A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

the lives and talk of working-class people. Out of this welter of influences would come, in July 1855, the slender green volume without its author’s name on the cover, called Leaves of Grass.

      Later that month, Emerson wrote to Whitman saluting him “at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.” In Leaves of Grass, he found “incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 189). Whitman did not see that letter until October, but as soon as he did he sent it to Greeley’s Tribune, where it was published without Emerson’s knowledge or permission. A second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1856, which included Emerson’s letter, again without his permission. By then, Whitman’s publisher, Fowler and Wells, were determined to get maximum effect out of the “emphatic commendation of America’s greatest critic” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 213).

      First notices of Leaves of Grass quickly linked the book to transcendentalism. Emerson’s own letter, as Jerome Loving points out, appears to be an effort to rekindle the movement which had begun to flag. But linking Whitman to the largely New England movement was at best a mixed blessing. With attention came inevitable blowback, including an outraged review by literary powerhouse Rufus Griswold. Leaves of Grass is “a mass of stupid filth,” Griswold wrote. “There was a time when licentiousness laughed at reproval; now it writes essays and delivers lectures” (qtd. in Loving 1999, p. 184).

In 1881, Whitman visited Emerson, now largely lapsed into aphasia, at dinner with Frank Sanborn, Louisa May Alcott, and her father Bronson. What Whitman remembered as a pleasant event was largely overshadowed by efforts of many influential New Englanders to separate the declassé poet and his supposedly shapeless poetry from Emerson’s reputation as New England’s sage. Emerson’s son Edward had been working hard in the years before and after his father’s death in 1882 to smooth out the elder Emerson’s reputation, including his efforts as a poet. “[T]he tide of protest of those days, the so-called transcendental period, ran strong and sometimes carried Mr. Emerson into fantastic and startling imagery and rude expression,” he wrote in 1898. It was that same impulse, Edward thought, that led his father to champion the work of “a young mechanic” and allowed him to overlook “the occasional coarseness which offended him.” Edward was sure his father was annoyed that Whitman published the famous letter of congratulation, and that his father was also disappointed that nothing more came from Whitman’s first great achievement (Emerson 1898, pp. 227–228).

      But in 1855, Emerson had been “happy” to read Whitman’s poetry, “as great power makes us happy.” Whitman hears Emerson’s call to enjoy an original relation with the universe and creates himself, “Walt Whitman,” in the course of his long unspooling lines. The speaker both creates and transcribes ecstatic, visionary experiences, as in “Song of Myself,” where he lay with “you” on a “transparent summer morning”:

      Swiftly arose the spread around me the peace and joy and

      knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the

      earth;

      And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my

      own,

      And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my

      Own,

      And that all the men ever born are also my brothers

      and the women my sisters and lovers,

      And that a kelson of the creation is love.

      (Whitman 1992, p. 192)

      “Song of Myself” is the first and most extensive poetic treatment of the drama of the ecstatic figure who co-creates and inhabits the world around him. What is striking here is not just the connection to Emerson but the connection to transcendentalists and transcendentalism. Like the movement’s lesser-known poets, Whitman recasts an “earth/heaven” dialogue into an earthly drama. Salvation here is simultaneously personal, natural, and relational, transfiguration a human possibility, not the result of divine intervention. At the same time, Whitman’s “I” is not a solitary self, but rather a fluid one, seeking connections with other selves and with the natural world, as poet Mark Doty has recently observed in What Is the Grass. Walt Whitman in My Life (2020).

      Of all the major American poets, Emily Dickinson was the last to live and write in years shared with the remaining survivors of the transcendentalist coterie. Starting with Dickinson, critical language about “legacy” and “influence” begins to shift away from proximity or community connection to something less direct and more subject to judgment and interpretation. From Dickinson onward, biographers and critics begin to use phrases like “hearing echoes of,” or “the tradition of” or “arguing with the work of.” Even more, with her taut and precise use of language and her metrical experiments, Dickinson seems to belong on the modern side of the great divide, an enemy of all that is flaccid and Victorian in writing.

At the same time, Dickinson belonged to her time and culture, which included the work and influence of transcendentalists. She was an attentive reader of Emerson’s essays and poems. She also read the essays, in Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, of the man she called “Preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Abolitionist, transcendentalist, Civil War officer, feminist, essayist, editor, Higginson carried on a twenty-five year correspondence with Dickinson, even if the poet’s works more than occasionally baffled him. Higginson would also preside over a two-part “regularized” edition of Dickinson’s poetry in 1890 and 1891, one that smoothed out her irregular lines and offered titles to her poems (Wineapple 2009). At least through these two figures, Dickinson would have a more than adequate knowledge of transcendentalism, a movement that, for all its Victorian patriarchal attitudes, featured strong women in positions of intellectual leadership, women like Sarah Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody.

      Thematically, too, Dickinson shared and extended transcendentalists’ interests in the movement’s major themes. Many transcendentalists exhibited a common interest in the natural world, as a place of refuge from greed and suffering, a site of visionary experiences, and an arena of the same processes of birth, death, and new life that also mark human life. But Dickinson’s tropes are strikingly vivid, offering both nature’s spectacular sunset and its inevitable fading and decay:

      Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

      Leaping like Leopards to the Sky

      Then at the feet of the old Horizon

      Laying her spotted Face to die

      Stooping as low as the Otter’s Window

      Touching the Roof and tinting the Barn

      Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow

      And the Juggler of Day is gone.

      (Dickinson 1961, p. 28)

      Like the transcendentalists, Dickinson inherited and transformed the language of religion. For them, the path of religious restlessness had already taken their parental generation away from Calvinism toward liberal religion, and now even that religious perspective was inadequate. For Dickinson, living in Calvinist-dominated Amherst, the rebellion that led some from biblical religion to religion as inward drama was staged in her poetry. She found the inherited language simultaneously a burden and a resource:

      Of God we ask one favor,

      That we may be forgiven—

      For what, he is presumed to know—

      The Crime, from us, is hidden—

      Immured the whole of Life

      Within a magic Prison

      We reprimand the Happiness

      That too competes with Heaven.

      (Dickinson 1961, p. 304)

      And like the transcendentalists, Dickinson explored the dimensions and experiences of the inner life. Where Emerson (and the male poets and