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A Semiotic of Ecstatic Naturalism:
Whitman, Literary Shamanism,
and the Metaphysical Sign
by
Michael Dellert
To state that Walt Whitman’s mysticism derives from the New England Transcendentalists is to repeat well-established opinion. And much has already been made of the notion that Whitman may have been propounding a new religion or establishing himself as a messianic figure. Indeed, to even talk about the revolutionary nature of Whitman’s poetry, his break from the literary conventions of the past and his forging into new poetical territory, his midwifery of American Modernism, is to say nothing new.
When we look to un-American terrain, however, Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass seems strikingly similar to early Irish and Welsh poetry. Most particularly, in presenting the transformative, polymorphic powers of the poet, and in proclaiming the ecstatic transcendence of the Self, Whitman seems Irish — yet if he broke with the traditions of the past to create new Modern ground, how can these similarities exist, and how can Whitman be Modern? To answer these questions, I will look at Song of Myself in relation to The Song of Amergin from the Irish literary tradition, and the Cad Goddeu from the Welsh. I will focus the light of a hermeneutic of ecstatic naturalism and literary shamanism, as propounded by Robert S. Corrigan (Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World) and George Hutchinson (The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of Union). I will also examine Whitman’s relations with the Irish immigrant community in New York City in order to illustrate his potential familiarity with Irish literature. Finally, Edward J. Ahearn’s article, Toward a Model of Ecstatic Poetry: Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan" and Rimbaud’s "Villes I" and "Barbare", will help me to define the nature of ecstatic poetry.
I. Whitman, Emerson, and Literary Shamanism
In his study of Whitman’s ecstatic poetry, George Hutchinson posits a genre which he calls "literary shamanism," drawing on the anthropological work of Mircea Eliade to draw parallels between Whitman’s mysticism and the deeper cross-cultural phenomenon of the primitive shaman. According to Hutchinson, shamanism’s "only ideological preconditions [are] the concept of a dualistic soul and the belief in parallel spiritual and physical worlds, the connections of which the shaman has special abilities to penetrate." [Hutchinson, xiv]
The early literature of Wales and Ireland was the production of a professional hereditary caste of highly trained, learned poets known as "bards," who can be described as an offshoot of the more ancient Celtic caste of "druids," and the practices of the "druids" have been described by some as "shamanistic." Thus, it can be argued that (as far as Whitman was concerned) the bards of Wales and Ireland were the inheritors of the more ancient shamanistic practices of their Celtic forebears.(1)
Similarly, one can see the development of certain kind of "shamanistic" thought in the early to middle nineteenth century, when American Transcendentalism emerged as an indigenous way of thinking about literature, religion, culture and philosophy. Of course, American Transcendentalism was rooted in the metaphysical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which the New England intellectuals of the early nineteenth century (Emerson, Thoreau, et al) embraced as an alternative to Lockean "sensualism" and the teachings of the Unitarian church. They freely mixed Kantian transcendental philosophy with Vedic thought (itself often considered "shamanistic" in origin) and English Romanticism. Whether German, English, or American, Transcendentalists assumed an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical world and can only be realized through individual intuition, rather than through doctrines of established religions.
R.W. Emerson (despite repudiating the label of "transcendentalist") built onto this transcendental metaphysics, positing that there walked among us men particularly suited to bridging the gap between ideal spiritual states and the physical and empirical world: poets. The definition of the poet in Emerson’s essay The Poet, which had so profound an influence on Whitman, lays out clearly what the poet’s role should be:
"The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart." [Emerson, The Poet]
Thus we can see here that Hutchinson’s shaman and Emerson’s ideal poet are essentially identical, creatures explaining the material world as a world embodying the transcendent spirit.
