Reading Whitman Religiously

The poet was viewed as a prophet in his own times

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By MICHAEL ROBERTSON

In December 1890, the elderly Walt Whitman received in the mail an unusual Christmas greeting from his admirer William Sloane Kennedy, a Harvard Divinity School dropout turned journalist. "Do you suppose a thousand years from now people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ?" Kennedy asked cheekily. "If they don't," he added, "the more fools they."

Kennedy's question was brazen, but it was probably not entirely unexpected. Starting in the 1860s, Whitman attracted a diverse group of adherents who regarded him less as a great poet, an American successor to Wordsworth, than as a great spiritual leader, a successor to the Buddha and Jesus. John Burroughs, the 19th century's most popular nature writer, published two books and dozens of essays on Whitman, all with one central message: Whitman's "Leaves of Grass is primarily a gospel and is only secondarily a poem." Burroughs scoffed at the notion of classing Whitman with "minstrels and edifiers"; he belonged among the "prophets and saviours." Leaves of Grass offers "a religion to live by and to die by," according to Thomas Biggs Harned, a prominent attorney and one of Whitman's literary executors. "I can never think of Whitman as a mere literary man. He is a mighty spiritual force."

Those responses to Whitman may sound strange to 21st-century ears, trained by decades of aesthetically oriented criticism to ignore poetry's religious dimensions. However, in the 19th century, many readers were receptive to the concept of the poet-prophet. As organized religion began to lose its cultural authority in the face of challenges from Enlightenment philosophers, biblical scholarship, and scientific discoveries, poets filled the spiritual void for many readers. William Blake, creator of elaborate private mythologies that cast the human imagination as the universe's divine creative force, was the first English-language poet to be widely regarded as a prophet.

The path toward a religious appreciation of Whitman was prepared not only by Blake's prophetic poetry but by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Critics have long recognized Emerson's literary influence on Whitman: Emerson's essay "The Poet," which calls for a uniquely American verse, served as a sort of template for Leaves of Grass. And they have noted his material aid to the poet (his letter to Whitman calling Leaves of Grass "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed" saved Whitman's self-published first edition from sinking into obscurity). Yet even more important, Emerson's work as a whole helped to prepare readers for the liberal, post-Christian spirituality that pervades Leaves of Grass.

Recent books by the religious-studies scholars Leigh Schmidt and Jeffrey Kripal locate the origins of liberal American spirituality in Emersonian transcendentalism. Pop sociologists would have us believe that the distinction between spirituality and religion arose in American culture about the same time as the musical Hair. Actually, the concept of spirituality (individualistic, mystical, pluralist) as distinct from religion (institutional, creedal, orthodox) originated in the 1830s with the flowering of Emerson's distinctive variety of Romanticism. When Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance" that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind," he was not merely rejecting the truth claims of Christianity in favor of a radical individualism; he was arguing that the self is indeed sacred, that the divine is to be found within. As Schmidt argues, the transcendentalists surrounding Emerson were North America's first "spiritual seekers" — that is, the first to reject institutional religion in favor of an individualistic, experiential, and eclectic quest for spiritual truth. Before the Civil War, most spiritual seekers turned for inspiration to some combination of Emersonian transcendentalism and non-Western religious writings and traditions. From the 1860s on, many turned as well to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Whitman's own spiritual aspirations, his ambition to become a poet-prophet, are evident both in his comments about his poetry and in the poems themselves.

I celebrate myself,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

So begins the first poem in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). The statement is political — it asserts a democratic equality between poet and reader — but it is also religious. I and you are not simply equal, but identical in a way that makes sense only in metaphysical terms. John Updike has written that the common charge against Whitman of egotism won't stick; rather, the self of Leaves of Grass is an example of "egotheism." "Divine am I inside and out," Whitman writes, but since I and you are interchangeable, you are as divine as I. Whitman offers a radically democratic theology: "Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme?" he asks in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. "We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes. … [There is nothing] in the known universe more divine than men and women."

Spirituality pervades Leaves of Grass. In the 1870s, as his poetic gifts faded and he increasingly turned to retrospection, Whitman wrote, "When I commenced, years ago, elaborating the plan of my poems, one deep purpose underlay the others, and has underlain it and its execution ever since — and that has been the religious purpose." Over the past century, academic critics, uncomfortable with religious interpretations of literature, have tried to explain away Whitman's statement — at other times he emphasized other purposes; he became more religious as he got older — but the poet's 19th-century disciples took him at his word.

Whitman's disciples were a large, diverse, loosely affiliated international group, ranging from a coterie of German writers to a gathering of middle-class Australians. However, most of the disciples were from North America and Great Britain. John Burroughs, the nature writer, was one of the first. In 1863 the 26-year-old Burroughs moved from upstate New York to Washington, D.C., in order to meet Walt Whitman, whose poetry he had discovered two years earlier. The two men quickly became close friends, but Burroughs never lost his awestruck view of the poet. Whitman "is by far the wisest man I have ever met," Burroughs wrote. "There is nothing more to be said after he gives his views. It is as if Nature herself had spoken."

