was inclined to praise woman, even if

171
she was a whore" (Thirlwall 288) . "It is my instinctive
affection for these 'lost' girls," Williams writes in his
Autobiography, "that is the best part of me--and them. I
loved them all. Like Toulouse-Lautrec (who had the advantage
of his deformity), I would gladly have lived in a brothel (of
them) for the warmth (extra-curricular) and the comfort to be
derived therefrom" (224). This idea of a woman is central to
Baterson and to Williams's belief that "every married man
carries in his head / the beloved and sacred image / of a
virgin / whom he has whored" (B 234). Eaterson is Williams's
attempt to solve "a linguistic problem reflecting false
'ideas' instead of the real 'thing,'" or to "achieve his goal
of redemption of the language by eliminating the moral and
physical distinctions of virgin and whore through a
recognition of their essential identity" (Ashton 195).

This false dichotomy of the virgin and the whore,
Williams believed, is another of those false oppositions
which have haunted American experience, making America a
place of "the bloody loam," "the vilest swillhole of
christiandom, the Passaic River" (B.37; Tn_the_Ameriean_Grain
195). America for Williams is the "Beauty" which is "whored"
by "the inhuman butchery" of the American Puritans, the idea
vendors whose minds were divorced from the reality, forging
their false ideas of the whore and the virgin, the sacred and
the profane, the white and the red, the black and the white.
In this sense, America for Williams is the second revelation
of the Word which was codified in the rigid mind of the
Puritans and which is to be liberated to become the Word of
the third revelation, who redeems man's false vision of good
and bad or virgin and whore. Paterson finally realizes that
his quest is to find the "Beauty" which is codified or
"locked in the mind past all remonstrance" and cries: "Rigor
of beauty is the quest" (B 3).

172

C. "Love, the sledge that smashes the atom"

Williams writes in his Autobiography, "I am a loyal
American citizen. I--I--I've spent my whole life, generally

speaking, for my country, trying to serve it in every way I
know how. I've even written a book about it" (317). The
book Williams wrote as "a loyal American citizen" is In_the
Ameriean_Grain, which aims "to get inside the heads of some
of the American founders or 'heroes' . . . by examining their
original records" (Autobiography 178) . In_the_Amar.inan_Grain
is "an inclusive definition" of "the American make-up"
(Autobiography 236), which found its way to his magnum_opus,
Baterson. "Thus," Louis L. Martz rightly insists, "Baterson
becomes the full realization of the moral vision, the
literary theory, the aesthetic manifesto, set forth in the
best of his earlier works, ln_the_Amerioan_Grain" and these
two works "reinforce each other" ("The Unicorn in Paterson"
78, 87).

Baterson is, Martz says, "one expanded metaphor" of
Williams's version of the American Grain (Boem_or_the_Mind
138). The American Puritan, Williams holds in ln_the
Ameriean_Grainr is dwindled into "a shell for his own 'soul'"
because of his fears of "the animate touch" with the New
World, "into picturesque smallness: children, dwarfs, elves"
(64, 177, 64). The Pilgrims of the Mayflower, "despoiled and
having nothing" in the wilderness of the New World, "looked
black at the world and damning its perfections praised a zero
in themselves" (65). They kept themselves "mercifully
blinded" to the world and "stressed the 'spirit,'" which "is
an earthly pride which they, prideless, referred to heaven
and the next world" (65). Because of their emphasis on "the
spirit against the flesh," they became "a race incapable of
flower" and "really lost in the world . . . morbidly seeking
the flame,--that terrifying unknown image to which, like

173
savages, they too offered sacrifces of human flesh" at Salem.
(66, 67-68) to appease the anger of the Word. Their
"tight-locked hearts" diminished God into a "God" who is
"redolent of these mysteries" and came "to befoul the New
World" (63, 64, 68). The "whole weight of the wild
continent" contributed to "their condition of mind
forcing it to reproduce its own likeness, and no more" (68).

Williams lets Cotton Mather reveal this Puritan mind by
filling a whole chapter of ln_the_Ameriean_Grain with some
quotations from Mather's Magnalia. The Puritans are regarded
by Cotton Mather as the Israelites of the New World, "a
chosen Generation of Men" or "a People of God settled in
those, which were once the maxilla Territories" (82, 83).

