in verse #50 : In voiceless text

Matt Miller, in his study Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of Grass, makes a convincing case that “…the poems of the 1855 Leaves appear in a boiling rush, the size and suddenness of which continue to beg for explanation.”[i]  He makes his case primarily through a careful examination of the notebooks and manuscript materials Whitman used in the years leading up to the publication of that first edition, arguing his point through 250 pages of text and illustrations, the latter mostly of manuscript pages.  What I find most fascinating, because of my interest in Joseph Smith’s writings, is Whitman’s uncertainty as to the genre of what he was planning.  In two pages “left from a larger notebook that either was lost or has not been associated with these leaves,”[ii] and now held in the Library of Congress, Miller finds a fascinating clue, one I alluded to in my last post.  To explain my fascination, I think it best to reproduce Miller’s transcription of that text, as nearly as I can:

Novel? — Work of some sort _^ ^{Play? —} instead of sporadic characters — introduce them in large masses, on a far grander scale, — armies — twenty-three full-formed perfect athletes — orbs — take characters through the orbs — “spiritualism” Nobody appears upon the stage simply — but all in huge aggregates nobody speaks alone, whatever is said, is said by an immense number[iii]

This could easily describe two very different works of nineteenth-century American literature:   Moby-Dick, or, The whale, and The Book of Mormon.  In scope, if not in original intent, both works share this grand scale and large cast of characters.  But Whitman, in a separate note on the same leaf, joined to the above by an asterisk, continues in a vein that ups the ante, yet still fits both of these near-contemporary ante-bellum works:

Bring in whole races, or castes, or generations, to express themselves — personify the general objects of the creative and give them voice — every thing on the most august scale — a leaf of grass, with its equal voice. —
— voice of the generations of slaves — of those who have suffered — voices of Lovers — of Night — Day — Space — the stars — the countless ages of the Past — the countless ages of the future[iv]

Whitman clearly felt that he was on to something big.  Miller notes that “What this passage sounds like, though, is ‘Song of Myself.’”[v]  In Whitman’s world, yes.  Coupled with two other fragments related to Leaves of Grass that appear at the bottom of the first leaf recto and its verso, this could well be the first evidence of Whitman surfacing like Mocha-Dick to sound his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of, at least, Brooklyn.

But that may leave you still uncertain as to the question of the inspiration driving the book.  Miller thinks the process was the inspiration for Whitman.  Early on he says “Readers exploring Whitman’s writing process have usually tried to understand what inspired him, and inspiration, I would contend, is something easily misconstrued.”[vi]  He believes that it was Whitman’s discovery of a process that heated the “boiling rush” behind the composition of Leaves of grass.  That process, as he recovers it from the manuscript evidence, was a precursor of the aphorism that “good artists borrow, great artists steal” (attributed, among others, to Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot, though both may have stolen it from someone else).  Eliot’s expression of the idea is a little less bald than that aphorism, and seems very clearly to describe the Whitman who emerges from Miller’s study:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.[vii]

The process that Whitman discovered gives Miller his title: collage.  Whitman kept extensive notebooks, daybooks, journals and papers on which he recorded anything that interested him, including the lists he is famous for and notes on how to get more lists from people he knew, or knew of.  From these he cut and pasted his lines as he composed that first Leaves of grass.  Sometimes literally cutting and pasting, as examination of the manuscripts shows.  Sometimes even stealing from himself, as Miller notes in adducing absence as evidence:

[T]here is no extant evidence to suggest that Whitman discovered his mature, long-lined style until late 1853 to 1854. Importantly, Whitman did publish three free-verse poems in 1850 — “The House of Friends,” “Resurgemus,” and “Blood Money” — but these poems are a far cry from the mature work of the 1855 Leaves, and even the inchoate writing of the 1854 notebooks. … “Resurgemus” in particular is important because Whitman later relineated it and included it with only minor changes as the eighth poem of the 1855 edition that eventually came to be titled “Europe, the 72d and 73d Years of These States.” However, refitting “Resurgemus” to the line and syntax of his mature style does little to hide its difference from the work he composed later. With its narrow focus, stilted rhythms, and lack of personhood and voice, the untitled eighth poem of 1855 still feels like a throwback.’[viii]

I have discussed Miller’s discoveries at such great length for two reasons.  The first, of course, is the purpose of this blog: to discuss verse.  The second may seem strange to most of you: I have long felt that Joseph Smith’s process of dictation seemed to work in much the same manner as Whitman’s process of collage. He seems to be able to figuratively cut and paste from the scripture that he holds in his head, stealing “from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest” to “weld his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique” as Eliot has it. There is no evidence that Smith worked from paper copy in dictating his revelations, beginning with the Book of Mormon. If you believe, as I do, that he was inspired in the production of that book, you are still left with the fact that he never talked about how he produced it, beyond saying that he translated it “through the gift and power of God.” No matter how you feel about that book, the evidence is that he dictated it without reference to sources, beside those resources that he had stored in his own brain. In an era of smart phones and e-books, the story that he read it from a seer-stone in the crown of a hat seems a little less fantastic, or miraculous, than it did in his day. But that story is not his. Emma told it. Support for it is inferred from evidence in the dictated manuscripts, not from Joseph’s words. And it is clear from other evidence, from his dictations of letters and prayers and answers to questions, that he spoke usually with no reference to a text — leaving aside his “inspired translation” of the Bible.

To me, that means that he was deeply involved, as a human, in the process — that he was not acting as a dictaphone, not acting as a recorder, but acting as a maker — as a poet. I leave you to chew on that for a month, and hope to see you back again.

But hold on, I hear you say: are you going to go through an entire post with once either quoting a poem or making a pun?

Your turn.

[i] Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of Grass / Matt Miller. — Lincoln and London : University of Nebraska Press, c2010, p. 9.

[ii] Ibid., p. 11.

[iii] Ibid., p. 15.

[iv] Ibid., pp. 15-16; I have been unable, for reasons known only to Microsoft, to import into Word from the Microsoft character map, the ‘hand-with-pointing-index-finger’ icon (character code 0x4C), or manicule, that Whitman drew into the ms. at the beginning of the second ¶ above, and which Miller used in his transcription. It’s probably just as well — I don’t know whether WordPress would recognize it anyway.

[v] Ibid., p. 16.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] from http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/, accessed 27 February 2015, quoting The sacred wood : essays on poetry and criticism / by T. S. Eliot. — London : Methuen, 1920, p. 114. I don’t have a copy of the book, so I can’t confirm the accuracy of either quote or citation; the emphasis appears to be added by the website editors.

[viii] Ibid., p. 7.