![]() By the time Whitman first put this voice into print in 1855, though, the nation was only five years away from discovering how fully the forces of division and violence would overpower the fading hopes of unity and absorption of difference. The end of slavery would come, Whitman believed, when the slave-owner and the slave could both be represented by the same voice, could both hear themselves present in the “I” and the “you” of the democratic poet, when the slavemaster could experience the potential slave within himself, and the slave could know the slavemaster within himself, at which moment of illumination slavery would end. ![]() His dawning insight had to do with a belief that each and every democratic self was vast and contradictory, as variegated as the nation itself, and so the poet had to awaken the nation, to bring Americans out of their lethargy of discrimination and hierarchy to understand that, within themselves, they potentially contained-in fact potentially were-everyone else. So Whitman in these early notes identifies the poles of human possibility-the spectrum his capacious poetic voice would have to cover-as it appeared to him at mid-nineteenth century: from slave to master of slaves. This is the beginning of Whitman’s attempt to become that impossible representative American voice-the fully representative voice-that speaks not for parties or factions but for everyone in the nation, a voice fluid enough to inhabit the subjectivities of all individuals in the culture. Whitman instead probes for a voice that reconciles the dichotomies, a voice inclusive enough to speak for slave and slavemaster-or that negotiates the distance between the two. ![]() ![]() Breaking into the kind of free-verse lines in which he would cast Leaves of Grass, he offers a wild attempt to voice the full range of selves in his contradictory nation: “I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves,” he writes “I am the poet of the body /And I am.” Whitman pauses at this point, then starts again: “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.” This amazing originating moment of Leaves of Grass reveals that at its inception Leaves was not an “abolitionist” work, at least not in the conventional sense of that term, for in abolitionist works the slave is pitted against the demonized slavemaster, and the irresolvable dichotomies of the nation are intensified. There are several places in Whitman’s notebooks from the early 1850s where we can see the original stirrings of “Song of Myself.” One particularly evocative place is in the so-called Talbot Wilson notebook, where Whitman hesitatingly inscribes a whole new kind of speaking. ![]()
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