Whitman eludes another A Contrary review by David M. Smith 
On Whitman C.K. Williams Princeton University Press 2010 Buy this book...> “Something happened, some utterly mysterious thing happened in the psyche of the poet which still remains the unlikeliest miracle.” The “unlikeliest miracle” C. K. Williams describes is the original 1855 Leaves of Grass, and the the poet in question is, of course, Walt Whitman, “one of the roughs, a kosmos,” the grand persona inhabiting that thin volume. Of the formation of that first Leaves of Grass, which Emerson called “the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed,” we know almost nothing. Indeed, scholars have puzzled over how one Walter Whitman, failed journalist and author of a bad temperance novel (Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate), could have mustered a work that, in Harold Bloom’s telling, places Whitman in the company of Milton, Bach, Michelangelo. Given that Whitman’s formal schooling ended at age 11, his sudden transformation at 37 does indeed seem the “unlikeliest miracle.” C. K. Williams combs through Whitman’s possible influences–the King James Bible, the now-forgotten poet Samuel Warren, Milton, Blake–before reverentially concluding, “We have to give Whitman’s genius its due: he did something that the evidence is in no way able to predict no matter how scrupulously we scour through his predecessors.” Thereafter, it feels like Williams has let this biographical riddle color his response to the poems themselves. Williams’ Whitman possesses a “poetic energy” that is “absolutely fluent and absolutely without limit… He could have planned thousands of poems, he was that charged with confidence, that certain of the force of his imagination.” The Whitman that emerges on this account is a monolithic mystery; any doubt, such as it is, lies with us, the present-day readers, struggling with his legacy–not with Whitman. Such a view, though, is hard to reconcile with lines like these: It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? “Whitman doesn’t doubt like this for very long,” Williams writes, “that Whitman was a stunningly successful, hardly ever flagging poetical-fictional colossus.” On the contrary, I would suggest that doubt, far from something Whitman can cast off whenever he wants, is more like the basis and permanent condition of the poems. The above-quoted “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”–as central to Whitman's poetic vision as “Tintern Abbey” to Wordsworth–does go on to conclude on this triumphant note: You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside–we plant you permanently within us… But such an ecstatic reclamation of self hardly seems possible, if not for the prior experience of already having been lost to oneself. Williams’ Whitman, the product of a “mysterious” metamorphosis, exists fully-formed and self-certain from the get-go; hence his doubt is akin to that of the modern philosopher, a mere example upon which to build an equally dubious project of knowledge. As far as I can tell, Whitman’s doubt and subsequent restoration is not about knowing or certainty, but what I can only describe (conscious of the term’s inadequacy) as an aesthetic experience: We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach–what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not? These lines might help explain why criticism seems so consistently befuddled before Whitman. Criticism, if it should demand our attention, must build upon and resolve some initial doubt, some instability, whereas Whitman lies in that extremely difficult space between distance and immediacy: “These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands… if they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.” Perhaps this is also why On Whitman ultimately falls well short of its mark. It is no matter, for Whitman is still one of our most mature, sane, tangibly human poets. For all his self-flaunting, Whitman’s enduring significance rests not upon adoration, our stopping to admire him, but upon communication, in the meaningful sense of him stopping and speaking with each and every one of us, wherever we happen to be.  David M. Smith is a regular reviewer for Contrary. He lives in Georgia. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0691144729Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0691144729shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1

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