November 8th, 2009:

As I have argued in previous posts, I classify Walt Whitman as a perfectionist. Viewing Whitman’s journals and notebooks up close at the Library of Congress, we saw the blotches of ink that had crossed out words and phrases and places where Whitman scribbled new ideas over the paper. Even in his letters to his friends and family, Whitman wrote multiple versions. Now that we have examined the different editions of Leaves of Grass and compared the alterations that were made to each edition, these changes support my conclusion that Whitman wanted to produce the best possible version of his work. Whitman upheld the value of the 1891-92 edition and said, “I wish to say that I prefer and recommend this present one, complete, for future printing, if there should be any” (148). But, does this statement mean that readers of Whitman today should view this edition as the definitive edition?

In all three editions of Song of Myself Whitman calls himself the “poet of the soul”. But each edition is written at a different stage of Whitman’s life. So, Whitman’s own soul and ways of thinking about the world around him was changed during each stage. In the 1855 edition Whitman was a confident 36 years old full of adventure and ready to embrace the world and spread his message. But in 1867 Whitman was in his late forties and had experienced the horrors of the Civil War. This soul of Whitman was battered, bruised, and uncertain about the future of America. And finally when it came to the 1891-92 edition Whitman was nearing his death and was coming to a realization that his writings would be the only thing to outlive him. So, this Whitman was more like a reflective old man teaching the younger generations. But, throughout each edition Whitman did not lose his hope for the American people to embrace his message. And most importantly, in each edition Whitman created an intimate atmosphere for readers to connect with him.

The reading that I focused on this week was “Good-Bye My Fancy.” .In the introduction to the Second Annex; Whitman personally addresses the reader and describes his state of both his mind and body during the time he wrote this “deathbed” edition. Whitman acknowledges his failing health but also notes the “sunny –fine” days where he feels “like a kid or kitten”. In Good-Bye My Fancy on page 639, Whitman makes a note that “Good-Bye” also marks the start of a new beginning. So although Whitman is approaching his death he realizes he is not ready to die just yet, and tells readers that this poem will not be written yet. The second part to this poem is found on page 654 and is at the end of the Second Annex. Although this poem is one of his final messages to his readers, Whitman does not end in a somber tone; rather, it is filled with exclamation marks. The word Fancy in this poem can represent a love for someone or something. I would like to think that Whitman is personally addressing the readers that have been his audience for over thirty years.

Whitman never edits out his secrets of life and meaning in the different editions. Although words, phrases, punctuation, and format might be different, the overall message does not change. Whitman sees a hopeful future for his readers and wants them to continue to discover new horizons. But the perfectionist Whitman wanted his readers to be provided with the best handbook, and thus choose his last book full of old age wisdom. Whitman never forgot he was the poet of the soul. So now the question that you have to ask yourself is, what soul of Whitman do you want to read?

Test

At the end of Daniel Longaker’s “The Last Sickness and the Death of Walt Whitman,” I somehow felt cheated by the conclusions Longaker draws regarding the connection between Whitman’s poetic characterization of mortality and the poet’s actual experience of death.  Whitman’s “indomitable will,” Longaker argues, would not have been “exercised in a struggle against the inevitable. 

          Perhaps, if he willed at all, it was to die sooner.  But bodily pangs and tortures seemed not to perturb him; he lived out his last days as he had lived his last forty years, with senses alert and keen and emotions under perfect control.  His mind was bent on higher things than those passing about his inert and worn-out body… This much, at least, is certain, that at the very end, as all through his life, the act of dying had no terrors for him who had passed ‘death with the dying and birth with the new-washed babe.’ (107-8)

 Longaker’s inclusion of a quote from “Song of Myself,” and his assertion that Whitman lived his final few months in the same manner that he had the “last forty years” (that is, since 1852), position Whitman within a framework for thinking about death that derives almost exclusively from Whitman’s 1850s-era poetry.  In particular, Longaker’s judgment of Whitman’s death-bed outlook seems to mirror “Song of Myself’s” championing of the “procreant urge of the world,” and the speaker’s sense in that poem that “there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life… And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (194).  According to Longaker, Whitman seems to complacently accept death, particularly because he remains preoccupied with “higher things” that must assumedly exist in a position beyond death’s grip.

            However, the cycle Whispers of Heavenly Death compellingly undercuts this perhaps over-simplified characterization of Whitman’s perspective on mortality.  As his largest-scale consideration of death as a subject, Whispers significantly appears in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass, when the Civil War’s immense human cost still weighed implacably on the country, and when Whitman’s advancing years, passing 50, began to align with the premature aging exacted by the war.  Thus death itself, not the world’s “procreant urge,” looms in Whispers as the power binding all experience, with the speaker of the poem “Assurances” acknowledging that “I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, / but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all” (563).  If there ever was life, in this vision, it led forward death.  (Rather crucially, “Assurances” appears in the 1856 Leaves as the drastically different “Faith Poem.” The life-death dichotomy reversal does not appear in the earlier version at all.)

            In line with that inverted restructuring of the relationship between life and death, Whitman infuses Whispers with a current of uncertainty about death that seems entirely alien to the feeling in “Song of Myself” that dying might be “lucky.”  Both “Thought” (one of a number of poems Whitman gave this name) and “Yet, Yet, Ye Downcast Hours” see Whitman’s speaker respond to the possibility that “Matter is conqueror—matter, triumphant only, continues onward” (562), that only a person’s decomposed and diffused corpse can continue to exist after death.

            Thus despite Longaker’s claim that Whitman thought only of “higher things than those passing about his inert and worn-out body” during his last days, Whitman himself encodes within Whispers his awareness of how definitive a physical life might be.  This realization actually helps us to make sense of what Longaker otherwise sees as entirely aberrant behavior: Whitman’s “deluded” avowal that he might yet “beat those doctors yet” and stay alive, and the strikingly ruthful tone of his observation that “Some of these fine mornings I shall be slipping away from you forever” (102).  Longaker’s attempt to hold up Whitman’s death as consistent with the poet’s writings on mortality crucially elides the uncertainty about, and corresponding fear of, death that appears both in Whitman’s behavior and throughout his Whispers, simplifying the poet’s death when it deserves a treatment as complex and contradictory as his poetry.