Out of his spiritual pride, Mather distinguishes the Puritans
from the Indians, regarding the Indians as the partisans of
the Devil who was "very strangely Emulating what the Blessed
God gave to Israel in the Wilderness" (101). For Mather, the
Indians are the imitators of "the Affairs of the Church in
the Weu_iTestamentl" like the "Devil" which "imitated what
was in the Church of the Qld_Testament," (102). "The first
thing they did, wherever they came, was to Erect a
Tabernaole, for their false god; which they set always in the
midst of their Camp, and they placed the Ark upon an Alter"
(102).

Williams condemns Mather's Magnolia, "the flower" of
Puritanism, as "a foul thing," suggesting that the Puritan,
not the Indian, was the Devil emulating the Israelites,
implanting "a doctrinaire religion, a form, that is to say,
fixed--but small," which was "bred of brutality, inhumanity,
cruel amputations . . . its rigid clarity, its inhuman
clarity, its steel-like thrust from the heart of each isolate
man straight into the tabernacle of Jehovah without
embellishment or softening" (111, 116, 111). Being caught in
"the baleful beauty of their religion" (113), the Puritans

174
ascended.toward heaven, but failed to descend into earth.
Committing "horrid atrocities in the name of their creed, the
cost of emptiness," they "closed all the world out" (112).
They were "giants" who had "their magnificent logic" but they
were "dwarfs" who could not realize that it was "black deceit
for them to condemn Indian sins, while they cut the ground
from under the Indian's feet without acknowledging so much as
his existence" (113-114). The God of the Puritans is also
"dwarfed" or codified like the Word of the second revelation
by "their magnificent logic" (113).

"If enamored of the gospel," Williams insists in Tn_the
Amerioan_Grain, "the Puritans in a wild New World by that
pure stare into the center of their souls excluded terrors
each for himself, and so, in effect, blocked all ingress and
all egress (in theory) to the tenderer humanities, the
frailties in which beauty lives entangled, rendering their
lives hard, unproductive of that openness which would have
been to them as a flower to the stalk" (129). Williams
associates this inhuman Puritan mind with Yankeeism, which
bred the monsters such as George Washington and Benjamin
Franklin "under the name of prudence" (143). The minds of
these Yankees were "All out of the New World" (154), turning
"totally dehumanized, like a Protestant heaven" (128). This
Yankeeism found its typical proponent in Hamilton, who
planned to harness the Passaic Falls to make Paterson "a
great manufacturing center, a great Federal City, to supply
the needs of the country" (B 69). Hamilton was "the
Federalist champion" who strove "to harness the whole, young,
aspiring genius to a treadmill," turning Paterson or America
into "the land of the company" or "the vilest swillhole in
Christendom" (194, 195). Under his imagination, "Everything
is Federalized and all laws become prohibitive in essence"
(128). In short, Yankeeism is divorced from the local, the
essence of reality, like American Puritanism; the

175
"Federalized" vision of Yankeeism is similar to the
"dehumanized" vision of American Puritanism.

Against this "dead ash" of the Puritans, Martz argues,
there was a contrasting vision, "a living flame" of early
explorers such as Columbus, de Soto, Daniel Boon, Aaron Burr,
Samuel Houston, and Rasles, which is presented in ln_the
Amerioan_Grain ("The Unicorn in Paterson" 78-87). Williams
holds in Tn_the_Amerioan_Grain that the "invisible" world of
the Puritans is replaced by the "visible" world of these
explorers, the world of luxurious beauty attractive "to
touch, to hear, to see, to smell, to taste" (206). Columbus
saw the New World as the newly created world, at whose beauty
God was pleased: "Bright green trees, the whole land so green
that it is a pleasure to look on it. Gardens of the most
beautiful trees I ever saw" (26). All of the Indians for
Columbus stood for new men as "naked as their mothers bore
them . . . youths, well made with very handsome bodies and
very good countenances" (25). They are symbolic of the union
or marriage with the local, and identical with Williams's
conception of the Beautiful thing, an identity of the virgin
and the whore, an identity of the body and the spirit, for
they are "themselves neither black nor white" and they are
both "naked" and "painted" (25).

