Life

Whitman was born in 1819 in Long Island, USA, making him historically the earliest of the spiritual Masters so far discussed in this 'Masters' section. His mother was a Quaker and his father a carpenter (a fact sometimes alluded to in Christ-comparisons). Whitman had only a simple education, but became a teacher, a printer's assistant, then editor of various newspapers, and writer of prose and poetry. His mother's Quaker influence, and the natural surroundings of Long Island were undoubted influences on him, but his evolution into the writer of the masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, is unchartable. In the 1984 preface to Gay Wilson Allen's critical biography Allen considers that the secret of this transformation during his early thirties has eluded all the biographers. Whitman's instinct for writing led him to publish numerous articles, and some early novels, all of which were so eclipsed by his Leaves that none remain in print today, and are universally considered mediocre. However for Whitman's friend, disciple, and biographer, Richard Maurice Bucke, the explanation of the transformation was simple : Whitman had entered 'cosmic consciousness'. This was Bucke's term for moksha, liberation or enlightenment.

Whitman's habit of mixing with the ordinary folk of Long Island, Manhattan, or wherever he was, gave him the subject matter and broad appeal that the more literary-circle types lacked. He mingled with workmen and took pleasure in doing their work with or for them, in a way that we would find very odd today, with our regimented and bureaucratic world of qualifications and identity passes. He liked to steer the vessels of friendly captains in Brooklyn harbour, but gave up eventually when he nearly caused an accident. He was particularly fond of the Broadway stage[coach] drivers, as he found them 'uncommonly talented' with their horses in the most difficult of thoroughways, and would join them up on the box — he spent the whole of a winter in the 1850s driving a stage for a sick driver, so that the driver 'might lie without starving his family.' Towards the end of the 1850s he was a frequent visitor to the New York Hospital where he looked after disabled drivers. Leaves of Grass brought him notoriety and fame, and through its publication he later met some of the literary notables of his age: Emerson, Thoreau, and Oscar Wilde. In 1861, when Whitman was forty-two, the American Civil War broke out, and Whitman's brother George joined up; he was injured at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Walter travelled to be with him. He spent time with the wounded, comforting the injured and dying young soldiers, and also spent much of his spare income (which was small in the first place) on treats for them. At Fredericksburg the field hospitals consisted of shabby tents, where the wounded were lucky if the blankets they lay on had a layer of leaves or grass between them and the hard ground. He not only tended to the wounded but mixed with the soldiers in the camp in his usual informal way and commented that he found himself 'always well used'. A correspondent of the New York Herald wrote this about Whitman's ministrations:

I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battle there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, in the Washington hospitals, or wending his way there, with a basket or haversack on his arm, and the strength of beneficience suffusing his face. His devotion surpassed the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness.

Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroisms he has been sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lighted by the presence of the God of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or whispers; they embraced him; they touched his hand; they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer; for another he wrote a letter home; to others he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a sheet of paper or a postage-stamp, all of which and many other things were in his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying message for mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go an errand; to another, some special friend very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and, as he took his way toward the door, you could hear the voices of many a stricken hero calling, 'Walt, Walt, Walt! come again! come again!'

Whitman was greatly affected by these experiences, as the following comments in letters to his mother showed:

Mother, I have real pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of saving quite a number of lives by keeping the men from giving up, and being a good deal with them. The men say it is so, and the doctors say it is so; and I will candidly confess I can see it is true, though I say it myself. I know you will like to hear it, mother so I tell you.

In a later letter he says:

Nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to, and death itself has lost all its terrors; I have seen so many cases in which it was so welcome and such a relief.

In 1865 he was appointed as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, only to be dismissed shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he was the author of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's friend William Douglas O'Connor published his defence of Whitman and attacked the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, for dismissing him (the pamphlet may have been the first time that the epithet 'The Good Grey Poet' was associated with Whitman). Secretary Harman of the State Department had sacked Whitman from his recent appointment as a clerk for "being the author of an indecent book", and went so far as to say that even if the President had ordered it he would not reinstate him. Bucke reported that a friend had been with Abraham Lincoln when Whitman passed outside the window of the East Room at the White House and described Lincoln's assessment of Whitman as follows.

The President asked who he was, and was told that it was Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass. 'Whitman "went by quite slow, with his hands in the breast pockets of his overcoat, a sizeable felt hat on, and his head pretty well up."' The President, 'says nothing, but took a good look until Walt Whitman was quite by. Then he says — (I can't give you his way of saying it but it was quite emphatic and odd) — "Well, he looks like a man." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of absent way, and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored.'

