Re-Visions of Columbus in Emerson, Thoreau, And

1 %

^

THE TRANSCENDENTAL ADMIRAL: RE-VISIONS OF

COLUMBUS IN EMERSON, THOREAU, AND WHITMAN

by

SCOTT G. PHILLIPS, B.A.

A THESIS

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial FulfiUment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS

Approved

August, 1997

y^ ) ^9 T TABLE OF CONTENTS

^^f' CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. ORIGINS OF THE COLUMBUS MYTH 3

m. EMERSON 14

IV. THOREAU 23

V. WHITMAN 32

VI. CONCLUSION 50

WORKS CITED 52

11 y^ CHAPTERI INTRODUCTION

In the Introduction to Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, Ed Folsom relates the story of how noted Whitman scholar Charles Feinberg was denied his request for a Centennial exhibition by the Library of Congress. "1992," Feinberg was told, "would be Columbus's year." Of course, as Folsom points out, 1992 was anything but a banner year for the once-celebrated mariner. While the long-rising wave of debunkings and deconstructions crested and crashed on the Quincentennial and the legacy it was intended to commemorate, Whitman's Centennial was a rousing national and intemational success. Yet, while Whitman scholarship and readings flourished during 1992, little notice was given to the coincidence of these anniversaries or to the poet's repeated identifications with, and literary appropriation of, our most protean and problematic American icon. While this silence may be attributable to an attempt at critical kindness towards the toasted bard (in contemporary criticism, Columbus is more Hkely to be represented as a symbol of imperialism, racism, phallocentricism, and ecocide than as a heroic visionary or intrepid world-finder), it is also indicative of a tendency in twentieth-century literary scholarship to underplay or avoid altogether the problem of this now-vilified American hero's persistent presence in American transcendental literature. This essay wiU explore the writings of three of America's most prolific and influential literary transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman-in an attempt to clarify the role the Columbus myth played in the development of each author's version of the "transcendental" vision. ^ The coincidence of the anniversaries of Whitman's death and Columbus's landfall could, of course, be dismissed as exactly that, unrelated incidents which, while conveniently situated for a scholar in search of a subject, are finally unremarkable and unimportant. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Whitman's death marks the end of a distinct and important period in American thought and culture. As the last of America's literary transcendentalists, Whitman's demise arguably meant the end of the "American Renaissance," an era which, though rooted in European Romanticism, in time produced an unprecedented and uniquely-American literature which contributed immeasurably to the American sense of identity. Whitman's death also corresponds with a pivotal moment in the history of the Columbus myth. As many thousands of admirers filed past the poet's body in his home in Camden, New Jersey, the nation's most celebrated artisans, architects, and engineers were gathering in Chicago to construct what modem historians cite as one of the most important and far-reaching events of postbellum American history. The World's Columbian Exposition-the largest, most widely attended, and most international world's fair of the nineteenth century-ushered in the dawn of the modem era, serving not only as a showcase for revolutionary innovations in consumer-driven manufacturing, travel, and entertainment technologies, but as a fomm, albeit muted, for social and historical reappraisals of American history, myth, and destiny. (Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, used the Exposition to announce his now-famous hypothesis concerning the closure of the American frontier.) Only nominally about Columbus or the anniversary of his "discovery," the Exposition celebrated American ingenuity, progress, and coUective consumption while bidding the nineteenth century, and its problematic symbology of spiritual individuahsm mixed with Manifest

X Destiny, a fond but firm farewell. By the century's end, Columbus had largely outlived his usefulness as an effective national symbol. Transcendentalism, too, had lost its always precarious public appeal as a philosophical and aesthetic mode of thought. But to understand how this happened, and why the nineteenth-century m^rth of Columbus is important to our understanding of American transcendental literature, we must first look to the origins of this m^rth.

^ CHAPTERII ORIGINS OF THE COLUMBUS MYTH

In his essay "Columbia, Columbus, Columbianism," historian Thomas J. Schlereth traces the public American history of the Columbus myth over three chronological periods. In the first, or "Columbia," period, the figure of Columbus is represented in the popular consciousness not as a historical or even mythical voyager-hero, but as an allegorical, and consistently female, classical deity. It appears that in the Colonial era Columbus and his legendary exploits were largely ignored: "The year 1692 passed without a single word or deed of recorded commemoration" (Sale 331). "Americans first discovered the discover," Schlereth notes, "during their quest for independence and nationhood; successive generations molded Columbus into a multipurpose American hero, a national symbol to be used variously in the quest for a coUective identity" (937). One manifestation of this quest can be seen in the rise of the word "Columbia" as a synonym for the New World. WhUe the first usage (1697) of the feminine adjectival form of "Columbus" is credited to Massachusetts Chief Justice Samuel SewaU (Schlereth 939)-and the term also makes an appearance in a few pre-RevoIutionary, and even loyalist, verses (Bushman 42-43)-the appeUation only came into popular currency in the mid-to-Iate 1700s in a shared attempt to infuse the budding repubUc with a sense of its own history and romantic self-sufficiency. Yet, as the early repubUc attempted to separate itself from European culture, it nonetheless felt the need to work within the framework of European cultural models. The goddess "Columbia," for example, was represented in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century art, engravings, and poUtical cartoons in one of two conventional forms. The first

"X depicts a fair-skinned and stately woman of European ancestry who, dressed in the robes of ancient Greece, bears aloft the flame of liberty. A modern remnant of this image can be seen in the production logo for the motion picture studio Columbia Pictures. The second form-an image which, though consistently present in American art, would become more popular with European than American audiences-depicts a half-naked "Indian Princess" placed typicaUy in a pose of submission and/or terror. Though both images were clearly derivative counterparts to the goddess Britannia, each was intended to provide America with a recognizably "civiUzed" emblem and a symbol of its much-desired non-British European ancestry.

While the origins of the name "Columbia" as an altemative to "America" are unclear and hotly debated, it is generaUy agreed that the word "first entered the Americain ethos in literary discourse" (emphasis added) (Kauffinan 158). The freed slave PhiUis Wheatley, for example, penned a number of poems in the neoclassical mode which gained considerable attention. Though this notice was due largely to her race and ex-slave status (Bushman 42)-WheatIey is credited with being America's first African-American female poet-her verse was generaUy considered competent and appropriately decorous. (In one notable and reveaUng deferral from this judgment, however, Thomas Jefferson declared her verse beneath the dignity of criticism) (Hart 712). But it was Wheatley's 1775 tribute to "his exceUency Gen. Washington" which has often been cited as America's fij-st patriotic usage of the name "Columbia":

One century scarce perform'd its destin'd round, When GalUc powers Columbia's fury found; And so may you, whoever dares disgrace the land of freedom's heaven-defended race! Fixed are the eyes of nations on the scales, For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevaUs.

X Anon Britannia droops the pensive head, WhUe round increase the rising hiUs of dead. Ah! cmel blindness to Columbia's state! Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. (29-38) Albert J. Hoyt, however, cites another woman poet as the first American to use "Columbia" in a revolutionary context. Mrs. Mercy Warren, wife of Gen. James Warren and sister of James Otis Jr., colonial patriots in the Revolutionary War, pubUshed in the Boston Gazette of Febmary 13, 1775 a poem identifying "Columbia" as a land "where Liberty, a happy goddess reigned / where no proud despot mles with lawless sway / Nor orphan's spoUs become the Minion's prey" (Kauffinan 158). Though Hoyt and others have uncovered a number of simUar minor instances of this patriotic use of "Columbia" arising in conjunction with the American Revolution, it would faU to a pair of epic poetic treatments of the explorer, and his first "comprehensive" American biographer, to set into motion the century-long process of America's "discovery" of Columbus and his transformation into a popular and useful national symbol. It was in the early revolutionary period that PhiUp Freneau began his career-Iong personification of America in the form of a mythic and mascuUne "Columbia," and in so doing transmuted the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" "from a personage of ItaUan birth and Spanish employ into the first American" (Schlereth 939). "American Liberty, A Poem" (1775), was Freneau's expression of the patriotic fervor of a whole generation of young American poets known as the "rising glory school" (Bushman 48). Praising "Columbia, America sometimes so caUed from Columbus the first discoverer" (143n), the poet exclaims:

Where darling peace with smiling aspect stood, Lo! the grim soldier stalks in quest of blood: What madness, heaven, has made Britannia frown? Who plans our schemes to puU Columbia down? (23-26) But Freneau had earUer shown an interest in the Uterary possibiUties of the discoverer's story, and in his teen years had already produced a number of poems in which Columbus played a featured role. The 1770 "Columbus to Ferdinand," for example, prefigures the heroic Columbus of much nineteenth-century lore and Uterature, creating a romantic and finaUy tragic narrative of genius, stmggle, and aUenation. With The Pictures of Columbus, the Genoese, an ambitious 14-part dramatic poem, Freneau buUt on the success of "Columbus to Ferdinand" and exploited the whole Columbus legacy with a remarkable degree of dramatic success. Freneau was perhaps the first American writer to realize that, as a simple tale of discovery, Columbus's story held only minor narrative interest. But, if told as a tragedy, and told weU, the tale had aU the makings of a powerful national, and ultimately democratic, myth. The final, powerful stanza of the poem succeeds in both valorizing the Admiral as America's Adamic founder and in damning the continent which funded his discovery:

To shadowy forms, and ghosts and sleepy things Columbus, now with dauntless heart repair; You Uv'd to find new worlds for thankless kings, Write this upon my tomb-yes-teU it there- TeU of those chains that suIUed aU my glory- Not mine, but their's-ah, teU the shameful story. (XVII. 19-24) But Freneau was not obUvious to the "black legend" of Columbus or to its impUcations. Though the biographical facts of Columbus's actions as governor were only sketchUy avaUable to Freneau and his contemporaries, the poet clearly had mixed feeUngs about the myth-buUding efforts to which he was contributing. In the poem "Discovery," for example, first pubUshed in 1886 but written fourteen years earUer, Freneau caUs to task aU discoverers