Like Columbus, Daniel Boone was also "wholly" possessed
by the "beauty of a lavish, primitive embrace in savage, wild
beast and forest" (136). Aaron Burr is for Williams a man of
the "free spirit" who "threw the whole mass of religious
dogma from him and declared himself a disbeliever" (201,
198). "He was immoral as a satyr," who found "the most
refined, courteous, gracious creature" in an "unbeautiful"
widow with "a scar on her face" and married her "in the teeth
of the world" (205, 200). For Williams, he stands for a
whole range of pioneer heroes who people Paterson, the

pioneers who were men of "a poetic knowledge" who had "the

176
conception of the New world as a woman" and "took the descent
once more, to the ground" to cultivate her; their descent is
"a gesture of despair" to redeem her (213, 220, 213), like
Chist, the Word of the third revelation.

Baterson is Williams's secularized version of the love of
Christ for all humanity. It is, then, no wonder that
Baterson revolves around sexual metaphor, a metaphor of
divorce and marriage which ranges from the vision of the
harmonious union of Paterson and the Garret Mountain, to the
scene of their divorce and finally to the vision of their
reunion. This vision of union redeems Paterson, who reaches
"a poetic knowledge" of the co-presence of the whore and the
virgin in existence. Williams borrows his fundamental
marriage metaphor from the Bible. Especially, the
Incarnation of Christ is a Christian metaphor of marriage
between God and man, which demolishes the distinction between
the world here and the world beyond, between the invisible
world and the visible, between the virgin and the whore.
Christ is for Williams the symbol of contact with the beauty
of the local, serving as the model of his poetic theory of
"no ideas but in things," the model of a new measure of love:
"Love, the sledge that smashes the atom" (B 177).

Chapter 5
Conclusion

The Gospel of Matthew describes Christ as assuming the
posture of Moses who decreed the divine Law to the Israelites
on Sinai. Like Moses, Christ preaches his sermon to the
crowds on a mountain, revealing his mission as the Messiah
not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it: "'Do not suppose
that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did
not come to abolish, but to complete. . . . I tell you,
unless you show yourselves far better than the scribes and
Pharisees, you can never enter the kingdom of Heaven'" (5:
17-20). His new interpretation of the Law becomes "a new
commandment: love one another" (John 13: 34). His new
commandment is radical enough to reverse the conception of
"the love of God" into that of "the love of man," identifying
the love of man with the love of God: "If he does not love a
fellow-Christian whom he has seen, he is incapable of loving
God whom he has not seen. . . . [and] whoever loves God must
love his fellow-Christian too" (I John 4: 20—21). Christ's
new commandment is not the annihilation, but the fulfillment
of the Law. Christ is then a visionary who turns to "the
world of the senses ('nature') . . . to find there the
meanings [he needs] to live with and by," as Waggoner defines
it (Ameriean_yisionary_Boetry 19). He naturalizes the
supernatural, or humanizes the supernaturalized Law of Moses.

This radical posture of Christ as a reinterpreter of the
Law is taken up by Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and William
Carlos Williams, who, utilizing a Christ figure both as the
poet and as the hero of their epic poems, reinterpreted the
traditional epics in that Christian context and wrote the
epics of the radical Puritanism, or humanized Protestantism.
Like Christ who initiated a radical Judaism, all of these
three poets are displaced Puritans who denied the original

177

178

sin of nan, finding "the Beautiful thing" in "the sinner," or
recognizing the divinity of each man. Like Christ who .
inaugurated a "new religion," they are the visionary poets
who wrote "the new Bible" of America, the American epics
which sing of identity, an identity of the physical and the
spiritual, the subject and the object, the profane and the
sacred, the Jews and the Gentiles, the white and the red, the
virgin and the whore, here and there, time and timeless.

This romanticism of these three poets partly lay in their
antipathy toward academicism, or their lack of formal
education. Gay Wilson Allen writes of Whitman: "Just as the
whaling ship was Herman Melville's 'Yale and Harvard,’ so was
the newspaper office Walt Whitman's university" (Weu_Walt
Whitman_Handbook 161). Whitman learned the world as a
carpenter building houses, as a printer, or as a journalist.
Crane worked at odd jobs, such as a factory worker. Of these
three poets, even Williams, who was alone educated at the
university, "had no instruction beyond high school
literature" (T_Wanted 14). And their romantic sensibility,
to use Williams's terms, was "rooted in the locality" of the
raw world rather than in the classroom of the educated world
(Autobiography 174), and nourished by their direct contact
with "the things" or the realities of the world through their
jobs.

