2
To Stand Between
Walt Whitman's Poetics of Merger and Embodiment

The contradictory desires evident in feminist and abolitionist attempts to negate the very bodies they had pledged to liberate are not confined to the impassioned realm of oppositional politics. Rather, such contradictions bespeak the pressures slavery had placed far more generally on the culture's ability to define personhood. In this chapter I argue that this ambivalent desire for identity to prove at once embodied and disembodied provides both the basis for Walt Whitman's vision of national reconciliation and the formal structure of his poetics. In turning from feminist-abolitionist rhetorics to canonized poetry I hope to demonstrate that questions of national union, poetic style, and individual identity may be mutually constitutive.

At that moment in his early notebook jottings when Whitman first assumes his new voice and verse form, he defines what it means to be a poet, and specifically to be the poet of the body, in terms provided by American slavery. Claiming to reconcile racially distinct bodies, Whitman locates the poet in the sexually charged middle space between masters and slaves:

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves
I am the poet of the body
And I am

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.^[1]

Only two of these lines are actually preserved in Leaves of Grass: "I am the poet of the body, / And I am the poet of the soul" introduces the twenty-first section of the poem Whitman ultimately called "Song of Myself," offering a self-defining summation that has informed most subsequent readings of Whitman's poetics.^[2] Slavery is not mentioned in any published version of section 21; it has disappeared, leaving the pairing of body and soul as its only trace. A sense of the political import of Whitman's poetics of embodiment is similarly absent from most critical assessments of his work.^[3] Yet in these notebook lines Whitman depicts his strategy of singing the body as a practice derived from the dynamics of American slavery. My discussion of Whitman's poetics reassesses the political sources and implications of his corporeal poetry, demonstrating that his celebration of the body not only reinterprets the body but also uses that reinterpretation to redefine the political. Even Whitman's effacement of the political origins of his poetics, as in his deletion of master and slave from these lines, ultimately serves not to dismiss the political in favor of the personal and bodily, but rather to absorb each into the other, to demonstrate that the same issues that inform political practice also designate individual identity.

In locating the poet between master and slave, and between body and soul, Whitman attempts to claim for his poetry the power to mediate oppositions. Able to speak for both sides, the poet alone seems capable of overcoming both the difference between slave and master that divides American society and the division between body and soul that makes the identity of each individual problematic. Moreover, in locating the poet between these two concerns, Whitman proposes to equate political questions with the question of the body, and hence to relate the structure of social practices to the structure of personal identity. What I call Whitman's

poetics of merger and embodiment refers, then, both to his poetic goal of healing radical divisions, social and personal, and to the poetic strategies by which he attempts to effect that goal.

Merger and embodiment are linked strategies in this poetics: merger, the perfect melding of opposites into a complete undifferentiated oneness, is best exemplified for Whitman in the physical imagery of the sexual embrace. What Whitman seeks in his poetry is simultaneously to express the particularity of bodily experience—he frequently compares his poetry to the human body—and to promote the healing sameness of merger. The practice of miscegenation or racial amalgamation associated with plantation slavery thus provides within Whitman's writings an historically resonant vocabulary with which to examine his poetics: in the scene of miscegenation racially distinct bodies merge. Presenting the poet as standing between master and slave, body and soul, the political and the personal, the ideals of merger and of bodily specificity, Whitman asserts the power of poetry, but such a presentation also inadvertently reveals the limitations of that power, the ways in which such poetry must remain contingent upon the very divisions it claims to heal.

Whitman's first notebook poetry records his developing sense of what it means to call himself "poet." The lines begin with a feat of autogenesis: "I am the poet," he writes, in a triumph of essentialism, a gesture of autonomous identity and agency. No sooner is this self-assured assertion of being made, however, than it is undermined. The "of" that relates the poet to his topic also appears as the tie between master and slave. Here Whitman recognizes that to assume the name of poet is to assume mastery and possession, but, as he further demonstrates, the line also weakens all claims to autonomy, for the slave comes first, identifying and so delimiting what it means to be master: after all, to be the "master of slaves" is a lesser, more circumscribed claim than that of being "master." The relation signaled by "of" remains simultaneously possessive and partitive: does the topic belong to the poet or is the poet part of his topic?

In identifying himself as the poet of the body in the subsequent line, Whitman might appear to evade these problems, since the topic of the body seems to replace the dynamics of possession and mastery with one of identity. I would argue, however, that these lines ought to be read as apposites, and that in defining himself as both the poet of slavery and the poet of the body Whitman points to the interdependence of these two concerns. The question of mastery and the question of identity are ultimately the same question. As I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, the practices of American slavery call attention to the ways in which the condition and status of one's body designate identity. Whitman shared this insight, asserting in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that "I too have received identity by my body" (l.63); thus Whitman's focus on the body repeats rather than escapes the failure of autonomy and the strictures of mastery with which these lines began. Whitman gives up here, breaking off the next line, inscribing only a beginning that trails away into blankness; in its incompleteness, "And I am" pathetically echoes Jehovah's own self-identifying tautology: I am what I am.

Whitman drew a slash across this verse, left a few lines of blank space on the page, and began again. The second version reverses the sequence so that now the pairing of body and soul introduces that of slave and master: the very ease of the reversal emphasizes Whitman's sense of these pairs as fundamentally the same. The third line originally read "Thus the slaves are mine and the masters are equally mine," making explicit the identification of poetry with mastery and the reliance of both on a notion of ownership. In the canceled line the poet stands as ultimate master, claiming ownership of all that the masters have, and beyond that, of the masters themselves. Here the equality of master and slave lies in their being "equally" possessed. Whitman's revision displaces the identification of poet with master, providing in its stead a concept of the poet as companion "go[ing] . . . equally with" slave and master. In making this change Whitman redefines the role of the poet: he replaces an essentialist conception of

the self-created poet with the anti-essentialist insight that poetic power results from occupying a specific relational position. The "I" who "will stand between" gains the ability to be "understood," and so takes the name of poet, by occupying the place of linkage between the opposing but interdependent roles of master and slave. That the desire to be understood punningly recapitulates the hierarchic standing of master and slave suggests the precariousness, if not the impossibility, of Whitman's poetic goal.