^ who transform their discoveries into opportunities for looting and subjugation. Though this poem never directly names Columbus, the impUcation of his shared accountabiUty is clear:

Alas, how few of aU that daring train That seek new worlds embosomed in the main, How few have saUed on virtue's nobler plan, How few with motives worthy of a man! (24-28) Steeped in the phUosophy of Rousseau, Freneau was also critical of any attempt to "civilize" the New World or its inhabitants, native or naturalized. Freneau caUed for an ethos of enUghtenment in such enterprises, and he encouraged explorers to adapt to and leam from the lands and peoples they "discovered":

If winds can waft to ocean's utmost verge, And there new islands and new worlds emerge- If wealth, or war, or science bid thee roam, Ah, leave reUgion and thy laws at home, Leave the free native to enjoy his store, Nor teach destmctive arts, unknown before. (35-40) Even in Picture of Columbus, the Admiral is not above reproach or accountabiUty. A character caUed "The Inchantress" is introduced early into the poem apparently with the sole purpose of qualifying Columbus's status as an innocent martyr-hero. In her attempts to discourage the mariner from pursuing his plans, the Inchantress wams:

The nations at the ocean's end, No longer destined to be free, ShaU owe distress and death to thee! The seats of innocence and love ShaU soon the scenes of horror prove. (68-72) This ambivalent blend of approaches to the Columbus myth-an awareness of Columbus's usefulness as a much-needed national icon mixed with a remarkably modem reserve about his right to such an honorific place in

8 history-did not take a firm hold in the pubUc consciousness, and American Uterature woiUd not see its like again untU the writings of one Henry David Thoreau. A much more popular Uterary treatment of the period was, not surprisingly, much more forgiving. The poet Joel Barlow graduated from Yale in 1778 and entered into a number of varied and temporary professional engagements, but aU of these were incidental to his Ufelong dream to create a national epic. That dream came to a fmition in the The Columbiad (1807), an epic continuation of his earUer long poem The Vision of Columbus (1787). The best known Columbus poem of the period (Bushman 75), The Columbiad does not begin with the voyager's suit, embarkation, or even landfaU, but with an elderly and despondent Columbus in chains. UnUke Freneau's poem, however, Barlow's vision is one of celebration and unguarded praise. "Hesper"-an aUegorical, MUtonic, angel-Uke figure-appears before the imprisoned Admiral and assures him, through a multivolume vision of America's past and future glory, of the value and virtue of his life and work. Throughout the epic narrative, both the Admiral and Barlow's audience are assured that "[t]he discovery of America made an important evolution in the history of mankind" (qtd. in Bushman 75) WhUe the original "Vision of Columbus" is colored by a patriotic fervor inspired by immediate contemporary events, Barlow's life's work, as Claudia L. Bushman points out, "glorifies peace over war; the improvement of civiUzation is Unked to the advancement of science rather than to faith. Man replaces providence as the instigator of progress" (76). This would be the Columbus of the mid-nineteenth century, a quasi-historical, masculine demi-god and a maUeable symbol for American expansionism and industrial might. The decidedly mystical quaUty of Barlow's otherwise positivistic vision of

y^ America served only to strengthen its popular appeal, and, almost a hundred years later, Walt Whitman would take a simUar tack in his own attempt to reconcUe the reaUty of a rapidly fragmenting and technology-driven nation with his own holy vision of the democratic spirit. But stiU another important step was needed before the Columbian myth could move on to its second stage. Schlereth argues that the "Columbus period," a movement in popular perception from the vaguely aUegorical spirit of "Columbia" to the "masculine, fiifteenth-century European. . . who sanctioned nineteenth-century American Manifest Destiny and western expansionism" (937) trvQy began with a popular biography written by Washington Irving. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus was a nineteenth-century pubUshing phenomenon which went through 175 printings by the century's end (Shurr 237). With his avowed goal to create "an American hero," Irving fleshed out in reader-friendly prose a larger-than-Ufe romantic hero who was just human enough to be useful. The popularity of Irving's work, however, was due as much to its purportedly superior scholarship as to its gripping Uterary treatment. In 1826, as it happened, the American ambassador to Spain, Alexander Everett, wrote to the author who he had recently met in France and knew to be fluent in Spanish, about an opportunity for a quick and, he suspected, lucrative job of translation. The work to be translated was the soon-to-be released msmuscript of one Martin Femandez de Navarette: Viajes de Colon, the first of a three-volume Coleccion de los viajes y descubrimientos, contained transcriptions of the long-Iost journal of the first Columbian voyage and a host of other uncoUected papers which included letters from the Admiral to the Spanish court, letters to the explorer's son written toward the end of the voyager's life, some depositions from the Pleitos lawsuit, and many other

10

X writings of historical interest. The timing of this request, as Kirkpatrick Sale has pointed out, covdd not have been more perfect:

Irving, then forty-two and down on his luck, with very Uttle money and repeatedly fmstrated in his efforts to find a subject for a new book that would estabUsh him as a serious writer, was immediately taken with the idea; it would be, he thought, the job of a couple of months, his languages were certainly up to the task, and it would prove a very neat answer to those American critics who had lately accused him of failing to write about authenticaUy American heroes and turning his back on the young nation, so in need of its able artists, to Uve in decadent Europe. He immediately wrote a letter of agreement and sent feelers to a few pubUshers, and a few months later headed off for Spain. (342)

But Irving's trip proved to be more than he bargained for. Finding at his disposal not only the labors of Navarrette but countless volumes of early American and Spanish history and Columbiana in the home of American bibUophUe Obadiah Rich, Irving resolved to write a fuU and comprehensive biography. "I had no idea of the nature of the task when I undertook it," he wrote to a friend, and confessed that he was "fuU of doubts and anxieties" about the work which "my future comfort and I may say my future subsistence depends" (qtd. in Sale 343). The success of the four-volume edition and its three-volume American counterpart, however, would aUeviate Irving's concems. Yet, although the biography was widely considered the best of its kind (Irving assured his audience that he had 'labored hard to make the work complete and accurate as to aU information extent"), it was anything but a work of rigorously accurate scholarship. Irving resolved oppositions in contradictory secondary sources by selecting those facts which best served the dramatic stmcture of the story. He omitted or apoIogeticaUy downplayed aU evidence of the admiral's cmelty or inept administrative abiUties, and, in perhaps his most significant and far-reaching contribution

11 to the Columbus myth, he perpetuated a number of demonstrably false notions about the motivation and origins behind the Columbian enterprise. The most resiUent of these notions would of course be the flat-earth error. In 1486, according to Irving, Columbus appeared before a councU of learned ecclesiastics in Salamanca. This heretic-hungry meeting of church dignitaries, learned friars, and astronomy, geography, and mathematics scholars is described as bombarding the upstart visionary with bibUcal and classical sources which contradicted his claim to be able to reach the east by sailing west. "Is there anyone so fooUsh," they quoted Lactantius, "as to beUeve there are antipodes with their feet opposite to ours; people who walk with their heels upward, and their heads hanging down." Moreover, Irving's councU accused the Genoese of heresy, since his assertion of the existence of a peopled continent halfway around the globe not only contradicted the Gospels but also the common sense fact that these distant tribes could not, therefore, be descendants of Adam. As a result, as the story goes, the historic voyage would only be funded due to a dramatic and patently-romantic gesture: Queen IsabeUa wovdd offer to pawn her jewels to bankroU the handsome mariner's dream. Irving's narrative is rife with such dramatic flourishes. In truth, an overwhelming majority of scholars in antiquity and the middle ages concurred that the earth was in fact spherical, and by the fifteenth-century aU doubt had disappeared. The episode detaiUng IsabeUa's offer was equaUy ungrounded in fact, as were a number of other embeUishments which Irving tossed in "in fuU fictional regaUa" (Sale 344). Sale offers up just a few simUar examples, such as:

[the] piratical voyages of Colon's youth, a brief university career, service for King Rene d'Anjou, the shipwreck off the coast of Lisbon, maltreatment by the Portuguese court, worse treatment by the SparUsh court,. . . the mutiny at sea, the

12 exultant retum to a jubUant Barcelona, the egg that proved his genius, the instant approbation of the civilized world-and much, much more. (344) The final image that emerges from Irving's biography is one of glorious utiUty to an emerging nation: the Admiral is sufficiently pious, but not traditionaUy reUgious; he sees God's plan for humanity as unfolding and inevitable, but sees himself at the center of that unfolding and his actions as agents in that plan's fmition; he sees self-reUance as the key to earthly fuIfiUment, and human thinking-persistent in the face of conventional ignorance-as the key to that self-reUance. It is easy to see why this Columbus took a hold so quickly in an America which, with the steady erosion of Calvinism, was both hungry for a new conception of God-in-man whUe it was also becoming increasingly secular, scientific, and certain of its own rising glory in the history of the world. It is also easy to see how this Columbus woiUd appeal to a phUosophical, reUgious, and Uterary movement which would emphasize the power of the individual, the imperatives of logic, and the emergence of a transcendent vision of man's role in the universe.