The link, seemingly unmediated, between Walt Whitman and nature inspired all of Burroughs's writing about Whitman. In his immensely popular essays, Burroughs preached a gospel of nature that appealed to spiritual seekers alarmed by Gilded Age urbanization. "Amid the decay of creeds," he wrote, "love of nature has high religious value." Burroughs called Leaves of Grass, which is suffused with Emersonian nature mysticism, "the most religious book I ever met" and described it as "the broad hymn of the praise of things; all the works of the Creative Father are sung in joyous strains." Burroughs saw Leaves of Grass as the foundational scripture of a religion uniquely suited to a democratic age. Recalling his own Baptist father but speaking for many in his generation, Burroughs wrote that "the old religion, the religion of our fathers, was founded upon a curse. Sin, repentance, fear, Satan, hell play important parts." However, Whitman "sings a new song. … The earth is as divine as heaven, and there is no god more sacred than yourself." Just as Leaves of Grass was more gospel than poem, Whitman was less a poet than "a great and astounding religious teacher."

All the disciples agreed with Burroughs's estimation that Whitman was primarily a prophet and only secondarily a poet. And all were as struck as Burroughs was by Whitman's personal charisma. ("Whitman's magnetic quality was peculiar," William Sloane Kennedy wrote. "I never knew a person to meet him for the first time who did not come under its spell.") No one was more infatuated with Whitman than Anne Gilchrist, a distinguished English woman of letters, who fell in love with him on the basis of his poetry. The widowed mother of four children, Gilchrist came across Whitman's poetry in 1869, shortly after her friend William Michael Rossetti, brother of the poets Dante Gabriel and Christina, issued the first British edition of Whitman's poems. Gilchrist was overwhelmed by the poems' sexual frankness and celebration of female sexuality, by their uncannily intimate appeals to the reader. "This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man," Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, and he continues:

(Is it night? are we here together alone?)

I spring from these pages into your arms.

In the 21st century, we have become so used to thinking of Whitman as the Good Gay Poet that it is easy to overlook his crossover appeal, his textual bisexuality. During his lifetime, he received countless romance-tinged letters from women who responded to the erotically charged invitations scattered throughout Leaves of Grass; Anne Gilchrist happened to be one of the first, and certainly the most serious, among them.

Gilchrist wrote her initial letter to Whitman two years after first reading his verse. "Dear Friend," she began, decorously enough, but within a few pages, her tone was panting, ecstatic: "O come. Come, my darling: look into these eyes and see the loving ardent inspiring soul in them. Easily, easily will you learn to love all the rest of me for the sake of that and take me to your breasts for ever and ever." When Whitman failed to respond within a month, she wrote him a second letter, this one more ardent and, certainly, more explicit about her desires: "I am yet young enough to bear thee children, my darling." Whitman was finally jolted into action, and he wrote what he hoped would be a placating reply: brief, tactful, and vague. But Anne Gilchrist would not be put off so easily. She continued her ardent letters for the next five years, at which point she set sail for America, bringing with her three of her four children, her pianoforte, and a houseful of good furniture. She intended to set up housekeeping as Walt Whitman's wife.

Frustrated in her desire, Gilchrist instead became one of his most faithful disciples. Whitman's biographers, focused on the sensational elements of his relationship with Gilchrist, have dismissed her as a "pathetic Victorian lady," ignoring her brilliantly incisive essays on Whitman, which highlight his religious message. "Whitman is, I believe, far more closely akin to Christ than to either Homer or Shakespeare or any other poet," she wrote William Michael Rossetti, and she aptly titled one of her essays on Whitman "A Confession of Faith." A serious student of science as well as a religious liberal, Gilchrist was struck by the way Whitman rejected the 19th-century division between religion and science and instead embraced the latest discoveries, incorporating scientific language and insights into his spiritualized apprehension of reality.

In Whitman's fervidly pantheistic vision, all of nature contains an "eternal soul." "The trees have, rooted in the ground!" he exclaims in an early poem. "The weeds of the sea have! the animals!" Gilchrist and Burroughs searched for a language to characterize Whitman's religious vision. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian disciple, was certain he had found the right term: cosmic consciousness. He used the phrase as the title of a best-selling book, which maintains that Whitman is "the best, most perfect, example the world has so far had" of cosmic consciousness — greater, that is, than the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad.

Bucke, who trained as a physician, was superintendent of the London, Ontario, Lunatic Asylum, which, under his leadership, gained a reputation as one of the most progressive institutions of its kind in North America. However, in this prepsychiatric era, asylums served as little more than warehouses for the incurably insane, and Bucke devoted much of his enormous energy and formidable, if eccentric, intellect to his work as a self-taught theorist of religion and promoter of Walt Whitman.

More strongly than any of Whitman's other disciples, Bucke argued for a religious interpretation of Leaves of Grass and a messianic view of the poet. Like Burroughs and Gilchrist, Bucke sought out Whitman after reading his work. Immediately after meeting the poet, Bucke wrote to a friend that he had encountered a god, a position from which he never retreated. In his 1883 biography of Walt Whitman, Bucke depicted a man so saintly that even Whitman himself was taken aback. "I am by no means that benevolent, equable, happy creature you portray," he wrote Bucke.

