“THE RELIGION OF WALT WHITMAN”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, April 2, 2006

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

In my generation, it is an interesting parlor-game to share with each other the different part-time jobs we had in our youth – part time jobs, for example, that worked us through college. I once did this in a group of Unitarian ministers, only to discover that about one third of dozen or so in that room had at one time or another been grave-diggers!

My own list included driving a town bookmobile and being a camp counselor. Another job, though, was working for a distributor of funeral cards. For hours at a time in this part-time job, I would count and package boxes full of cards that said things like, “thank you for your expression of sympathy,” and so forth. It got me through college, anyway.

One of the products distributed by this funeral card company was a heavily abridged edition of Walt Whitman’s most famous book of poetry, “Leaves of Grass.” At the time I knew very little about Whitman, but when I flipped through the little book, I was impressed with the poems which seemed to offer comfort and reassurance to people who were experiencing the grief of loss.

There was quite a bit I didn’t know about Whitman, or that book of poems, at the time. Things that I didn’t know were far more interesting than the things that I did know. I did not know, for example, that that book was a very heavily edited version of a book that was quite lengthy, containing several hundred other poems. I did not know that through that book, Walt Whitman came to be known as the poet of democracy, becoming the voice of a new United States, and a symbol of American idealism. I did not know that Whitman was inventing a new American writing style at just the time that America was inventing a new culture and a new form of government.

Nor did I know that much of the omitted portion of Whitman’s book was political, and that it was a call for racial and social justice for everyone. Nor did I know that his writings reflected the new American spirit of individualism, and perhaps the most telling of Whitman’s messages was about the integrity of each human individual. I did not know that he sang a message of mysticism, of blending the human soul with the beauty of nature. Nor did I know that much of the omitted parts of this book were deemed, in his time and in ours, as highly sensual, even erotic, and he refused the many calls from friends and admirers to censor those passages from later editions. Nor did I know that many of those passages were motivated by his own life as a gay man in a world that rejected his sexual identity. There was quite a lot I didn’t know about that book or its author, but over the years I’ve come to understand that Leaves of Grass and other poetry by Whitman are perhaps the best literary expression of the American spirit of liberty, democracy and humanity that has ever been produced.

Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 in a small Long Island village. His father was a carpenter and a farmer who never became very successful. His mother, with whom he always remained close, came from a devout Quaker background, though the Whitman family was never active in the Quaker religion.

Whitman is often considered to be the first real poet of American democracy, and his background seemed to reflect his pedigree as a “common man” of the working class poor. Among eight siblings, one brother was named George Washington Whitman, another Thomas Jefferson Whitman, and another Andrew Jackson Whitman. Walter was named after his father.

The family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was young, and it was there he enjoyed his adventurous childhood, and where he learned to love the city. Most of the great writers of early America came from educated and privileged backgrounds. Whitman was among the first to come from the working class, and was primarily self-educated. He attended public school for only six years, and then dedicated himself to reading and scholarship. At age twelve, he became an apprentice at the Long Island newspaper, and was successful enough that he began publishing his own writings. At age seventeen, after a fire destroyed the newspaper, Whitman taught school to earn money. He disliked teaching, which only lasted five years, and eventually returned to newspapers, becoming an editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in his early 20s. Whitman lost his job at the Eagle when the publisher objected to Whitman’s stand against slavery.

Another newspaper publisher hired Whitman to go to New Orleans to launch a new paper there. He took his fifteen-year-old brother with him, who would work as an office boy. New Orleans proved to be a flowering experience for Whitman’s mind and spirit. He relished in the mix of cultures, races, and even languages there. He loved the exotic lifestyles and longing for adventure he found among those he met. But it also was his first direct experience with slavery, and he was disgusted by the slave auction house near his home.

He only stayed in New Orleans a few months. One reason for leaving was that his younger brother was constantly sick, but more importantly because his strong stand against slavery was unwelcome by his employers. Nevertheless, it was in New Orleans that Whitman nurtured his passion for a new country that welcomed diversity, and it was also there that he began writing poetry.