13 CHAPTERIII EMERSON

American transcendentaUsm emerged in mid-1830s New England as an eclectic coUaboration of romantic, ideaUstic, mystical, and individuaUstic beUefs and their adherents. Although its many sources, its lack of a sustained and centralized organization, and its acceptance-even encouragement-of theoretical contradictions have made it a difficult "movement" to define and limit, America's avowed, suspected, and even marginal transcendentaUsts did share a number of common beUefs and points of emphasis, and an insistence on the "infinitude" of the individual stands at the center of them aU. As does Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Boston-bom son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson became the popular spokesmam for Uterary transcendentaUsm after his own resignation from the Unitarian ministry and the subsequent pubUcation of his book Nature in 1836. The first and fundamental document of his phUosophy, now considered the "gospel" of American transcendentaUsm (Reuben 3), Nature caUs for man to "enjoy an original relation to the universe," and not to become dependent on outmoded creeds and irrelevant dogmas. Emerson's sources for such a beUef were, Uke those of his Uke-minded contemporaries, diverse and varied. Emerson's admiration for Plato and the Neo-Platonists, the British phUosophy of Hume, Berkley, and Locke, the metaphysics of Swedenborg, Eastem mysticism, Montaigne, Kant, Carlyle, Coleridge, and others have aU been cited as pivotal influences in shaping the author's phUosophy and Uterary obsessions. The nineteenth-century myth of Columbus, however, in both its popular oral and Uterary forms, has received Uttle critical attention as a source and model for transcendental thought.

14 In "American TranscendentaUsm: An Introduction," Paul B. Reuben has done an admirable job of sjnithesizing the shared beUefs of the transcendentaUsts into a Ust of 'T^asic premises" which, sUghtly abbreviated, can serve as a concise and useful touchstone for this study:

1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe-and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, idtimately, the cosmos itself. (. . .) 2. The stmcture of the universe dupUcates the stmcture of the individual seff-aU knowledge, therefore, begins with self- knowledge. (. . .) 3. TranscendentaUsts accepted the Neo-PIatonic conception of nature as a Uving mystery, fuU of signs. . . . 4. The beUef that individual virtue and happiness depends upon self-realization-this depends upon the reconciUation of two universal psychological tendencies: a) the expansive or self-transcending tendency -a desire to embrace the whole world-to know and become one with the world. b) the contracting or self asserting tendency-the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate-an egotistical existence. WhUe Reuben's premises appear to be representative and accurate, we are left, upon their close examination and comparison, with an even simpler formula: microcosm plus macrocosm equals transcendentaUsm. Combined, these ancient ontological models-and a desire to understand and reconcUe them-form the essence of the Transcendental ideal. This formulation echoes a statement of Emerson's which is generaUy representative of "transcendentaUsm" as a cast of thought: "In aU of my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of private man." But the impUcations of this "infinitude" were not not universaUy agreed upon by the writers with whom this essay is concemed, and an examination of their attempts at both extemal and intemal "reconciUations" vis-â-vis the Columbus myth provides, perhaps, a key to gaining a better understanding of the "movement."

15 Clearly aware of the multipurpose utUity of the Columbus legend in expanding and defining his doctrine of "infinitude," Emerson carts out the explorer-discoverer-martyr-hero as a exemplary instance of his thesis in over a dozen of his now-famous lectures and essays. His first book-Iength essay Nature, for instance, is largely an attempt to define his beUef in man as microcosm. It is also his first Uterary appropriation of America's myth of discovery: "When the bark of Columbus nears the shores of America;-before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of aU their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the Uving picture?" (17). In this undoubtedly Irving-inspired vision, Emerson adopts the Admiral as symbol of "infinitude," i.e., of the individual's inseparable link to his environment. But in selecting the "discoverer" of that environment as his representative man, Emerson is also suggesting that this "infinitude" must, in effect, be eamed. The romantic hero of fortitude and action developed by Irving and his predecessors is set forth as a model for reaUzing one's own microcosmic potential. WhUe Nature could easUy be, and has often been, misinterpreted as a caU for Americans to break aU ties with their European past, to look to themselves alone for the answers to life's mysteries, it is in reaUty a caU for a retum to discovery, for a revolt against the apathy and feeUng of belatedness which had begun to weigh down the American mind and its emerging sense of identity. Emerson's caU for an "original relation to the universe" is more a cry for the continuation of a legacy than a manifesto for myopic separation; in the foUowing passage from the first paragraph oí Nature, the emphasis faUs on the "also":

Our age is retrospective. It buUds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The

16 foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and phUosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a reUgion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? . . . The Sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. Their are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (7) The "foregoing generations" and their accompUshments do not lack aU value because they are "foregoing," but, Emerson suggests, may in fact serve as a valuable rebuke to the later age's missing spirit of discovery. "AU take for granted," Emerson would write in an 1842 issue of The Dial, ". . . that a great deal, nay, almost aU, is known and forever settled. But in tmth aU is now to be begun, and every new mind ought to take the attitude of Columbus, launch out from the gaping loiterers on the shore, and saU west for a new world" ("Senses" 1191). With his deeply-ingrained Protestant ethic, Emerson continues to chide the "gaping loiterers" of his own age throughout his writing career, presenting as cardinal virtues persistent effort and real-world resiUts. Columbus, a famiUar symbol of the value of vision married to action, serves repeatedly as his model. Although, as one acquaintance would point out, Emerson typicaUy "spoke more of men and books than of nature" (Cameron 204), Emerson would often bring the Columbus myth into his broader discussions of "natural laws" and the necessity of appreciating one's native land. In an 1844 lecture written for the MercantUe Library Association, for instance, Emerson writes:

Columbus aUeged as a reason for seeking a continent in the West, that the harmony of nature required a great tract of land in the Westem hemisphere, to balance the known extent of land in the eastern; and it now appears that we must estimate the native values of this broad region to redress the

17 balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the advantages opened to the human race in this country, which is our fortunate home. ... The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food to our mind, as weU as to our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relation with men and things. CToung" 214) But of course Columbus is not the only mythical/historical personage to appear in Emerson's work. What is remarkable, however, is the adaptabUity Emerson found in the icon as an iUustrative figure, and his varied placement of the Admiral in the most Ulustrious and unUkely company attests to the importance of the Columbus m^rth in Emerson's overarching conception of "the infirUtude of private man." In the essay "Self-ReUance," for instance, Emerson marvels that "Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat" (280), and Ukens him by association to P^^hagoms, Socrates, Luther, Copemicus, GalUeo, Newton, Plato, MUton, Moses, and Jesus. In "Heroism," the mariner is catalogued alongside Pericles, Xenophon, Bayard, Sidney, and Hamden as one of a group of heroes who "teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depths of our Uving, should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days" (378). "Experience" also holds up the Admiral as a great man in great company, and encourages its audience to leam from his example:

As I am, so I see; use what language we wiU, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the nUnd's ministers. Instead of feeUng a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a traveling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or Umestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. (489)

18 And, though Columbus did not make the final cut for Emerson's 6-part Representative Men, he does make a number of key appearances there, and is clearly included in Emerson's quirky pantheon:

How easUy we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer.. . . Life is girt aU around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their Ught to our sky. (620) Moreover, in the above work's chapter on Plato, Emerson flirts with the association of Columbus with Darwinisticism which would soon become inseparably linked with the Columbus Myth:

The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodUe, or fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six miUenniums, she had tumed out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a good ameUoration of trUobite and saums, and a good basis for further proceeding. (655) The 1860 Conduct ofLife, a coUection of Emerson's lectures from his western lyceum circuit, continues this evolutionary musing and unabashedly ties it to his nation's destiny. The essay "Fate," for example, argues that,

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done. The vegetable eye makes the leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need is; the first ceU converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or naU, according to the want: the world throws its life into a hero or shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were ItaUans, in their time: they would be Russians or Americans today. Things ripen, new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. (962) Lest we think, however, that Emerson's repeated pubUc references to Columbus were merely handy, audience-friendly metaphors, we need only to

19 glance through his decades of personal joumal entries to see the author's lifelong interest in the Admiral. Rarely a year went by in which Columbus did not receive repeated mention in the joumals. In them, Emerson explored his own theories about fame and compensation,

For, if the pitiful ingratitude which /embittered/shortened/ the Uves of Socrates, Columbus, GalUeo, were not in some measure (compensated) retrieved in the eye of their distant admirers by the regret and honors of another generation, the appetite of fame which has in aU ages wrought so much good would altogether cease in despair of gratification. (Joumals 223) his beUef in the power of independent thought,

Five or six facts independently of almost no value, made the discovery of America in Columbus' mind & it took as many centuries to accumulate them. One man sees a fact & secures it which is to him altogether frivolous but inestimable to the race when seen in connexion with another fact not known for 100 years after. Facts seek their intentions. [H]appy marriage of fact to fact. (Journals 176)

So Columbus came almost in am open boat. Throw in mind against matter; an energetic purpose is as good as a century of improvements. (Joumals 325) and his desire for America's inteUectual and spiritual advancement,

Can we not tmst ourselves?. . . Dare we never say, this time of ours shaU be the era of Discovery? These have been the ages of darkness. Wide Europe, wide America Ueth in night, tumeth in sleep. The moming twiUght is grey in the East; the Columbuses, the Vespuccis, the Cabots of moral adventure are loosening their saUs & tuming their bowsprits to the main. (Joumals 396) Even at the time of his first European tour, shortly after the death of his wife and his resignation from the ministry, Emerson was forming his transcendental doctrines in decidedly Columbian terms. Two weeks out from Boston aboard the Jasper (his second tour, interestingly enough, would be aboard the Washington Irving), Emerson writes:

20 Though I do not find much attraction in the seaman yet I can discem that the naval hero is a hero. It takes aU the thousand thousand European voyages that have been made to stabUsh our faith in the practicabiUty of this our hodiumal voyage. But to be Columbus, to steer WEST steadUy day after day, week after week, for the first time, and whoUy alone in his opiiúon, shows a mind as soUtary and self-subsistent as any that ever Uved. (Porte 93) But Emerson's final estimation of the value of the Columbus myth is perhaps best summed up by a phrase Emerson ciUled from a letter he had written to Margaret FuUer in 1846, a phrase which he copied into his joumal and adapted into two of his later lectures: "There is a Columbia of thought & art which is the last & endless sequel of Columbus's adventure" (Joumals 385). Yet, as Stanley Edgar Hymen has pointed out, "One of the inevitable consequences of Emersonian ideaUsm was the ease with which it could be used to sugar-coat social injustice, as a later generation was to discover when it saw robber barons piling up fortunes whUe intoning Emersonian slogans of Self-ReUance and Compensation" (30). WhUe Emerson probably would not have approved of this over-extension of his phUosophies, some of his later writings did reflect, and perhaps even contribute to, the increasing appropriation of the Columbus myth in extoUing the materiaUsm of his age. In the 1870 essay "Success," for example, Emerson depicts the Admiral as a shrewd financial manager as weU as a gifted mariner: on his return to Spain, Columbus announces to his sovereigns that "they may ask aU the pUots who came with him where is Veragua. Let them answer and say if they know where Veragua Ues. I assert that they can give no other account than that they went to lands where there was an abundance of gold" (706). This exemplar of success, Emerson teUs us, wisely doctored the books. His use of