Whitman's first notebook poetry thus charts the development of his conception of the poet from an autonomous, self-made being to a site of mediation. In this latter view the poet is simply what stands between. If the poet articulates body and soul, master and slave, these terms and relations similarly constitute the place and role of the poet. In these early lines Whitman does more than merely stake out a topic. Rather, by identifying the poet as mediator, he traces the ways in which the oppositional nature of his subject matter defines his poetic voice.^[4] So later, in Leaves of Grass , Whitman identifies miscegenation—the erotic merger of racially distinct bodies—as a model for poetic power, even as this new voice makes the uttering of such topics possible.

"I Sing the Body Electric" comprises Whitman's most insistent demonstration of his ideal of poetic embodiment, that the supple, flexing body of the "wellmade man," "conveys as much as the best poem . . . perhaps more" (l. 11). His claim that the wellmade body and the best poem are equally expressive suggests that flesh and words can serve as substitutes for each other. The programmatic aim of this poem is to collapse the two meanings of convey: to present what is carried by the body and what can be communicated by words as the same. Significantly, Whitman fashions this "Poem of the Body," as it was perhaps more appropriately entitled in 1856, out of the least celebratory, most exploitative of discourses on the body: the chant of the auctioneer hawking slaves.

A slave at auction!
I help the auctioneer. . . . the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this curious creature,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him,
For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled.
(ll. 83–87)

Like the poet, the auctioneer stands between slave and master, product and buyer; the business of both is to sing the value of the thing at hand and to extract the assent of purchase from their audience. In usurping the place of the auctioneer, Whitman is, of course, criticizing his office, demonstrating that even the hyperbole of the auctioneer's pitch grossly understates the value of the item on the block: the human body, he opines, is hardly paid for by all time and the entire world. But he is also inadvertently demonstrating the uneasy parallels between his poetics and the practices of American slavery, the ways in which the act of celebrating a body resembles the act of selling one so that his task as poet corresponds to that of the auctioneer. The parallels prove even closer, for Whitman's concept of embodiment is delimited by the body of the slave.

On the auction block, regardless of any other claims to identity a slave might express, he or she is nothing but body, flesh for sale. The slave at auction provides the quintessential instance of what it means for one's identity to be entirely dependent upon one's body. Though many other human bodies are celebrated in this poem, and throughout Whitman's poetry, to a significant degree Whitman's fundamental image of the body remains that of the slave: one central example of the completely corporeal person. The description of the negro driver in "Song of Myself" suggestively matches in the details of dress and posture the drawing of Whitman that replaces his name on the title page of the 1855 Leaves of Grass .

The negro that drives the huge dray of the stoneyard. . . . steady and tall he stands poised on one leg on the stringpiece,

His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hipband,
His glance is calm and commanding. . . . he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache. . . . falls on the black of his polish'd and perfect limbs.
(ll. 220–23)

Whitman's placement of the drawing, as has often been argued, privileges flesh, or at least the image of flesh, over name or word as a pointer to identity. It is the first instance of the book's complex and self-conscious strategies of self-incarnation: "Whoever touches this book touches a man." The substitution of a portrait for his name, and the similarities between that portrait and his description of a black man indicate comparable efforts on Whitman's part to assert the corporeality of his own identity.

To argue that in Whitman's poems the challenge of bodiliness gains its absoluteness and urgency from even an indirect comparison of the black salable body of the slave and his own is, however, to tell only half the story. Whitman proposes to unify a discordant America by creating a poetry that would reconcile bodily differences. The intense bodiliness of the slave at auction thus simultaneously initiates Whitman's poetic project and poses the major obstacle to its achievement. The auction block initiates Whitman's poetic project by staging his attempt to negotiate the space between master and slave. It poses the major obstacle to the achievement of this project of poetic reconciliation because, though Whitman insists on the materiality of all being, and particularly of our sense of otherness, he can find no way to heal these divisions that does not dissolve the bodies out of which his poetry is made. Despite his exuberant rhetoric of celebration, despite his insistence that in singing the body this poem overcomes all bodily differences, the costs and contradictions inherent in his double goals of merger and embodiment remain visible. So, as auctioneer in "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman gradually strips away the slave's skin, dismembering the body in the act of celebrating it, until all that is left is eternal and ubiquitous blood.

Examine these limbs, red black or white. . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve;
They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes, of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, goodsized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs his blood. . . . the same old blood. . the same red running blood;
(ll. 91–96)

Here Whitman evokes blood as a physical equalizer: something of the body that is, nevertheless, not implicated in the bodily differences of skin "red, black or white." In asking us to imagine this blood as distinct from the bodies that contained it, Whitman nevertheless insists that it serve as a metonym for those bodies, recalling them even as it would replace them. The refrain of blood promises to function as refrains usually do, to promote the comfort of repetitive, nostalgic sameness. Yet Whitman's reliance on blood in his effort to merge the body of the slave into a generalized humanity is, to say the least, disturbing. From the auction block an appeal to blood too easily recalls the bloody backs of whipped slaves. In the lore of plantation slavery, as in all racist discourses, blood is precisely where race dwells, and the genealogy and value of light-skinned slaves is traditionally measured in drops of black and white blood.^[5] Whitman's poetics of merger and his poetics of embodiment both initiate and contradict each other. For just as Whitman's celebration of the body results in pulling apart the slave's flesh to facilitate the merger of the slave's notoriously different body into a vision of human sameness, Whitman's chorus of merger and inclusion repeats the bloody, physical differentiations of plantation life.

Long before Whitman developed his new poetics of merger and embodiment, his depictions of slavery anticipated the dynamics of the later poetry. As early as 1842 and

the publication of his "temperance novel" Franklin Evans , Whitman had begun to explore what it might mean to "enter into both" slaves and masters. Franklin Evans, in his simultaneous sexual allegiances to the slave Margaret and the free Mrs. Conway, occupies a middle position that prefigures, in gothic style, the mediating role Whitman later advocated in his notebook poetry, and so suggests some of the dangers and limitations of that role.

