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Radical Utterances from the Soul's Abysms: Toward a New Sense of Whitman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Contrary to widely accepted arguments, Whitman's poems did not resolve the unconscious conflicts from which they sprang; nor did they indicate the resolution of philosophical questions or psychological conflicts. Neither should they be judged according to their success or failure in such analogical pursuits. Instead they must be judged according to the honesty and courage with which Whitman confronted the chaos within himself and according to the amount and quality of poetic order with which he was able to express the chaos within. If seen in a psychoanalytic context, Whitman's mystical or transcendental moments—moments of apparent attunement with the universe—are wishful assertions, comparable to psychological catharsis—“catharsis” being an experience which gives the illusion that conflicts are resolved when in fact they are not. There is bibliographical and biographical evidence in support of these arguments, but the strongest evidence comes from the literary analysis of such exemplary poems as “Clef Poem,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 Almost all Whitman critics have assumed that the cathartic experiences which occur so often in the poems indicate the resolution of conflicts. The only challenge to this view that I can find is by Richard Chase, “ ‘Out of the Cradle’ as a Romance,” in The Presence of Walt Whitman, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 52–71. The study which otherwise most nearly resembles the present essay, Edwin Haviland Miller's Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey (Boston: Houghton, 1968), accepts the position that catharsis is equal to resolution.
2 I use “psychoanalysis” in a broad sense, but I mean to exclude those—like Jung, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown—who have used Freud as the basis for a new metaphysic. Such a view has a special difficulty when applied to Whitman; it too nearly coincides with one of the two world views between which Whitman continually vacillated. One of the chief arguments of this paper is that Whitman was constantly torn between two exclusive views of the world, one which denied the ego and one which elevated it. In orthodox Freudian terms, transcendentalism denies the ego; nevertheless, Freud's language gives us a way to talk about this denial which is impossible in a system that argues that the part that talks—the rational self—can or should be transcended. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York : Harper, 1966), characterizes these opposed views as “analytic”—the Freudian view—and “prophetic”—the view of such followers of Freud as Jung, Reich, and D. H. Lawrence (p. 30). I have employed Rieff's terms throughout this essay.
3 Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (New York : Hendricks House, 1962), pp. 180–81.
4 Whicher, “Whitman's Awakening to Death,” in Lewis, p. 6.
5 Fredson Bowers, Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860) (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), speculates that the failure of a presumed homosexual affair sometime between 1856 and 1858 may have caused the despair evident in some of the “Calamus” poems, and would apply to “As I Ebb'd” which is thought to have been composed in 1859. But Edwin Miller argues convincingly against the relevance of such speculation: “Attempts to find the origin of ‘Out of the Cradle’ in a personal experience about 1858 or 1859 strike me as misguided and irrelevant, since the significance of an unsuccessful love affair (if one could be proved) would be not so much the event itself as the reactivation of the experience of loss, ultimately the loss of the beloved mother” (A Psychological Journey, p. 175).
6 I have described this process in “Whitman and the Failure of Mysticism: Identity and Identifications in Song of Myself” Walt Whitman Review, 15 (Dec. 1969), 223–30.
7 It appears that the typography of the “You” and “you” in these last lines was deliberate; despite meticulous correction of this poem in the “Blue Book” (p. 199) these words are unchanged and are so printed in all subsequent editions.
8 A Psychological Journey, p. 28. Miller's position regarding “There Was a Child” is partly based on the syntheses of psychoanalysis and metaphysics attempted by Marcuse and Brown; I have explained my differences with this position in “Walt Whitman and Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Literature and Psychology, 20, No. 2 (1970), 79–81.
9 An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 118, 131.
10 In another context Edwin Miller has noted evidence that Whitman's feelings about his mother were not as simple as he usually pretended: “In hundreds of letters to members of his family, not once is he critical of her obvious self-centeredness and wilfullness. . . . Yet his ambivalence … is evident in his failure during the years when he was a government employee to act upon her repeated suggestions that she come to Washington and establish a home for him” (A Psychological Journey, p. 55).
11 Among the best such readings is Gay Wilson Allen's in The Solitary Singer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 231–35.
12 These questions are suggested by Edwin Miller's conclusions (A Psychological Journey, p. 185). Although I disagree with Miller's conclusions, I find his reading the most effective of those yet published.
13 See Otto Fenichel, M.D., The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: Norton, 1945), pp. 296–97.
14 “ ‘Out of the Cradle’ as a Romance,” p. 67.
15 Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York : New York Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 747, 746.
16 I wish to thank Edwin Lipinski, M.D., for his suggestions regarding my use of psychoanalytic theories.