21 the Admiral in the 1860 essay "Wealth" is even more in tune with America's worship of the almighty doUar:

Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem for practical navigation as weU as for closet geometry, and looks on aU kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen untU they dare fit him out. Few men on the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was forced to leave much of his map blank. His successors inherited his map, and inherited his fury to complete it. (547) As the essay's titie indicates, however, this inheritance is as much a material as a spiritual one; he prefaces the Columbus passage quoted above with the foUowing:

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimUation of nature to themselves, the converting of the saps and juices of the planet to the incamation and nutriment of their design. Power is what they want, not candy;-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuaUty to their thought, which to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists." (547) As the essay continues, Emerson does begin to sound more and more Uke those "captains of industry" who would later evoke his work: "Some men are bom to own, and can animate aU their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character" (549); "There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so in making money" (550).

22 CHAPTER TV

THOREAU

But before we judge Emerson too harshly, let us consider the occasion for the essay "Wealth." It was certairUy not composed to fiU a hole in his repertoire; he had already written an essay by the same title for the 1856 English Traits. But this earUer essay wamed against the excess and abuses of money, and Emerson suddenly found himself in need of a hearty defense for its pursuit. This new essay, it seems-which originated as a lecture for Emerson's lyceum circuit in the mid-to-Iate 1850s-was written, at least in part, as a rebuttal to Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). This fact becomes evident with even a cursory reading of the 1860 "Wealth": "It is of no use to argue the wants down," Emerson writes: "The phUosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants few, but wiU a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried peas?" (546). The falling out between Emerson and his one-time disciple is too weU documented to warrant a lengthy discussion here, but it is worth noting that Emerson's tone in the essay's introduction is, though clearly an annoyed one, more expressive of fatherly concern than of spiteful derision:

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He faUs to make his place good in the world unless he not only pays his debt but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. (545) The reference to "debt" seems most Ukely aimed at Thoreau's brief (ovemight) imprisonment in 1846 for refusing to pay his poU tax, a purportedly poUtical gesture which, though eventuaUy made famous by the Thoreau's Uterary treatment of it in "Resistance to CivU Govemment,"

23 Emerson felt to be "mean and skulking, and in bad taste" (qtd. in Hjnnan 24). The reference to the importance of making a contribution and of doing "justice to his genius" is equaUy appUcable to Emerson's feeUngs about Thoreau, as made evident by sections of Emerson's funeral address for him, expanded for pubUcation in 1862:

Had his gerUus been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical abiUty he seemed bom for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for aU America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is stUI only beans!" (MiUer 375) The significance of Emerson's response Ues, for the purposes of this study, in highUghting the subtle but distinctive uses each man would make of the Columbus myth. Like Emerson, Thoreau makes frequent use of the voyager-hero. (Columbus makes multiple appearances in each of his four major works) But unUke Emerson, Thoreau is disinterested in the Admiral's status as a repubUcan standard-bearer and, in foregoing Emerson's Carlyle-esque hero-worship, he opts instead to use the symbol of discovery to his own more personal ends. WhUe Emerson's Columbus represents the ideal man of action, an exemplar of self-reUance whose exploits further the ends-the practical, material ends-of aU humankind, Thoreau's Columbus is more selectively symboUc, a paraboUst's emblem of the value of questing, of observing the world, Ustening to the voice of intuition, and discovering greater truths within. Thoreau's appropriation of, and impUcit response to, America's discovery myths in the conclusion to Walden is justly famous, but it bears repeating here:

24 Be... the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans, explore your own higher latitudes,-with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pUe empty cans sky high for a sign. Were preserved meats intended to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents, not of trade, but of thought. (578) In one feU swoop-"not of trade, but of thoughf'-Thoreau wrenches one of America's preeminent myths from the hands of the fiscal opportunists and deUvers it into the hands of the individual seeker after tmth. Even early in his writing career, Thoreau showed an interest not in Columbus's status as a national or plutocratic icon, but in the legendary discoverer's interior life. During his sophomore year at Harvard, for example, Thoreau was given the foUowing assignment: "Give your idea of the Anxieties and DeUghts of a Discoverer, of whatever CIass,-CoIumbus, Herschel, Newton." Thoreau picked the mariner-he had been reading Irving's histories at the time-and, by 1834, he "had begun his Ufelong reading in the narratives of discovery" (PaiU 48n). Though only an academic exercise, Thoreau's treatment of the legend was, as F.B. Sanborn has pointed out, "tmly spirited," and it rivaled Irving's account if only by its expressive force and characteristic concision:

Trials stUI awaited him. An alteration of his compass spreads terror through his crew: threatened with mutiny, he stiU pursues his course at the hazard of his life. A glorious discovery awaits him, the dazzling splendor of which casts into the shade aU his previous trials and difficulties. What must have been his reflections on finding himseLf the discoverer of a New World? Did he ever regret his perseverance? Did he ever repent of having set himseff up as the laughing stock of Europe? Nay,-did not rather a sense of what he had endured serve to heighten the enjoyment of his success? (qtd. in Sanbom 69)

25 The source of this assignment was Edward Tyrrel Channing, the Harvard professor of rhetoric and oratory who would become as famous for his training of American authors (he also taught Emerson, Holmes, and Dana), as for his notable famUy (he was the brother of WiIUam EUery Channing, the "apostie" of New England UnitariaiUsm and precursor of the transcendentaUsts; the uncle of WiUiam Henry Channing, the Christian sociaUst, Brook Farm resident, and member of the Transcendental Club; and the uncle of WiIUam EUery Channing the younger, the Concord poet and Thoreau's fiiend, traveUng companion, and first biographer [Hart 118]). Like Emerson, however, Thoreau's joumals lend some interesting insight into his Uterary uses of the Columbus myth. Around 1850, Thoreau encountered further biographical treatments of Columbus: quoted repeatedly in Thoreau's joumals of the period, Alexander von Humboldt's discussions of the Adn ral in Aspects of Nature and Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctical Regions of the New Continent were in many respects as honorific and rhapsodic as Irving's. But the German naturaUst and explorer adso emphasized Columbus's powers of observation, praising him as a gifted describer who "retained a profound feeUng for the majesty of nature" (qtd. in Sale 378n). It is easy to see why Thoreau's interest was piqued. In a journal entry from 1850-three years after he concluded his oft-ridiculed experiment in Uving, but four years before a completed Walden was pubUshed-Thoreau writes:

Referred to the world's standard, the hero, the discoverer, is insane, its greatest men are aU insane. At first the world does not respect its great men. . . . Humboldt says, speaking of Columbus approaching the New World: "The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, aU led him to suppose (as we are told by Hererra in the

26 Decades (95)), that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adomed with plants." Expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and also of the Fountain of Youth, led to real, if not compensatory, discoveries.

However tongue-in-cheek, this emphasis on "real, if not compensatory, discoveries" is again key to understanding Thoreau's distinctive use of the Columbus myth. Unlike Emerson, Thoreau showed Uttle interest in the debate over America's lack of a distinctive coUective identity, or in any "evolution in the history of mankind" a la Barlow. Self-reUance, for Thoreau, begins and ends with the individual, and aU of history is but a means to that end. The American myth of discovery was in Thoreau's estimation useful, but only as aU myths are useful, i.e., in providing pubUc symbols for private tmths. In his first major prose work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau writes: "We moderns. . . coUect only the raw materials of biography and history, 'memoirs to serve for a history,' which itself is but materials to serve for a mythology." "Who knows" Thoreau continues, "what shape the fable of Columbus wiU at length assume, to be confounded with that of Jason and the expeditions of the Argonauts"(50). SimUarly, in an undated entry predating March or April 1842, Thoreau again discusses the s^nnboUc value of history:

We read history as criticaUy as í we consider the landscape, and [are] more interested in the atmospheric tints, and various Ughts and shades which the intervening spaces create, than in its ground work or composition. It is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west-the same sun but a new Ught and atmosphere. Its beauty is Uke the sunset-not a fresco painting on a waU-flat and bounded by the actual ,but atmospheric and roving or free. In reaUty, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from monUng to evening. What is of moment is its

27 hue and color. Time hides no treasures-we want not its then but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct, they are the more like the heavens. (erasure Thoreau's) (qtd. in Cameron, Transcendental C]imatÊ957) A Week contains many such attempts to interpret the value of history through arresting metaphors, and the figure of Columbus is often included in them. In a characteristic attempt to simpUfy history in terms of the ever-present individual, Thoreau writes:

And yet the Uves of sixty old women, such as Uve under the hiU, say of a century each, stmng together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother, a respectable tea party merely,-whose gossip would be universal history. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus. . . . (265) This decidedly irreverent image is of course vintage Thoreau, and he wiU continue in this and in his later works to treat the discovery myth as a merely useful sounding board for his own thoughts on both inward and outwardly-focused exploration; in the chapter of A Week titled "Friday," for instance, he writes:

It is easier to discover another such a New World as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so weU; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and stiU history accumulates Uke rubbish before the portals of nature Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies, are aU that we know of it Let us not, my friends, be weedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whosoever they are that attempt it. (311) And in "Wednesday" he uses a simUar trope for the search for "some continent man," e.g., the elusive "Atlantides" of true friendship:

Columbus has saUed westward of these isles by the mariner's compass but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The eamest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of

28 tUne, and walks through the densest crowd unintermpted, and as it were in a straight line. (214) But there is perhaps another reason for Thoreau's reluctance to engage in the kind of hero-worship Emerson and Irving embraced. In TheMaine Woods,

Thoreau writes:

I am reminded by my joumey how exceedingly new this country stiU is. You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh visited. If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, have discovered only the shores of America. (654) The "country" was indeed new, but, as Thoreau knew from his own travels into "the interior and back parts," the land was neither new nor undiscovered by man. The American Indians were a lifelong source of fascination for Thoreau-Hawthome said Thoreau was "incUned to lead a sort of Indian life among civUized men" (qtd. in Sayre 123)-and in The Maine Woods he teUs of his first revelation, on Ustening to the unguarded talk of his "uninteUigible" guides, of the reaUty and nobiUty of these "native" Americans:

There can be no more startUng evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race, than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak or understand. . . . It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrow-heads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets. (696) Unlike the Columbus of popiUar renown, we nUght add. In fact, Thoreau reaUzes, "These were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born; they have not yet died away. . . " (697). But the decline of the American Indian as a strong and unified people Thoreau recognized and lamented, and, whUe he never directly impUcates the Admiral, Europeans in general are acknowledged as the cause of the

29 American Indians' near-destruction. On reading Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report ofthe New Found Land of Virginia, for instance, Thoreau writes in his joumal: "Indeed, it was as if mere intercourse with the whites caused a mysterious and pecuUar disease which swept off the natives" (Sayre 149). Though in this case the disease was Uteral, it marks an early stage in Thoreau's development of a metaphor: the "disease of civiUzation," of which Columbus was the obvious harbinger, becomes a common trope in Thoreau's work(Sayre 151-52).

Carol Krob notes a simUar paraUel in the author's use of Columbus with his disdain for civiUzation. Citing an admittedly fleeting reference to the 'Extract fi-om the Chronicle of Bernaldez" which Thoreau cuUed from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, "in Columbus's first voyage the natives pointed toward the heavens, making signs that there was aU power and holiness," Krob suggests that Thoreau adopted some of Bemaldez's themes in describing his own joumey of discovery, including "the theme of savagery versus civiUzation and the ambivalent concept of human "progress'" (216). There is perhaps a hint of this disapproval of European coIoniaUsm as weU in Thoreau's report of the wreck of a brig carrying Irish imnUgrants in Cape Cod:

Why care for these dead bodies? They reaUy have no friends but the worms and the fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as Columbus and the PUgrims did,-they were within a mUe of its shores; but before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we beUeve that there is far more universal and convincing evidence-though it has not yet been discovered by science-than Columbus had of this; not merely mariners' tales and some paltry drift-wood and sea-weed, but a continual drift and instinct to aU of our shores. (858)

30 But Thoreau's irreverent use of the Columbus myth is consistent with his treatment of aU things which he felt smacked of conventional patriotism and/or civilized ideals, and his treatment of the Admiral is a special case among his contemporaries. In fact, the vehemence with which he declared his self-reUance often caused friction with his otherwise Uke-nUnded contemporaries. As he said of his meeting with Walt Whitman, for example, "I did not think much of America or of poUtics, and so on, which may have been somewhat of a damper to him" (Perry 369) Indeed, the "poet of democracy" had a different view of things. But, like both Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman celebrated the "infinitude" of man, and he arguably transcended even the Concord transcendentaUsts in both his celebration of the self and in his spirituaUzation of their common symbol of self-reUance.

31 CHAPTER V WHITMAN

WhUe Whitman's treatment of the Columbus myth is, as I wiU show, more like Emerson's than Thoreau's, it is in many respects more mystical than Emerson's Irvingesque hero. And, whUe Whitman's treatment of the Admiral has received more critical attention than either of the two essayist's-due largely, of course, to his more sustained and expUcit poetic treatments of him in "Prayer of Columbus," "Passage to India," and "A Thought of CoIumbus"-his appropriation of the myth has not been explored to sufficient critical depth. A fuUer exanUnation of this appropriation reveals, however, that Whitman's vision of the Columbus mjrth is central to his post-war attempts to reconcUe his "self- asserting" or "egotistical" tendencies, previously discussed as indicative of transcendental thought, with an increasing "desire to embrace the whole world," the phUosophical and aesthetic key to what Whitman conceived of as a new stage in his role as America's poet. In the "Preface" to the 1872 pamphlet "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free," for instance, Whitman announced that he had accompUshed his aspirations for Leaves of Grass and woiUd move on to explore new materials. Just a few months earUer, in an annex to the second printing of the fifth edition of Leaves, "Passage to India" appeared. But, as a lengthy footnote in the 1876 editions ofLeaves and Two Rivulets teUs us, Whitman had long had bolder aspirations for the poem and its radicaUy different vision; he had hoped to compose "a further, equaUy needed Volume, based on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation which enveloping aU precedents, makes the unseen SoiU govem absolutely at last" (LeaYÊS 748). "Passage to

32 India," Whitman asserted, was a cmcial poem, indeed a "passage" itself, to this new spiritual program. In a conversation with Horace Traubel, Whitman announced, "There is more of me, the essential lUtimate me, in that than in any of the poems." But commentators on Whitman's first Columbus poem have long debated about the essence of this "essential" Whitman. PubUshed, in its initial form, in nine sections and 255 lines, "Passage" is rivaled only by "Song of Myself' in its ambitious and complex program. Whitman in fact opens the poem with a passage not unlike many found in "Song of Myself," an anaphoral ode to humankind's achievements: "Singing my days, / Singing the great achievements of the present, / Singing the strong Ught work of engineers" (1-3).

But this speaker is not, as David S. Reynolds points out, the "Whitman of the fifties, sensuously caressing the world around him, but rather one of the early seventies, praising technology and using it as a metaphor for eventual poetic and reUgious fruition." Before going on to explore this metaphor, however, Whitman estabUshes the occasion for his exaltation: "In the Old World the east by the Suez Canal, /The New by its mighty raUroad spann'd, / The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires" (5-7). The first two of these great achievements in engineering, the Suez canal joining the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the transcontinental railroad Unking America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, were both completed in 1869 and form the immediate occasion and, therefore, the primary technological focus in the poem. Some critics have been troubled by the poem's later abandonment of the third image (those "eloquent gentle wires" of Une 7), but, as Martin K. Doudna has pointed out, the transatlantic cable to which it refers was completed three years earUer, in 1866, stUl recently

33 enough to be germane to the song of "my days," but not appropriate for elaboration in a poem celebrating the singular 'Tear of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans" referred to in section 6 (Doudna 51-2).

But the first section does not stop at mere praise of America's mechanical prowess. The poem's wider concern is with the significance of these achievements. This significance is explored in part through a connection which would have been evident to Whitman's contemporaries: the Columbus myth was repeatedly invoked as a justification and celebration of American progress. Advances in transportation and communication technologies in particular were repeatedly celebrated in expUcitly "Columbian" terms. As early as 1850, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, early champion of the transcontinental raUroad project, wrote that he would Uke to see along that road a "coUosal [sic] statue of the great Columbus. . . pointing to the westem horizon and saying to the flying passengers There is the east, there is India'" (Goldfarb 76). SimUar invocations of Columbus were prevalent in discussions surrounding the lajáng of the transatlantic cable (Aspiz 10). The poem goes on to explore the rich inheritance of humanity's progress, a progress which is not only material but spiritual. He sees God's purpose, or at least an abstract God-principal's purpose, in both kinds of advancement. The "weld[ing] together" of aU peoples through better engineering is suggested to be a direct step towards spiritual advancement: "Lo, soiU, seest thou not God's purpose from the first? / The earth to be spanned, connected by network, / The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage" (31-33). Section three then introduces the "tableaus-twain," detaUed descriptions of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental raUroad. The

34 geographic tour offered in the description of the train's joumey emphasizes the importance of the American achievement, but both "tableaus" serve to remind the reader of the origin of the poem's titie as the section closes with a parenthetical acknowledgement that they are but the fiUfiUment of a centuries-old dream: (Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream! / Centuries after though art laid in thy grave, / The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.) (65-67). Columbus and other explorers of the physical world are paid tribute here and in the foUowing section. The "rondure of the world at last accompUsh'd," human kind is free to take their explorations to the next, to the spiritual, level. As the poem continues, Whitman's personal identification with Columbus becomes more clear: "A ceaseless thought, a varied train-Io, soul, to thee, thy sight they rise, / The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions" (74-75). These dramatic exchanges between Whitman and his soiU seem to function not orUy to advance the dialectic but also to reinforce the connection between the identity of the poet and that of the explorer. By section five, in fact, any possibiUty of a disinterested admiration completely dissolves:

After the seas are aU cross'd, (as they already seemed cross'd,) After the great captains and engineers have accompUsh'd their work, After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist, FinaUy shaU come the poet worthy the name, The true son of God shaU come singing his songs. (101-05) Man's bewUderment over his destiny, an anxiety felt since the first man and woman were cast out of the Garden, wiU be soothed by the poet, the divinely ordained and inevitable synthesizer of humankind's physical and spiritual progress. The aUusion to Adam and Eve is in no way inconsistent. The poet's role is to sjnithesize not only past and present, but science and reUgion,

35 the "myths Asiatic" of section two. There is also the impUcation here, and throughout the poem, of Darwinistic thought, a theme often discussed by critics of this poem and acknowledged by Whitman himself; as Whitman teU Traubel, "There is no phUosophy, consistent or inconsistent, in that poem... but the burden of its evolution-the one thing escaping the other-the unfolding of cosmic purposes." Biological evolution suggests for Whitman, as it did for Emerson and so many others, social and even spiritual evolution.