Whitman took the core beliefs of the Transcendentalists and he absorbed and synthesized these with various other influences into his own psyche as he sought to achieve a conscious awareness of reality, the divine, and spiritual truth through transcendental intuition:
"Many of the ideas and theories Whitman was developing [...] he found amplified, extended, and partly altered by the work of other thinkers. Hugh Blair's prefatory 'Critical Dissertation' on the Poems of Ossian held the spiritual machinery of the works supposedly translated by [James] MacPherson to be essential and 'sublime,' connected with universal religious and epic motifs." (Hutchinson, 44)(2)
From this admixture of transcendental philosophy, mysticism, comparative myth and religion, Whitman begins to develop the style of ecstatic naturalism that leaps from the pages of Leaves of Grass when it is first published in 1855:
" 'The primitive poets, their subjects, their style, all assimilate. Very ancient poetry, of the Hebrew prophets, of Ossian, of the Hindu singer and ecstatics, of the Greeks, of the American aborigines, the old Persians and Chinese, and the Scandinavian Sagas, all resemble each other.' " (Hutchinson, 47) 3)
II. Ecstatic Naturalism
Robert Corrington’s idea of ecstatic naturalism "locates all forms of semiosis within a self-transforming nature that represents the seed bed for all powers and potencies, be they semiotic or presemiotic" (Corrington, 2). Corrington argues that all semiosis, all signification, exists within the metaphysical framework of a continuously changing cosmos, and that this cosmos contains pre-semiotic possibilities as well as the attained world of social signification. Corrington’s method brings together classical pragmatism, naturalism, and postmodern psychoanalysis to create a hermeneutic strategy that Corrington calls "emancipatory reenactment" by which "genuine potencies from past conceptual horizons are freed to play a new role in a contemporary and expanding horizon of meaning." (Corrington, 8). Corrington argues that this is possible because:
"all categories are in and of an evolving universe that contains genuine novelty … All sign users are part of a vast evolutionary matrix that contains innumerable suborders and evolutionary niches that may or may not be hostile to the needs of the given sign-user. Within these orders, forms of novelty (variation) occur that open up semiotic possibilities while canceling others." (Corrington, 6).
While it might seem counter-intuitive to place Whitman within any sort of "system," given his reputation as a breaker of traditions, it is nevertheless valuable to examine Whitman semiotically, because he is still a sign-using creature seeking to communicate to other sign-using creatures through a system of signification, i.e., written language. Thus, it becomes possible to fuse the shamanistic ideology described by Hutchinson, the transcendental Poet of Emerson, and the ecstatic naturalism of Corrington to arrive at a method by which we can understand Whitman’s Song of Myself as an emancipatory reenactment of the genuine potencies latent in the conceptual horizons of the Song of Amergin and the Cad Goddeu, and that these genuine potencies exist in a pre-semiotic realm from which Whitman, in his poetic ecstasy, brings forth these potencies, acting as a bridge between the parallel spiritual and physical worlds, i.e., between the presemiotic and the semiotic.
III. Song of Myself (1855)
But how does this relate to Whitman? Let’s look.
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. (Kaplan, 27)
In the opening lines of Song of Myself, Whitman is destabilizing the identity of the poetic voice, grounding the voice in the subjective ‘I’ and immediately creating a dialectic with the objective ‘you,’ forcing the objective ‘you’ to "assume" that which the poetic voice assumes, to take on, in a sense, the shape of the poetic ‘I’. But this dialectical tension is immediately reversed, giving back to the objective ‘you’ the ‘good atoms’ of the subjective ‘I,’ as the poetic voice begins to assume the shape of the objective ‘you’. Right from the outset, Whitman is playing games with transformation and shapeshifting, transcending from his own self, and forcing the reader, as the signification of the objective ‘you,’ to transcend from the self as well, and for reader and poet to mingle and merge, their atoms mingling like lovers.
Every kind for itself and its own … for me mine male and female,
For me all that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweetheart and the old maid … for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children. (Kaplan, 33)
Here, Whitman reaches beyond the limited boundaries of his own Self once again, drawing together opposites, unifying male and female, boys and men, sweethearts and old maids, joy and melancholy, and then fusing a triune arrangement of mothers, grandmothers and children that resonates with both biblical and classical pagan associations.
