惠特曼和迪根森诗歌中的继承与创新

同济大学浙江学院 汪进波

Introduction

Walt Whitman (1819—1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830—1886) play a very important role in the American Romantic Movement in carrying on the Transcendental tradition begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and in bringing forth original innovations to the American literary establishment that was characterized by what Emerson called “the courtly muses of Europe”. While upholding Transcendentalism as their literary guidance or poetic doctrines, they not only gave full expression to Emerson’s essential metaphysical ideas of assertions of self-reliance, cultural independence, the infinitude of man, and eternality of poetic imagination, but also brought about revolutionary changes to its thematic concentrations and artistic expressions, thus supplementing and expanding the genteel Anglo-American literary tradition of 19thcentury by rejecting Christianity and embracing nature and self as sources of imagination.

Acting upon the Emersonian principle of self-reliance, Whitman and Dickinson, separately but resolutely resisted the Europhilia that had dominated American literature. With a focus on the American soil, Whitman sang enthusiastically and ingeniously his love for his motherland and American freedom and democracy, eulogizing the infinite power of the free individual self. He reacted against the conventional rationalism with a free Yankee verse form that well matched his poetic themes of individualism, freedom, nationality and democracy. Dickinson, on the other hand, challenged the tradition by her chosen withdrawal from society and concentrated on her “small” world of mind (her soul), exploring the immortal meanings of life’s eternal subjects, love, death, and nature. Her bold experiments and innovations in the conventional verse form, style and diction are in keeping with her aesthetic transcendental philosophy and the contents of her poetry.

The Emersonian background

Emerson has been generally acknowledged as the founder of American literary romanticism and father of American Transcendentalism. The age of Emerson, to which Whitman and Dickinson belonged and of which they were eminent representatives, is the age of American Renaissance, the American rebirth of arts and literature. Just as the European Renaissance was an open rebellion against the dominance of the Church and God and a shift from the divine authority of religion to the laws of the natural and secular world and the infinite power of human beings, the American Renaissance inherited its anti-religious and anti-authoritarian spirit through a daring literary revival against the predominance of the European tradition in American literature and art.

This ideological and artistic revolution aimed at breaking away from dependence upon the British literary convention, putting an end to its religious interferences and obstructions in literary creation, and creating a purely nationalistic American literature and art. In hisAmericanScholarwhich was hailed as American literary declaration of independence, Emerson sent a direct strong appeal to American writers and poets to be independent and self-reliant, to get rid of the British influence and to create and establish the truly American literature. InTrinitySchoolAddress, Emerson further called on young American intellectuals to build up their self-confidence and the spirit of self-reliance, and to rebel against the existing American Church that practised religion as if God were dead.

But Emerson was not against the divinity of God. He was opposed to the religious practices that treated God as formalities, ceremonies or rituals, and to the religious teachings and doctrines that interfered in and stifled human thought and imagination. Emerson appealed for a new kind of religion, a religion that, consisting of himself only, could enable him to directly communicate with God. And he found and expressed his religion inNaturewhich was to him the greatest spiritual text capable of being read by everyone. The tenets of his religion lay in the fundamental principle of self-reliance, the infinitude of private man, and in the vital doctrine of the imaginative, inspiring and immortal soul.

Whitman and Dickenson’s anti-religious attitude

Emerson’s anti-clerical spirit greatly encouraged his contemporaries and his posterities among whom Whitman and Dickinson were the outstanding representatives. Whitman was strongly opposed to institutional Christianity and persistently remained a non-conformist throughout his life. But this didn’t mean he needed no God. In fact, like Emerson, he longed for an effective relationship with God without the intermediation of the institutional church. He wanted a religion of the heart rather than that of the head. He had repeatedly asserted the transcendental importance of the religious element in his poetry. For him,LeavesofGrasswas his ownBibleand his new religion. His Christ inSongofMyselfwas an image of the eternal, infinite and immortal soul, i.e. the poetic imagination. Whitman proclaimed in his 1855 preface toLeavesofGrassthat “there will be no more priests.... A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man and every man shall be his own priest” (Whitman 2008: 11). So, in the mind of Whitman, the poet himself was the priest, and his poetic imagination led him to his Christ and his God.