These three poets inherited their spirituality from their
mothers: the mystic Quakerism of Whitman's mother, or the
Christian Science of Crane's and Williams's mothers. In each
case, their fathers were more naturalistic and practical.
These poets were not sentimentalists, as some critics say,
but genuine visionary poets who rigorously sought the essence
of things. They found "beauty" in the naked world of
"nature," the world of the poor, the battlefields of war, the
obstetric ward of the hospital. Whitman sees Christ in the
face of a dying soldier in the battlefield; Crane seeks an
absolute beauty, "a stab at truth" in the human struggle;

179
Williams finds "the Beautiful thing" in a degraded black girl
beating a rug. .

In this sense, they are the Emersonian poets expounded in
"The Poets" by whose use of "nature" "the distinctions which
we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest
and base, disappear" and to whom "What would be base, or even
obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new
connexion of thought"; they are the Emersonian "epic" poets
who "sing of the gods, and their descent unto men," or the
godliness of men; they are "thus liberating gods" who have
awakened men to get "a new sense" to find "within their
world, another world, or nest of worlds" (10, 11, 17). They
fulfilled Emerson's prophecy, the prophecy of the coming of
"the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all
things await" (21). They "ejaculated as Logos, or Word"
their songs, the songs of the New World in which "a new
nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in
castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer" (23). Being the
possessors, not the tenants, of the world, they are
completely in harmony with the world, as Emerson says of the
American epic poet in "The Poet": "Thou shalt have the whole
land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and
navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the
rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein
others are only tenants and boarders" (24).

Whitman's Song_ot_Myself, Crane's The_Bridge, and
Williams's Baterson are not epics of the "castles" and "the
sword-blade," but epics of "groves and pastures." Even
though these three poets spent most of their lives working
with the people in cities, they had all been captivated by
the pastoral vision of the New World during all their lives.
Whitman's contact with the natural world, especially his
bathing experience "naked" in the sea, "was so acute that it
would bring him repeated ecstasy and torment until the end of
his life" (Allen, Bolitary_Ginger l6). Crane would desire to

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return to the world of his "principal experience" of his
youth, "an outdoor world of streams and open country and
forests, a world that would always be with him" (Unterecker
21). Williams would be "the dark beast" in the "enchanted
woods," where, "away from home, away from school, among these
tall grasses he was lord. And long before he ever thought of
becoming a poet or a physician he dreamed of being a
forester: a primitive Adam or one of those long-vanished
Indian noble savages ranging far and wide in his own primeval
world of second-stand woodland growth" (Mariani, William
Carlos_flilliams 22). It is no wonder, then, that their
epics center around the vision of Paradise: Gong_ot_Myself
evolves around the world of "the grass"; The_Bridge envisions
the "vernal" country, where "pity steeps the grass and
rainbows ring / The serpent with the eagle in the leaves" (GB
117); Baterson_depicts the pastoral vision of the New World
represented in Paterson.

These three epics are not "folk" epics, but "Christian"
epics in the sense of Thomas A. Vogler's classification of
the epic mode. Traditionally, epics are usually classified
into something like the two modes which W. P. Ker calls
"primitive" and "artificial" or "literary" epics, or which C.
S. Lewis calls "primary" and "secondary" epics. However,
Vogler divides the epic modes into the "folk" epics like
those of Homer and Virgil, and the "Christian" epics like the
modern epics of Dante and Milton. The folk epic hero, Vogler
holds, is constantly exposed to the physical conflict and his
heroic virtue is recognized by overcoming "the physical
threat of the destruction or loss of tribal identity and
secure[s] the future of the race through his own fruitful
sexual union or the preservation of some other union," but
the Christian epic hero is involved in the spiritual struggle
and his spiritual quality is realized by his triumph over
"the temptation of sin and the threat of damnation" (7).
Discussing the epics of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart

181
Crane in the context of the Christian epic tradition, Vogler
asserts that these epics of the Christian mode are the "epics
of consciousness," which describe "the history of a mind,"
the growth of the hero's mind, and lead to "an awakening and
rebirth of man as well as the poet" (13, 12, 13).

