Transcendentalist Catalogue Rhetoric: Vision Versus Form

Abstract

W< yHITMAN'S CATALOGUES are a most salient feature of his poetry, and certainly the most neglected. It is tempting to skip over them as we read. pure contralto sings in the organ loft, etc.-why bother with the rest? After all, we can predict what the next sixty lines will say. And so we pass quickly by the redundant images to follow the of the poem, whatever that is, so as to be able to come up with a theory of structure which will satisfy our struggling students, and our own rage for order. Dawdling among the catalogues only slows us down. Still, when we allow ourselves to loafe awhile, we may be struck by art in such passages, which at first seem the very antithesis of art. Sensitive discussions of like Randall Jarrell's, show that other readers have felt the same way;' and the impact of catalogue rhetoric upon poets is certainly attested to by the tradition in American poetry which, following employs it, not to mention the long antecedent tradition of prophetic 1 See Jarrell's essay, Some Lines from Whitman, in Poetry and the Age (New York, I955), pp. IOI-I20. Several more scholarly though less sensitive studies of catalogues have been made. Mattie Swayne, Whitman's Catalogue Rhetoric, University of Texas Studies in English, XXI, I62-I78 (July, I94I), is illuminating on the underlying purpose of the catalogue but confines its discussion of the style itself mainly to the characteristic grammatical patterns used by Whitman. Detlev W. Schumann, Enumerative Style and Its Significance in Rilke, Werfel, Modern Language Quarterly, III, I7I-204 (June, I942), is chiefly valuable for general comparisons and contrasts among the three writers. Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., 'Crossing Ferry': A Note on the Catalogue Technique in Poetry, Modern Philology, LI, 225-232 (May, I954), defends the artfulness of the catalogue as a structural device in terms of a particular example, as I attempt to do in the first section of this paper. Especially stimulating is Coffman's discussion of the progression of tone and idea within and between the two principal catalogues in Brooklyn Ferry. Harry R. Warfel, Whitman's Structural Principles in 'Spontaneous Me,' College English, XVIII, I90-I95 (Jan., I957), detects unity and movement in the apparent randomness of another catalogue. All four scholars relate use of the catalogue to transcendentalist idealism, and their observations-though quite brief, except in Miss Swayne's case-should be compared with mine below, as should Roger Asselineau's interpretation of catalogues as spiritual exercises in The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book (Cambridge, Mass., I962), pp. I02-I03.