Whitman’s revolutionary reputation as a poet is attributable to both his original style and his original content. With regard to style, he was the first significant writer of free verse, writing with beauty unattached to boundaries of meter and rhyme. Though he began his work with a deep appreciation for the traditional great poets of his time – Shelley, Keats, and Bryant – he eventually went his own way, starting an entirely new and radical poetic style, much as this young America was experimenting with new types of society and culture.

When he returned to New York, he again worked at newspapers, but now he devoted himself to writing, and especially poetry. For almost a decade he wrote poetry without any seeming intent of publishing, but instead of perfecting his unique style. During this time that he wrote and re-wrote like an athlete training for a marathon, and only when he had made ample changes after changes was he ready to publish his first collection of poems in a book entitled “Leaves of Grass.”

The free verse style was so extraordinary that it shocked the literary world. The magazine Life Illustrated reviewed Leaves of Grass by describing it as “lines of rhythmical prose, or a series of utterances (we know not what else to call them).” Quite a few critics questioned whether it was, in fact poetry. Perhaps in response to this, Whitman re-wrote the titles of all his poems for the next edition, and put the word “poem” in each new title.

Leaves of Grass has an extraordinary history. There were many new editions to this collection of poems over the next thirty-five years, and with each edition, new poems were included, old poems were rewritten, poem titles were freely changed, and poems were radically rearranged into different orders and sequence within the book. It was as if the spirit of free verse that liberated the poet from form and structure extended beyond the poems themselves and into the collection that kept transforming. The first edition of the book in 1855 contained twelve poems; the last edition in 1892, the year Whitman died, contained 293 poems.

From the beginning, Whitman’s passion for American democracy, as well as his contempt for the institution of slavery shaped the spirit of his poems. His early draft contained these free verse lines:

I am the poet of the body

And I am the poet of the soul

And I am

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 will understand me alike.

His first edition in 1855 did not have widespread acclaim. He sent copies to noted writers, but he got a response from only one: Ralph Waldo Emerson. By then Emerson was celebrated as the young countries most famous essayist and lecturer, and he wrote back to Whitman saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Having substantial experience in the publishing world, Whitman would become a master publicist, and in the next edition Whitman printed on the cover, without Emerson’s permission, that praise attributed to Emerson.

Whitman rapidly became a celebrity in literary circles, and a key figure in the bohemian New York culture of writers and artists. Until his time, the literary Mecca of America was Boston, home of so many cultural elites. But Whitman democratized American literature, voicing the feelings of all classes and all segments of society.

When Emerson came to New York, he invited Whitman to join him at his room in the stylish Astor Hotel. When Whitman arrived dressed informally as a common man, the hotel refused to let him in. Though Emerson admired Whitman’s poetry and ideas, it was clear their class differences provided some tension in their relationship, at least that was the case for Emerson.

For Whitman, these differences weren’t a problem. His poems were celebrations of a country whose individual spirit transcended the differences of class and race. His democratic faith was in the equal importance of all parts of society, and sometimes thought of his writings as a “New Bible” that would express America’s conversion into a real cultural democracy.

I have mentioned that much of his poetry was controversial because of its fairly explicit sexual references. In later years, when Whitman was considering a Boston publisher to produce a new edition, Emerson took a stroll with Whitman across the Boston Common and Emerson tried to convince him to omit the sexual sections from the Boston edition. Emerson, the proper Bostonian, had no personal objection but knew it would be too scandalous for that city. Whitman ignored his requests. As it turned out, before the Boston firm could publish it, a lawsuit was filed to prevent its publication, charging it as obscene literature. Leaves of Grass was thus “banned in Boston,” but Whitman eventually found a publisher in Philadelphia.

The scandalous sections contained sensual passages of both heterosexual and homosexual reference. Interestingly, in the public controversy Whitman’s male-female verses were far more objectionable than the male-male ones, perhaps because the public was more alert to explicitness in heterosexual literature.

It is well established that Walt Whitman’s sexual orientation was homosexual, and that is apparent in a number of his poems. Much of his poetry characteristically celebrates human sensuality as well as sensuality found in all of natural beauty. Sexual orientation for him seemed to be irrelevant to such celebration. His writing, in a sense, was “omni-sexual.”

