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Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples

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This is an innovative group portrait of Whitman's impassioned "disciples" (there is really no other word for them). It is restricted in scope to familiar figures who left us "copious letters and diaries and memoirs. . . All the disciples in this book are writers." Unfortunately, important allies who have gone begging in the existing Whitman biographies continue to go begging here--for example, Walt's right-hand man, Henry Clapp. With keen insight and a dedication to historical nuance, Robertson reassembles these ensemble actors against a freshly delineated backdrop. I must say, I learned something new and deeply satisfying in every chapter.

The key to the author's clarity is a willingness to avoid equivocation and to make concise assertions. That he succeeds for page after page is a measure of his uncommonly good judgment, and indeed, for the most part, the book runs like a well-kept engine firing on all cylinders. But the risk of being concise is to be reductionist. Take the treatment of spiritualism on page 10: "Unlike Spiritualism or Theosophy, Whitman's verse rejected all forms of supernaturalism, offering instead a pantheistic affirmation of the sacredness of the everyday." Obviously Robertson is essentially right about Walt's staunch insistence on the sacredness of the everyday. But Leaves of Grass was also a love letter to his potential allies in the abolitionist, free love, and suffragist movements, crafted to appeal to their spiritualist yearnings. One cannot succeed by seizing only one horn of the dilemma; we are constantly called to respond to Walt's own insistence that he contained contradictory multitudes.

Indeed, scholars in this field need to resist a rush to declare, "But Whitman was never X." Over the years, the various values of "X" have included "gay," "a Quaker," "a free lover," "a Bowery b'hoy," "a reformer," and, amazingly enough, even "a transcendentalist." On page 186, Robertson asserts that Whitman "steered clear of the American 'free love' movement." This may well have been true in 1889, but Whitman's famous Boston Commons debate with Emerson in 1860 can only be understood as Whitman's decision to throw his lot in with the antebellum Free Love movement--over the objections of his "Master."

Whitman's latter-day denunciations of the Free Love and Spiritualist movements are properly viewed as one among countless instances of his circle's deliberate historical revisionism. As shown by Ann Braude in Radical Spirits, the same kind of historical revisionism was simultaneously being conducted by that one historical figure whom I believe Whitman most resembles--the lesbian Quaker human-rights champion, Susan B. Anthony.

The ultimate test of the book is whether Robertson can fully portray the intense passion of these disciples without committing character assassination. (Even Walt was regularly, and deeply, embarrassed by Richard Maurice Bucke's view of the reformer-poet as a cosmic messiah.) This can be done, as shown by Artem Lozynsky in 1977; likewise, Worshipping Walt shows Robertson to have that singular degree of empathy and sophistication needed to do justice to this history.

What could possibly be more gripping than the mixture of eroticism, mysticism, scandal, faith, and ardent activism which characterized the nineteenth-century Whitman movement--heady passions which still motivate Whitman's partisans today, as Robertson shows. (In the interest of full disclosure, this writer is one of those mentioned as the modern equivalent of the "Whitmaniacs.")

The breathtaking climax of Worshipping Walt is actually tucked away as something of a throwaway in the middle of the chapter on Horace Traubel. Traubel, the bookish boy who grew to be Walt's principal torch-bearer, spent part of his life writing bad poetry. But his entire wrongheaded poetic career was redeemed by the single impassioned prayer-poem he wrote the day Walt died. It may be a minor criticism, but I regret that Robertson did not reserve this ecstatic utterance as his book's spectacular valedictory.

I view Worshipping Walt as a welcome turning point for the entire field--I see it as just that vital. Whether your interest is in the power of poetry, American Studies, the sociology of religion, radical reform, gay history, or Walt Whitman himself, start here; you'll be rewarded.

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul"

