His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing

Abstract

ed fit—(the three picturesque blacks in the men’s cabin in the Fulton ferry boat—their costumes—dinner kettles/ describe them in the poem.—20 Christopher Beach suggests that this fragment “is certainly the point of departure for slavery passages in ‘Song of Myself,’ ‘I Sing the Body Electric,’ and ‘The Sleepers.’”21 Even if we could verify that Poem of the Black Person preceded the writing of these poems, arguing for this fragment as a “point of departure” is problematic because Whitman’s depiction of the “black person’s” passiveness runs contrary to his other pre-Civil War poetic conceptions of black Americans.22 The most compelling argument as to why this poem was never written, or why it is at best a misguided departure point, is that in this proposed poem Whitman has the passivity reversed. This becomes more apparent if we consider an often quoted passage from Whitman’s early notebooks: I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves I am the poet of the body And I am I am the poet of the body And I am the poet of the soul I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.23