And in this following sequence, we see the catalogue as a series of poetical transformations, as the poetic subject shifts through a variety of shapes and experiences, creating harmony.
The blab of the pave … the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and pelts of snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites … the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter – the sick man inside, borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd – the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
The souls moving along … are they invisible while the least atoms of the stones is visible?
What groans of overfed or half-starved who fall on the flags sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here … what howls restrained by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the resonance of them … I come again and again. (Kaplan, pp.33-34)
Here, the poet himself becomes like the "impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes," echoes of a presemiotic ecstatic consciousness, reverberations of meanings and images that shuffle rapidly from moment to moment. The poets of ancient Wales and Ireland used similar techniques to accomplish similar effects in their own times, creating the potentialities which Whitman now expresses, some eight hundred years later.
IV. Cad Goddeu, The Battle of the Trees (ca. 900AD)
Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees) is a sixth century Welsh poem attributed to the earliest poet of the Welsh language whose work has survived, Taliesin, c. 534 – c. 599AD (Wikipedia, "Cad Goddeu"). It is found in the Llyfr Taliesin (Book of Taliesin), which is itself a compilation of early Welsh literature, written in 10th century Welsh (Wikipedia, "Book of Taliesin").
The opening lines of this poem exhibit much the same transformative power that Whitman himself uses in Song of Myself.
I HAVE been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,
I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
A year and a half.
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over three score Abers [aber = the mouth of a river].
I have been a course, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas:
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp,
Disguised for nine years.
in water, in foam.
I have been sponge in the fire,
I have been wood in the covert.
I am not he who will not sing of
A combat though small,
The conflict in the battle of Godeu of sprigs.
Through this opening, the poet, Taliesin, defines himself by what he is not: "I am not he who will not sing." Just as any signification resonates with all of the meanings of all those things which it does not signify, so too does Taliesin resonate with all those things which he is not, before he becomes what he is. The presemiotic potencies of the vast evolving universe are shuffled like a deck of cards, until at last the image of Taliesin the poet emerges, but only as a shadow of what Taliesin is not, present by his absence. Taliesin becomes the bridge between these presemiotic potencies and the attained world of signification. He is all that is not Other-Than-Him, yet he has been all that there is.
Later in the poem, Taliesin sings of the nature of his own creation:
Not of mother and father,
When I was made,
Did my Creator create me.
Of nine-formed faculties,
Of the fruit of fruits,
Of the fruit of the primordial God,
Of primroses and blossoms of time hill,
Of the flowers of trees and shrubs.
Of earth, of an earthly course,
When I was formed.
Of the flower of nettles,
Of the water of the ninth wave.
In this passage, Taliesin claims to have sprung not from mortal parents, but fully-formed from the very earth itself, from the fruits and the primroses and the flowers, as well as from the ninth wave. Once again, he is creating himself by resonating with those things which he is not, the presemiotic potencies of a self-transforming nature. There is an attempt throughout this passage to formulate an origin for the Self known as Taliesin, to come to a knowledge of a pre-semiotic existence, a "material maternal":
"By seeing the self as a momentum under way toward a 'lost object' that reminds it of its conditions of origin, post modern psychology honors the rhythms of [the presemiotic potencies of a self-transforming nature] that live at the point of origin and, in a transformed sense, at the point of the not yet that comes to the self from out of the future." (Corrington, 11)
Similarly, in his essay, Toward a Model of Ecstatic Poetry: Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Villes I’ and ‘Barbare,’ Edward Ahearn describes the ecstatic consciousness as "a transcendence of normal modes of experience" (Ahearn, 43). In this poem, Taliesin creates the very same consciousness that Ahearn discovers in the work of Coleridge and Rimbaud: "a fine sample of what such a consciousness might experience: enormous energy...; intensity of experience and fusion of extremes...; concentration and dispersal of self, body and world..." (Ahearn, 43).