Vogler's "Christian" epic mode obviously involves a
radical reinterpretation of the classical epics from a
Christian perspective. Early Christian apologists and later
Christians who were influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy
regarded Greek literature and philosophy as "a preparation
for Christ," notably as in Clement of Alexandria's
interpretation of Homer and Plato. In his Greek_Myths_and
Ghristian_Mystery, Hugo Rahner asserts that, ”Guided by the
genius of poetry, this blind singer [Homer] touched with
trembling hands the primal forms of truth, and for us this
makes him the forerunner of the Word that appeared to us
clothed in the flesh of man" (284). Rahner, quoting
Clement's interpretation of Odysseus's suffering on the mast
in terms of Christ's suffering on thecross, maintains that
Odysseus's mast is a symbol of Christ's cross which is the
"sign of victory" and that Odysseus is "the perfect model" of
Christ, the pilot of Christians (373, 379). Following
Ambrose of Milan's argument, he adds that, if Odysseus "falls
short of the perfect model," he is "the man in bonds who is
the mythical prototype of the Christian who is a bondman unto
freedom" (379). Christ on the cross is interpreted both as
"'our Orpheus,'" a visionary poet "who brought home [to the
land of light] his bride, mankind, out of the depths of dark
Hades" and as "'our Odysseus,'" a visionary pilot or hero who
brought his companions to the land of eternal life (383, 58,
383). This Christian interpretation also leads us to see
Homer's lliad as an epic poem of Christian heroism to save
Helen imprisoned in Troy, the land of sin. This Christian
reading of Homer can be applied to Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas's
departure from Troy is regarded on the model of Abraham's

182
journey from Ur of the Chaldees, the land of his father's
house, to the unknown land, the land of milk and honey, and
of Moses's leading of his people from Egypt toward the
Promised Land of Canaan. Aeneas's journey to the Underworld
is a symbolic death of a visionary poet who carries the sin
of all humanity on his shoulder and achieves human salvation
by his death. It is also a symbol of the hero's
transformation as a true Christian and as a leader of his
people to establish the eternal city of Rome, the land of
eternal life.

This metamorphic theme of classical epics seen from a
Christian perspective was typical of the writings of the
early American Puritans, who made every effort to justify
their pilgrimage to the American continent as their mission
to plant the New Canaan, the New Eden. According to Vogler,
the American epics discussed in the preceding chapters are
also the epics of the mind or consciousness. Each of the
heroes in Whitman's Gong_ot_Myselr, Crane's The_Bridge, and
Williams's Baterson experiences his spiritual metamorphosis
through ordeals of consciousness and finally becomes a man of
vision. Whitman's epic Muse migrates "from Greece and Ionia"
to "America" and "ended the strata of her former themes," the
"themes of war," "the epics of Asia's, Europe's helmeted
warriors" to sing "a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide,
untried domain" of "Practical, peaceful life, the people's
life, the People themselves, / Lifted, illumin'd, bathed in
peace--elate, secure in peace" (LG 196, 197, 196, 201).
"Ideal Americanism," Whitman believed, "would take the Greek
spirit and law, and democratize and scientize and (thence)
truly Christianize them for the whole, the globe, all
history, all ranks and lands, all facts, all good and bad"
(2rose_florks 660). Just as Christ destroyed the barriers
between regulated Judaism (poetry ruled by rigid meter) and
free-spirit gentiledom (free verse), so Whitman came "to
essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and

183
poetry," inaugurating free verse, the poetry of "the greatest
eloquence, or the truest power and passion" (Brose_Works
519). Unlike the "old" epic poems of Asia and Europe which
are "rooted in the long past. . . . celebrate man and his
intellections and relativenesses as they have been," Whitman
insists that the American epics should be "New Poetry"
singing "them all as they are and are to be" (Brose_Works
668). .

In this belief, Whitman sings in Song_of_Myself a "new"
epic singing "the average, strong, complete, sweet-blooded
man or woman, the perfect longeve personality" and "To exalt
the present and the real, / To teach the average man the
glory of his daily walk and trade" (LG 202). Personifying
America as a Person, Whitman "troop[s] up thy waters and thy
lands; / . . . thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and
mountains" (LG 203). His epic sings the "Modern Man," not
only "Of physiology from top to toe," but also "Of Life
immense in passion, pulse, and power, / Cheerful, for freest
action form'd under the laws divine" (LG 1). It is not the
song "merely for products gross or lucre," but for "the soul
in thee, electric, spiritual" (LG 205). In other words,
Whitman's epic is concerned with "the thinginess of the
things," not merely the physical but the spiritual domain of
the hero. It is a song of the co-presence of the physical
and the spiritual, the union of the body and the soul. It is
a song of "an identical body and soul, a personality" (Brose
Works 723). The hero of Sonn_of_Mysalf is awakened to the
realty of existence, becoming a poet of the Body and the Soul
(LG 48), affirming everything from heaven to earth. He is,
as Allen says, "the interpreter of the purpose of cosmic
creation, as Christ was the intermediary between God and his
children"; if Milton's epic of 2aradise_Lost is to "justify
the way of God to men," Whitman's Christian epic of Song_of
Myself is to justify the belief that "the physical world has
fulfilled its divinely-intended purpose" (Weu_Walt_Whitman