Columbus retums to the poem's center in section six: the "chief histrion," or actor (152), the "Admiral" is described as "History's type of courage, action, faith" (155). Whitman's continual development of Columbus as a symbol succeeds in universalizing him, in creating a symbol of aU men, including poets, who seek to explore the unknown. Despite the fact that Columbus died in "dejection, poverty, death," the deeds of such great men are argued to fulfíU a divine purpose, a purpose which is often realized only after that individual's death. The remainder of the poem continues along this vein, and in the conclusion the speaker resolves to attempt, for good or iU, his own spiritual joumey of discovery, a "Passage to more than India!" (224). In one final series of dramatic declamations, the speaker exhorts his soiU to be Uke Columbus:

SaU forth-steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we wiU risk the ship, our selves and aU. (248-51) In "Prayer of Columbus," first pubUshed in Harper's Monthly in March 1874, Whitman continues to identify with the figure and the legend of Columbus. The Admiral that appears in this poem, however, is less a figure of bold adventure than "A batter'd, wreck'd old man" seeking comfort from

36 his god in the face of bleak and aU-but-hopeless conditions (1). Whitman had at this time recentiy suffered form a paralytic stroke and the loss of his mother, as weU as from a feeling of neglect from an American pubUc he had so long attempted to reach and represent. The poem is far from being an exercise in self-pity, however. This older Columbus remains "history's t3T)e" of "courage" and "faith," if no longer of "action." His strong reUgious faith and persistence in the face of adversity remain for Whitman consistent and admirable. What Unks this poem most clearly to "Passage to India," however, is the speaker's (Columbus's) longing for some "divine sanction" for his work, a work arising, he feels, out of some higher source:

O I am sure they reaUy came from Thee, My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee, The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words, A message from the heavens whispering to me even in sleep, These sped me on. (26-30) The apparently Christian though somewhat abstracted "Thee" addressed in this poem bears a strong resemblance to the transcendent "Thou" of section eight in 'Tassage of India." And, Uke "Passage," this poem ends on a note of positive, faith-based hope, a prophet's vision in which "on the distant waves saU countless ships, / And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me" (65-66). WTiitman's last poem, "A Thought of Columbus" seems to be a response to this imagined prophesy. This third Columbus poem, handed to Traubel just 10 days before the poet's death, is a complex ode to inspiration and the heroic "Discoverer" of the western world. The source of the explorer's art is again the subject of speculation, and again the triggering impulse is attributed to a kind of connection with an ahistorical divine:

37 A breath of Deity, as thence the bulging universe unfolding! The many issuing cycles fi*omthei r precedent minute! The eras of the soul incepting in an hour, Haply the widest, farthest evolutions of the world and man. (3-6) WTUtman again assumes the representative voice of a people and praises the explorer, a praise which over the expanse of time answers, at least in part, the prayer he penned only 17 years earUer. Addressing the AdnUral directiy, the poem continues:

K thou stiU hearest, hear me, Voicing as now-lands, races, arts, bravuras to thee, O'er the long backward path to thee-one vast consensus, north, south, east, west, Soul plaudits! acclamations! reverent echoes! One manifold, huge memory to thee! oceans and lands! The modem world to thee and thought of thee! (20-25) There are indeed "reverent echoes" of Columbus myth in these three poems, and aU of them embrace the idea of Columbus as a "kosmos," a noun Whitman defined as "mascvUine or feminine, a person who[se] scope of mind... includes aU the known urUverse" (Notebooks 1669). But Columbus also fulfiUs, as Betsy ErkkUa has pointed out (273), the Emersonian idea of the poet, for the poet, Emerson writes, is "representative. He stands among partial man for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. . . . He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they wiU draw aU men sooner or later" ("Poet" 465). Just as the legendary Columbus's passion and courage succeeded in drawing humankind to America's shores, so Whitman wished to continue that nUssion, leading humanity through an equaUy bold exploration of the realms of the spirit. Whitman felt that "Passage to India" was the beginning of a new stage in his poetry, that it gave "freer vent and fuUer expression to what, from the first. . . more or less

38 lurks in my writing, undemeath every page, every Une, everywhere" (LeaYÊS

747). But attempts to accurately isolate the period of Whitman's initial identification with the Admiral have thus far been unconvincing. In Walt Whitman's Pose, Esther Shephard speculates that an 1868 letter from Bronson Alcott may have encouraged the poet's Passage to India venture as weU as the subsequent change in his use of ship and sea imagery (particularly their increase in frequency and their movement away from the shore-walker's point-of-view). Responding to Whitman's essay "Democracy," later incorporated into the prose volume Democratic Vistas, Alcott writes:

The scope and spirit of your paper on Democracy deUght and satisfy me beyond aU expectation, and I write without compUment or reserve to the man, the American Columbus, whose sagacity has thus sounded adventurously the sea of our Social Chaos and anchored his thought so securely in the soU of the newly discovered Atlantides about which Plato died dreaming. EspeciaUy have I to thank you for deUvering such doughty thrusts into the sides of the British behemoth sending him bottomwards. AU you say of the Imperial West is strong and IS. (Shephard 255) WhUe Shephard's suggestions seem reasonable, one is led to wonder what led Alcott to make the connection in the fixst place. The concluding Unes to the essay Alcott is praising suggests that Whitman's identification with the Admiral had already begun:

There is yet, to whoever is eUgible among us, the prophetic vision, the joy of being toss'd in the brave turmoU of these times-the promulgation and the path, obedient, lowly reverent to the voice, the gesture of god, or holy ghost, which others see not, hear not-with the proud consciousness that amid whatever clouds, seductions, or heart-wearying postponements, we have never deserted, never dispair'd, never abandon'd, the faith. (Prose Works 391)

39 This hopeful vision prefigures the mystic, faithful voyager-hero of "Prayer" and "Though of Columbus," visions which in turn are direct appropriations of the popular mythology. One must also note that Alcott was not the only admirer to make such an association: in an article predating aU of the writings discussed above, the German critic Ferdinand FreiUgrath quotes and concurs with Whitman's EngUsh pubUsher W.M. Rossetti:

Whitman beUeves that the Columbus of the continent or the Washington of the states were not more truly founders and buUders of this America than he himself wiU be in times to come. Surely a subUme conviction, and by the poet more than once expressed in stately words-none more so than the poem which begins with the line: 'Come, indivisible wUl I make this continent." (AUen, Walt Whitman and the Worid 88^ SimUar identifications, which Whitman apparently encouraged, would occur to admirers throughout the rest of the poet's Ufe. Noting, for instance, that the line between poetry and prose was rapidly dissolving, French critic Leo Quesnel remarks in 1884 that Whitman may be right in considering himself "the initiator of a new poetic technique to taUy the incommensurable future of America, a Christopher Columbus of Uterature" (AUen 56). In Modern Authors: A Review and a Forecast (1891, London), Arthur Lynch asserts that Whitman is "not cultured enough" but has an "eminently virile mind" and is "a new Columbus" (Correspondence 268n). Anne GUchrist in a letter to Whitman foUowing his 1873 stroke and the subsequent pubUcation of "Prayer of Columbus," writes, 'Tou too have saUed over stormy seas to your goal-surrounded with mocking disbeUevers-you too have paid the great price of health-our Columbus" (LÊaYÊS 42 In). Whitman made simUar remarks conceming this poem. In an 1874 letter to EUen O'Connor, he writes, "I shouldn't wonder if I have unconsciously put a sort of

40 autobiographical dash m it" (Corre.spondence 272). A few weeks later, he makes a simUar confession to Peter Doyle: "I have a poem in the March Harper as I beUeve I mentioned in my last. (I am told that I have colored it with thoughts of myself-very likely)" (Correspondence 278). The typical critical stance toward Whitman's identification with Columbus has also been unsatisfactorUy narrow, emphasizing, for the most part, the biographical paraUels between the aUing and neglected-feeUng Whitman of early seventies and the persona of the "batter'd, wreck'd old man" the poet assumes in "Prayer of Columbus":

My hands, my limbs grow nerveless, My brain feels rack'd, bewUder'd, Let the old timbers part, I wiU not part, I wiU cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me, Thee, Thee at least I know. (51-55) WhUe there is certainly much to invite a purely biographical reading, problems arise when we attempt to fix the poet's repeated identifications with the Admiral within this singular episode of the Columbian story. Harold Aspiz, for example, explains the connection in this way:

As a reflection of the poet's physical decUne and the shattered health that cuInUnated in his paralytic coUapse in 1873, after the strain of his hospital labors had taken their heaviest toU, the poet developed the Whitman-Columbus myth. It was inspired by Washington Irving's Life and Voyages of Columbus, by the frequent invocation of Columbus's name in association with the laying of the Atlantic Cable, and perhaps by Thoreau's admonition to "be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds operating within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." Alcott had, in fact, praised Whitman as "the American Columbus." (Aspiz 10-11)

But if the "Whitman-Columbus myth" was "developed" in 1873, what, one wonders, are we to make of the lengthy gestation period? The first record we have of Whitman's exposure to Irving's biography is in 1847, a favorable

41 Tf ifi'i \]'MSí SiiSSiiLSSr^'^^ÍTr«'mfiSSSI^^ir^.

review of the book written for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. We have no conclusive evidence that Whitman ever read Walden, first pubUshed in 1854, and the transatiantic cable, to which Aspiz refers, was completed m 1866, one of three technological achievements which form the immediate occasion for the 1871 poem Tassage to India." Alcott's letter is dated 1868. Our search for the genesis of Whitman's identification with the voyager should, it seems, begin earUer.