Over the years Whitman had several committed long-standing relationships with men, the most significant one being a Washington D.C. trolley driver named Peter Doyle. Doyle was an Irish immigrant who had been a confederate soldier during the Civil War. Though never publicly acknowledged, everyone close to Whitman knew about and honored their partnership.

Without arrogance, Whitman believed his literary voice was to announce a new American vision which was just then being born and taking shape. It was a unique spiritual vision, and at times he referred to “Leaves of Grass” as a “New Bible” for America, and he even numbered the lines of the verses, much like the verses were numbered in the books of the Bible. At one point he wrote that from the start in his poetry “one deep purpose overlay the others, and has underlain its execution ever since – and that has been the religious purpose.”

The American religion he envisioned, and that he celebrated in his writing, was a democratic faith that destroyed artificial separations based on race or class or privilege of birth. It was a belief not only in the equal worth of every human soul, but also in the sacred value of each person. He saw this vision as a radical departure from the European tradition that America left behind.

Just as he saw religious value in each person, he could find spiritual value in the simple treasures of everyday life – the sunrise and the seashore, the growth of a tree and the hoot of an owl. Everything and everyone was blessed with profound value, if only we could open our eyes to it.

Whitman’s life reflected his vision – he lived what he preached. Though he achieved the respect and applause of many of the country’s leading figures – and even that of famous literary voices in Europe – he himself was more comfortable in making friends from within the working class, and spent his leisure time in the pubs and other gathering spots in working class neighborhoods. He made no distinction between corporate moguls like Andrew Carnegie or U.S. Senators or ferry boat captains or construction workers. They were all of equal worth and worthy of equal respect.

There is an important relationship between Whitman’s Quaker background and his religious vision of a new American democracy. Though Whitman had little to do with any organized religion, he was well versed in Quaker teachings and honored his Quaker family roots. His mother had been raised Quaker, and taught those values. His father was not Quaker, but he nevertheless was a strong admirer of the radical Quaker preacher Elias Hicks. Whitman knew well the Quaker culture, and at one time intended to write a biography of Hicks, the man who led the liberal reform movement within the religious tradition.

Whitman’s celebration of what is called “the common man” is founded on his belief in the worth of each individual. At times he refers to everyone as being Christ. This parallels the most profound Quaker doctrine of the “inner light,” that God exists in each person and gives us an inner spiritual wisdom that we can trust. This concept is woven throughout Whitman’s most famous epic poem, “Song of Myself,” which begins “Leaves of Grass.” For example, that poem contains this line:

“Divine am I inside and out,

And I make holy whatever

I touch or am touch’d from.”

Of course he is not speaking just of Whitman, but whatever he has to say about himself in “Song of Myself” is clearly something he attributes to all human beings. The quality of being “divine . . . inside and out” is, of course deeply imbedded in Hicksite Quaker thought, with which Whitman was so familiar. To the Quaker, the authority of the “inner light” wisdom was greater than that of the Bible. Also like the Quakers, Whitman’s view of American democratic religion is distrustful of ritual and of institutions. The Hicksite Quakers were especially involved with social reform movements that Whitman also promoted: the abolition of slavery and the rights of women.

Throughout his life Whitman had little or nothing to do with organized religion. He honored his Quaker family roots, but had no formal association with them or any other religious tradition. Some commentators suggest that he adopted Quaker theology, but not its rules of living. At times he flirted with new religious fads that were springing up at an astounding rate in those days – spiritualism, phrenology, mesmerism, and so on. He associated with a number of Unitarians, including the New England transcendentalists led by Emerson, and the abolitionist leaders, such as his friend Moncure Conway, a Unitarian minister.

His religious views were an amalgam of transcendentalist mysticism and American democratic faith. There is also substantial evidence that he was influenced by ancient Hindu writings. In memoirs written near the end of his life, he recalled that he had read “the ancient Hindu poems before writing Leaves of Grass.” Emerson once described Whitman’s work as a “mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald.” Indeed, one can see in Whitman’s personal copy of the Gita that he had underlined many passages and written himself notes in the margin.

