The Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso, initiated in 1846 by Congressman David Wilmot, called for the end of slavery in states acquired from Mexico during and subsequent to the Mexico-American war. Whitman supported the proviso, though it eventually failed in the Senate, and is now historically regarded as one of the events leading to the Civil War. This proviso reflected enhanced division between the North and South regarding slavery. 

I have mixed thoughts about Whitman and racism from “Song of Myself.” I can’t seem to decipher his position on it. For the time, it probably seemed provocative and possibly seditious for him to harbor a runway slave, yet, when he lists among the jobs and activities of persons in Canto 16, he mentions “the quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand” as just one activity among others without explicitly denouncing it. If his interest is social reform, he should probably say something by way of resistance. I think this is an example of Whitman’s encoded inconsistencies, his contradictions that led him to famously exclaim: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” 

Maybe, but to me Whitman is the ultimate relativist, and cannot provide a moral compass by which we may guide our actions.  He is as “wicked” as “righteous;” he simply belongs to every position to which one can ascribe. He loves nature, but has no qualms with killing animals for sport. He is a loafer, but also a capitalist. For what other reason might one work hard and compile one’s poems? They are no longer “thoughts,” but thereby become commodities. 

Specimen Days: Grow—Health—Work

This diary entry of Whitman is fascinating because, speaking of himself as a young boy, we witness many of the traits that will develop into his subsequent identity.  It anticipates his penchant for travel and the outdoors. Perhaps, the constant movement of his formative years bred this comfort, providing the initial experiences for what he would eventually term in “Song of Myself,” “his place late at night in the crow’s nest.” For comfort, he would eventually look both “on” and “outside of pavement or land.”

His “omnivorous” reading habit, cultivated from youth, also proved useful, in that it gave him the requisite tools to articulate his philosophy. Even though his thought and prescriptions are based in the experiential, visceral, and communal, (and decidedly populist/non-intellectual) he would not be able to articulate as eloquently without a history of study. He, in time, respects this learning, but subordinates it to essentially human, visceral, touch-specific experiences: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origins of all poems…”

Whitman also worked odd jobs (compositor, teacher in various counties) at a young age, which may have contributed to his later attitude of respect toward the working individual, and his perception of himself as embedded within the working community. In “Song of Myself” he declares, after listing a series of jobs, “and of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

Collectively, this diary entry underscores and possibly provides the source for dynamic, essential aspects of Whitman’s character.  

Part 17 of “Song of Myself ,“ and elements of the surrounding cantos, exemplify, I think, Whitman’s approach to life, his worldview. Whitman sees himself defined by community and vice-versa.

Whitman sees the world or aspects thereof as composed of binaries that sometimes seem to somehow unify, or have potential to unify.  They are distinct yet unified. He sees himself carrying on an intellectual tradition just by recording “his thoughts,” since they are all the thoughts that every man has ever thought; and moreover, they belong to you as much as to him, since they are your thoughts as much as his.

The apparent contradictions of binaries never give Walt anxiety; rather, they give him comfort as the constitutive fabric of his conceptual cosmos.

Sort of how a quilt is composed of different patches, but each pieces has an essential quality of quilt-ness simply by dint of its inclusion, which reminds one of one’s status as an American-as divergent parts contributing to a national identity-, since Walt is an American to the utmost degree.  After enumerating a lengthy grouping of persons/workers and descriptions of their positions, he integrates himself among this vocational list; he is all jobs, or at least “more or less” has components of them, and they --Walt, the jobs, and the people who perform them-- tend toward each other.

Communally, in Whitman’s perspective, we are granted meaning by granting meaning: our part in the/as the whole justifies not only ourselves, but also the community at large.

“…in all people I see myself, none more and not a barley-corn less.”