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PARTISAN REVIEW
innocence that was his myth, but by the character of his
will
to inno–
cence, by the dynamics of his creative struggle with American actu–
ality-by the inclusiveness of his will to convert the tyrannous condi–
tions of consciousness Tocqueville described into functions of indi–
viduality, to assimilate experience with all its evils into modes of sig–
nificant continuity with his own being. And the fact is that the
lasting consequence to culture of Whitman's struggle to equate the
American fact with its European myth has not really been a confir–
mation of our endemic innocence but a livelier consciousness of our
conditions and an enhanced sensitivity to the immediacies of exist–
ence; an augmented awareness of the possible only as it exists in the
actual; a greater capacity to experience life as the substance of culture
and to know our culture as it issues from life.
As
a result of Whit–
man's "general and vague" throes in the void he inherited, 'Democ–
racy' is no longer the "general and vague" verbalism it once was;
and the once nugatory "minute and clear" particularities of our in–
dividual experience have acquired a poetic
mana
and a communica–
bility with ideas- and even, insofar as we remember Whitman, a
democratic significance- that they might never have had if the past
century had left us only the lyrical heritage of its Emersons and
its Tennysons to introduce us psychically to our world.
Nevertheless, as Whitman's enemies have always argued, the
greatness of his cultural example or influence does not alter the char–
acter of his verse as it stands immutably before us on the printed
page; his poetry
as
poetry, they argue, is vitiated, and perhaps to
the core, precisely by this constant confusion of poetry and life. Ad–
mittedly, Whitman surrendered to his velleities; he confounded what
might be called the "pure" and the "practical" imaginations; but
we today, in our sensitivity to this characteristically 'Romantic' error,
just as extremely dissociate them- and our understanding of Whit–
man's individuality and our ability to respond to
his
power (as dis–
tinct from its mythical modes) have suffered accordingly. Leslie Fied–
ler, for instance, seems to me the victim of a fashionable metaphor–
and of his own brilliant penchant for generalization-when he fails
to distinguish Whitman's unique consciousness from the 'void' de–
scribed by Tocqueville: he concludes that Whitman's personal devo–
tion to his "mask" was a "peculiarly American duplicity, that double–
ness of our self-consciousness ... which arises from our belief that