The influence of Hindu philosophy can be found in many places of Whitman’s work, but certainly it is there in his mysticism about nature, and the sublime unity of all things. Hear these lines from his poem, Song at Sunset, and reflect on the Hindu vision of unity in nature:

“Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings,

even the tiniest insect!

How the earth darts on and on! How the sun,

moon, stars dart on and on!

How the water sports and sings! (Surely it is alive!)

How the trees rise and stand up – with strong

trunks, with branches and leaves!

Surely there is something more in each of the

trees – some living Soul.

O amazement of things! O spirituality of things!”

Or consider these final lines of a poem called “To Think on Time”:

“I swear I think now that everything without

exception has an eternal soul.

I swear I think there is nothing but Immortality.”

There is little question that Whitman had a powerful religious sentiment, but for him religion was something that was internal within us, not something that is given to us by some outside institution or tradition. He longed for an innovative and original religious sense for America, and didn’t believe that could be found in the established churches. He wrote, for example,

”Above all things the flights and sublime ecstasies of the soul cannot submit to the statements of any church or any creed. Really, what has America to do with all this mummery of prayer and rituals and the rant of exhorters and priests? I demand something far more real than that for America. I say that today the mummery of the churches, in which none believe but all agree to countenance, is what stands in the way of real religion for these states.”

What was “real religion” for Whitman? It was many things. It was democratic – accessible to anyone regardless of their station in life. It was individualistic, something experienced by each person rather than promoted by a community or society. It was at the same time mystical and natural – it is found in the structure of the world. Here are some famous lines about religion from Leaves of Grass. (Note that in this passage the word “Religion” is always capitalized.)

“I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the

sky are for Religion’s sake;

I say no man has ever been half devout enough;

None has ever yet adored enough, or worshipped half enough.

I say the real and permanent grandeur of These

States must be their Religion;

Otherwise, there is no real and permanent grandeur,

Nor character, nor life, worthy the name, without Religion.”

There is no doubt that the key defining event in America during Whitman’s life was the Civil War which began in 1861. And it would also prove to be pivotal in Whitman’s life. He was already 40 when the war broke out – too old to enlist – though two of his younger brothers served in the Union army.

As the war continued longer than anyone expected, Whitman began interviewing and writing about wounded soldiers who returned to New York hospitals. When the family got word that his brother George may have been wounded in battle in Virginia, Walt left New York to find his brother. Though it turned out that George had only minor wounds, Walt Whitman found something far more significant. At the battlefield site he found countless wounded soldiers, from North and South, that were hurting and scared. Many had amputations of arms and legs, and Whitman wrote about the piles of discarded limbs he found. He began interviewing and consoling those soldiers, as he had done at the New York hospitals, and his writings began shifting from an idealistic celebration of life to a more guarded view. The country he celebrated in verse that was unified by spirit of such different kinds of people was now falling apart. The diversity that made this country so special was now tearing it apart.

Whitman stayed for some time at the battlefield site, but eventually chose to move to Washington, D.C. where he could continue visiting and comforting wounded soldiers, taking down messages to send to their families. He would stay there until long after the war ended. It is estimated that he helped and comforted several tens of thousands of soldiers over that time. He often said that he benefited far more from his caring for these soldiers than what they gained from him. Yet he felt himself valuable in ways he never did in any other setting. Whitman wrote, “I can testify that friendship has literally cured a fever, and the medicines of daily affection, a bad wound.”

While volunteering in the military hospitals, he developed a longstanding friendship with Union Colonel Richard Hinton, whom he had visited when Hinton was a patient. Hinton later recalled that experience, saying:

“When this old heathen gave me pipe and tobacco it was the most joyous moment of my life. Every Sunday there were half a dozen old roosters who would come into my ward and preach . . . though we were wishing the blamed old fools would go away. He didn’t bring any tracts or Bibles, his funny stories and pipes and tobacco were worth more than all the preachers and tracts in Christendom.”

His experiences during the war also inspired more poetry. One of his more famous poems, Drum-Taps, recalled when he first visited the aftermath of a battlefield and came across the dead body of a young soldier. “Young man,” the poet writes,

“I think I know you – I think this face is the

Face of Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he lies again.”

