CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Texas A&M University “HOT LITTLE PROPHETS”: READING, MYSTICISM, AND WALT WHITMAN’S DISCIPLES A Dissertation by STEVEN JAY MARSDEN Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2004 Major Subject: English “HOT LITTLE PROPHETS”: READING, MYSTICISM, AND WALT WHITMAN’S DISCIPLES A Dissertation by STEVEN JAY MARSDEN Submitted to Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________ ____________________________ M. Jimmie Killingsworth William Bedford Clark (Chair of Committee) (Member) ____________________________ ____________________________ Michael Hand Jerome Loving (Member) (Member) ____________________________ _____________________________ Janet McCann Paul Parrish (Member) (Head of Department) August 2004 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT “Hot Little Prophets”: Reading, Mysticism, and Walt Whitman’s Disciples. (August 2004) Steven Jay Marsden, B.A., Western Illinois University; M.A., Northern Illinois University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth While scholarship on Walt Whitman has often dealt with “mysticism” as an important element of his writings and worldview, few critics have acknowledged the importance of Whitman’s disciples in the development of the idea of secular comparative mysticism. While critics have often speculated about the religion Whitman attempted to inculcate, they have too often ignored the secularized spirituality that the poet’s early readers developed in response to his poems. While critics have postulated that Whitman intended to revolutionize the consciousness of his readers, they have largely ignored the cases where this kind of response demonstrably occurred. “Hot Little Prophets” examines three of Walt Whitman’s most enthusiastic early readers and disciples, Anne Gilchrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Edward Carpenter. This dissertation shows how these disciples responded to the unprecedented reader- engagement techniques employed in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and how their readings of that book (and of Whitman himself) provided them with new models of identity, iv politics, and sexuality, new focuses of desire, and new ways in which to interpret their own lives and experiences. This historicized reader-response approach, informed by a contexualist understanding of mystical experience, provides an opportunity to study how meaning is created through the interaction of Whitman’s poems and his readers’ expectations, backgrounds, needs, and desires. It also shows how what has come to be called mystical experience occurs in a human context: how it is formed out of a complicated interaction of text and interpretation (sometimes misinterpretation), experience and desire, context and stimulus. The dissertation considers each disciple’s education and upbringing, intellectual influences, habits of reading, and early religious attitudes as a foreground to the study of his or her initial reaction to Leaves of Grass. Separate chapters on the three figures investigate the crises of identity, vocation, faith, and sexuality that informed their reactions. Each chapter traces the development of the disciples’ understanding of Whitman’s poetry over a span of years, focusing especially on the complex role mystical experience played in their interpretation of Whitman and his works. v For the Reader. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the support of many people. I’d like to thank Jimmie Killingsworth for keeping me at it and letting me follow it out, William Bedford Clark for teaching me the value of a comma, Jerome Loving for providing his valuable and considered judgment, and Janet McCann for asking the right questions. Thanks also to Michael Hand, for asking some difficult ones. Finally, I’d like to thank Laura Osborne for being around. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………… iii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………… iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………............ vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………............ vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..... 1 Disciples and Critics………………………………………………................ 4 Reevaluation…………………………………………………………............ 13 Mysticism and Method……………………………………………………… 16 Real and Imaginary Readers………………………………………………… 25 A Précis of Chapters………………………………………………………… 36 II “A WOMAN WAITS FOR ME”: ANNE GILCHRIST AND LEAVES OF GRASS………………………………………………………. 39 III “SO SACRED—THE EXPLICATING NOTE”: DOCTOR RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE READING “COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS”………… 91 There Was a Child Went Forth……………………………………………… 94 Into the Wilderness………………………………………………………….. 