Dickinson’s aversion to Christianity is even stronger. When she found that she couldn’t share the unquestioning faith of her fellow students in the institutional religion at the South Hadley Female Seminary, she soon left and refused to be a converted Christian. She stopped going to the church at seventeen and remained a non-Christian throughout her life. However, by renouncing the Church, she was not renouncing her self but preserving her self. By giving up her Christian faith, she was taking up her transcendental faith. Her self-reliance and independence in her religious choice, her chosen way of secluded life, and even the way she always dressed herself (in white robes), reflected her transcendentalist view of life, which could be reinforced by her actually having read Emerson’sNatureand heard his speeches made during his visit to her hometown Amherst in August 1885. Like Emerson and Whitman, she had “Christ” too, whose image frequently appeared in many of her poems. Her religion was her conscious choice of spiritual life (her mind), through which she could achieve direct union with her God. The fact that throughout the latter part of her life she was always dressed in white ropes further proved her wish to be separated from the physical world and merged with the spiritual world, her soul living and conversing with God as his white angel.

Whitman and Dickinson’s Emersonian anti-religious attitude or their transcendental view of religion largely shaped their aesthetic outlook and poetic motifs. They emphasized seeking their god (the divine, timeless and spaceless soul) and the universal truth without a third interfering force, but through self-reliance, the infinitude of the private self or the omnipotent power of the poetic imagination. Such transcendentalist ideas became the main concerns of Whitman and Dickinson.

Whitman’s source of poetical imagination

In exploring his transcendental themes, Whitman’s source of poetical imagination was the macrocosmic realistic outer world: the democratic and scientific America. As a journalist, he had travelled extensively throughout his country. The “En-mass”, the people he met, the scenery and other things he saw had become the original firsthand materials which inspired him to compose his masterpiece,LeavesofGrass. The American landscapes, the natural world and the universe were his endless source of constant imagination where his omnipresent and omnipotent soul freely soared, sensing and experiencing the infinitude of man. To him, the poet should be faithful to the outer and broader reality and must have the substances of his poems derived from the concrete materials of the world, which consisted of the central truth of 19thcentury science and the essential spirit of the 19thcentury American democracy. But he didn’t merely take in these appearances of reality. They were distilled and refined in his processing center of imagination to bring out the themes of his poetry.

Guided by Emersonian transcendentalism and inspired by his impressions of American land and people, Whitman dealt brilliantly with his favourite topics of individualism, democracy, nationality and self-reliance. InSongofMyself, he sang of the immense vitality of self and individualism, the infinite power of the spiritually identical, universal soul that existed in each physically different individual being. To him, the individual man’s body might become the object of secular authority and tyranny, but there was no authority on earth above the authority of his free self and free soul. Like Emerson, he found identity and unity of the soul in the individually distinctive appearances. InCrossingBrooklynFerry, people from various places and different backgrounds come to and leave the ferry, but once they get on the floating ferry (spirituality) from the land (physicality), they share the meeting point on board of the ferry boat on the water which to Whitman is their identical soul, their flowing imagination, and their uninhabited infinite power as a free self.

It is important to note, however, that his view of self and individual was not himself or a single person. The self or his individual hero was represented and celebrated as a manhood, as an American. The self suggested the group, the multitude, the whole or the democratic entirety including both the American nation of which he was a citizen and the entire human being of which the America was a nation.LeavesofGrassopens with a short but incisive introduction, which lays out the themes for the entire poems: “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person; Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse” (Whitman 2008: 14). Here, he was singing for the American democracy built upon the general American individual freedom, as was against the European aristocracy entitled to a limited and selected few. And the implications of this American democracy were universal, applying to both America and the human race. Self-reliance, Emerson’s central subject matter, became Whitman’s vital energy expressed in the theme of nationality in Whitman’sLeavesofGrass.

