Toward the Death and Flowering of Transcendentalism in Walt Whitman

TOWARD THE DEATH AND FLOWERING OF TRANSCENDENTALISM IN WALT WHITMAN BY TIMOTHY GILMORE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 Timothy Gilmore 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the chair, Dr. David Leverenz, and members of my supervisory committee, Drs. Susan Hegeman, Stephanie Smith, and Louise Newman. Special thanks also go to Dr. William Slaughter and Dr. Michael Wiley at the University of North Florida and Dr. James Smethurst at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst for their support and motivation. Thanks also must go to Jo Carlisle, for her constant support and discourse. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………….………..…………………....3 LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………..……...…5 ABSTRACT………………………………………...…………………………….……….6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION………………………………...………………………………7 2 MISPRISIONS OF GERMAN IDEALISM AND EMERSON’S THREE FIGURES OF COMPLETION…………………………………………………..19 3 MARGARET FULLER’S UNSYSTEMATIC ARCHITECTURE……………..42 4 THOREAU’S PROJECT OF RECOVERING THE IRRECOVERABLE: THE THING-IN-ITSELF ANDTHE THING-IN-ITS OPPOSITE….…………….…..65 5 AN OUROBORIC UNDERSTANDING OF OPPOSITIONS IN WALT WHITMAN’S “SONG OF MYSELF”……………………….…………...……..95 6 [SELF] IDENTIFICATION WITH/OF THE OUROBORIC IN“SONG OF MYSELF”: A READING OF WHITMAN THROUGH HERBERT MARCUSE………………………………………………….…………..……...119 7 HUMANIZATION THROUGH INTERPERSONAL OPPOSITIONS IN DRUM-TAPS…………………………………………………………..…….….140 8 THE RHETORICAL OUROBORIC IN WHITMAN’S WAKE; OR, THE OUROBORIC INTERRELATION OF SPEAKER AND SUBJECT SINCE WHITMAN. PART ONE: SANDBURG, HUGHES, AND THE BEATS…….166 9 THE RHETORICAL OUROBORIC IN WHITMAN’S WAKE; OR, THE OUROBORIC INTERRELATION OF SPEAKER AND SUBJECT SINCE WHITMAN. PART TWO: PARRA, THE BLACK ARTS, AND SPOKEN WORD…………………………………………………………………….........202 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………….………………….223 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………….……………………………..232 4 LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1-1 Immanuel Kant Engraving Framed by an Ouroboros……………………8 5-1 The Ouroboros……………....…………………………………………125 5-2 American Indian Motif of Ouroboros………...….………….…………126 5-3 “Old Man” Series, Photographed by Thomas Eakins………….....……139 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy TOWARD THE DEATH AND FLOWERING OF TRANSCENDENTALISM IN WALT WHITMAN By Timothy Gilmore May 2007 Chair: David Leverenz Major: English I trace American Transcendentalists’ concern with oppositions into the poetry of Walt Whitman. This trajectory begins with misprisions of Kant’s ideas about the oppositions of material and ideal, misprisions picked up and reinterpreted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Whereas the Transcendentalists prioritize one side of an oppositional relationship, based on their focus on the Ideal, Whitman reinterprets oppositions as defining each through the other. I use the symbol of the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its tail, to illustrate Whitman’s reinterpretation. Whitman’s ouroboric understanding of oppositions works on a macrocosmic level with more abstract oppositions and on a microcosmic level to explain the self as always defined through the other. I use the theories of Herbert Marcuse to show how Whitman’s ouroboric of the self and other works to “humanize” the subject, to liberate the subject from objectification. Finally, I show how this microcosmic ouroboric influences twentieth-century poetry toward increased spokenness and toward an extension of the ouroboric of self and other to the poetic speaker and his or her subject. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In the 1984 Wolfgang Peterson fantasy film, The NeverEnding Story, a little boy named Bastian loses himself in a strange book, a book described as “not safe,” the story of which is the unending tale of human imagination. The hero of the story, Atreyu, the story-side version of the reader, wears an amulet called the Auryn around his neck. As long as he wears the amulet, he has the power to keep the story “neverending,” to fight off “the Nothing,” which threatens to destroy the psychogeographical realm of story and imagination that exists within the book. When Bastian reads of the presentation of the Auryn to Atreyu by the representative of “the Childlike Empress,” he’s stunned to realize it’s the same symbol as the one on the cover of his strange book. It is, in fact, the symbol of two serpents, convoluted together and swallowing each other’s tails. The Auryn symbolizes the neverending nature of the story in the same way the lemniscate symbolizes infinity in mathematics, by showing a closed circuit with no end and no