The Virginia chapters of Franklin Evans , making up nearly one-third of the novel, "intrude" as Leslie Fiedler observes, "so inappropriately upon Whitman's temperance novel"^[6] that their prominence attests to something other than an interest in the ills of drink. Whitman's attempts to connect the story of Margaret and Mrs. Conway to his ostensible temperance theme actually serve less to explain the horrific events, or even to identify them as a punishment for drunkenness, than to represent intoxication itself as an issue of color. Evans, who during the preceding chapters has left his innocent rural childhood to pass through a recurring series of inebriate depravities and improbable rescues, arrives in Virginia at the plantation of Mr. Bourne, where, during an evening of wine-filled revels, he marries Bourne's slave. Evans's marriage to the creole Margaret results, as it were, from the darkness of drink. "In persons who use wine," Whitman writes,

The mind becomes, to use an expressive word, obfusticated , and loses the power of judging quickly and with correctness. It seems, too, that the unhappy victim of intemperance cannot tell when he commits even the most egregious violations of right; so muddied are his perceptions, and so darkened are all his powers of penetration. And the worst of it is, that even in his sober moments, the same dark influence hangs around him to a great degree, and leads him into a thousand follies and miseries.^[7]

This is, I believe, the only time in Franklin Evans that Whitman calls attention to his choice of words, and even as he transforms obfuscated into a new word of his own, his delight in its expressiveness spills out into other words: percep-

tions are "muddied," powers of penetration "darkened" until "the same dark influence hangs" over the entire passage. By finding the word that links intoxication and miscegenation, Whitman imbues Evans with blackness. With the coining of this new word, moreover, Whitman evokes not only blackness, but also the corporeal nature of plantation authority, since the elided middle term between obfuscate and obfusticate seems to be fustigate .^[8] The suppressed centrality of fustigate , a word that evokes the punitive beatings of slavery, is particularly suggestive in view of Whitman's identification of the middle place with the role of the poet. As with the blood of the auctioned slave, the mergers offered by Whitman's poems frequently depend upon a variety of batterings. Thus, even before Evans's marriage and the arrival of blue-eyed Mrs. Conway place him between dark and fair-skinned lovers, alcohol has already fashioned him into the cipher of a violent, muddied, and obfusticated whiteness.

In miscegenation Whitman finds an extremely potent instance of mediation, a blatant demonstration that otherness can be reconciled, that the opposites of black and white can meet and blend. For Franklin Evans, hero and narrator of this novel, to become the locus of racial mergers, he must displace the tale's most obvious figure of miscegenation, the creole Margaret. Following sentimental conventions, Evans first describes Margaret as an amalgam, "luscious and fascinating": her complexion "just sufficiently removed from clear white, to make the spectator doubtful whether he is gazing on a brunette, or one who has indeed some hue of African blood in her veins" (204). With each description, however, Margaret's skin appears darker and the claims of her African ancestry grow less doubtful; in short, Evans's narration transforms her from an emblem of undecidability into a repository of African otherness. In this way Evans simultaneously evacuates the space where black and white meet (so that he may occupy it himself) and erects the poles of difference that make this mediation meaningful. Responding to Margaret's questions about the "northern beauty," Evans identifies the two women as perfect and absolute opposites:

" 'You have been told the truth,' said I; 'she is wonderfully fair, not dark and swarthy, which I detest!' and I turned away, sure of the effect of the sharp arrow I had winged" (209). The fair versus the dark, the adored versus the detested; by asserting difference Evans initiates discord, and consequently can position himself—the "I" who describes, loves, and hates—in the space between. The occupation of this space, the passage makes clear, requires the absolute otherness of binary opposition; and in the Virginia chapters Whitman depicts Evans at work manufacturing the discord that attests to his desirability.^[9]

This middle place is not, however, simply the locus of desire, for merger ultimately requires the effacement of the mediator. In Franklin Evans , the self-destructive implications of mediation are figured not by Evans, but by the mulatto slave boy Louis. Like Evans, Louis stands between Margaret and Mrs. Conway. As Margaret's brother and Mrs. Conway's "page," he belongs to both women. Mrs. Conway had exacted Louis's services as a gift from the infatuated Evans; her insistence on taking Louis as her slave represents a mediated attack on Margaret, demonstrating that she, not the creole, controls Evans and his property. In claiming possession of Louis, Mrs. Conway wounds Margaret. Thus there is proper symmetry in Margaret's use of Louis as the weapon with which she first wounds Mrs. Conway: following his sister's instructions, Louis leads his new mistress to an infected cottage and so exposes her to some unnamed southern plague. Mrs. Conway does not, however, die of that disease, though, signaling the dangers of mediation, Louis ultimately does.

Louis's death provides an acute example of a process inherent in all acts of mediation: the role of linking opposites entails self-effacement. At the moment of merger the mediator disappears, becoming no more than the space in which diverse figures can meet and combine. For Evans such invisibility proves a sign of his power; it later does the same for the figure of the poet in Leaves of Grass , whose capacity to link all things often seems to depend upon his ability to pass secretly and invisibly between them. In displacing the self-

destructive potential of mediation onto Louis, Whitman acknowledges the possibility that the most potent instances of authorial self-effacement may ultimately point to death.

The plot of Franklin Evans emphasizes the sexual nature of Evans's mediation. Throughout most of the story, the bodies of Margaret and Mrs. Conway converge in their shared contact with his. As I have already suggested, the erotic notion of mediation made explicit in Evans's Virginia exploits is not confined to Whitman's novel. The poetic task Whitman identifies in the notebook fragment, for example, may suggest an erotic penetration: "entering into both so that both shall understand me alike." In this line Whitman claims that such penetration will not only permit contact with and comprehension of a suddenly passive "me," but beyond that, their common receptivity to the entering poet will somehow make master and slave "alike." When Evans incites Margaret's jealousy and anger by referring to her "dark and swarthy" skin, he characterizes his taunt in specifically penetrative terms: his words are "a sharp arrow." Not surprisingly, as the story progresses, Margaret's hatred of Mrs. Conway takes on an eroticized tenor. Indeed by far the most erotic scene in the novel concerns neither Evans's relations with Margaret, nor his flirtatious encounters with Mrs. Conway, but rather the scene in which, once Mrs. Conway's fever breaks, Margaret strangles her rival in her sickbed.^[10]

"Thank God!" sounded in a low murmur from her tongue; "thank God! I shall not die!"

The sounds came faintly; but faint as they were, they sank into ears besides those of the speaker. They sank and pierced, with a dagger's sharpness, the soul of Margaret the creole: for she it was, whose eyes had been during those long three hours almost winkless at the room window. And was her rival, then, to get well once more? . . .

Horrid purposes lighted up the creole's eyes as she softly put aside the curtains, and stepped into the room. With a stealthy pace she drew near to the sick woman's bed. . . .

