Incalculable, Unaccountable, Indivisible? Walt Whitman's Lessons in Arithmetic

Abstract

I heartily advise you to peg away at the arithmetic-do something at it every day-arithmetic is the foundation of all such things-(just as a good stone wall is the foundation for a house)- become a good arithmetician first of all--Whitman to Pete Doyle1As surprising as it might seem to some, Walt Whitman was once a math teacher. The proto-hippie with his flowing beard and saggy pants, so proudly singing of infinites and things beyond measure, at one point stood in front of a crowded roomful of students in a stuffy Long Island schoolhouse and discussed multiplication tables, long division and subtraction rules. And he was passionate about it, too2-a passion he carried forward into Leaves of Grass and inscribed into virtually every page of his poetic corpus.Over the course of Whitman's poetic life, arithmetic in Leaves did not remain a static symbol but changed alongside the poet's project. Embraced for its radical language of equality, the science of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division quickly became a metaphoric staple in Whitman's poetic assembling and disassembling of nature into temporary aggregates and complex particulars. Still, with the dawning of the Civil War, Whitman observed the mathematical principles he employed as a lyrical elevation of life, turn into a practical devaluation of it-a turning into numbers of bodies, that could then easily be calculated away as long as the overall equation was favorable. What Whitman the educator embraced and Whitman the celebrated, the Good Grey Poet schooled by fratricidal conflict had to reign back in. The following pages will follow this development from early traces of mathematical thought in Whitman to its inception as a poetic-political program in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and its subsequent reevaluation in the context of the Civil War.While grounded in a historical reading of Whitman's text, this essay then also echoes and corresponds to an emerging critical discourse on the intersections of art and mathematics3-especially in German media theory following the publication of Friedrich Kittler's post-structuralist magnum opus Musik und Mathematik, which media-archeologically tries to rethink the epistemological walls that today separate letter, sound, and number. While Kittler himself dives deep into a Homeric past to stake his claims, the nineteenth century-and especially Whitman's democratic epic-seem like a prime entry point to considering these seemingly divergent scribal and logical systems together. Growing out of a soil saturated with New England's transcendental idealism, the mid-1800s saw number and letter suddenly rediscovering their kinship. Calculations are works of taste in the same manner as the productions in music and for instance a 1840s article in a musical journal states, though it may be also true that they are more often applied than music or poetry to what are commonly called purposes.4 Whitman, all about useful poetry, would take up the challenge suggested by such a claim and (re)construct a rigorous arithmetic in and out of language that even by today's standard has lost little of its radicalism. And it all began with Whitman's own, hands-on experience with mathematics: in school.Arithmetic of YouthWhile Walter Whitman's time as a small-town schoolteacher (18361841) was by any stretch of the imagination just a temporary solution to help the ambitious young man through a financial rough patch, he did apparently show an honest interest in the well-being of his pupils as well as employ some rather unorthodox teaching methods-one of them being the daily practice of mental arithmetic. In those days, as Bernstein Freedman observes, this practice was evidently a procedure strange enough to warrant special comment when Whitman's former students were interviewed by Whitman' disciples (in this case Horace Traubel) many years later (Freedman 29).In this regard, Whitman seems at least partially indebted to the set of educational practices he had experienced as a student himself. …