Whitman's Mystic Vision for a Divided America
A Special 4th of July Post for Jack Ass Wisdom Subscribers
Whitman’s copy of Persian translations, which he carried in trunk through the Civl War (and read from it to wounded soldiers). Note the edges, stained with Virginia wine, a displacement of wine frequently used as a metaphor in Persian Sufi poetry.
Without getting too academic on 4th of July I want to share a relevant discovery of how our great national poet turned to Persian verse in an attempt to unify an increasingly divided United States.
Whitman lived in rapturous love of his country, inserting himself into seemingly endless lines to celebrate its people, nature, and industry. “I hear America singing!” he famously proclaimed. Elsewhere, in praise of its democracy, he said, “The United States themselves our essentially the greatest poem.”
Much like today, the increasing divide among these states prior to the Civil War really concerned him. On a grant to examine his personal copy of a book that includes Persian translations (see the image above), I happened upon a discovery that continues to blow my mind like the impending fireworks display above the Hudson River. Throughout his great poems of the Civil War, Whitman actually imitated Persian verse in English translation.
Facing what he rightly suspected would become the eventual break up of his country, consider how Whitman must have read Emerson’s translation of a famous poem by the twelfth century Persian Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Briefly, this excerpt summarizes The Conference of the Birds, an over four-thousand-line poem relating the story of a flock of thirty birds searching for the bird of supreme wisdom, known as the simurgh. At the end of their spiritually transformative journey , they come to realize that all along they themselves collectively represent the king bird for whom they’ve been seeking. This insight puns upon the Persian name of the bird, with “si” as the number “thirty” and “murgh” meaning “bird.” Emerson aptly captures the revelation in the following except:
They knew not, amazed, if they
Were either this or that.
They saw themselves all as Simorg,
Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
When to the Simorg up they looked,
They beheld him among themselves…
Dramatizing this spiritual transcendence through a modern reorientation of such ancient mysticism, Whitman begins to lose his definitive identity from “Song of Myself” as he attempts to transcend the politics of his American nineteenth century by making himself the domestic version of this foreign bird:
From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird,
Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;
To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,
To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself—to Michi-
gan then,
To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs,
(they are inimitable;)
Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs—to Missouri
and Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,
To Tennessee and Kentucky—to the Carolinas and
Georgia, to sing theirs,
To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam
accepted everywhere;
To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be,)
The idea of all—of the western world, one and insep-
arable,
And then the song of each member of These States.