Free Upstream by Mary Oliver

mystical cloud. Clearly his idea of paradise was here—this hour and this place. And yet he was, in his way, just as the mystic is, a man of difference—a man apart.
    James’s other marks of distinction concerning the mystical experience are as follows, and also feel much in accord with the emanations of
Leaves of Grass
: that mystical states “are illuminations, revelations . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time”; that such a state “cannot be sustained for long”; and that the mystic feels “as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
    Whitman published
Leaves of Grass
in 1855, twelve poems and a prologue which unite into a single work. For the rest of his writing life Whitman wrote no other verse but fed it into that ever-expanding book—that is, all the work of his “after life” was refinement, addition, inculcation. Except in the hope of better effect, he took up no new subjects, nor altered the rhapsodic tenor ofhis voice, nor denied any effort of catalog, rhetoric, eroticism, nor trimmed his cadence, nor muted his thunder or his sweetness. His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.
    That his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and that their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection, is perhaps another clue to the origin of Whitman’s power and purpose, and to the weight of the task. If it is true that he experienced a mystical state, or even stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion, and James is right, then he was both blessed and burdened—for he could make no adequate report of it. He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And
Leaves of Grass
is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitman’s persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.
2.
    The prose “Preface” that stands before the poems is wide-ranging and pontifical. Emerson lives here in both thought and word; actual phrases taken from Emerson’s essays “The American Scholar” and “The Poet” are nailed down as Whitman’s own. Whitman claims for his work the physical landscape and spiritual territory of America; in so doing he turns, like Emerson, from the traditions of Europe. He claims also, for the poet, a mental undertaking that is vast and romantic, and a seriousness that is close to divine.
    _______
    The twelve poems of the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass
consist of one huge and gleaming Alp followed by a relaxed undulation of easily surmountable descending foothills. The initial poem, “Song of Myself” (sixty-two pages * ), is the longest and the most critical. It is the Alp. If the reader can “stay with” this extended passage, hehas made a passage indeed. The major demands of the poem are here established, the first and essential lesson given in the first half-dozen lines:
    I celebrate myself,
    And what I assume you shall assume,
    For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
    I loafe and invite my soul,
    I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass. (p. 27)
    In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words; example, metaphor, narrative,