Walt Whitman when science and mysticism collide

Whitman was the first important American poet to celebrate science. He rejected the Romantic notion that science despoils the virgin purity of nature and preys on the poetic imagination. But Whitman was a false paladin. He violated the spirit of science the better to gratify his cosmic affirmations and mystical worldview. Despite his putative defense of science, Whitman was imbued with a Romantic mentality.

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Walt Whitman was the first important American poet to extol science. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass, his epochal volume, came out, the Romantic aversion to science still chafed poetic sensibilities. Through its invasive procedures, the standard indictment read, science violated Nature's pristine wholeness, disfiguring the beauty of natural forms. "We murder to dissect," carped Wordsworth. Edgar Allan Poe depicted science as a vulture preying on the heart and the imagination. With its voracious appetite for analysis, it eviscerated myth, wonder, spontaneity, reverie, and awe.

Whitman dismissed the charges as anachronistic poppycock. He raised a toast: "Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!" Geologist, chemist, surgeon, mathematician, cartographer, lexicographer, the whole menagerie of exact demonstrators were welcome in his poetic parlor: "Gentlemen, I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you. Your facts are useful and real." Useful, we shall see, was the operative word.

Though short on expertise, Whitman had a wide-ranging interest in contemporary science--astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, including evolution. He was an avid, if unsystematic, reader of popular books and magazine articles on science. As newspaper editor in the 1 840s and 1 850s, he supported scientific enterprises. Later, when The Origin of Species had become a cause celebre, the Good Grey Poet plumped for Darwinism: "It is needed as a counterpoise to widely prevailing and unspeakably tenacious, enfeebling superstitions. With its advent, the world of erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually bettered and broadened in its speculations."

These superstitions were nourished by ecclesiastical institutions, for which the poet had meager respect. From his father, an admirer of Thomas Paine, Whitman had imbibed anti-clerical sentiments. He scoffed at the disparate creeds of religions, each claiming to see the truth through the colored lenses of its own dogmatism. Though scarcely an agnostic, he liked the brash way Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Huxley twitted the religious establishment: "It does seem, he remarked, "as if Ingersoll and Huxley without any others could unhorse the whole Christian giant." As prophet of pantheistic mysticism, Whitman may have harbored similar aspirations even though he sometimes sounds like a boisterous Jesus: "0 despairer, here is my neck, / By God! You shall nor go down! Hang your whole weight on me." Whitman thought science could dear the way for spiritual regeneration by softening hidebound creeds, fables, and traditions.

Leaves of Grass bristles with allusions to science. Now, meteorology ("I" is the rain):

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed,
  altogether changed,
And yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust layers of the globe.

Now, conservation of energy:

Myself discharging my exerementirious body to be burned,
Or tendered to powder, or buried,
My voided body nothing mote to me, returning to the
  purifications,
Further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

And stellar life cycles:

The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns, Swelling, collapsing, ending serving their longer, shorter use.

These lyrical evocations of natural processes show that a scientific outlook needn't stifle the imagination nor swaddle the spirit.

Had Whitman been content to infuse the formulations of scientific discourse with the finer breath of poetry, he would have merited the epithet Poet of Science, the title of a study by Whitmanite Joseph Beaver. With a different temperament and background, he might have been a modern Lucretius, the great Roman poet of materialism. As it stands, Beaver's laudatory epithet is deceptive. Despite the hurrahs, Whitman relegated science to the role of data collector for a higher muse. While science was a useful antidote to superstition, it couldn't penetrate the spiritual substratum of reality. Scientific facts, Whitman believed, had esoteric ramifications best elucidated by sages, seers, and philosopherpoets: "The highest and subtlest and broadest truths of modern science wait for their true assignment and last vivid flashes of light through meraphysicians. The poets of the cosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and stratagems to first principles."

Properly illuminated, the lore of science corroborated Whitman's eclectic mysticism, grounded, he thought, in the first principles. Scientists may have been bemused by his metaphysical extrapolations. Evolution, both cosmic and Darwinian, was constrained by an idiosyncratic anthropic principle: