Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations by Edwin H. Miller (review)

Abstract

118Rocky Mountain Review rigor mortis gives the sensually and politically threatening dark woman of the East a statuesque pose that can be beheld without further threat to New England moralities" (211). This interpretation exemplifies what is most exciting about Luedtke's program, for here we step beyond the moralistic thematics of the light and the dark to discover a culturally sophisticated writer. Ofcourse Luedtke's analyses are not consistently provocative or complete. For instance, I found his treatment of The Scarlet Letter more suggestive than compelling. Luedtke does not retheorize Hawthornian romance either, a surprise given the study's title. But Luther Luedtke's Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient forces us to reread those familiar Hawthorne stories and novels with a keener appreciation for their Oriental subtexts. Ultimately, Hawthorne himself seems one of Dickinson's pards, afflicted by a longing for an Asia of innocence, sensuality, and freedom he can never recover. KEN EGAN, JR. Rocky Mountain College EDWIN H. MILLER. Walt Whitman's "Song ofMyself": A Mosaic of Interpretations. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. 179 p. In an attempt to gain control over the 52 sprawling sections ofSong ofMyself," one commentator (Henry Wells) divides it into five lyrical acts (xx). Another (Malcolm Cowley) discovers nine sequences in Whitman's narrative (xxi). Walt Whitman's lengthy poem is a didactic construction about the growth of the self and creative power and moves through four phases (Roy Harvey Pearce); it "delineates the poet's struggle to free himself from didacticism" and has seven distinct structural units (Howard Waskow, xxii). Over twenty ways of structuring Whitman's poem, with emphasis on varied thematic concerns by commentators from the late nineteenth century to this decade, are offered in the introduction to Edwin Miller's book. With its philosophical questioning, bold and sometimes wild assertions, catalogues and more, "Song of Myself" would seem to elude the grasp ofreaders who desire some semblance ofa unified construction. And it does. Whitman's poem, Miller acknowledges in his introduction, "has been tested by all kinds of methodologies, without achieving a breakthrough to a widely acclaimed consensual reading" (xxviii). The poem's resistance to a critical consensus makes Miller's book especially useful. In addition to the "search for structure" summarized in the introduction, Miller briefly details various attempts to establish the poem's genre. The 1855 version ofthe poem then follows. The heart of the book is 100 pages of section by section commentary, "the mosaic of interpretations." Not all sections are treated equally. Some are dealt with in a brisk paragraph, while others provoked interpretations so illuminating or controversial that pages ofMiller's summary can only suggest their complexity. For example, section 5—"Loafe with me on the grass"—is examined by classifying the thematic issues into Mysticism (God), Sexuality (Man), and Art (Poet). With many sections Miller summarizes or quotes from a variety of approaches, sometimes complementary Book Reviews119 but more often not: mystical, Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, socialhistorical , literary historical, and biographical. Will this gathering together of discordant voices leave the reader dizzy? Consider some responses to the longest ofthe catalogues, section 33. Here the speaker adopts multiple roles and expresses an understanding of a heroic skipper at sea, a "hounded slave," and others in distress and extreme circumstances, and reaches a climax with these lines: "All this I swallow and it tastes good .... I like it well, and it becomes mine, / 1 am the man .... I suffered .... I was there." The poets Randall Jarrell and John Berryman praise the power of these lines. In contrast, Denis Donoghue thinks he has caught the whiff of a sham: "It is one thing to suffer and it is another thing to sympathize with the suffering of others, and these experiences are not identical, no matter what Whitman's equations say" (113). Sparks can fly when no author intervenes to approve, disapprove, or correct the critics' claims. Rather than a sense of dizziness, though, the reader's insight into and appreciation of the poem's ability to sustain widely divergent views can be renewed through a reading of the "mosaic of interpretations." This is not to suggest, though, that Miller is the neutral...