Still nearer and nearer came the wretched female: and now she stands by the very bedside. Unconscious yet, the lady is quiet and composed—fearing nothing and suspecting nothing. An instant more, and her throat is clutched by a pair

of tight-working hands. Startled with terror, she would shriek, but cannot. What torture fills her heart! She turns, and struggles and writhes; but those deadly fingers loosen not their grasp.

The murderess presses upon her. Poor lady! Her soul feels very sick, as in one little minute whole troops of remembrances, and thoughts, and dreads come over her. She grows fainter and fainter. Her struggles become less energetic, and her convulsive writhings cease. Still those terrible hands release not.
(225–26)

A third presence does, however, suffuse their dyadic combat. Evans sleeps, undisturbed, in a nearby chair. The passivity of his sleep both enables and contains their erotic meeting. The two writhing women on the bed, are they not his dream? It is, after all, his voice that tells their struggle and their passion.

The victim in this sickroom struggle appears, invariably, as a soul: first "the soul of Margaret" "pierced, with a dagger's sharpness"; and then the very sick soul of the poor lady "clutched by a pair of tight-working hands." While the victims of violence are represented as souls, the attackers are not simply bodies, but, with striking consistency, fragments of bodies. The sounds that pierce Margaret's soul issue not from Mrs. Conway, but from "her tongue"; and Mrs. Conway is strangled not by Margaret, but by "those deadly fingers," "those terrible hands." The combat that Evans incites and describes thus presents in the gothic guise of rape and murder the lovemaking that joins body and soul in the awesome embraces of "Song of Myself." Significantly, however, in "Song of Myself" Whitman reverses the relation of body and soul so that it is the soul that "plunged your tongue to my barestript heart, / And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet" while the body is penetrated and held (ll. 80–81). Prefacing this plunge of tongue and reach of hands, Whitman writes:

I believe in you my soul. . . . the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.
(ll. 73–74)

The mutual relinquishing of abasement he prescribes in these lines uncannily revises the mutual abasement figured in Franklin Evans , where Margaret and Mrs. Conway are each victim and each (however passively) aggressor in their struggle. Moreover, in the novel the cruelty and violence of sexuality belong alike to male and female, to penetrating tongue and to encircling hands. The mutuality of abasement forms a perfect circuit in the narrative. As she dies Mrs. Conway "grows fainter and fainter," echoing the "faintly but faint" sounds with which she unwittingly wounds Margaret.^[11]

Evans's narration of Mrs. Conway's murder is not only erotic; it is also, strangely, voyeuristically, in the present tense. A familiar ploy of the suspense story, the shift into the present tense in mid-sentence—when, having drawn near, nearer and nearer, Margaret finally reaches her victim's bed—suggests that the act of merger does not occur once and elsewhere but perpetually now and here. The violence and eroticism of the meeting with otherness thus belongs not to the past and distant frame of narrative but to the immediate and present lineaments characteristic of lyric utterance. The fantasy produced within the conventional idiom of the horror story's suspenseful and proximate threats shockingly displays the merger of apparently opposed bodies that, as my discussion of the 1855 Leaves of Grass demonstrates, comes to define Whitman's poems.

The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite. . . . they unite now.
("The Sleepers," l. 178)

In offering the problematics of miscegenation and, more specifically, the story of Mrs. Conway's murder as a paradigm of Whitman's poetic practice, I am also raising questions about genre distinctions. I wish to demonstrate not only that the same politically grounded conception of miscegenation informs both Franklin Evans and the 1855 Leaves of Grass but also that Whitman's effort to mediate between the

differences he sees and the idealized merger he desires exploits his effort to articulate the relationship between narrative and lyric modes. Whitman's thematic concern with merger and difference, and the social and political implications such a concern entails, is enacted by his treatment of poetic form. In particular, the interaction of lyric and narrative modes within his poems participates in the more general project of reconciling social divisions, and provides a formal manifestation of the contradictions inherent in this project.

Whitman's proposal, so disturbingly enacted by the shifting tenses with which he describes Mrs. Conway's murder, is that difference relies upon the temporal sequence of narrative, while merger depends upon the arresting of narrative and its replacement with the atemporality of the lyric. Merger always occurs for Whitman in the now of lyric pronouncement. It may be described in an oneiric future tense, but it can only be achieved in the performative present of the poet's saying. One reason for this is that temporality implies motion and change and therefore threatens to fracture whatever unity may be achieved in the stillness of any framed and frozen moment. For merger to reconcile difference requires the stopping of time: "now" ends the sentence.^[12] As is evident in my reading of the Virginia section of Franklin Evans , however, the mediator's claim to reconcile differences depends upon the prior existence of those differences. The mergers Whitman seeks in his lyrics first require the recognition of discord. The stable opposition between lyric mergers and narrative difference cannot be so easily maintained. Within Leaves of Grass the determinate relations between moments of merger and moments of difference, and between lyric and narrative modes that Whitman seems to propose, do not hold. Instead these concepts and the relations between them constantly require renegotiation. My reading of "The Sleepers" elaborates the terms of these negotiations, exploring the significance of the problematic relation between merger and difference both for Whitman's political project of reconciling difference and for the hybrid generic form of his poems.

"The Sleepers" begins with the familiar figure of the poet in the midst.

I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet. . . . swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers;
Wandering and confused. . . . lost to myself. . . . ill-assorted. . . . contradictory,
Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping.
(ll. 1–5)

Wandering within a night vision, the "I" both passes among the sleepers, distinguished from them by his open eyes, and is one of them, dreaming his wanderings out of his own sleep. Confused, lost, ill-assorted, contradictory, the diversity Whitman attempts to unite through his mediating "I" is already present within that "I": the figure relied upon to reconcile diversity is itself diverse.^[13] Within the night vision time proves similarly contradictory. "Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping," the actions that would connect the poet to the sleepers, are acts of attention that require a cessation of motion. Yet in these lines the figure of the poet remains enmeshed in a string of gerunds that casts each act of attention as but one in an endless series. Here every pause anticipates renewed motion: constantly stopping, the wanderer cannot stop.