In the most recent and revealing attempt to explain the Whitman-Columbus connection, "Irving and Whitman: Re-Historicizing the Figure of Columbus in Nineteenth-Century America," WUUam H. Shurr argues that Whitman's principle source for the Columbus poems was an 1861 reissue of Irving's biography. But Irving's avowed goal, to create "an American hero," met, as we have seen, with not a Uttie success. The myth quickly outgrew the myth-maker, and its episodes were simpUfied and absorbed-through further biographies, schoolbooks, advertisements, and poUtical rhetoric-into the American consciousness. It is this consciousness, this myth, which Whitman clearly was attempting to tap. WhUe in his prose notes for "Prayer," Whitman does transcribe several phrases verbatim from Irving's work, it is George Ticknor's brief biographical sketch of the Admiral in History of Spanish Literature which seems the most Ukely candidate for the poet's first epiphaiUc moment of identification with the Admiral; in a neglected entry from one of his many partial notebooks, Whitman writes: "Columbus was a grander man by far than I thought-had visions-wrote with unsurpassed vigor [. . .] -had the loftiest spirit" (Daybooks 460). Whitman is responding here to Ticknor's account of Columbus's Jamaican vision, a dream in which, according to a 1503 letter to his sovereigns, Columbus is comforted by the Holy Spirit: "Fear not," says the

42 spirit, "be of good cheer; aU these thy griefs are written in marble, and not without cause" (Ticknor 209). Ticknor relates how Columbus "beUeves himself to be, in some degree at least, inspired; and to be chosen of Heaven to fuIfiU certain of the solemn and grand prophesies of the Old Testament" (209). It is this characterization of Columbus as prophet which Whitman first adopts in "Passage to India." This conclusion is reinforced by Whitman's presumably deUberate misquote of Ticknor in the same notebook entry:

In 1506 Columbus died at VaUadoUd, a disappointed broken-hearted old man-Uttle comprehending what he had done for mankind, and less the glory & honor that through aU future generations awaited his name. But the mantle of his devout and heroic spirit feU on some of his successors. (460) Ticknor's actual Unes conclude with the words "none of his successors." Shurr's argument does attempt to move beyond simpUstic interpretations of the Columbus connection, but in its attempt to justify the affiiUty in terms of current critical theory, it oversteps textual reaUty and ultimately faUs to convince:

Both Irving and Whitman. . . used Columbus as a mirror for their own personal sense of professional neglect and faUure. He was a figure through whom to project and protest their depression as writers at points in their careers when each author felt under appreciated... Columbus served also as the vehicle for their reflections on the poUtical evUs of their own times. He fumished a useful means of diagnosis of pubUc UIs as weU as private. (328) In his attempts to move beyond the conventional explanation of Columbus as "surrogate martyr figure," and to justify Whitman's affinity with the now-viUfied American icon, Shurr argues that Whitman "undermines or subverts (even deconstmcts) the national vision of progress whUe appearing to be its primary apostle or nUssionary and its most lyric celebrant" (240). Without offering further explanation or sufficient supporting evidence, Shurr

43 asserts that "'Prayer of Columbus' is "most poUtical in its reference to current events. It contains deep within itself some destabUizing elements for that very American Dream which it seems to celebrate" (246). UnUke "Passage to India," the poem in question does not seem, to this reader, to make reference to any "current events," and any attempt at subversive messages seems unUkely in Ught of the poet's other uses of the Admiral. "Prayer of Columbus" is simply (but significantiy) a solUoquy in which Whitman-Columbus prays for comfort and affirms his democratic/reUgious faith.

As his prose wiU attest, Whitman was aware of the dangers inherent in the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny," but his faith in democracy and in human nature apparentiy outweighed his fears. He could not help, as weU, but be aware of the Columbus myth's role in justifying America's "progress." The Admiral was everywhere. Apart from frequent mentions in the rhetoric of expansion and technological advancement, Columbus's role as the premier cultural icon could be seen in the $5 banknote (issued in 1863) which bore his Ukeness, in the erection of at least twenty-eight major pubUc monuments throughout the country during Whitman's Ufetime, and in an actual caU- heavUy supported by American CathoUcs-for the Admiral's canonization. Nowhere was the Columbus craze more in evidence, however, than in Washington DC, the very birthplace of Whitman's first two Columbus poems. Living up to its appended namesake, the District of Columbia was a veritable shrine to the mariner. The capitol buUding alone, to which Whitman made frequent visits (Prose Works 301), contained more than a dozen prominently featured artistic tributes to the AdnUral (Bushman 131-32) The great bronze doors at the entrance to the Rotunda-enormous Ghibherti-Uke castings which depict favorite (though historicaUy inaccurate) episodes in the

44 myth-were both instaUed and relocated to their present position during Whitman's years in Washington (Bushman 132). Columbian paintings and statuary were also in abundance, and the traditional iconography by which Columbus was made easUy identifiable in these works lends another compelling bit of evidence to a theory supporting both Whitman's exposure to these myth-buUding efforts and to the centraUty of the Columbus m^rth in his evolving poetic program. In paintings, Columbus was typicaUy depicted in one of two largely consistent scenes. The first, like John Vanderlyn's Landing ofColumbus (a large mural which dominates the east waU of the Rotunda), shows the Admiral sword in hand and in Spanish dress at the moment of landfaU. WTiat most clearly distinguishes him from other conqueror-explorers haiUng out of Spain, however, is the ever-present symbol of the Columbian voyage, a three-masted barque floating prominently on the marine horizon. WhUe I do not wish to suggest that this prominent iconographic symbol is the sole source for Whitman's use of ship and sea imagery (both are prevalent throughout his poetry from the first edition oíLeaves onward), it might weU be a contributing factor to the changed use and increased frequency of such images noted by Esther Shephard (see above). The second typical scene, however, contains iconography compeUingly consistent with Whitman's later imagery and diction: when not depicted at the moment of landfaU, Columbus is often shown holding aloft, or contemplating in repose, an orb or globe. The image is intended to recaU, of course, Columbus's legendary role in shattering the world's supposed ignorance of the earth's rotundity. Though the frequency of Whitman's use of the word "orb" does increase significantly in his post-war writings (it is used only once in the 1855 edition oíLeaves but appears fourteen times by the 1891 deathbed edition) its use is largely

45 conventional as a somewhat florid synonym for astronomical bodies. The archaic term "orbic," too, as it appears in a few pre-war poems like "Song of Myself "and "We Two, How Long We Were Were Fooled," remains merely descriptive of roundness and/or carries a fairly straightforward astronomical connotation: "A tenor large and fresh as the creation fiUs me, / The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me fuU" (558-60); "We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and steUar, we are as two comets" (12). By 1871, however, both words denote not only rondure but Whitman's developing theory of spiritual unity and his desire for a Uterature of global democracy. "Song of the Exposition," for example, echoes the Columbian "dream" of "Passage to India":

Thou, also thou, a World, With aU thy wide Geographies, manifold, different, distant, Rounded by thee in one-one common orbic language, one common indivisible destiny for AU. (171-74) Democratic Vistas also adopts the word "orbic" as a kind of shibboleth for the new spiritual democracy the essay predicts and advocates; the "orbic quaUty" of democracy, Whitman argues, is its abUity to "work in, if we may so term it, and justify God, his divine aggregate, the People, (or, the veritable horn'd and taU'd DevU, his aggregate, if there be those who insist on it)-this I say is what democracy is for" (651). The necessary foremnners of such a democracy, Whitman insists, are to be new "races of orbic bards" (974), Columbus-Uke visionaries with "needed orbic works launched forth" (971). In addition, the third section oíDemocratic Vistas-wntten as a separate essay but never pubUshed independently-was originaUy titled "Orbic Literature." And in the essay "Emerson's Books, (The Shadows of Them)," Whitman laments that most Uterature "seems at its best some Uttle fleet of boats, hugging the shores of a boundless sea, and never venturing, exploring the

46 unmapp'd-never, Columbus-Iike, saUing out for New Worlds, and to complete the orb's rondure" (1052). In an interview for her 1898 book American Authors and Their Homes, Francis Whiting Halsey asked WilUam Dean HoweUs for his take on the recentiy deceased Walt Whitman. "Whitman," HoweUs repUes, "was like Columbus. Hediscoveredanisland, insteadofthecontinent"(108). WhUein its immediate context this remark seems merely a nUld admonition of Whitman's purportedly "fomUess" poetics, it does suggest a skepticism toward Columbus's status which was typical only of the dawning modem era. WhUe murmurs conceming previous Icelandic, Venetian, and Portuguese discoveries of the New World had long been in circulation, Columbus's reputation as World-Finder only came under serious fire during the last quarter of the nineteeth century (Porter 161). To the end, however, Whitman expressed reservations about modem tendencies toward "destmctive iconoclasm" (Prose Works 373), and, toward the end of his Ufe, he sounds remarkably like Thoreau in his discussions of the value of history. In an 1888 discussion with Traubel conceming the Bacon-Shakespeare authorship debate, for example, Whitman objects to a particular "Shakespeare skeptic" as:

a searcher after things out of the normal... a man who Ukes to go about showing us how we have made mistakes-put a wrong twist into facts: that Judas was a pretty good feUow, of some use, after aU: that Caesar was not thus and so, but thus and so: that there was no WiIUam TeU-that the WUUam TeU story was whoUy a myth: that Columbus did not do this or that on the voyage to America, but did that or this: aU of which might be tme and might serve a purpose, but tends to over-refine a man's sense of right and wrong. (Traubel 38) This "temper of the age," Whitman insisted, was not without a certain value-"the arguments at the bottom are irrefutable," he conceded-"but the

