Whitman's Tangled Roots: The Problem of Sources

Abstract

Harold Aspiz. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 290 pp. Roger Asselineau. The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1980.189 pp. Martin Bickman. The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 182 pp. Betsy Erkkila. Walt Whitman Among the French. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296 pp. In the fourth section of "Song of Myself" Walt Whitman envisions both the questions that the future would ask of him as well as his ability to transcend those queries. He depicts himself as standing firm though surrounded by "trippers and askers" who are inquiring about "people I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,/The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new." In the face of all this "pulling and hauling" Whitman asserts the consistent core of himself, a dynamic center which is unaffected by the ephemeral events which others call history or reality. "These come to me days and nights," he writes, "and go from me again,/But they are not the me myself."