Night's darkness and dreams proffer a model of atemporal nonsequential experience where the "I" is both container and contained, where time is simultaneously experienced as motion and as stillness, where boundaries are not fixed, and hence where differences can be dissolved. Omnipotent yet absent, like Evans asleep in his chair, the night demonstrates the power of authorial self-effacement. The night of "The Sleepers" exemplifies Whitman's lyric task, providing the poet with an example of mediation's power and therefore with a means of accomplishing the desired union. So while the poet's "I" still wanders among the sleepers, observing but not touching them, "the night pervades them and enfolds them" (l. 10) in a caress at once masculine and feminine. As we have

seen, Whitman's understanding of all merger as erotic does not simply present sexual union as the most powerful image of union, but also, as here, strives to reconceive sexual intercourse as well, redefining it in reciprocal, bisexual terms. Pervading and enfolding the sleepers, the night is equally enfolded and pervaded by them. Bisexuality, like miscegenation, offers the body not as an irreducible and irreconcilable sign of absolute difference—male versus female, white versus black—but instead as the site where difference meets. The night teaches that the confusions and contradictions that appear to plague the poet in the poem's opening lines are, if rightly understood, the source of his strength; it is the ambiguity of the middle position that makes mediation possible. By encompassing the others' dreams and by entering into each one, the poet locates and transgresses boundaries in an act of fusion that imitates night's mediation.

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.
(ll. 29–30)

Whitman's claim to become the other dreamers climaxes in a tryst whose polymorphic eroticism forges identifications across gender and into darkness.

I am she who adorned herself and folded her hair expectantly,
My truant lover has come and it is dark.

Double yourself and receive me darkness,
Receive me and my lover too. . . . he will not let me go without him.

I roll myself upon you as upon a bed. . . . I resign myself to the dusk.

He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
He rises with me silently from the bed.

Darkness you are gentler than my lover . . . his flesh was sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.
(ll. 46–54)

The "I" of this passage appears simultaneously male and female, identified with the poet even as it speaks for the adorned and expectant woman. Similarly, mirroring the woman's coy fondling of her hair, the darkness folds itself in two and becomes both the night and the lover embraced in nighttime fantasies. Thus the night not only provides the setting for tryst or dream, but also becomes a body in these encounters, "and takes the place of my lover." Displacing the lover's sweaty flesh, the gentle embrace of darkness erases the lover's body at the very moment that it makes that body black. Thus Whitman's fullest depiction in this poem of an erotic coupling that engages racial and sexual difference relies upon an image of the night which in its elusive intangibility diffuses all differences, masking both the physicality and the racial nature of the scene described. Indeed this passage recalls the "dark but comely" lover of The Song of Solomon; if there is a black body behind the night, it comes not from the plantation but from Biblical poetry.

The encounter between the woman and her lover is three times mediated, first by this act of intertextuality, then by the poet whose voice lays claim to the woman's body and reveals her desires, and last by the night in whose darkness the scene is quite literally embedded. Moreover, the night occupies the place of all otherness: it is the "you" that responds to the double "I" of woman and poet. This is the first "you" in the entire poem, and, though initially addressed to the darkness, it tends, as this pronoun so often does for Whitman, to point outward from the printed page, naming and implicating the reader.

My hands are spread forth . . I pass them in all directions,
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.
(ll. 55–56)

The pleasure of the woman stroking her lover, the night, her own body, is also the pleasure of the poet whose hands spread forth these lines, and who offers the sound of words to sound up the journey of our readings.

Be careful darkness. . . . already, what was it touched me?
I thought my lover had gone. . . . else darkness and he are one,
I hear the heart-beat. . . . I follow . . I fade away.
(ll. 57–59)

It is impossible to identify the source of this touch. Of course her own hands touch her, as do the poet's, as do the composite of lover and darkness, as do all the even more invisibly present readers. The touch marks the complete absorption of these multiple selves into darkness and indifferentiation that nevertheless persists in claiming a bodily and tactile presence until, like the orgasmic "I," all difference has faded away. The problems of bodily difference, and the strategy of resolving such dilemmas in a rhetoric of amalgamation, finally come to define Whitman's poetic task, not as theme or topic, but as the basic structure of poetic production. With its intense erotic charge, Whitman's poetics of merger here offers a powerfully positive and seductive apotheosis. It is important to recognize, however, that this passage, for all its erotic appeal, entails the same process of absorbing and decontextualizing bodily difference as that employed in "I Sing the Body Electric" when the auctioneer-poet strips off the flesh of the slave.

It is not, moreover, accurate to describe "The Sleepers" as a dream fantasia in which night's ambiguities enable the suspension of time and support the defiance of all difference, for despite these visions of merger, the swiftly fluctuating scenery of dreams is punctuated by narratives. So Whitman includes a description of Washington leaving his troops. So he tells the story—"My mother told me today as we sat at dinner together" (l. 110)—of an Indian woman who had stopped at the house selling rushes for weaving chairs and had spent the day beside the fire. These passages are not presented as part of the rhetoric of dreams, and instead of mergers they tell of separations. Washington "kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another. . . . he shakes hands and bids goodbye to the army" (l. 109). Though Whitman's mother gave her "remembrance and fondness," the Indian woman "never came

nor was heard of there again" (ll. 121, 126). In short these are stories of the loss that even fondness and manly kisses cannot overcome. What interests me about these losses is that Whitman does not simply oppose the union offered in dreams and wrought by his words to the external divisions and separations that painfully characterize so much of living; rather he reveals the instability of such oppositions, and the ways in which merger and difference, lyric and narrative are implicated in each other.

Like many of the dream images of merger, the first of these extended narratives begins with Whitman seeing some bit of external world: "I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea" (l. 81). In earlier passages such sight initiates moments of identification, mediation, and union.

A shroud I see—and I am the shroud. . . . I wrap a body and lie in the coffin;
It is dark here underground. . . . it is not evil or pain here. . . . it is blank here, for reasons.
(ll. 76–77)

Seeing prompts becoming, and, in what by now should be a familiar pattern, the poet/shroud wraps a body and lies in the coffin, and from that middle place mediates between death's threat of blankness and the distinctions of reason. Though the scene may represent the ecstasy of sexual absorption as the equally dark obliteration that is death, it nevertheless remains within Whitman's structure of mediation, and as the poet speaks out of the grave his identification with the shroud promises to bridge even the radical otherness of death.

Similarly the relation between a naked swimmer and the sea appears at first to offer simply another permutation of the relation between a body and "the dark grave" (l. 79); at stake in both images is a sexualized encompassing that is also a lethal absorption. Unlike other acts of seeing in this poem, however, Whitman's vision of the swimmer does not succeed in reconciling differences. Instead it betrays the complicity of

Whitman's vision and descriptive powers in the divisions he seeks to merge.