47 letter of destmctive criticism must not be pushed too far. It tends to render a man unfit to buUd" (39). WhUe this casual dismissal of the value of "right and wrong" may be as disturbing as Emerson's gospel of wealth, it is entirely consistent with Whitman's program of inclusivity and acceptance. In an article cUpped from the Edinhurgh Review (April 1849), for instance, Whitman brackets the foUowing passage:

the highest creations of poetry-those of a Homer or a Shakespeare-embody tmth yet more comprehensive and universal than any consigned to the page of history. Montaigne remarks in one of his essays, that the value of history does not consist in the bare facts it records, but in the instmction the facts are capable of conve^dng; and this is so tme that the parts of history which are positively fabulous are so often more fuU of significance, and have reaUy had more influence than the most accurate recital of the bare facts. (Trent 175) Later in the article, Whitman underUnes, brackets, and fixes a pointing hand on the foUowing:

In the same way every work of genius, by coming, as it were, into mesmeric rapport with the affinities of kindred geiUus, and stimulating its latent energies, is itself the parent of many others, and fumishes the materials and mdiments of ever new combinations. (Trent 175) "The classical models," Whitman has written at the top of the page, 'long lost or buried, then, after the 'dark ages,' fished up again and made presidential." This odd use of the word "presidential" is also charmingly consistent with the poet's lifelong obsession to create a trvUy "democratic" Uterature. The popiUar "fable of Columbus," as Thoreau caUed it, was to Whitman just such a resource, far more valuable than any painstakingly accurate history could be. It served for Whitman as one of the "grand and archetypal models" caUed for in Democratic Vistas:

48 It must be reiterated, as, for the purpose of these memoranda, the deep lessons of history and time, that aU else in the contributions of a nation or age, through its poUtics, materials, heroic personaUties, miUtary eclat, &c., remains cmde, and defers, in any close and thorough-going estimate, untU vitaUzed by national, original archetypes in Uterature. They only put the nation in form, finaUy teU anything-prove, complete anything-perpetuate anjrthing. (405)

49 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION

HoweU's choice of metaphor, "Whitman was Uke Columbus," was likely prompted, it seems, by Whitman's repeated evocations of the Admiral. The connotation ascribed to Columbus as symbol, however, differs markedly from Whitman's own. WhUe Whitman often depicted the explorer as a tragic hero who's attempts to reach India were ironicaUy but fortunately thwarted by an intervening continent, his role as world-finder is never-for Whitman, Emerson, or Thoreau-in dispute. From his earUest pubUshed mentions of the Admiral in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, untU his last poem, "A Thought of Columbus," Whitman continues to depict Columbus as the "far Discoverer," as a symbol of successful nationaUsm, Manifest Destiny, and the Adamic founding of the New World. In an 1847 editorial lamenting poUtical resistance to the WUmont Proviso, a hotly-debated aboUtionist amendment concerning the annexation of Mexican territories, Whitman argued: "The immortal author of the Declaration of Independence is as much the originator of the proviso as Columbus was the discoverer of the continent" ("Gathering" 222). Yet, ironicaUy, it is our awareness of Columbus's association with both imperiaUst expansion and the introduction of slavery into the Americas which has led to the steady decUne in popularity, and cultural potency, of the Columbus myth. But Emerson would say this is only natural; in his hundredth lecture before the Concord Lyceum, the 77-year-oId TranscendentaUst concisely explained both the origins and decUne of the another institution for which he was the key spokesman: "There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the

50 EstabUshment and the Movement" (MiUer 5). TranscendentaUsm, Ui the years surrounding Emerson's and Whitman's deaths, was witnessing both its demise and some fmits, for good or Ul, of its "success." WhUe the Uterary transcendentaUsts never entirely resolved their phUosophical oppositions or succeeded in implanting in the American mind their more esoteric doctrines, their basic tenets emphasizing the value of individual effort had become an inseparable part of the GUded Age "EstabUshment," a past which was a necessary foU in the development of American Modemism. The Columbus myth, too, had been successfuUy absorbed into the spirit of the age, and, by becoming an ideal and obvious target for further reappraisals of America's identity and destiny, carried the seeds of its own destmction. As Emerson wrote in the opening number of The Dial, "The spirit of the time is in every form a protest against usage and a search for principles." Indeed, perhaps the spirit of every "time" could simUarly defined.

51 WORKS CITED

AUen, Gay WUson. Walt Whitman Abroad. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1995.

—, and Ed Folsom. Walt Whitman and the World lowa City: U of lowa P, 1995.

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman anH the Bodv Reantifíil Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Bushman, Claudia L. America Discovers Columhim Hanover: UPofNew England, 1992.

Cameron, Walter Kenneth. ed. Resnonse to Transcendental Concord. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1974.

—, Transcendental CMmatf^ Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1965.

Doudna, Martin K. "The Atiantic Cable in Whitman's Tassage to India."' Walt Whitman Review 23 (1977): 50-52.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Experience." Ralph Wflldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 469-92.

—, "Fate." Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Libraryof America, 1983. 937-68.

—, "Heroism." Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Libraryof America, 1983. 369-81.

—, Joumals and MisceUaneous Notebooks. Ed. WUUam H. Gilman et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1960-82.

—, "Nature: Introduction." Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 5-230.

—, "The Poet." Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 445-68.

—, "Representative Men." Ra ph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lect irps Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 611-762.

—, "Self-ReUance." Ralph WaJdo Emerson: Essavs and Lecture.^ Ed. Joel Porte. LibraryofAmerica, 1983. 257-82.

52 —, "The Senses and the Soul." Rplph Waldo Emerson: Essavs and Lectures. Ed. JoelPorte. Libraryof America, 1983. 1190-95.

—, "Success." ThP nomplete Writings of Ralnh Waldo Emerson. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1929. 706-15.

—, "Wealth." The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1929. 545-58.

—, "The Young American." Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983.

Folsom, Ed. ed. "Introduction: 'Generations Hence.'" Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays lowa City: U of lowa P, 1993.

Freneau, PhiUp. "American liberty, A Poem." The Poems nf PhilUp Freneau. Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1902. 142-152.

—, "Discovery." The Poems nf Phillip Freneau. Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1902. 68-72.

—, "ThePicturesofCoIumbus." The Poems of Phillip Frpnean Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. Vol.l. Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1902. 89-123.

Goldfarb, Clare R. "The Poet's Role in Tassage to India."' Walt Whitman EeYÍÊ3Y8(1962): 75-79.

Halsey, Francis Whiting. American Authors and their Homes. New York: James Pott & Co., 1902.

Hart, James D. ed. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Hymen, Stanley Edgar. "Henry Thoreau in Our Time." Thoreau: A Co lection of Critical Essays. Ed. Sherman Paul. Englewood CUffs, N.J.: Prentice HaU, 1962. 23-36.

Kauffinan, Christopher J. "Columbianism." The Christopher Columhus Encyclopedia. Ed. SUvio A. Bedini. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1991.

53 Krob, Carol. "Columbus of Concord: A Week as A Voyage of Discovery." ESQ 21(1975): 215-21.

MUIer, Perry. ed. Thp American TranscendentaUsts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1957.

Paul, Sherman. The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration. New York: RusseU and RusseU, 1958.

Porte, Joel, ed. Emerson in his Joumals. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Porter, Charlotte and Helen A. Clarke. "School of Literature. Poems lUustrative of American History: Discoveries: LoweU's and Whitman's Columbus." Poet-Lore 7 (April. 1895): 218-22.

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 4: American TranscendentaUsm: An Introduction." PAL: Perspectives on American Literature-A Research and Reference GiiidÊ. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/engUsh/reuben/home.htmI. 17 June, 1997.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Sanbom, F.B. The Life of Henrv David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton MifíUn Company, 1917.

Sayre, Robert F. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Schlereth, Thomas J. "Columbia, Columbus, Columbianism." The jQumal of American Historv. 79.3 (1992): 937-951.

Shephard, Esther. Walt Whitman'.s Pose. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936.

Shurr, WUUam H. "Irving and Whitman: Re-Historicizing the Figure of Columbus in Nineteeth-Century America." American Transcendental Quarterlv. 6.4 (1992): 237-50.

Thoreau, Henry David. A WPPV nn the Cnncord and Merrimack Rivers: Walden. or ^ifp in the W»^^s; T'^e Maine Woods: Cape Cod. Ed. Robert F. Sayre. Library of America, 1985.

,_- xhf WritiPfT^ nf Henry Ppv^d Thnreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey. Vol. 2. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

54 Ticknor, George. fíifítnry nf Sfpflni.sh Literature. Vol. 1. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman m Camden. Vol. 3. Boston: SmaU, Maynard, & Company, 1906.

Wheatiey, PhUUs. "To His ExceUency General Washington." The CoUected WorksofPhiIUsWheatiey. Ed. John C. Shields. NewYork: Oxford UP, 1988. 145-46.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edwin HavUand MiUer. New York: New York UP, 1961-1977.

—, Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. WUUam White. New York, New York UP, 1961-1977.

—, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

—, Notebooks and UnpubUshed Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Greer. New York: New York UP, 1984.

—, "Passage to India." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.411-21.

—, "Prayer of Columbus." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 421-23.

— Prnse Wnrks 1892. Ed. Floyd StovaU. VoL 2. New York: New York UP, 1961-1977.

—, "Song of the Exposition." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Editiûn. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 195-205.

—, "SongofMyself." Lpave.s nf Grass: Cnmnrehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 28-89.

—, "AThoughtof Columbus." Le^v^s nf Grass: Comnrehensive Reader'.s Editiûn. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. NewYork: New York UP, 1965. 581-82.

55 "We Two, How Long We Were Fooled." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Rpadpr'.s Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and ScuUey Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 107-08.

56 PERMISSION TO COPY

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a

master's degree at Texas Tech University or Texas Tech University Health Sciences

Center, I agree that the Library and my major department shaU make it freely avaUable for research purposes. Permission to copy this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Director of the Library or my major professor.

It is understood that any copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shaU not be aUowed without my further written permission and that any user may be liable for copyright infringement.

Agree (Permission is granted.)

T- Student's Signapire Date

Disagree (Permission is not granted.)

Student's Signature Date