V. The Song of Amergin (ca. 1150AD)
The Song of Amergin is one part of the tale of the Milesian Invasion of Ireland, which itself is but one of many stories told in a loose collection of poems and prose narratives known in Middle Irish as Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), compiled and edited by an anonymous scholar sometime in the eleventh century AD.
During the episode of the Milesian Invasion of Ireland, the Milesians (mythical ancestors of the modern Irish people) must make a landing on the island against a magical defense by its inhabitants (the Dé Danann).
"Upon a signal, they [the Milesians] moved toward the beach, but the druids of the Dé Danann raised a magical storm to keep them from reaching land. However, Amergin sang an invocation calling upon the spirit of Ireland that has come to be known as The Song of Amergin, and he was able to part the storm and bring the ship safely to land [emphasis mine]." (Wikipedia, "Amergin.")
Among the Milesians was Amergin mac Míled, who served as a druid, bard and judge for the Milesians. As Taliesin did in the Cad Goddeu, the druid Amergin rhapsodizes about his identity, creating a correspondence between himself and the land of Ireland, which at this point in the story is terra incognita, unexplored, presemiotic:
I am a wind on the sea
I am a wave of the ocean
I am the roar of the sea,
I am a powerful ox,
I am a hawk on a cliff,
I am a dewdrop in the sunshine,
I am a boar for valor,
I am a salmon in pools,
I am a lake in a plain,
I am the strength of art,
I am a spear with spoils that wages battle,
I am a man that shapes fire for a head.
Unlike Taliesin, who "[has] been in a multitude of shapes," Amergin claims to be in twelve different shapes simultaneously. The many shapes that Amergin assumes are all "presemiotic," images of the natural (non-human) world which are themselves incapable of signification, yet Amergin becomes the bridge between the presemiotic potencies of these shapes, drawing them together into himself and thereby transcending himself before rebounding and becoming "a man that shapes fire for a head." He bridges the metaphysical and the material, bringing together the diversity of the world.
Thus we see Whitman, whether consciously or unconsciously, digging into the past, unearthing poetical techniques long buried, drawing forth new meanings and new methods of signification, to create what seems to be an entirely "Modern" and American form of poetry.
"...emancipatory reenactment ... reaches down into a past horizon and alters the correlation between local and regional features so that unthought and alien aspects can emerge in new guise as regional structures of great scope." (Corrington, 8)
It is by this reaching down into the past and drawing forth meanings that had lain latent within the past, revitalizing those meanings and giving them new signification, that Whitman achieves his Modernity and establishes himself as Emerson’s Poet.
VI. Whitman and the Irish
The foregoing analysis, however, begs the question: Was Whitman familiar with the Song of Amergin or the Cad Goddeu? Certainly, Whitman was exposed to some of the influences of the burgeoning Celtic Revival that would come into its fullest flower in the poetry of William Butler Yeats in the later nineteenth century.
For one thing, the sheer number of Irish immigrants in the New York City area during Whitman’s lifetime was staggering. Prior to the 1840s, there was already a sizeable Irish population in America. From 1823-1830, Whitman and his family "lived in various places in Brooklyn, including the vicinity of the Brooklyn Navy Yard located very near the heaviest concentration of Irish in Brooklyn" (Krieg,12, 17).
Added to this pre-existent and vibrant New York Irish population were immigrants fleeing the Irish potato blights of 1845, 1846, 1848, and 1849. These potato blights, and the strong movement in Ireland for the repeal of the 1800 Act of Union with Great Britain, led to the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848.
