CitePermalink: 2Virtually all of the Romantics had unorthodox ideas on religion. This has traditionally been misread as a kind of pantheism, where nature is worshipped as or instead of God. Wordsworth and Emerson are the most famous examples of this, with Emerson the best source for sorting it all out. In Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “The Divinity School Address,” Emerson gives us a fair idea of how he constructs his own trinity of Self, Nature, and God. The first two works are often misread as proclamations of the divinity of nature, but this is because of the failure of most readers to recognize Emerson’s conception of alienated or “divided” man. This is clearly treated in the beginning of “The American Scholar” (1837) when he discusses the “old fable” about the division of labor, and in his Orphic poet’s song at the end of Nature (1836). Nature is a shell made by man, a projection of his mind or spirit, but then man became “the dwarf of himself.” The proper state is achieved “by the redemption of the soul,” and “The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.” Likewise, in “The American Scholar,” he says that man shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim. (469)
CitePermalink: 4If there be one lesson more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature.
CitePermalink: 5To worship nature, then, would be to worship oneself. This is further illustrated by a famous passage in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,”
CitePermalink: 6And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (93-102)
CitePermalink: 7The “sense sublime,” like Emerson’s spirit, is not something “out there,” but is, rather, something internal, something projected out of the self, or as Whitman says in section 2 of SM, filtered from your self. This is akin to Blake’s notion that man has forgotten that “All deities reside in the human breast” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), which is akin to Christ’s “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 18:21), which is also echoed in Emerson’s conclusion to Nature.
CitePermalink: 8This leads us to Emerson’s “The Divinity School Address,” which is an indictment of the present state of Christianity. He sees Christ as the unalienated man.
CitePermalink: 9He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul….Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man….He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.”
CitePermalink: 10That is of course rather heavy stuff, but it is essential to most of the Romantics’ notions of God. He goes on to say that the “true” Christianity is “a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,” and finally that the job of the clergy is to “acquaint men at first had with Deity. Be to them a man.”
CitePermalink: 11All of this is not to say that man or the self is God. All of these writers, when speaking of God, always use the third person. God is real, although He is reconceived. It has often been said that there is a marked difference between the God of the Old Testament (wrath, vengeance, the Law) and the God of the New Testament (love, mercy, forgiveness). It might be said that the Romantics are collectively presenting a “Newer” Testament for a new age. Whitman points this out in section 41 of SM, where he lists the gods of most major religions, “Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,” implying that the work of our days calls for something else. Yet Whitman elsewhere speaks lovingly and reverently of God, as in sections 6 and 48. All of the Romantics clung fast but troublingly to the concept of God, even the “atheist” Shelley, and it could be argued with some validity that the ends of the Romantic “periods” in both England and America came when the writers of literature could no longer do so. Admittedly, I cannot claim to fully understand all of this (and am inclined to doubt anyone, even the Romantics themselves, fully has), but my suspicion is that it all gets back to Logos:
CitePermalink: 12In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
CitePermalink: 14Whitman says, “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul” (section 21), which is a reassignment of the task of poetry. Up to this point in history, especially in American poetry, poetry was a literary form for the upper classes and typically dealt with abstractions of nature, religion, politics, and “real” life. Whitman presents a new subject for poetry: life as it is actually lived. Sexuality is a part of life, a part of human consciousness, and to avoid it, in Whitman’s eyes, would be to lie. Mark Twain addresses this notion wonderfully in Letters from the Earth (1909), in which the yet unfallen Satan, while temporarily banished from heaven, writes back to his angel buddies Michael and Gabriel about the absurdity of man’s vision of heaven:
CitePermalink: 15he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race—and of ours—sexual intercourse. (1391)
CitePermalink: 16Blake also addresses this notion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), attributing the problem to the errors that Paul contributed to the practice of Christianity concerning the denial of the flesh. It is probably worth noting that Whitman echoes the Apostle’s Creed when he proclaims in section 24, “I believe in the flesh and the appetites.” Finally, much has been made of Whitman’s purported homosexuality; I don’t think that this manifested itself in his poetry until his later work and therefore do not believe that it is fruitful to dwell on or even worry about it, although Harold Bloom’s claims about his auto-eroticism are perhaps another matter. However, I will leave that line of inquiry up to you.
CitePermalink: 18I doubt you’ve read this far, and if you have, sorry. I was first taught the poem by a Professor at The University of Alabama, and he divided the poem into three primary stages:
CitePermalink: 19The integration of the individual body and the individual soul
The integration of self with the physical and natural world
The reconciliation of self with the spiritual world
CitePermalink: 20This sounds good and reasonable, and you can take it as you will. I won’t, however. Nevertheless, I do read the poem as a kind of narrative of reconciliation and redemption on several levels, but not, however, of the speaker (Whitman?). Rather, like Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Whitman provides the roadmap for the reconciliation of the reader, and ultimately, America. For what it’s worth, if you feel compelled to divide the poem into stages, you could say that the early part of the poem establishes the speaker as the Emersonian concept of “Man Thinking,” while toward the end of the poem the “I” of the poem becomes, at some level, poetry. Which means that the speaker/poet becomes the logos, which means all sorts of things regarding human nature, human potentiality, the divinity of man, the nature of God, and the special role of poetry in the new age and the new republic (remember that he is writing the new American poetry, which can only mean something if it is differentiating itself from European, and specifically English, poetry), but I don’t want to do all of your work for you….Finally, it’s a great poem, and despite its length and the considerable effort required to read it adequately, it is worth the trouble (although I highly doubt that you will indeed become redeemed and reconciled, unless, perhaps, you are a better reader than I). As Blake says, however, this has been:
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A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (93-102)
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The integration of self with the physical and natural world
The reconciliation of self with the spiritual world
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