184
Handbook 200, 205).

This Whitmanian epic spirit is inherited by Crane and
Williams, whose poetic vision is opposed to both the
traditions of American Puritanism and Eliot's negative
modernism as embodied in The_Waste_Land which, according to
Crane, "has dug the ground and buried hope as deep and
direfully as it can ever be done" (Letters 115) and which,
according to Williams, "wiped out our world as if an atom
bomb had been dropped upon it" (Autobiography 174). Both
Crane and Williams envied and admired Eliot's poetic skill
(Crane, Letters 114-115; Williams, Autobiography 174), but
they turned to Whitman as a guide to poetic vision. Whitman
is centrally placed in Crane's The_Bridge, playing a role as
"Our Meistersinger" (GB 94), and is implicitly and explicitly
alluded to in Williams's Baterson, where, as Williams says in
his Autobiography, Paterson seeks his vision by journeying
toward the land of Whitman from the sea of the blood (392).
Crane and Williams reached Whitman by a different route, and
their alignment with Whitman proves James E. Miller's belief
in "Whitman's lodgement in the American poetic psyche"
(W X).

Crane wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson: "The more I
think about my Bridge poem the more thrilling its symbolic
possibilities become and . . . I begin to feel myself
directly connected with Whitman" (Letters 128). Like
Whitman's Gong_or_Myself, Crane's The_Bridge aims "to
enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our
America" (Letters 223). Paradoxically, Crane's
spiritualization of the physical is the way in which he
confirms the physicality of things. While Crane reached
Whitman's optimism through his paradoxical exploitation of
Eliot's poetic technique, Williams turned to Whitman's poetic
form. Williams, regarding Whitman's free verse of "the
imitation of the sounds of the sea per_se" as "a mistake,"

insists that "Whitman with his so-called free verse was

185
wrong: there can be no absolute freedom in verse. You must
have a measure but a relatively expanded measure to exclude
what has to be excluded and to include what has to be
included. It is a technical point but a point of vast
importance" (Seleoted_Letters 135, 321). Williams believed
that "Whitman, great as he was in his instinctive drive, was
also the cause of our going astray" (Geleoted.Essays 339).
Williams's attitude toward free verse is well illustrated in
the third section of Book Two of Baterson, where Williams
describes Paterson as attentively listening to the falls to
grasp its language. Paterson, "missing the sense (though he
tries) / . . . shakes with the intensity / of his listening,"
for the language is "without style" or has "no syllable in
the confused / uproar"--no form, no structure which will give
the words their own significance and authority; he is "lodged
/ under its flow" without structural form (2 81).

Whitman was for Williams, however, "a key man to whom I
keep returning" (Geleoted_Bssays 218), "an instrument" which
led him "into the nature of the line by breaking finally with
English prosody" (Geleoted_Letters 286-287). Williams felt
his resposibility to continue Whitman's "instinctive drive"
to free poetry from its dead form, "the tyrannies of the
past" (Selented_Essays 339, 218), seeking to invent a new
measure which keeps language alive, to build "a new
construction upon the syllables" (Autobiography 392).
Williams's poetic measure constructed "upon the syllables" is
a measure positioned somewhere between free verse and the old
fixed form of iambic meter, like the "relative positions" of
the stars (2,50). It is "a relatirely stable foot, not a
rigid one" (Selentad.Essars 340), "an instinctive
approximation of the principle of the relativistic or
variable foot," which is theoretically supported by
Einstein's theory of relativity (Salantad_Latters 335).

After several years' experimentation with the concept of

relative measure, Williams finally realized, as he says in l

186
Wanted_to_Write_a_Boem, that the relative measure with which
he had experimented was the "variable" foot: "The foot not
being fixed is only to be described as variable. If the foot
itself is variable it allows order in so-called free verse.
Thus the verse becomes not free at all but just simply
variable, as all things in life properly are" (82). This
variable foot, as Alan Ostrom tersely says, is a measure of
"not freedom.trom measured form, but freedom tor it" (106), a
measure which has its position between freedom of free verse
and regularity of iambic meter. The idea of the variable
foot, Williams says in l_Wanted_to_Write_a_Boem, is "my final
conception of what my own poetry should be" (80). This
concept of a relativistic measure gives birth to Williams's
poetic theory of Objectivism, which sees the poem as "an
object, an object that in itself formally presents its case
and its meaning by the very form it assumes" (Autobiography
264-265).