By the time Whitman moved to Washington to care for the wounded soldiers, he was beginning to gain a successful reputation as a poet. He was even popular in England, though his books were censored there of some of the more sensual material. His success did not translate into money, though, and he always struggled to make a living, often living on the edge of poverty. (Though his Leaves of Grass, had become quite popular nationally, it was selling in many bootleg copies for which Whitman received nothing.) While in Washington, a friend found him an office job with the Department of Interior, but in 1865, the new Secretary of Interior, upon reading Leaves of Grass, thought it scandalous, and fired Whitman. The same friend then got him another clerical job with the Attorney General’s Office, which he kept until 1874 until he retired because of poor health.

He retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he continued prolific writing in spite of serious health problems. Over the next ten years, he struggled with those health problems, though at times he was well enough for travel to Canada and Colorado. He finally died at his home in Camden, New Jersey on March 26, 1892.

Let me close by returning to the beginning. In 1844, a decade before Whitman became a published poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the universally acclaimed “sage of Concord” and the universally accepted voice of the new American writers and thinkers. In 1844, Emerson published an essay entitled “The Poet,” which seems to call for the appearance of a new American poet who will capture the essence of this young land of promise and idealism. That poet has not yet arrived, he said.

Hear some of Emerson’s words about the meaning of “the poet,” and see if you hear, as I do, the prophet of American culture anticipating the work of Whitman. Here are some of Emerson’s words:

“The poet stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. . . . All (people) live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. . . .

Elsewhere in the essay, he seems even to anticipate Whitman’s invention of free verse:

“For it is not metres, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem – a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own. . . . The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, . . . not with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life. . . . not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar.”

And Emerson laments in 1841 that he sees no such American poet on the horizon. And yet he is convinced that the new American life lends itself to a unique poetic expression. America is indeed its own poem waiting to be written, and he lists the parts of American life that await the words of a poet. He continues:

“For the experience of each new age requires a new confession and the world seems always waiting for its poet. . . . I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. . . . We have yet had no genius in America which knew the value of our incomparable materials. Our log-rolling, our stumps and politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”

Whitman was the poet Emerson longed for, who turned the American vision into a veritable religious vision of democracy and equality and individuality.

The choir anthem this morning was a Whitman “Credo,” taken from his epic poem “Song of Myself.” There is another Credo from Whitman that can be found in the long preface to “Leaves of Grass.” I will close with these words which are, I think, an able summary of the religion of Walt Whitman:

“This is what you shall do. Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man (or woman) or number of men (or women) – go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families – re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”

READING

From “Life of Whitman” (1883) by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke

[Dr. Bucke was a close friend of Whitman’s who wrote one of the first biographies]

“His face is the noblest I have ever seen. I have never seen his look, even momentarily, express contempt or any vicious feeling. I have never known him to sneer at any person or thing, or to manifest in any way or degree either alarm or apprehension, though he has in my presence been placed in circumstances that would have caused both in most men. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many tings and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him; all sights and sounds, outdoors and indoors, seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw. . .

“He had a way of singing, generally in an undertone, wherever he was or whatever he was doing, when alone. You would hear him first thing in the morning . . . and a large part of the time that he sauntered outdoors during the day he sang, usually tunes without words, or a formless recitative.

“He never spoke deprecatingly about any nationality or class of men or time in the world’s history, or feudalism, or against any trades or occupations – not even against any animals, insects, plants, or inanimate things – nor any of the laws of nature, or any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity or death. He never complains or grumbles either at the weather, pain, illness or anything else. He never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it.

“I believe all the poet’s senses are exceptionally acute, his hearing especially so; no sound or modulation of sound perceptible to others escapes him, and he seems to hear many things that to ordinary folk are inaudible. I have heard him speak of hearing the grass grow and the trees coming out in leaf.

“He said, one day, while talking about some fine scenery and the desire to go see it,

‘After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights --- not the Alps, Niagara, Yosemite, or anything else – is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.’

“I believe this suggests the central teaching of his writings and life – namely, that the commonplace is the grandest of all things; that what is really wanting is not that we should possess something we have not at present, but that our eyes should be opened to see and our hearts to feel what we all do have.”