Walt Whitman as a Mystic Poet

 

Mysticism is not really a coherent philosophy of life, but more a temper of mind. A mystical experience, according to Bertrand Russell, involves insight, a sense of unity and the unreality of time and space, and a belief that evil is mere an appearance. A mystic’s vision is intuitive; he feels the presence of a divine reality behind and within the ordinary world of sense perception. He feels that God and the supreme soul animating all things are identical. He sees an essential identity of being between Man, Nature and God. He believes that “all things in the visible world are but forms and manifestations of the one Divine light, and that these phenomena are changing and temporary, while the soul that informs them is eternal.” The human soul, too, is eternal. Transcendentalism is closely connected to mysticism, for it emphasizes the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical.

Whitman believed the soul to be immortal. He felt identification with all animate and inanimate things around him. What is interesting about Whitman’s mysticism is that, as Schyberg observes, “In his book we can find the typical characteristics of absolutely all the various mystic doctrines.” But generally, Whitman, unlike other mystics, can describe his mystical experience in specific and concrete terms without resorting to ambiguities and hyperbole.

            It is true that we cannot call him a pure mystic in the sense of oriental mysticism. He is not a ‘praying’ man. Like all mystics, he believed in the existence of the soul, in the existence of the Divine Spirit, in the immortality of the human soul, and in the capacity of a human being to establish communication between his spirit and the Divine Spirit. But he differs from the oriental or traditional mystics in that he does not subscribe to their belief that communication with the Divine Spirit possible only through denial of the senses and mortification of the flesh. Whitman declares that he sings of the body as much as of the soul. He feels that spiritual communication is possible, indeed desirable, without sacrificing the flesh. Thus there is a great deal of the sexual element in Whitman’s poetry especially in the early poetry - Section 5 of Song of Myself is a case in point where the sexual connotations are inseparable from the mystical experience.

 To Whitman the mystical state is achieved through the transfigured senses rather than by escaping the senses. In Section 11 of Song of Myself, once again a mystical experience is symbolically conveyed through, piece of sensuous experience. In Section 24, the poet becomes the spokesman of the “forbidden voices” of “sexes and lusts, voices indecent”. He loves his body and is sensitive to another’s touch. Both the lady and the prostitute enjoy equal position in his poetry, for the inner reality, the soul has been created by the same god. “If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred”, he says in one of his poems. He celebrates all the organs of the body-male and female.

Whitman does not reject the material world. He seeks the spiritual through the material. He does not subscribe to the belief that objects are elusive. There is no tendency on the part of the soul to leave this world for good. In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, we see the soul trying to play a significant role in the administration of this world of scenes, sights, sounds, etc. Whitman does not belittle the achievements of science and materialism. Whitman has throughout his poetry shown his faith in the unity of the whole, or “oneness” of all. This sense of the essential divinity of all created things is an important aspect of mysticism and is also closely related to Whitman’s faith in democracy calling for equality and fraternity.          ‘Song of Myself’ is replete with lines proclaiming this “oneness”.

Whitman is a mystic as much as he is a poet of democracy and science, but a “mystic without a creed”. He sees the body as the manifestation of the spirit which is delivered by death into a higher life. A spear of grass is not an inert substance for him but God’s handkerchief, the flag of his disposition. Whitman’s mysticism is “democratic” mysticism available to every man on equal terms and embracing contradictory elements.