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The Limits of Whitman's Symbolism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
Whitman has often been thought of in the context of modern Symbolism. His conception of poetry as an indefinite art, his general tendency to treat the world of objects in terms of his subjective vision, and the extensive use he made of poetic symbols to present that vision are the aspects that have readily invited comparison with the aesthetics of Symbolism. In his sensibility, of course, Whitman is quite unlike the French Symbolists or their successors in the twentieth century who have taken over some of their characteristic attitudes. But the resemblances, too, in terms of aesthetic belief and method have been mentioned so frequently that an impression prevails among scholars that Whitman, like Poe, was in some ways a forerunner of the Symbolists. Thus, in Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson attempts to connect Whitman with modern Symbolism. He speaks of ‘the thoroughgoing symbolism of [Whitman's] poetic attitude’ (p. 21) and studies him as part of a dominant Symbolist tradition in American literature, in which Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville are the other great names. Following a suggestion by Edmund Wilson in his Axel's Castle, Feidelson maintains that, in their typical preoccupations, these writers were closer to ‘the symbolistic aesthetic that produced modern literature’ than to Romanticism (p. 4). But ‘Symbolism’, whether the term is understood in the French sense or in the somewhat wider sense defined by Feidelson, hardly seems to fit Whitman because of certain fundamental differences in his conception of poetry as well as his vision of reality.
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References
1 Feidelson, Charles Jr, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar. For other discussions of the subject, see Jones, Mansell P., The Background of Modern French Poetry (Cambridge, 1951)Google Scholar; Catel, Jean, ‘Whitman's Symbolism’, in Allen, Gay Wilson (ed.), Walt Whitman Abroad (Syracuse, 1955), pp. 76–87Google Scholar; Allen, G. W. and Davis, Charles T., Walt Whitman's Poems (New York, 1955), pp. 16–21.Google Scholar
2 See Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement (New York, 1967), ch. 3.Google Scholar
3 ‘I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words’ (‘A Song of the Rolling Earth’, 3). Emerson, too, often doubted that language was at all a worthy medium of thought, though paradoxically he also believed that words had a magic potency. See Liebman, Sheldon W., ‘The Development of Emerson's Theory of Rhetoric’, American Literature, 41 (05 1969), 178–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffith, Clark, ‘Emersonianism and Poeism: Some Versions of the Romantic Sensibility’, Modern Language Quarterly, 22 (06 1961), 125–34Google Scholar. Both Emerson's and Whitman's celebration of indirection proceeded from a recognition that the poet's intuitive sense of reality must by its very nature baffle and elude expression. At any rate, there was never any suggestion that words by themselves could create reality. Though, often, a lot of mysticism is read into Whitman's American Primer, I find that G. W. Allen gives a sensible account of it when he says that it is nothing but a ‘naïve assertion of the poetic and oratorical value of words’ (American Prosody (New York, 1935), p. 219).Google Scholar
4 The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Prose Works 1892 (New York, 1964), vol. II, p. 544.Google Scholar Subsequent references to this title will appear in the text as Prose Works. Cf. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. Carlyle's ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ also points to the conclusion that the symbol, being but a vesture, is finally to be laid off in favour of the reality it clothes.
5 Matthiessen, F. O. in American Renaissance (London, 1941), pp. 549–77Google Scholar, Catel and Feidelson, among others. See also Rountree, Thomas I., ‘Whitman's Indirect Expression and Its Application to “Song of Myself”’, PMLA, 73 (12 1958), 549–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Waskow, Howard J., Whitman: Explorations in Form (Chicago, 1966).Google Scholar Both Rountree and Waskow see ‘indirection’ as a method for securing reader engagement. But ‘indirect expression’, in the special sense in which they apply the term, can hardly be called ‘indirection’ in the Symbolist sense, as it includes even rhetorical devices and direct dramatization of action.
6 Trent Collection, no. 15.
7 For an interesting discussion of this aspect of the Transcendentalist aesthetic, see Tanner, Tony, The Reign of Wonder: Naïvety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge, 1965).Google Scholar
8 Referring to the composition of the poem ‘After the Sea-Ship’ (‘Sea-Drift’) Whitman said: ‘The first time I ever wanted to make anything enduring was when I saw a ship under full sail and had the desire to describe it directly as it seemed to me’ (quoted in Matthiessen, p. 565).
9 Matthiessen, p. 547; Miller, James E., Walt Whitman (New York, 1962), p. 115.Google Scholar
10 Gohdes, Clarence and Silver, Rollo G. (eds.), Faint Clews and Indirections (Durham, N.C., 1949), p. 53.Google Scholar
11 Bucke, , Harned, and Traubel, (eds.), The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (New York, 1902), vol. 6, p. 30.Google Scholar Subsequent references to this title will appear in the text as Complete Writings.
12 ‘Of the spirit of life in visible forms—of the spirit of the seed growing out of the ground—of the spirit of the resistless motion of the globe…of them is this man's poetry’: In Re Walt Whitman (Philadelphia, 1893), p. 31.Google Scholar