His biography of Whitman completed, Bucke turned to his magnum opus, Cosmic Consciousness. The book, published in 1901, proved enormously popular and has never been out of print; it is currently available in four paperback editions in North America. In essence, Bucke took the typically Victorian belief in progress and applied it to the religious realm: Human consciousness was evolving, and Walt Whitman was the latest, best, and most perfect example of a fully evolved spiritual being. Although Whitman is central to Bucke's evolutionary argument, it is possible to appreciate Bucke's material on mysticism without sharing his Whitmanite fervor, which seems to be the experience of most of the book's readers in the century since it was published. Cosmic Consciousness became a best seller because it perfectly anticipated the central characteristics of modern liberal spirituality: rejection of tradition, eclecticism, and a valorization of mysticism as the primary religious experience.

Convinced that cosmic consciousness was on the rise, Bucke avidly collected case histories from his correspondents, who included the British man of letters John Addington Symonds. Symonds encountered Leaves of Grass a few years after graduating from Oxford, and he incorporated Whitman's pantheism into the individualistic belief system that Symonds dubbed "Cosmic Enthusiasm." However, his enthusiasm was not just for Whitman's mysticism; he was equally stirred by the poetry's homoeroticism.

Symonds married at 24 in an effort to cure the attraction to other men he had experienced since childhood. The attempt was unsuccessful. However, Leaves of Grass, which he read the year after his marriage, offered Symonds a new way to think about his sexual desires, which he had been taught to believe were degenerate and perverse. In contrast, Whitman's poetry portrayed male love as pure and ennobling, as in his poem "A Glimpse":

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Symonds thrilled to that depiction of male love as an island of purity amid the moral filth of the larger culture. He was not alone. Other man-loving British intellectuals embraced both the spiritual and the homoerotic fervor of Leaves of Grass — as well as, in many cases, embracing Whitman himself. Distinguished visitors from Britain regularly showed up on Whitman's doorstep in Camden, N.J., where Whitman moved in 1873 after suffering a stroke. His visitors included Oscar Wilde, who made two pilgrimages to Camden during his 1882 tour of the United States, subsequently published an essay titled "The Gospel According to Walt Whitman," and boasted for years afterward, "The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips."

Early in his career, Whitman had imagined that his poetry would be read by American workingmen. As it turned out, he found his most receptive audience among the British intelligentsia. His hopes for a wider audience explain his warm response to a group of lower-middle-class disciples from the English industrial city of Bolton. In the 1880s, a small group of friends began meeting on Monday evenings for cocoa and conversation at the home of J.W. Wallace, an architect's assistant. Wallace, who experienced a religious crisis at the time of his mother's death, embraced Leaves of Grass as a gospel, made a pilgrimage to Whitman in Camden, and regularly preached Whitmanite sermons to his friends. In the 1890s, he began preaching more broadly. Wallace, a socialist, found himself at the center of the "ethical socialism" movement in England's industrial North. Ethical socialists eschewed Marxist radicalism in favor of a religiously tinged emphasis on personal transformation. Services at the socialist Labour Church, which flourished in the industrial North, typically included working-class anthems in place of hymns and passages from Leaves of Grass in place of readings from the Bible. Wallace successfully made Walt Whitman a patron saint of British socialism — literally so: He wrote a biography of the poet for the monthly "Calendar of Socialist Saints" feature in Young Socialist magazine.

Wallace's religious-political interpretation of Whitman lost its influence after the turn of the century, when British socialists shifted their attention from personal conversion to electoral victories in Parliament. However, his writings on Whitman are gaining new attention from scholars. For years, Wallace and the other disciples were dismissed as "hot little prophets," a lunatic fringe of "subliterary minds." Now an increasing number of critics are turning their attention to what Whitman himself called "the religious root-ground" of Leaves of Grass.

They are joined by large numbers of ordinary readers. In the course of researching a book on Whitman's 19th-century disciples, I encountered people across the United States and England who consider Whitman to be a religious figure. I attended services at a Unitarian chapel in Bolton where the minister salted his sermon with quotations from Leaves of Grass; I participated in a guided-meditation session at a Quaker meetinghouse in Washington, D.C., that used Whitman's words as a guide to higher states of consciousness; and I met with the New Jersey secretary of commerce in his office to talk about how, as a teenager living in Camden, he felt a mystical connection to Whitman as he jogged past the poet's tomb in Harleigh Cemetery. These 21st-century readers of Whitman don't deify the poet as did disciples like Bucke, who fell under the spell of his personal magnetism, and they are not inclined to make Leaves of Grass the basis of a movement to transform society in the way that Wallace imagined was possible. But Leaves of Grass is important to many readers today not just as a book of poetry but also as a foundation of their spiritual lives. For all their eccentricities, Whitman's 19th-century disciples pioneered an approach to America's greatest poet that remains valuable today.

Michael Robertson is a professor of English at the College of New Jersey and author of Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, just published by Princeton University Press.