In Williams's poetic theory, prose is much closer to
verse than it is in traditional metrics: "I want to say that
prose and verse are to me the same thing, that verse (as in
Chaucer's tales) belongs With prose" (Geleoted_Letters 263).
Williams's juxtaposition of prose and verse is successfully
featured in Baterson, where, as he wrote in a letter to
Parker Tyler in 1948, "All the prose . . . has primarily the
purpose of giving a metrical meaning to or of emphasizing a
metrical continuity between all word use" (Geleeted_Letters
263). The close relationship between prose and verse is for
Williams the ordering principle of "our poems as well as our
lives" (Geleeted_Bssays 340). It was Williams's intention to
blur the distinction between the past and the present,
between prose "fact" and poetic "fiction," between urban and
rural, between objective and subjective, between the physical
and the spiritual.

Williams's theory, as James E. Miller asserts, "convey[s]
the sense of totality: all of life is included here . . . and

187
belongs here and cannot be excluded, the poetic and the
anti-poetic, the rational and the irrational, the important
and the trivial, the poetry and the prose of life" (Amerioan
Guest 136). It is the secular version of the Word, the Word
of the third revelation in whom the distinction of "Gentile
and Jew" is "buried" (2 211), for the Word is "the Beautiful
thing," the identity of the virgin and the whore, the
incarnation of the spirit in the flesh, the embodiment of
heaven and earth (2 213). The "heart of the explanation" in
Baterson is Paterson's quest for "the Beautiful thing," whose
"vulgarity of beauty surpasses all their / perfections" (2
123, 119). Unlike Crane's The_Bridge, Williams's Baterson
physicalizes or naturalizes the spiritual. While Crane sees
everything in terms of the spiritual, Williams physicalizes
the spiritual in the way of confirming the spirituality of
the things.

Along with their employment of the Christ figure as a
visionary poet and as an epic hero, these three epic poets
are all alike in personifying America itself as the hero of
their epic poems or as the Word. Just as Whitman, as Miller
says, "resumes his own central and epic role" (Amerioan_Quest
46), so Crane and Williams are figured both as the heroes in
their epics and as visionary poets. They are also all alike
in describing America as the bride of the Word and they sing
the union of the Word and man in terms of sexual symbolism or
what Williams calls in Baterson "the riddle of man and
woman." Their sexual symbolism is derived from a Christian
concept of marriage of man and the Word. The Bible
deliberately employs a nuptial metaphor in explaining the
relationship between man and God. It has been argued that
the first chapter of Genesis describes God's creation of the
universe in sexual imagery, the union of the spiritual and
the material, with God's embrace as the wind sweeping over
the surface of the formless abyss. In the Old Testament, the
Israelites as a whole are sometimes described as the bride;

188
sometimes the City of Jerusalem itself is pictured as the
bride, the harlot to be redeemed as the bride; sometimes a
particular person or a prophet, for example, Jeremiah, is
depicted as the lover to be raped by God. In the New
Testament, Christianity sees reality as united in the one
love of God and man, developing this sexual metaphor into the
metaphor of marriage of Christ and man, or the Church itself.
This Biblical symbolism of the marriage of God with the human
believer became a standard feature of literary tradition. In
the Diyine_Gomedy, Dante's journey into Paradise is achieved
only by the guidance of, or the union with, his lady
Beatrice; John Donne renders in his poetry the union of man
with God in terms of marriage.

As Jeremy Ingalls points out to reinforce his commentary
on the epic tradition, this American epic vision of spiritual
metamorphosis is a sort of answer to the question raised by
the literal-minded Nicodemus to the symbolic discourse of
Christ in the Gospel of John: "The epic question has always
been and continues to be the question which, at the midpoint
of urban world history, a certain Nicodemus articulated on
that evening when he inquired: 'Can a human being be born
again?‘ This was already the intrinsic question nearly two
thousand years earlier, in Gilgamesh. It continues to be the
motivating question in and beyond Blake's Jerusalem" (47).
And in a similar way, these American epics are not the
revoking of the epic tradition, but the completion of it.

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