I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head. . . . he strikes out with courageous arms. . . . he urges himself with his legs.

I see his white body. . . . I see his undaunted eyes;
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him headforemost on the rocks.

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
Will you kill the courageous giant? Will you kill him in the prime of his middle age?
(ll. 81–86)

In decrying the death of the swimmer, Whitman acknowledges the gratuitous violence of a senselessly divided and antagonistic world. His questions attest to his inability to heal these divisions, despite all his claims and desires. Yet to read these lines simply as assertions of Whitman's desire to heal all wounds and resolve all differences, or as signs of his repugnance at the violence and divisions that baffle his project of poetic merger, is to ignore the disturbing logic of their syntax. For Whitman is not just a helpless and appalled observer of a violence distinct from his narration of it. The poet's initial report depicts concord, not violence: as the swimmer swims "naked through the eddies of the sea," the water appears to caress him. But in describing them the poet renames the eddies as something to be hated; his words anticipate their violence and so create it. In asking the waves, "Will you kill?" Whitman presents himself as willing the death the subsequent lines describe. Indeed, the entire description of the drowning occurs in the anticipatory formulations of the poet's questions. Thus at the moment of questioning violence, Whitman demonstrates the ways in which his poetry requires and is complicitous in the act of wounding. Moreover, the erotic energy of this battering, as the water strikes the swimmer's beautiful naked body, fuses destruction with sex-

ual pleasure. In so doing it neutralizes the interdependence of merger and division, cure and violence, enacted within the poem, recasting this troubling aspect of Whitman's poetic practice as a site of erotic release.^[14]

That the same questions can be seen both as initiating discord and as demonstrating the horror of such divisions suggests that a simple opposition between moments of difference and moments of merger, and hence between lyric and narrative modes, is inadequate to explain Whitman's poetic project. Instead it becomes clear that Whitman's poetics of merger is equally a poetics of difference, since it is always differences and divisions that initiate his poems, making mediation not only possible but necessary. The historically grounded narratives of loss and separation that follow—the shipwreck of the Mexico ,^[15] Washington's farewell, the mother's story, the slave family split by sales—arise as responses to acts of violence inscribed by the poet. The stories suggest the poet's investment in violence and division; in turn, the lyric dream of universal reconciliation that ends the poem depends upon these narratives of separation. The generic instability of "The Sleepers," its fluctuation between lyrical evocations of a dream world and narrative reports of historical events, can thus be understood as a formal manifestation of a single attempt, poetic and political, to grapple with difference. The generic issues are not simply formal or mechanical; rather, as the following example illustrates, they carry urgently political implications.

Whitman deleted the last of the stories of separation from the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass: in this expunged passage he assigns his "I" to the slave.

Now Lucifer was not dead. . . . or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir;
I have been wronged. . . . I am oppressed. . . . I hate him that oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn him! how he does defile me,
How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for their blood,

How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat that carries away my woman.
(ll. 127–32)

The slave may call himself the heir of Lucifer, but the hated "him that oppresses me" deserves that appellation as much as the slave does, since it is the white man who imposes the hell that produces the slave's hellish anger. White and black meet, then, in their joint claim to the name of Lucifer. The slave may occupy the position of speaker, but Lucifer mediates this union. Indeed his name is the only name either opponent has. We only know that they are a black man and a white from the blood money paid for brothers and sisters, and from "the steamboat that carries away my woman."^[16] The cycle of oppression, hatred, and vengeance that links these figures precedes the contextualizing markers that name them free and slave, white and black. And even those markers provide contradictory evidence: though the speaker is clearly a slave, in some lines the oppressor appears to be the owner who does not release him, while in other lines he appears to be a slave-catcher and trader. The fluctuating identifications of the oppressor present the slave as the victim of an undifferentiated white aggression. Thus the slave's curse indicts not any particular oppressor but the entire system of slavery and society's abusive response to racial difference.

By describing the motions of antagonism, and the climactic resolution of that antagonism in destruction or release, before identifying these relations with the institution of slavery, Whitman abstracts the historical particularities of slavery into an apparently ahistorical poetic pattern of division and merger. So even before Whitman removes this passage from the poem, the passage itself can already be seen to thematize its own erasure.^[17] The section of this poem of mergers that most explicitly addresses the political divisions of American slavery also works to suppress that social content, enacting the transformation of a specific historical narrative into a lyric evocation of universal conditions. At stake in these frequent shifts between lyric and narrative modes is the relation between Whitman's political concerns and his poetic ones. The

hybrid genre of "The Sleepers" demonstrates the dependence of Whitman's poetics of merger on the presence of social divisions. If Whitman's project of poetic merger relies upon, indeed proves complicitous with, an oppositional conception of society, it simultaneously strives to hide its contingent nature and to deny any such reliance. Thus the poet's outrage at the death of the swimmer and his complicity in the drowning can be located in the same lines; thus a single passage demonstrates the ways in which the hatred between master and slave informs the patterns of destruction and release characteristic of Whitman's poetics and dramatizes the suppression of that relation. The contingent relation between merger and difference cannot be straightforwardly acknowledged, for, once it is, the healing claims of a poetics of merger become moot.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that "The Sleepers" ends in an emphatic reassertion of the poet's healing powers. "Elements merge in the night," Whitman exclaims (l. 141), and in the rhapsody that follows, all the figures that have appeared separately in earlier sections are recalled and included: "I swear they are averaged now. . . . one is no better than the other, / The night and sleep have likened them and restored them" (l. 161). The power to average difference that Whitman claims for night and for sleep is the power to halt time, always necessary for the achievement and perpetuation of mergers; it is the power Whitman seeks in lyric utterance. But though dreams may occur within a time or timelessness of their own, night does not exist outside time; indeed it measures time, marking the limit of each day.

I too pass from the night;
I stay awhile away O night, but I return to you again andlove you;
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid. . . . I have been well brought forward by you;
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long:
I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you. . . . but I know I came well and shall go well.