Throughout his poems, he evinced a strong nationalistic spirit and determination to establish an indigenous American culture with characteristic American literature, art, and social institutions, and he achieved this in both theory and in practice, as shown inAmericanVistaandLeavesofGrass. And the essence of this distinctive culture was the American democracy symbolized by the image of omnipresent vigorous grass inLeavesofGrasswhich was capable of growing and surviving in every corner of America and the world. It is significant to note here that Whitman’s nationality extended beyond literature. His nationalism also expanded into internationalism as he longed for the brotherhood of man throughout the world, dreaming of annexing Canada and Mexico into America, uniting and organizing a big international family under the American democracy, so that the seed of American democracy could grow in every corner of the world.

Out of his soul, Whitman sang affectionately of these American motifs, without pretension and reserve. “To readers used to the measured, elegant, and restrained tone of the genteel tradition of literature, Whitman’s uninhabited ‘barbaric yawp’ must have seemed an indecent invasion of personal privacy” (Miller 1969: 25). But it is just his uninhabitedness and his personal instantaneous explosion of feelings that closely fit his pursuit of self-reliance and individual freedom. It is only when he truly sang that we detect the difference between Whitman and Emerson, the difference between the “genteel tradition of the gentleman” and the “bardic yawping”, and “body-electric” of the rough. Emerson also sang, but he did it because he had to, while Whitman sang out of his heart, without any affectation. There is a strong feeling of naturalness and spontaneity in Whitman, whereas there is certain tinge of pretension and artificiality in Emerson. The former is a pop singer, while the latter, a parlour (royal) singer. Whitman had once said that he “both blasphemes and worships Emerson” (Traubel 1914: 69). He inherited the essence of Emerson, his spirit of self-reliance, but he discarded the genteel tradition, “the courtly muses of Europe” that were still with Emerson though he was opposed to it.

Dickinson’s source of poetic imagination

If Whitman’s poetic scope centered on the macrocosms dealing with the larger and brighter issues of life, then Dickinson derived her source of poetic imagination chiefly from her small narrow world of the Homestead, her microcosmic inner world of mind where her soul dwelt upon, with her focus always on the morbid side of life. Her “small” world seen through her “landscape of soul” stood in striking contrast with the vast natural landscape of America, that of the world, and the boundless and infinite universe of Whitman through which his free soul roamed.

However, the smallness of her world is only physical, which is her Amherst Homestead where she spent almost her entire life secluded from outside. Yet, her limited small world which she took great pride in is by no means narrower in scope than the outer physical world. Through it, many of life’s permanent insoluble issues like love, death, fear, sorrow, melancholy, loss, and nature are imaginatively and insightfully treated by her with an intense passion and great depth. Her transcendental view of these problems filled them with a universal truth and aphoristic significance.

Under her pen, “Death” was no longer a dreadful thing but a beautiful and meaningful creature, for it was an entrancing and necessary venue leading to immortality. The theme of love also reached a philosophical height. The rejections of love described in her poems which may be based on her real experiences of being rejected by several men she loved, serve to prove that to Dickinson the earthly love, though sweet, could never escape the fate of being ephemeral due to circumstances. She seemed to believe that only spiritual love or dedication to Christ could bring eternal joy and happiness. And the disputed intense lesbian tendency reflected in her poems and letters through her relationship with Susan, her sister-in-law and with Vinnie, her own sister, can be interpreted as her conviction that, like the spiritual love, the universal love of one’s brothers and sisters was the most enduring one, just like the general “comradely love” or the love of manhood of the alleged homosexual Whitman.

