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Imagery Analysis - Home Sudden Imagery when Whitman writes about Patriotism
When reading the works of Walt Whitman, his patriotism, inconsistency, fluctuating, self-interesting, and self-forgetfulness, could show that patriotism need not and should not keep one from making imaginative cosmopolitan connections with people in other countries. He cites that as in the case of "This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful," for Whitman these connections were neither superficial nor facile, and even though they remained imaginary for him, they also carried with them a deep, troubling identification with others throughout the world, an identification without which no one's patriotism can hope to free itself from narcissism chained to a national mirror.
What some might call Whitman's essentialism is only one of the features of his statement about the United States that might mark it, in some eyes, as dated, obsolete, historically confined and limited. Another is his use of the plural verb "are," as opposed to the "is" that gradually became dominant after the American Civil War forever rearranged the notion of an American nation. Only 79 years into the American experiment in 1855, Whitman's grammar reflects the evolving balance between, on the one hand, the plura of e pluribus and, on the other, the emerging unum under construction. In addition, without listening closely to history, or to various histories, we might not catch the note of desperate, even doomed, hopefulness behind the vatic pronouncement that the United States are essentially the greatest poem.
What his revisions in the line make clear is that Whitman's sense of himself as a kosmos somehow did not square with his sense of himself as American. With the dropping of the national identity and the preservation of the local, we are left not with a trinity of nouns possibly in apposition to one another-as though somehow being an American, from a teeming nation of nations, and a tough guy from lower Manhattan and a cosmic world unto oneself were all equivalents-but with an opposition of local and larger-than-local.
This account of Whitman's patriotism has much to recommend it, and it illuminates various aspects of his later life and career, such as his annual lectures about Lincoln on each anniversary of the assassination or the publication of a sixth edition of Leaves of Grass in 1876 to coincide with the national centennial and to reassert the identification of poet and country. But this account also ignores one extraordinary piece of evidence from well before both the election of Lincoln and the Civil War, the unpublished tract "The Eighteenth Presidency!" composed in 1856 in anticipation of the November elections, which put James Buchanan in the White House, as Stephen Cushman states.
As in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Whitman names himself, and as in the poem that become "Song of Myself," he links that naming to his identity as an American, one so identified with the political workings of the nation that he is ready to join those workings as a delegate or candidate. He is no anarchist or antigovernment libertarian here. In the ninth edition of Leaves of Grass, this poem bears the title "This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful" and appears as the nineteenth poem in the famous-some would say infamous-"Calamus" cluster, devoted to what Whitman called manly love. The critical conversation about this cluster, and about Whitman's homosexuality in general, has been carrying on for some time and shows no signs of abating.
Whatever one decides, if indeed one does decide at all, what matters most to our discussion here is that the speaker's placement of himself in America is clear, as he refers quite directly to "my own lands," a phrase in which the possessive "my" also implies an identification with the country that Whitman himself never once left. But also clear is that although the speaker locates himself in and identifies himself with America, the poem is about his concurrent identification with people he imagines to be like himself in other countries, an identification that crosses national boundaries and envisions a kosmos made up of loving attachments between men.
With a deeper sense of the context provided by the original sequence, we can now see that two more small moments in the first draft of "This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful," which originally began on a note of greater discomfort, with "pensive" in place of "thoughtful," confirm that for Whitman the stakes were high in what some might dismiss as a slight poem, as some sort of struggle between national identity and cosmopolitanism is in progress there. First, in the original manuscript the geographical triad "Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or Japan" reads "Or far away in China, India, or Russia," with "India" added in pencil above a caret mark. As the 1871 poem "Passage to India" makes clear, Whitman reserved a special place for India in his imagination.
(Cushman)
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