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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the first edition of Leaves of Grass occur these puzzling lines, kept in the third edition, but later eliminated:
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.
1 Fac. ed. of the 1855 text (Portland, Maine: Mosher and Gable, 1920), p. 74.
2 “The Sleepers ” The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. Louis Untermeyer, Inner Sanctum Ed. (New York, 1949), p. 393—this edition hereafter cited as I SE.
3 Notes and Fragments, ed. Richard M. Bucke (London, Ontario, Canada, 1899)—hereafter cited as Notes. Cf. the following fragments from Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, 2 vols. (New York, 1921)—hereafter cited by volume and page:
I am a Curse:
Sharper than serpent's eyes or wind of the ice-fields!
O topple down Curse! topple more heavy than death!
I am lurid with rage!
I invoke Revenge to assist me— (n, 73)
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. (n, 69)
In the silence and darkness
Among murders and cannibals and traders in slaves
Stepped my spirit with light feet, and pried among their heads
and made fissures to look through … (n, 71)
[What Lucifer cursed when tumbling from Heaven] (n, 72)
The last line, printed in brackets, occurs in a passage in which the poet expresses sympathy for everything and everybody, including even the Devil, and it was apparently an insertion in the MS. Italics in quoted matter are mine unless otherwise noted.
4 See Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago, 1946), pp. 388–393; also Whitman's “The Bible as Poetry” (ISE, pp. 891–894).
5 For examples of Whitman's notes on Dante, see Notes, pp. 95–96, 165, 167; on Milton, pp. 98–99.
6 Duke Univ. Lib. Collection, pp. 454–55. Cf. note on Milton: “Whoever believes in the Calvinistic theology to him the thread of Paradise Lost may seem strong—to others it will be weak …” (Notes, p. 99).
7 American Whig Rev., Dec. 1851, pp. 516–524, signed “J.B.”
8 As late as 1888, Whitman confessed to Traubel that he had not read Taylor's translation of Faust: “I have always meant to read it—it always seemed so formidable.” Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Boston, 1906), i, p. 126.
9 Whitman later, in the difficult period after the Civil War, deepened his knowledge of the German tradition, particularly of its Idealist philosophers. In his notes on Hegel, he wrote: “Humanity, the race, History, with all its long train of baffling, contradictory events—the tumultuous procession—the dark problem of evil, forming half of the infinite scheme —these are the themes, questions, which have directly or indirectly to do with any profound consideration of Democracy and finally testing it, as all questions and as underlying all questions.” Hegel offered the following solution: “The varieties, contradictions and paradoxes of the world and of life, and even good and evil, so baffling to the superficial observer, and too often leading to despair, sullenness or infidelity, become a series of infinite radiations and waves of the one sea-like universe of divine action and progress, never stopping, never hasting” (Notes, p. 134).
10 Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 130.
11 J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper (London, 1952), pp. 2,37.
12 “He reminds me of that passage in Young's poems where as death presses closer and closer for his prey, the soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, shrieking, berating, to escape the general doom” (ISE, pp. 768–769).
13 Quoted from Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (New York, 1906), pp. 101–102.
14 Included by Whitman in the following list: “Jehovah, Adonai, Christ, Brahm, Buddha, Ormuzd, god of light, Arimanes, god of darkness” (Notes, p. 153).
15 Swinburne, who oscillated violently in his reactions to Whitman, associated him, on the one hand, with Blake (in his William Blake, where he attributed to him “depth of sympathy and a height of scorn which complete and explain each other, as tender and as bitter as Dante's”), and on the other hand, with Byron (in the later Whitmania, where Whitman “has exactly as much claim to a place beside Dante as any Vermersch or Vermorel or other verminous and murderous muckworm of the Parisian Commune to a place beside Mazzini”; and where “Whitmaniacs and Byronites have yet to learn that if rhetoric were poetry John Bright would be a poet at least equal to John Milton … ”) (ISE, pp. 996–1005).
16 However, the 9th American edition of “Festus” was published in 1850 (B. B. Mussey, Boston), whereas the 3rd English edition came out only in 1848, testifying to Bailey's great popularity in the States.
17 For example, from Bailey's Preface: “The poem has been taken to be a sketch of world-life, and is a summary of its combined moral and physical conditions, estimated on a theory of spiritual things, opposed as far as possible to that of the partialist, pessimist and despairing sceptic, the belief of the misbeliever, so prevalent in our time; not only in regard to the creation, government and administration of the world by divine providence, but in its views as to the origin of the so-called mystery of moral evil; and in its general positions known as universalist, illustrative of the highest aspirations and the happiest future, here and hereafter of humanity” (Festus, London: G. Routledge, 1901).
18 American Whig. Rev., pp. 523–524. Professor Emory Holloway has drawn my attention to the fact that the idea of the reformation of a fallen angel was treated by Whitman as early as 1841, in the poem entitled “The Punishment of Pride” (The Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, p. 17). It is difficult to determine whether Whitman might have found this idea in Bailey, since neither the New York Public Library nor the Library of Congress has the first American edition of “Festus” (the 3rd American ed. appeared in 1846.) However, its publication in England in 1839, and its immediate popularity, makes this at least a possibility. The first evidence of Whitman's acquaintance with “Festus” found thus far, as we have seen, comes from his reading of an 1845 article.
19 The name of “Lucifer” does not appear among the final versions of Whitman's poems, but the same fundamental idea was later applied to “Satan” in “Chanting the Square Deific” (1865–66):
Defiant, I, Satan, still live, still utter words, in new lands duly
appearing, (and old ones also,) …
Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including
Saviour and Satan…