Whitmania: Round 6, Funk Soul Brother

I will begin this post by quoting the fifth section of “Song of Myself:”

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And now I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And now I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a keelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein, and
poke- weed.

I wanted to point out how this passage illustrates the transcendentalism of the Americans and how it is derived from Immanuel Kant, similar to the British Romantic Movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Kant in his lecture “The Transcendentalist”:

the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (quoted in Reynolds et al 148).

Here the speaker of the poem is having a transcendental a priori experience that is initiated by his senses. As his soul becomes entwined with his body while being close and touching Nature (the first two stanzas), something transcends his body and enters his mind. Reynolds writes, “This symbolic sexual experience [compare with Ann’s postings on homosexuality] results as he sees a series of spiritual [a priori] truths” in the last stanza of section five (149). The soul of the speaker aids him in his quest to find truth in the universe simply by touching and communicating with Nature, for it is on the grass that their a priori journey begins.

This passage also shows how Whitman deviated from the other American Romantics as well. His transcendence does not stop at his fellow man but extends to include all things. It is “less vague, less formless, less other-worldly, and more attentive to mankind than either Emerson’s or Thoreau’s” (150). His Kantian connection to the world was inclusive and his a priori experiences were recorded sensitively in this poem.

Works Cited

Reynolds, Larry J., Tibbie E. Lynch. "Sense and Transcendence In Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman." The

South Central Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 4, Studies by Members of the SCMLA. (Winter, 1979) pp. 148-151.