As Michael Robertson points out in his wonderful Introduction to "Worshiping Walt" the Whitman disciples, who consisted of a large, diverse, international group of poets, scholars, and writers--William O'Connor, John Burroughs, Anne Gilchrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, J. W. Wallace, and Horace Traubel-- insisted that the essential unity of "Leaves of Grass" has to be taken as a whole (5). To all of the disciples who knew Whitman personally his presence appears to have been spell-binding. Many spoke of his personal magnetism, his powerful force as a religious teacher and prophet, and more than a few compared him to Christ, or the Messiah. "Why did the disciples think that Whitmanism might become an organized religion, possibly rivaling Christianity?" (9) asks Robertson. His answer is that it has to do with the nineteenth-century "crisis of faith" with which the West was wrestling, following the shocks that were delivered, in successive blows, to Judeo-Christian belief by the spiritual liberalism of Emersonian Transcendentalism (10). The comparisons with Christ are not without a basis in Whitman's own writing, as he identified with the Crucified Christ at the beginning of his oeuvre in 1847, following his bout with the "Fierce Wrestler!" "I remember my crucifixion and bloody coronation / ... I remember the mockers and buffeting insults / I am alive in New York and San Francisco, / Again I tread the streets after two thousand years / ... I can easily build as good, and so can you" (NUPM, 1: 78, 79). "Really," Whitman wrote in the early 1860's, "what has America to do with all this mummery of prayer and rituals and the rant of exhorters and priests?" (NUPM, 6: 2095) For any perceptive reader of Whitman the aim of his work was indisputably religious. Robertson cuts to the chase and exposes Whitman's mission like few other scholars, as when he quotes Whitman saying in "Democratic Vistas" that both "individualism" and "adhesiveness" are part of his religious vision: "Both [individualism and adhesiveness]" says Whitman, "are to be vitalized by religion, (sole worthiest elevator of man and State,) breathing into the proud, material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element" (21).

Whitman solved the problem of religion, Robertson says, by replacing priests with poets (21). Despite the tendency of the disciples to Christianize Walt, holding him up as a God, or turning him into a second Christ, Robertson keeps a level head and sticks with the facts about the poet, which for the most part proves his modesty. Robertson shows how Whitman discouraged his disciples from projecting the God-image onto him by revealing his ordinariness, one who had achieved divinization amongst the many, but who resisted the temptation to spiritual power, celebrating the Divine in all people. Clearly the disciples went overboard in their adulations of Whitman, and Whitman was quick to point out his criticisms. Bucke, for instance portrayed Whitman in 1883 as "the Savior, the Redeemer of the modern world" (115), and he was ridiculed later in a private conversation with Horace Traubel, where Walt complained: "What I quarrel with is the Doctor's damned definiteness--and it is very damned! ... I, the author, am in constant doubt about it" (119). Despite these misgivings about his disciple's tendency to deify him, Whitman asserted: "it is my dream to devote the rest of my life... to the study and promulgation of the new religion" (122).

One of Robertson's best chapter's concerns the question of same-sex passion, where he says that the prominent question in Whitman scholarship, in the 1970's was: "was Walt Whitman gay?" (140). The entire book, up to this point, reads seamlessly and this chapter is certainly no exception, and the chapter on Horace Traubel reads better than a good novel. There are quotes that are new to me, such as the following jewel: "It is queer how the whole world is crazy with the notion that one book, one ism... is to save things" (252). Whitman had his doubts that Leaves of Grass, the Bible, the Upanishads, Koran, or any other spiritual text, could save the world.

I finished Robertson's book wondering whether it might be high time for the field of Whitman scholarship to offer an answer to what Whitman actually meant by the "new religion." Robertson is to be congratulated for breaking new ground. He cites the reasons for the suppression of the deification of Whitman following the publication of an important biography on the poet in 1906, a book that became problematic to Whitman's disciples and shifted the focus to his poetry.

It is clear from historical documents that some of the early disciples tried to make a Messiah out of him, because they failed to read the message of his "New Bible" correctly. Today, even while we can only be grateful to the disciples for advancing Whitman's poetic project and religious vision, any enlightened reader must part company with the mistaken notion of discipleship.

There seems to be no other word to describe the coterie that formed around Walt Whitman. The devotees were more than fans, they saw Whitman as a prophet, and framed his impact in terms usually reserved for religion. Each feels their life was totally changed by having read Whitman. I had not thought of his prose as it compares to the content and sound of the Psalms, but the disciples have a point.

Writing in the exact middle of the Victorian era, his words were surely a tonic to those tired of the prudishness of the times. Whitman gave those surrounded by a culture of guilt and shame permission to be natural, free and have some self-esteem. For some, this may have been their first exposure to ideas we take for granted today.

Whitman, who must have had enormous charisma, is portrayed as aloof from all this adoration. He is slow to answer mail. He does not encourage visits, but once the visitors come, he develops deep friendships. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright who developed discipleship into a business Fellowship, The: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship Whitman asks nothing of these worshippers.

This is a fascinating little volume. Well placed photos help to tell the story. It is not only the story of these disciples, but also a story of the times. The people profiled are not exactly average, but they are not the heroes in the history books. Through their profiles we also learn something of everyday life of the time.