As can be seen, Dickinson could discern no fewer meanings and values in her secluded small world than what Whitman did in the great realistic world. The two worlds of Whitman and Dickinson, though apparently different, share a lot in common. They use their poems to reveal, explore and examine two kinds of realities from different perspectives: one existing in the microcosmic inner world and one in the macrocosmic external world, or the spiritual and the physical worlds. But the scope and meanings of the former, the hidden and abstruse implications of the spiritual sphere, are much broader and more complicated than those of the visible and actual physical world. She made this explicit in her following poem:

TheBrain-iswiderthantheSky

For-putthemsidebyside-

Theonetheotherwillcontain

Withease-andyoubeside-

Thebrainisdeeperthanthesea-

For-holdthem-bluetoblue-

Theonetheotherwillabsorb-

AsSponge-Buckets-do-

ThebrainisjusttheweightofGod-

For-Heftthem-PoundforPound-

Andtheywilldiffer-iftheydo-

AsSyllablefromSound-

(Dickinson 1924: 632)

Here, Dickinson painted two graphic pictures for us, one of the mind (the spiritual universe)and the other of body (the physical universe). They validly justify the greatness, immensity, and importance of her chosen secluded small world, and her transcendent spiritual view of the soul represented by “Brain” over the body represented by the “Sky and the Sea”. It follows then that her narrow scope is as large as the cosmic worlds of the French realist Balzac and of the British realist Dickens. Her world, her universe of mind, is like the New World, the North American Continent before Christopher Columbus, with so many novelties and curiosities for her to explore and discover: “Soto! Explore thyself!/Therein thyself shalt find/The Undiscovered Continent/No Settler had the Mind”(Dickinson 1924: 832). Therefore, her concentration on the inner world is a breakthrough from her predecessors Emerson and Whitman whose poetic imagination was motivated by forces of the outside world. Such a focus on intrinsic motivation for imagination, both valid and meaningful, opened a new era of literary representation in her time.

Like Emerson and Whitman, Dickinson also dealt with the eternal issue of man and his relationship with nature and God in her poems. But instead of getting extrinsic imagination from the vast nature and the complicated secular world, she gained her intrinsic inspiration through intense meditations of the meanings of such universal subject matters as unrequited love, hopeless longing, loss of friendship, calm confrontation of death, and melancholic reflections on nature, to name just a few. She treated them accurately, vividly, and transcendentally, bent on bringing forth the meanings of the “circumferences”, the dualistic and circular nature of life and existence on earth and the immortality and eternality of the consciousness or soul beyond the physical world. It is just her focus on the inner life that earned her the deserved title as the precursor of the modern mind. She, to some degree, had paved the way for the emergence of modernism, particularly the stream of consciousness, at the turn of the century. Her affinity with the metaphysical or transcendental poets Emerson and Whitman in exploring the private self and the soul, and her daring revolting against the literary standard her age respected, demonstrate her keeping up with the literary tradition of her time and her inventive spirit in creating something new and adding fresher blood to it.

Whitman and Dickinson’s poetical innovations

Both Whitman and Dickinson pursued ingenuity of poetic language and style in answer to Emerson’s call for “meter-making argument” in writing poetry in which the thought should be given priority to rather than the form (Baym 2012: 20). Both experimented and innovated with the poetic forms and languages in order to conform to the romantic themes of their poetry. Whitman responded to Emerson’s request to be more creative by abandoning poetic structure. So he adopted a free verse form in hisLeavesofGrasswhich initially received more censure than applause, as it was against the existing poetic standard. It is said thatLeavesofGrasshad been cast in fire. But all his efforts at getting rid of the restrictive aspects of the previous tradition of versification aimed at clearing the baneful foreign elements or influence on the American verse. It was years later when his revolutionary and innovative free verse was recognized as the best form of expression of his democratic and individualistic spirit. Through adopting the free verse, he had achieved a perfect unity of form and content. His free verse was a breakthrough from the traditional stanzaic patterns and measured lines, but it still retained the valued conventional poetic devices like alliteration, repetition, inversion assonance, etc. While breaking the metric rules, he also experimented with poetic diction by violating the accepted rules of poetic languages. Coined words, exotic words, taboo words, slangs and jargons, or languages for people of all walks of life and for people of all ages and both sexes, were all present in his poems, which correspond with his themes of the universality of individualism and democracy. Overall, Whitman followed his idol Emerson in his poetic explorations and experiments and in some aspects surpassed his mentor through his daring innovations in poetic form and languages.