beginning. The Auryn is, in fact, a variation of the ouroboros, the symbol of the serpent swallowing its tail, which I use as a trope in the following study. The ouroboros has had wide-ranging symbolic uses. Later in this study, I mention uses made of the symbol by Margaret Fuller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jorge Louis Borges, Carl Gustav Jung, and French historian and archaeologist Louis Charbonneau- Lassay. The ouroboros appears in much older motifs as well, from ancient cultures worldwide. Even Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent in Aztec mythology, sometimes appears biting his tail. 7 The ouroboros became an especially common symbol in alchemy, and as an alchemical symbol has also found its way toward use as a philosophical and literary trope. In his 1656 A Letter to a Friend, English alchemist and physician Sir Thomas Browne writes, that the first day should make the last, that the tail of the snake should return into its mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon the day of their nativity, is indeed a remarkable coincidence, which, though astrology hath taken witty pains to salve [sic], yet hath it been very wary in making predictions of it. (93) Randall Clack writes about how alchemical symbols become important tropes for writers of the American Renaissance. Concerns with such themes as opposition, reconciliation, and regeneration in alchemy yielded frequent use of concepts such as the philosopher’s stone and symbols such as the phoenix, the hermaphrodite, and the ouroboros, which Clack traces to Margaret Fuller (117). Indeed, I begin Chapter 5 with Fuller writing about the ouroboros. Meanwhile, an 1812 engraving by J. Chapman of Immanuel Kant Figure 1-1. Immanuel Kant Engraving Framed by an Ouroboros 1 is framed with an ouroboros. 1 Numerous popular culture texts use the ouroboros, including science fiction novels and television series. In 1994, composer Kay Gardner completed Oratorio: Ouroboros: Seasons of Life, a “neopagan oratorio.” In Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, time is described as ouroboric and shown with a hand-drawn 8 Recently, the ouroboros has appeared in popular science books like Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge and Joel R. Primack’s and Nancy Ellen Abrams’s The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. Narby’s book, the interesting premise of which is a little hard to swallow (no ouroboric pun intended), argues that hallucinogenic medicinal plants used by indigenous peoples in such places as the Peruvian Amazon yield metaphoric imagery that may be directly tied to the inner workings of human health. Particularly, Narby thinks the widespread indigenous vision of the sacred snake may be directly connected to the DNA spiral. As he puts it, “the biosphere itself, which can be considered ‘as a more or less fully interlinked unit,’ is the source of the [shamanic] images” of spiral serpents with sacred healing knowledge (131). Primack and Abrams use the image of the ouroboros as a trope for connecting the two seemingly incompatible realms of physics: relativity and quantum theory: But then a very strange thing happens. As we continue along the Cosmic Uroboros to the very tip of the tail, gravity becomes extremely powerful again. The reason is that gravity’s strength increases as objects get closer to each other, and at the tip of the tail distances between particles are almost unimaginably small. The Cosmic Serpent swallowing its tail represents the possibility that gravity links the largest and the smallest sizes and thereby unifies the universe. This actually happens in superstring theory, a mathematically beautiful idea that is our best hope for a theory that could unify quantum theory and illustration. Meanwhile, in Jack Kerouac’s personal mythology, most directly dealt with in the lesser known novel Dr. Sax, good is represented by Dr. Sax and evil by the “Great World Snake,” which lives underground. This imagery may also have influenced Jim Morrison’s rambling about a seven-mile long snake in the “ancient lake” in The Doors’ song, “The End.” Similarly, James Wright translates Pablo Neruda’s “Some Beasts,” ending, And deep in the huge waters the enormous anaconda lies like the circle around the earth, covered with ceremonies of mud, devouring, religious. 9 relativity. In string theory, sizes smaller than the Planck length get remapped into sizes larger than the Planck length. (163) In using the ouroboros as a central symbol for their writings, Narby, Primack, and Abrams argue for the use of convenient symbols for tropes. I use the ouroboros as a trope to describe Walt Whitman’s appropriation and evolution of American Transcendentalist concerns with oppositions. The use of

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