I will stop only a time with the night. . . . and rise betimes.a
I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you;
Not you will yield forth the dawn again more surely than you will yield forth me again,
Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely than I shall be yielded from you in my time.
(ll. 195–204)

The cyclical pattern of night and day seems to offer a way to overcome the movement and change inherent in temporality by containing this division within a larger structure of sameness. But when at the poem's end the poet attempts to adjudicate between night and day, pretending with frail bravado that the choice is his to make, it becomes evident that time cannot be so easily held. "My time" is a vain boast. The halting of time implicit in Whitman's notions of merger resists the narrative of history, and in doing so imposes an erasure on precisely those historically bound oppositions (slavery among them) that, at the same time, are recognized as the source of his need to reconcile otherness. In order to claim and maintain the unitive and healing power of night's atemporal mergers, Whitman must erase and forget the knowledge that his poems of merger originate in difference: "I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you. . . . but I know I came well and shall go well."

In describing Whitman's vision of the mediating poet in terms of interacting lyric and narrative modes, I am suggesting that the choice and manipulation of poetic style can exert political force. Thus Whitman's conception of the poet as mediator itself establishes connections between literary and social practices.^[18] Such connections function not only to expand the notion of poetic efficacy but also to redefine what constitutes political action. What I have been calling Whitman's poetics of embodiment amounts to the aspect of his

poetic style most deeply implicated in this process. For Whitman, the human body serves as the site where the issues of representation and the questions of political power intersect, and so it is in his treatment of the human body that Whitman most explicitly establishes links between poetry and politics and most radically revises the assumptions and practices of both.

In "I Sing the Body Electric" Whitman presents the body of the slave as an exemplary instance of embodiment: the salable flesh of the slave attests to the role of the human body in designating identity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Whitman's depictions of the slave serve to ground the poetics and politics of embodiment developed in "Song of Myself." Though other black bodies—most notably the negro driver and his team of horses—appear in the 1855 version of this long poem, and more are added in the new catalogues of the 1856 edition, the figure of the fugitive, of the black body in transition between slavery and freedom, predominates. Just as the slave on the auction block, a piece of merchandise, appears to encapsulate the materiality of being, the transitional status of the fugitive seems to denote the fluidity of identity.

Yet as we have seen, Whitman's celebration of corporeality in "I Sing the Body Electric" strips away the flesh it claims to sing, while here the slave's attempt to change his condition, to disentangle blackness from slavery, is represented through brutal marks upon his body. Moreover, the two scenes in "Song of Myself" in which Whitman depicts an escape from slavery to freedom also involve a transformation of the relation between the poet and his subject, a gradual elimination of the initial distance between the "I" that speaks and the body of the fleeing slave. In short, the transition of the fugitive from slave to freeman manifests the structure and implications of Whitman's poetics of embodiment from a variety of perspectives: individual, aesthetic, and political. The relation between identity and the human body, the relation between the poet and his subject matter, and the relation between poetry and political practice all cohere in Whitman's representation of the fugitive.

The figure of the runaway slave first appears in a series of verse paragraphs that pose varying personae for the poet: he is the solitary hunter, the ecstatic sailor on a Yankee Clipper, the playful companion of boatmen and clamdiggers, the witness of a marriage between a trapper and a squaw, and finally the host of a fugitive slave. As such a list makes clear, by the time the story of the slave is told, the flexibility of the poet's identity, the ease with which his "I" can be transferred from one subject to the next, has already been well established. Such metamorphoses are so characteristic of Whitman's verse that readers generally take them for granted.^[19] In the depictions of the fugitive slave in "Song of Myself," however, Whitman carefully details this usually instantaneous transformation, laying bare some of the contradictions it entails. Anticipated by the fugitive "I" of Whitman's poem, the figure of the fugitive slave makes evident the predicament of that "I."

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,
I had him sit next me at table. . . . my firelock leaned in the corner.
(ll. 183–92.)

While the fugitive remains outside of the house, the speaker retains the fixed integrity of an observing "I" clearly distinct from what it observes: "I heard his motions," "I saw him"; but once the speaker begins to tend the slave, he relinquishes

this self-defining pronoun. In washing and clothing and giving and remembering, the unique identity of the server is gradually absorbed by the body being served as each "and" further separates the act that follows from the "I" that designates the actor. Only after the fugitive leaves for the north, becoming, for the first time since entering the house, an actor rather than a body being acted upon, does the speaker again assert his "I." Whitman's deployment of pronouns presents physical contact as capable of holding the differentiations of identity in abeyance.

Whitman claims in this passage that the slave's body not only represents but is the locus of social divisions, so that healing the galls caused by the physical iron fetters of slavery actually sutures the divisions between the enslaved and the free, black and white. The healing of the slave's body enables him to claim a free identity and become a grammatical subject. In this passage physical contact merges the identities of host and slave, but the successful outcome of this merger, the slave's transformation into a freeman, requires that the barrier of pronominal difference be reerected. If the assertion of a separate "he" and "I" is necessary for the achievement of freedom, it nevertheless reinscribes the divisions emancipation hoped to remove. The "firelock leaned in the corner" offers a sad reminder of the violence those divisions produced within antebellum society. Indeed the question of the host's relation to the fugitive gains urgency from the presence of the gun: how secure is their merger, how wary is their difference? A pious abolitionist sentiment would simply interpret the firelock as a promise of protection against external enemies, but within the house, self and other, enemy and friend, merger and difference are not so easily and perfectly identified. The waiting gun could equally well indicate the host's trust in the stranger beside him or his vigilant lack of trust. In the previous scene a gun has already suggested the precariousness and explosiveness of interracial contact. Whitman describes the trapper bridegroom: "One hand rested on his rifle. . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl" (l. 189).

Over six hundred lines later, the figure of the fugitive reappears, and this time Whitman attempts a more radical union, as if to demonstrate the limitations of his earlier strategy.

The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
The murderous buckshot and bullets,
All these I feel or am.

I am the hounded slave. . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me. . . . crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence. . . . my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,
They taunt my dizzy ears. . . . they beat me violently over the head with their whip-stocks.
(ll. 830–39)

The transference of the poet's "I" to the figure of the hounded slave, and the consequent merger of these two identities, is marked by the drib and ooze of wounded flesh. Here Whitman employs a manifestly corporeal vocabulary to articulate the union of poet and fugitive, demonstrating how his poetics of merger depends upon the notion of embodiment. There is a Doubting Thomas quality to this passage, as if probing the fugitive's wounds would assure the veracity of Whitman's poetic miracle: he would become the other, and so otherness would be eliminated. The fugitive's attempt to change his status and the poet's attempt to write this poem share, for Whitman, the same assumptions about the corporeality of identity: for the slave, escaping to freedom or returning to captivity entails a harrowing of his flesh; for the poet, telling this story involves representing that flesh as his own. Whitman's equation of poetry with bodily experience strives to defy any distinction between the written and the physical world.

