Whitman and mysticism

What is mysticism: Mysticism is not a coherent philosophy of life, but rather a state of mind. A mystical experience, according to BERTRAND RUSSEL, implies perception, a sense of unity and unreality of time and space, and the belief that evil is mere appearance. The vision of a mystic is intuitive; he feels the presence of a divine reality behind and within the ordinary world of sense perception. He feels that God and the Supreme Soul that animates all things are identical. He sees an essential identity of being between Man, Nature and God. He believes that “all things in the visible world are but forms and manifestations of the one Divine Life, and that these phenomena are changeable and temporary, while the soul that informs them is eternal.” The human soul is also eternal. Transcendentalism is closely related to mysticism, as it emphasizes the unintuitive and spiritual over the empirical.

Whitman’s poetry is full of transcendental and mystical tensions: he was deeply influenced by Emerson, the American transcendentalist. His thinking was intuitive and not systematic like that of a logician. He wrote as a mystic:

Wisdom is from the soul, it is not susceptible to proof, it is its own proof.

Apply to all stages and objects and qualities, and it is content,

It is the certainty of reality and the immorality of things and the excellence of things.

There is something in the floating of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.

Whitman believed that the soul was immortal. He felt identification with all the animate and inanimate things around him. The interesting thing about Whitman’s mysticism is that, as Schyberg observes, “in his book we can find the typical features of absolutely all the various mystical doctrines.”

Whitman is a mystic with a difference: one cannot call him a pure mystic in the sense of Eastern mysticism. He is not a man of prayer. Like all mystics, he believed in the existence of the soul and in the existence of the Divine Spirit, in the immortality of the human soul and in the capacity of the human being to establish communication between his spirit and the Divine Spirit. But he differs from traditional or Eastern mystics in that he does not subscribe to their belief that communication with the Divine Spirit is possible only through denial of the senses and mortification of the flesh. Whitman states that he sings both to the body and to the soul. He feels that spiritual communication is possible, even desirable, without sacrificing the flesh. Thus, there are a great deal of sexual elements in Whitman’s poetry, especially early poetry: section 5 of Song of Myself is an example where sexual overtones are inseparable from mystical experience.

The Material World is not denigrated: Whitman does not reject the material world. He seeks the spiritual through the material. He does not subscribe to the belief that objects are illusory. There is no tendency on the part of the soul to leave this world forever. In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, we see the soul trying to play an important role in managing this world of scenes, images, sounds, etc. Whitman does not belittle the achievements of science and materialism. In Section 23 of Song of Myself, he accepts the reality of materialism and says:

Human for positive science!

Long live the exact demo!

Nature and man will not separate or spread more.

Searching for divine reality: Whitman accepted the Theory of Evolution but could not believe that evolution was a mechanical process. In the slow process of growth, development, and change that science was revealing, Whitman saw God becoming evident and unmistakable to man. The soul of man finds full dissatisfaction only in the search for the reality behind the manifestations. As he says in A Passage to India:

Bathe me, oh God, in you, riding you,

Me and my soul within reach of you.

At the end of the journey, the soul meets God – or the “Great Camerado” as he says in Canto a mí mismo.

Whitman’s sense of unity of the whole: his cosmic consciousness. Throughout his poetry, Whitman has shown his faith in the unity of the whole, or “oneness” of everything. This sense of the essential divinity of all created things is an important aspect of mysticism and is also closely related to Whitman’s faith in democracy which he calls for equality and brotherhood. Song of Myself is replete with lines proclaiming this “unity.” He knows

…that all men born are also my brothers… and all women my sisters and lovers,

And that a keel of creation is love.

It praises not only life, but the absolute wrath of each particular and individual person, of each existing real being. Whitman equates all opposites and accepts evil as part of Reality.

In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the poet has achieved the unity of all humanity: “The simple, compact, well-assembled scheme, myself disinterested but part of the scheme.” Time becomes one in Whitman’s poetry. Past, present and future merge into a spiritual continuum. Thus, in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he says:

It is useless, neither time nor place-distance are useful,

I am with you, men and women of a generation,

Or many generations later.

Mysticism Governing the Imagery and Symbolism of Whitman’s Poetry: The mystical search for Reality and communion with the Divine lends itself easily to representation in terms of the image of the journey. The song of the open road is a poem whose theme is a symbolic journey of exploration of the universe, both spiritual and physical. Out of the Cradle Endless Rocking symbolizes the mystical search for reality and the ultimate discovery of the meaning of life. When the Lilacs last in the yard, Bloom uses symbols and images designed to affirm the importance of Death. Death is seen as a liberator because it leads to a new life, and the poet, having had the mystical experience of this truth, seeks to be a “unifier of here and hereafter”.

As GW Allen points out, the “attempt to point the way between reality and the soul pretty much sums up Whitman’s intention in Leaves of Grass.” The mysticism here is obvious. The cosmic “I” of Whitman’s poems is on a perpetual journey. His soul is but a fragment of the soul of the world. The mass of images that run through his poems symbolize unity and harmony in him and in all of creation. The grass spear assumes a mystical meaning through its symbolic value: celebration of individuality and the mass, exclusion of no one, exception of all. In Song of Myself, Whitman speaks of God as his beloved and his “bedfellow” sleeping next to him all night. The mystical experience is conveyed in terms of highly charged sexual imagery.

Whitman rarely lost touch with physical reality, even in the midst of mystical experience. Physical phenomena to him were symbols of spiritual reality. He believed that “what is not seen is proven by what is seen”; therefore, he makes use of very sensual and concrete images to convey his perception of divine reality. He finds a purpose behind natural objects (grass, seabirds, flowers, animals) to,

The smallest outbreak shows that there really is no death…

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…every blade of grass is no less than the traveling work of the stars…

In fact, it could be said that mysticism constitutes the very poetic form of Whitman’s poems, he considered that the universe constituted a unity of disparate objects, unified by the Divine Spirit; thus, his poems are “Leaves of Grass” which mean both separation and unity. Whitman’s dominant grass metaphor presents a case for unity and harmony, a basic component of structure.

Mystical Structure of Song of Myself: Song of Myself is perhaps the best illustration of Whitman’s mysticism influencing meaning, form, and symbolism. Says James E. Miller: “When viewed in terms of the phases of traditional mystical experience, Song of Myself takes on an integral structural form.”

The reader can rediscover what the poet by looking at his own spear of summer grass and embarking on his own mystical journey. Song of Myself is an “inverted mystical experience”: whereas the traditional mystic attempted to annihilate himself and mortify his senses in preparation for his union with the divine, Whitman magnifies the self and glorifies the senses in his progress toward union with the divine. Absolute.

Conclusion: Whitman is a mystic as much as a poet of democracy and science, but a “mystic without a creed.” He sees the body as the manifestation of the spirit that is “delivered” by death to a higher life. A blade of grass is not for him an inert substance but God’s handkerchief, “the flag of readiness.” Often, in his sensibility, matter dissolves, trees become “liquid” and contours “fluid”. The real is transmuted and has cosmic visions. It becomes a comet that travels around the universe at the speed of light.

I start like the air, I shake my white hair in the sun of the dance floor,

I spill my flesh in eddies,

And drifting in jags of lace.

If Leaves of Grass has been called a “Bible” of America, it has a lot to do with its mystical tension. It is true that Whitman’s brand of mysticism is not identifiable with the self-denial of the Christian variety or the passivity of the Oriental. What we may call Whitman’s mysticism is a “democratic” mysticism, available to all men on equal terms and embracing contradictory elements. But it is undeniable that mysticism is central to the meaning of Leaves of Grass.