99 Medicine, Romanticism, and Positivism……………………………………. 105 On First Reading Whitman………………………………………………….. 119 Illuminations………………………………………………………………… 128 Man’s Moral Nature………………………………………………………… 140 Biography and Exegesis…………………………………………………….. 148 Comparative Readings and a Community of Believers…………………….. 155 Cosmic Consciousness……………………………………………………… 174 Ciphers, Mystic and Otherwise………………………………………........... 184 The Purpose of Cosmic Consciousness………………………………........... 202 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………. 211 viii CHAPTER Page IV “THE FACE OF HIS HOURS REFLECTED”: EDWARD CARPENTER’S READING OF LEAVES OF GRASS…………………………..…………... 215 Childhood and Family Life…………………………………………………. 225 Reading Nature……………………………………………………………… 232 Schoolboy Loneliness and Sexuality……………………………………….. 237 Religious Career and Vocation……………………………………………... 251 First Reading Whitman……………………………………………………… 254 “The Religious Influence of Art”…………………………………………… 256 Escape and Romantic Disappointment…………………………………….... 266 Narcissus and Other Poems……………………………………….………… 268 “The Face of His Hours Reflected”……………………………………......... 278 Italy and Jane Olivia Daubeny…………………...………………………….. 283 Letters and Discipleship……………………………………………………... 286 Pilgrimage: Reading Whitman……………………………………………..... 299 Crisis, Rereading, and the Bhagavad-Gita………………………..…….…… 304 Reading, Mysticism, and the Subject / Object Barrier………………..……. 315 Sex, Reading and Subject-Object…………………………………….….….. 318 Writing Naked………………………………………………………….…… 321 The Use of Materials……………………………………………………….. 327 Speaking the Password………………………………………………….….. 331 Mirrors and Laughter……………………………………………………....... 333 Ideals………………………………………………………………………… 338 Preparation of Stores for Future Wants…………………………………….. 342 Language, Evocation, and Context…………………………………………. 344 The Freemasonry of Comrade-Love and the Great Celestial City………….. 346 Final Impressions of Whitman………………………………………………. 352 IV CONCLUSION: THE MATERIALS OF PERSONALITY…………………….. 366 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………. 366 Other Cases………………………………………………………………….. 375 WORKS CITED…….………………………………………...…….……………...... 378 VITA………………………………………………………………………………… 392 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Miracle is simply the religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be dominant. To me all is miracle. In your sense the inexpressible and strange is miracle, in mine it is no miracle. The more religious you are, the more you see miracle everywhere. – Friederich Schleiermacher, On Religion Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem. – Walt Whitman, “To You” Since the beginning of what we might call professional Whitman studies, critics have not known quite what to make of those who preceded them, those admirers and followers who for a variety of reasons were drawn to Whitman in his last years. I mean in particular those for whom Whitman’s works and presence were matters of vital religious or spiritual import, who came to believe that Whitman was as much prophet as poet. _______________ This dissertation follows the style and format of the MLA Handbook. 2 These readers had not studied Leaves of Grass as a detached object of critical contemplation, but, influenced by Whitman’s own complex rhetoric of reading—a rhetoric derived from, but perhaps richer than Ralph Waldo Emerson’s own Gnostic theory of response—had attempted to put it to work as a force in their own experience. They had used it, taken it seriously, and attempted to follow its suggestions and dictates. Though they all saw the book according to their own lights, they also changed as they thought it prescribed them to change. Among them were two writers who would prove instrumental in the creation and popularization of the idea of comparative mysticism itself and the basic assumptions and methods of reading that made it possible, Richard Maurice Bucke and Edward Carpenter. These two men came from very different backgrounds. Bucke was a medical doctor and financial speculator, a materialist involved in the development of late nineteenth-century depth psychology, a warden of the insane who was more than usually cognizant that what we called sanity was “a matter of fashion.” Carpenter was a gay former Anglican priest seeking a new vocation. A socialist radical and reformer educated in the liberal Christianity of his day, Carpenter subsequently became involved in the intellectual currents that fueled the study of Eastern religion and comparative mythology in England. Despite their differences, both modeled their lives and pursuits after their own vision of Whitman, and developed between them an understanding of Whitman’s message that