The Young Ireland movement was a group of young literary men and women, Catholic and Protestant, interested not in constitutional reform and repeal of the Act of Union, but in full separation of Ireland from England. Notable members of this group included Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy, founders of the Irish journal Nation, and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (known by the pseudonym Speranza), mother of Oscar Wilde. These young men and women had sought to focus attention on a common national culture of history and literature, and laid the foundation for the later Celtic Revival exemplified by Yeats. Their 1848 rebellion was put down by the English, and a number of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement, notably John Mitchel, were arrested while others fled the country, some finding refuge in America. Mitchel was imprisoned in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) but escaped and made his way to New York City in 1853. (Krieg, 4-5)
Many of the most fervent proponents of the democratic ideals that Whitman held so dear were Irish newspapermen. By 1841, Whitman’s political and journalistic activities had already introduced him to such prominent Irish-American figures as Mike Walsh, leader of the New York Spartan Band and the Bowery B’hoys, and John Louis Sullivan, who coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny." (Krieg, 4-5)
In 1847, Whitman was recommending books by Irish author William Carleton to readers of the Brooklyn Eagle (Krieg, 5). Carleton was one of Ireland's finest nineteenth century novelists, and "His father had an extraordinary memory and a thorough acquaintance with Irish folklore" (Wikipedia, "William Carleton.").
Thus, one can see that Whitman was not only familiar with the shanty towns of the Irish immigrants, but also with prominent and culturally-sophisticated Irish-Americans, as well as being familiar with the work of the leading Irish novelist of the day. Added to this, the Lebor Gabála Érenn was still accepted as an accurate and literally true history of Ireland as late as the seventeenth century, and Geoffrey Keating’s history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (ca. 1634) was based in part on the Middle Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, and thus the folktales and pseudo-historical myths of ancient Ireland were common knowledge to some extent among the Irish in America.
Therefore, the circumstantial evidence, in my opinion, indicates that he may have known of these works, if not at first hand, then through the influences of these works on other works touched on by his own scholarship, and on the innumerable Irish immigrants which permeated New York public life during his time. Whatever the case, it should be abundantly clear that Whitman must be read in an encompassing global context, for that is certainly how he envisioned himself.
1. This connection from bard to druid to shaman is tenuous, of course, in light of modern Anthropological and Celtic Studies: Eliade’s hypotheses have been criticized for being unsupported by direct research; druidism and shamanism have been adopted and mutated by New Age mystical fringe groups; and the actual practices of the Celtic druids are largely unknown outside of ancient sources hostile to them (Greek and Roman writers in cultural conflict with the Celts). However, in Whitman’s time, during the early years of the Celtic Revival, such ideas were gaining in popularity. For example, Hutchinson’s definition of shamanism is also echoed in Volney’s Ruins, a book Whitman is known to have read: "According to Volney the [Chinese] chamans [sic.] ‘give a complete representation of the whole system of the Stoics and the Epicureans, mixed with astrological superstitions, and some traits of Pythagorism’" (Hutchinson, p.35) Interestingly, Pythagorism is also associated with the Gallic druids of the Roman era through the historian Didorus Siculus, who wrote in 8BC: "The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among them [the Gauls], teaching that the souls of men are immortal and live again for a fixed number of years inhabited in another body." (Didorus Siculus, Histories, V.28.6) Whitman was likewise introduced to the study of European paganism and the folklore of the British Isles at about the age of 16, when he received a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in an edition which apparently contained Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J.G. Lockhart, esq. [sic] In these works, Sir Walter Scott discusses European paganism, Scandinavian sagas, the lore of the skalds, and of Odin, and correlates these with classical (Greek/Roman) mythology, mystic rites, and prophecy (Hutchinson, 43). Thus, we can see how Whitman might have been able to draw parallels between bards, Northern European paganism and Chinese shamans, based on some of the incidental evidence of the sources to which he had access, despite the legitimate modern and well-researched objections to such a connection.
2. Referencing MacPherson, James, Poems of Ossian, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d., rpt. 1830
3. Quoting The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke et al., New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1902
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