Whitman in turn had great respect for the President and on his assassination in April 1865 wrote 'When Lilacs Last in the dooryard Bloom'd', a great elegy for the dead man, and included it amongst a series of poems in the section of Leaves called 'Memories of President Lincoln'.

In 1868 an edited version of Leaves was published in England by William Michael Rossetti. The was read by Anne Gilchrist, widow of Alexander Gilchrist (the biographer of William Blake), who then received the unexpurgated version and becomes one of its champions, leading her to visit Whitman in 1876. Meanwhile, in 1873, and at the age of only 54 Whitman suffered his first paralytic stroke, leaving him lame. His mother died in the same year, and Whitman was now far from the peak of health and good cheer that he described in 'Song of Myself'. He visited Emerson on his sickbed in 1881, a year before Emerson's death, and in 1882 met Oscar Wilde. In 1883, Richard Maurice Bucke, by now a close friend of Whitman's, published his biography, which included many letters and articles from both hostile and friendly press. In 1884 Whitman was finally able to buy his own house in Mickle Street in Camden, from profits made from Leaves. He lived there until his death in 1892, known to all as the 'Sage of Mickle Street'. It was four years before his death that a second stroke rendered him, at the age of 73, almost immobile, though he continued to receive a stream of visitors, many of them writers.

Teachings

It is an almost entirely novel proposition that Walt Whitman was a great spiritual teacher, and a more detailed argument is presented elsewhere. The interest in Whitman is usually for his masterful and daring poetry (considering the Victorian prudishness that prevailed in educated society of the time), as literary father to the Beat Generation writers and poets, and as possible homosexual. That he was a great spiritual teacher was seen by only a few of his contemporaries, and Richard Maurice Bucke's analysis of him as such was dismissed by the scholars of religion. Two Hindu scholars in the nineteen sixties and seventies, V.K.Chari and O.K.Nambiar, provided analyses of Whitman in a Vedantic context, but their work had little impact in the West.

It seems from a comment made by a British friend of Whitman, Edward Carpenter, that Whitman made a deliberate effort in his Leaves of Grass to hide his spiritual message. Edward Carpenter was an English social reformer and prolific writer who visited Whitman twice, once in 1877 and once in 1886. He recorded his first impressions in Days With Walt Whitman.

Meanwhile in that first ten minutes I was becoming conscious of an impression which subsequently grew even more marked — the impression, namely, of an immense vista or background to his personality. If I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met anyone who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing than he did. Yet away and beyond all this I was aware of a certain radiant power in him, a large benign affluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the place where he was — yet with something of reserve and sadness in it too, and a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.

Whitman gives us an insight into the spiritual message hidden in Leaves in this conversation with Edward Carpenter (Whitman is talking first).

"What lies behind Leaves of Grass is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost every line but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure. There is something in my nature furtive, like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing 'Leaves of Grass.' Sloane Kennedy calls me 'artful' — which about hits the mark. I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up." I [Carpenter] replied that all through history the old mysteries, or whatever they may have been called, had been held back; and added that probably we had something yet to learn from India in these matters. W.: "I do not myself think there is anything more to come from that source; we must rather look to modern science to open the way. Time alone can absolutely test my poems or any one's. Personally, I think that the 'something' is more present in some of my small later poems than in the 'Song of Myself'.

Where then is the clear evidence that Whitman had a spiritual teaching? This extract is perhaps the best clue yet:

For your life adhere to me,
(I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that?
Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. (Starting from Paumanok, v. 15)

Whitman presents himself as spiritual teacher here, reminiscent to us perhaps of a Zen Master, or even G.I.Gurdjieff, though Whitman would have had no knowledge of either. He is not just claiming the he possesses the 'solid prizes of the Universe' (which we translate as Self-Realisation, moksha, liberation or nirvana), but that he can 'afford it' to those that persevere. The reader may well find that such an interpretation of these lines no more than wishful thinking, but the evidence (which cannot be presented in full here) is overwhelming once one takes into account many similar hints in Leaves and the accounts from Whitman's contemporaries (mostly out of print now).