Dickinson answered Emerson’s call for creativity in poetry writing in an even more creative way. For instance, instead of throwing away all poetic structure as Whitman did, she added her own original stylistic features, most notably dashes and capitalization. As can be easily seen, Dickinson’s poetry abounded with original form and creative diction in defiance of tradition. First is her brevity of expressions, which can be seen not only in the lengths of her poems ranging from 12 to 30 lines on the average, never exceeding 50 lines, but also in the relative conciseness of each individual line. This brevity was achieved through succinct uses of words and flexible handling of the parts of speech. She frequently used nouns and verbs as adjectives, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as nouns. She used coined and exotic words too to achieve vividness and economy of expression. One reason for such display of brevity is, as analysed by Sewall in hisLife, that there was a family tradition or puritan heritage of reticence in her family, characterized by conciseness of speech. The other and more important reason is her pessimistic view of the brevity of the physical life and her acceptance of eternality of spiritual life. The second feature of her poetry is her unique choice of tense and mood of sentences. Her persistent use of the simple present tense indicates her escape from the passage of time on earth, her feeling of freedom and safety from the effects of the secular forces and her longing for the timeless Eternality, her spiritual world of the soul. Her unconventional punctuation is still another feature of her poems, sometimes creating new relationship between words, sometimes generating musical and rhythmical effects. Her famous and noticeable dash, for instance, always conveys an implication of uncertainty, ambiguity, or duality of nature and life, or suggests the riddle or mystery is unsolved and the answer is to be explored. Finally, there are capitalizations for emphatic purposes, lack of titles, disregard for rhythm sche-mes, etc.

It is true that her poems sometimes don’t rhyme, for which she has been generally criticized as either violating poetic rules or as evidence of lack of poetic aptitude. But, like her special choice of withdrawn living, her occasional unrhythming may also be purposeful, symptomatic of the disharmony of life in the real world. Life does not always rhyme. As her deliberate choice of living was against the accepted convention, then her unrhythming can be regarded as a kind of reform and rebellion against the established literary tradition.

Conclusion

The above comparisons show that as the disciples and reformers of Emersonian tradition, Whitman and Dickinson carried forward and revolutionized the American romantic tradition. Through their well matched thematic and artistic innovations and transformations of the Anglo-American verse, they both broadened the romantic scope and vision and enriched the romantic means of poetic expressions, bringing American Romanticism to a new stage. If Emerson were the father of American Romanticism, then Whitman and Dickinson could well be his son and daughter, carrying his blood of self-reliance and transcendentalist genes, but exhibiting distinct differences in temperament, with Whitman being gregarious and extroversive and Dickinson withdrawn and introversive, and in their attitudes towards the universe, with Whitman concentrating on the outer world and Dickinson on the inner world.

Both Whitman and Dickinson had greatly contributed to the development of American romanticism and American literature through their creative inheritance of literary tradition and their original innovations. Both poets were deeply influenced by Emerson, the exponent of Transcendentalism, not only sharing his anti-religious attitude and interest in a new kind of religion through which they could fully express their romantic ideas, but also abiding by the poetic principles formulated by Emerson and his cohorts. And their abidance was not slavish imitation but added new meanings and dimensions to the romantic idealism of Emerson and expanded the Emersonian vision of the world. Their poetic advocations and practices demonstrated an essential truth that literature evolves and progresses through convention and invention.

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