Whitman identifies human beings with their immortal souls. And he never stops celebrating the song of the soul’s liberation. He encourages us to dare everything on our way home to unity in God.
The American poet Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892. During his lifetime, he was known as “the good grey poet” and “the saint of Camden.” Later authors described him as a religious teacher, visionary, “prophet of a new era,” “man with a cosmic consciousness,” and one of the great heralds of the path to liberation.*
He collected his incredibly direct poems in his influential, poetry-revolutionising collection Leaves of Grass. A volume that grew more extensive with each new edition during his lifetime.
The “Leaves of Grass” poems have accompanied and inspired me since my youth. Especially in difficult times, individual poems from it were like beacons for me, with a power that I could draw on to lift myself up.
It is as if Walt Whitman takes me (and his readers in general) by the hand and leads us to a high perspective on the world, on life, on human beings.
He is like a friend who shares his deepest thoughts with you completely openly, a “camerado”, a soul companion and soul guide, someone who knows the great liberating jubilation of existence.
Walt Whitman is certainly one of the greatest sources of encouragement among the poets and thinkers. At the same time, he is a huge challenge. For what are we to make of a man who writes:
I praise with electric voice,
For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.
Song at SunsetI see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then.
Song of Myself, No. 48
Do I contradict myselt?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Song of Myself, No. 51
There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me. […]
I do not know it – it is without name – it is a word unsaid,
Song of Myself, No. 50
This poem is testimony to a deep self-knowledge.
A human who can write such words from his own experience is no longer a seeker. He has found.
He has explored his inner self and made contact with its innermost being. He possesses first-hand knowledge; with his inner senses, he has discovered “something” within himself and is interacting with it.
He is therefore very aware of what it means to be human, namely to have a direct share in something wonderful within himself, in his own being.
I imagine what it would be like to be permanently in this state of bliss. How would I perceive the world?
For me, Whitman is a hermetic poet because he sees through things and events to the forces at work to bring the “divine plan” to fulfilment. He writes:
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for travelling souls.
All parts away for the progress of souls.
Song of the Open Road, No. 13
It is this big, all-encompassing, nothing-excluding “yes” to life as a whole that Whitman sings about like a hymn of praise. In doing so, the wise bard never excludes “evil” or “the rejected.” Everything has its place.
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.
Autumn Rivulets, To a Common Prostitute
His universal love spread throughout the world. In a society where slavery and women’s rights were still a thing of the future, gender and racial equality were completely natural to him.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the arguments of the earth, […]
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of creation is love.
Song of Myself, No. 5
Even death, one of his favourite themes, is for him only a stop on the journey back to God.
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward to life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Song of Myself, No. 6
And so Walt Whitman celebrates a dynamic universe in which everything exists for the development of souls.
He also encourages us in our turbulent apocalyptic times with statements such as the following:
There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
Song of Myself, No. 45
For spiritual seekers, Whitman is a true spiritual guide who repeatedly points to the spiritual treasure hidden within every human being. It is the responsibility of each individual to lift it up and use it in the service of humanity:
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Song of Myself, No. 46You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.
Song of Myself, No. 46None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, […]
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
(To You)
Whitman identifies human beings with their immortal souls. And he never stops celebrating the song of the soul’s liberation. He encourages us to dare everything on our way home to unity in God. Like an eagle that pushes its young (us!) out of the safe but narrow eagle’s nest so that they (we: you and I!) – trusting in their innermost powers – can fly themselves, conquer the vastness of life, the world beyond the “I”, and experience the field of life of the soul itself.
Darest thou now, O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.Till when the ties loosen
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.
Then we burst forth, we float,
in Time and Space, O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.
Whispers of Heavenly Death, Darest Thou Now O Soul
Literature used and recommended:
– Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
– Richard Maurice Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness – A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind chapter Walt Whitman
– William Norman Guthrie: Walt Whitman (The Camden Sage) as religious and moral teacher, Cincinnati, The Robert Clarke Company, 1897
– Roland D. Sawyer: Walt Whitman The Prophet-Poet, Boston, The Four Seas Company, 1918
– Michael D. Sowder: Walt Whitman, the Apostle, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1999
– Jan van Rijckenborgh, Catharose de Petri: The Universal Gnosis, Rozekruis Pers, Haarlem, NL, 1981. The authors place Walt Whitman alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Jacob Böhme and Johannes of the Cross in his significance as a witness to the path of liberation.
– Zweig, Paul: Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, New York, Basic Books, 1984.