Richard Maurice Bucke for example writes, in the context of the world's religious books:

Leaves of Grass is such a book. What the Vedas were to Brahmanism, the Law and the Prophets to Judaism, the Avesta and Zend to Zoroastrianism, the Kings to Confucianism and Taoism, the Pitikas to Buddhism, the Gospels and Pauline writings to Christianity, the Quran to Mohameddanism, will Leaves of Grass be to the future of American civilisation. Those were all Gospels, they all brought good news to man, fitting his case at the period, each in its way and degree. They were all "hard sayings" and the rankest heresy at first, just as Leaves of Grass is now. By and by it too will be received, and in the course of a few hundred years, more or less, do its work and become commonplace like the rest. Then new Gospels will be written upon a still higher plane. In the mean time Leaves of Grass is the bible of Democracy, containing the highest exemplar of life yet furnished, and suited to the present age and America.

John Burroughs found that Whitman was "swayed by two or three great passions, and the chief of these was doubtless his religious passion." He then goes on to say, "Now there is no trace of this [traditional] religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have left any shadow upon him. Ecclesiasticism is dead; he clears the ground for a new growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done."" What does Burroughs think that Whitman puts in the place of Ecclesiasticism? He notes that for Whitman, "any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household — any bit of real life, anything that carried the flavour and quality of concrete reality — was very welcome to him!"

Whitman himself comments in 'Song of Myself':

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Burroughs concluded that "In the past this ideal was found in the supernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found in the natural, in the now and here." On Whitman's deathbed Burroughs mused that "It is the face of an aged loving child. As I looked, it was with the reflection that, during an acquaintance of thirty-six years, I never heard from those lips a word of irritation, or depreciation of any being. I do not believe that Buddha, of whom he appeared an avatar, was more gentle to all men, women, children, and living things." There is not space here to present the full case for Whitman as guru, but the testimony of those that knew him, comparisons to Christ and the Buddha, and the Hindu claim of Whitman as Vedantist should leave the reader with at least an open possibility.

Commentary

Whitman died just around the time that Vivekananda came to the USA, but they never met. How then did Whitman conclude that there was 'nothing more to come from that source [India]?' Perhaps his intuition told him that he personally had made one of the greatest contributions to the spiritual life of humanity, one that would really include all that India had to offer, but take it into a new, modern world, one that had to make more than just an accommodation with science and democracy, but celebrated it. Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti were all from India and as we have seen their contributions are profound, but in their different ways they were the fulfilment of their tradition rather than a departure.

Whitman's teachings, once they are unearthed from its secular, poetical and old-fashioned text, Leaves of Grass, are extraordinary, and help us engage with all the issues central to this site. They are the most complete vision of a jnani via positiva path yet put forward. Perhaps their time is only now coming, and may prove to be the greatest contribution of America yet to the world.

'Whitman not only provides the source material for any serious study of via positiva, but also challenges us to redefine the boundaries between secular and spiritual. His is the greatest contribution to the spiritual life yet to come from America.'

There is not space here to comment on the Hindu interpretation of Whitman, which includes comparisons with Upanishadic and Vedantic themes, and with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. What is of importance to us is a vision of an inclusiveness and an embraciveness that can only be achieved through a transcendence of the normal sense of self, in other words an epitome of via positiva. To find no fault in any manifest thing or in its adjuncts, to include women in every breath that talks of men, and to have come completely to terms with death, may not sound like the culmination of a spiritual path to everyone. Nor would everyone be convinced that Whitman had transcended 'ego', for the brashness of his poems, even the very title of 'Song of Myself' can ring false to those convinced that religion means renunciation. (Even as sensitive a thinker as D.H.Lawrence complained that Whitman's soul had 'leaked out into the universe', showing that he understood Whitman not one jot.) Most would find Whitman's claim to be Christ's equal, quietly made in a poem tucked away in Leaves, to be outrageous. But as one peruses his poems, and the testimonies of his contemporaries, one gradually finds a religiousness that is convincing and powerful — but simply lacking in 'Ecclesiasticism', that is any remnant of traditional religion.

Whitman not only provides the source material for any serious study of via positiva, but also challenges us to redefine the boundaries between secular and spiritual. His ministrations in the hospitals of Washington were not carried out as a Christian, but as a natural response from his expanded sense of self. His love of the ordinary men and women of America was not in order to proselytise, but because he saw the divine in them and could reflect that back to those that could see it. Whitman was not an ordinary man, but his love of the ordinary was the basis of his spiritual message, and brings a whole new dimension to our understanding of jnani.