From Spears to Leaves: Walt Whitman's Theory of Nature in "Song of Myself"

Abstract

HERE is widespread critical agreement that Walt Whitman was not a consistent philosophical thinker. Although Whitman speaks in Song of Myself as though he is presenting an answer to the age-old question of Being, it is generally agreed that he did not do so. Critics have noted traces of various philosophical systems (or approaches), including Platonism, neo-Platonism, trancendentalism, pantheism, mysticism, Hegelianism, Darwinism, vitalism, and phrenology in Song of Myself, but have not been able to find an underlying logic in Whitman's thought that addresses the basic conflicts in these systems.1 The ideas Whitman expresses in Song of Myself have often been praised for vigor, therefore, but never for consistency. What Whitman gives with one line he seems to take away with another. The purpose of this paper is to show that there is in fact an underlying consistency of thought in Song of Myself to which all the lines of the poem, not just some of them, can be related. I shall try to show that Whitman is presenting in this poem not an assortment of only vaguely related and often inconsistent ideas as is usually assumed. Rather, he is giving us a of (or a philosophy of Being) which answers to the demands that Emerson made for such a theory in Nature. An understanding of Whitman's theory of nature in Song of Myself is, it seems to me, the key to unlocking other Whitman puzzles, e.g., the structure of the poem, the function of the catalogs, Whitman's use of language, his view of the importance of science and the greater importance of poetry, as well as his philosophical relation to Emerson. In my opinion Whitman's theory of nature is so fundamental to his poetry