Whitman's poetics of embodiment always, however, remains a poetics. Indeed what is so searing about his exorbi-

tant claims to inhabit another's body is that the more fervently he asserts them, the more extravagant and impossible they appear.^[20] The pathos of this inevitably failed poetic ideal is inscribed within the poem itself. Indeed Whitman's most adamant assertions of his poetics of embodiment consistently work to undermine their own authority. So Whitman's insistence that he does not describe the slave's experience, but rather embodies that experience, contains its own caveat: "All these I feel or am," he writes, suggesting that the tangible claims of embodiment may amount to nothing more than an imaginative projection of feeling. Moreover, the alternatives of feeling or being relate to the scene described with a remarkable lack of specificity. It is not just that the triumph of embodiment (I feel the bullets, I am the hounded slave) so easily collapses into the far lesser claim of sympathetic feeling, but that the assertion of embodiment expands to permeate the entire scene so that Whitman's "I" belongs to it "all," not only to the fugitive but to the fence that supports him and the buckshot and bullets that wound him. Normal distinctions between the animate and the inanimate are denied. The bullets gain a murderous intentionality; twinges of pain become the agents that inflict pain. Thus the embodiment claimed in these lines relies on a sense of identity that remains distinct from any specific corporeal manifestation and instead moves between them. Identity appears infinitely flexible and transferable at the very moment when Whitman attempts to locate it in the human body.

In asserting his poetics of embodiment Whitman thus raises questions about the validity of this ideal from two seemingly opposite perspectives: either poetic embodiment is impossible, bodies are discrete objects, and no amount of will or desire can eradicate their otherness, so that a poetics of embodiment can offer only the representations of a sympathetic but nevertheless alien imagination; or embodiment is possible, and the body is not a barrier to identification (since identity appears fluid, transferable, and only incidentally associated with any individual corporeal form), so that a poetics of embodiment can offer only the disintegration of all

links between the body and identity. If the body defines identity, then a poetics of embodiment remains a potent fantasy; if, on the other hand, identity can be transferred from one body to another, then a poetics of embodiment might be achievable, but it would also be meaningless. As a defense against these undesirable positions Whitman redefines his poetics of embodiment so that it simultaneously insists that identity inheres in the flesh and that it is a matter of representation, infinitely mobile and ultimately indeterminate.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments;
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . . . I myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
(ll. 840–42)

These lines provide a frequently quoted synopsis of Whitman's poetics of embodiment. What is finally most significant about them, however, is not the exorbitant claim to become the other, to put on another's body with the ease of changing clothes, but the odd doubleness with which Whitman retains the distance and difference of the observer. As he leans on a cane and observes, Whitman simultaneously presents himself as object and as subject, embodied and disembodied, the wounded person and the voice which describes that livid flesh.

The case of the fugitive slave provides Whitman with an extreme and definitive instance of the problematics of embodiment characteristic of his poetry as a whole. Whitman's focus on the body has a political as well as a poetic meaning. He proposes in Leaves of Grass that the divisions in the social fabric, the nature of identity, and the relation of the poet's word to the external world are not simply analogous, but finally identical questions. For in trying to reconcile an embodied and a disembodied conception of identity, Whitman makes clear that the divisions between self and other (white and black, master and slave) that inform the political delineations of personhood can be located with equal force within

each person and within every act of utterance. I have suggested as much already in arguing that Whitman's first notebook poetry presents the relation between slave and master as an alternative means of articulating the relation between body and soul and in showing that Whitman's most powerful image for the comingling of body and soul reiterates the scene of miscegenation. The import of bodily difference manifested by American slavery challenges not only national unity but also any unitive conception of identity. By literalizing this challenge Whitman dismantles traditional distinctions between what is a personal and what a political issue: each stands equally well as an emblem for the other. Moreover, Whitman finds that poetry is constituted out of the same divide between the disembodied and the embodied, the intangible words that demand to be felt as a palpable world. What the miscegenating embrace of body and soul produces in "Song of Myself" is poetry:

Loafe with me on the grass. . . . loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want. . . . not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
(ll. 75–81)

Not only does the pair of body and soul indicate the divided nature of identity, but viewed separately body and soul each display the same split between the embodied and the disembodied. The soul has a corporeal form (a throat, a head), while the body lacks the impermeability, the strict boundaries, normally associated with flesh, so that a bosom-bone may be parted as easily as a shirt. This passage establishes not one mode for poetic production, but two: the regulated

but undifferentiated lull that the body requests from the soul, and the fleshy communication of a plunging tongue. The dual conception of identity as simultaneously corporeal and incorporeal with which Whitman responds to the challenge of bodily difference results in a similarly dualistic notion of poetry.

In reading the relation Whitman traces between body and soul, or between hum and tongue, as reinscribing the problematics of a corporeal identity characteristic of American slavery, I am, therefore, also examining the erasure of such historical markers: Whitman's consistent decontextualizing of his imagery. "Song of Myself," for example, forges a conception of self and of song that is notorious for its claims of expansive universality. If I have presented miscegenation as an historically grounded model of Whitman's poetic practice, it nevertheless remains clear that Whitman's depiction of the sexual union of radically different kinds as the embrace of body and soul entails a dramatic relocation of social divisions, and hence the absorption of the political realm into the person of the poet. Whitman concluded his preface to the 1855 edition by setting up a criterion by which to judge the poems that follow: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it" (24). The claim of affection acknowledges the erotic nature of this standard. Whitman's ideal of absorption is fulfilled. For if Whitman's poetry does absorb the social divisions of antebellum America, and particularly the crisis over slavery, it is also absorbed by it. Thus the poet, the person whom Whitman imagined as capable of mediating between the social divisions exemplified by American slavery, finally comes to incarnate those divisions. Ironically, as the next chapter will argue, for an actual slave woman the ways in which her body incarnates social divisions does not prove a source of authorial power. Instead, for Harriet Jacobs the identity between flesh, world, and word that Whitman seeks serves only to fashion the act of writing into another site of oppression.