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Womblike. Due to the same schism, Whitman never really understood the essential duties of an artist. Real harmony of form is "created from within." It demands "an act of unified being in the artist himself"; the more he enters "into the depths of his own soul, the deeper he [enters] into the meaning of things." And "there [is] no other way of achieving creative insight in place of an external and generalized view." Whitman achieved such insight and such harmony only rarely; notably, Fausset points out, in a sense of death as womblike as his frame of mysticism or the childlike attachment to his mother, which he never broke. Much of the time he substituted, for truly distilled perception, declamations, loud affirmations, a catalogue of beloved objects, and worked in a vocabulary too superficial and meager, and in a formal pattern too loose, to produce anything that can be called true poetry.
His bisexualism also involved Whitman in other difficulties. One can be as hopelessly tethered to flesh by Whitman's sort of "false relish," Fausset observes, as by the Puritanism which he was overreacting against. The errors and half-truths of Whitman's gospel in general are brought out most clearly, Fausset believes, in the celebrations of sex, Children of Adam and Calamus. Whitman "affirmed far too easily the identity of body and spirit . . . and this evasion resulted in an almost complete sacrifice of the distinctively human values to biological forces."
In these poems, Fausset shrewdly remarks, "the faces of men and women in love, the eyes of their intelligence, hardly ever meet." He also finds symptoms of frustrated sexual impulse in Whitman's spurious "primitiveness": "A primitive man may think in his bodily organs. But he would be the last to think about them or to display or exploit them consciously." In short, "to attempt [as Whitman did] to resolve the conflict of self-consciousness and sex by merely sinking to the biological level . . . was to abandon the hope of human integrity without recovering an animal innocence."
War. By 1860 Whitman's work as tne poet-propagandist of democracy (Song of Myself, Song of the Open Road, Children of Adam} was almost finished. Democracy's crisis, the Civil War, was to provide him with the source of his greatest poetry and the great central act of his life. Being a simple man, he liked the glamor of war, liked still more its courage and comradeship. He wrote half-Hitlerish lines on the glories of immolation en masse. He also wrote the maturest poems of his life, possibly the finest that have ever been written about war. And in the hospitals of Washington he lived his gospel of brotherhood more eloquently, truly and bravely than he had ever managed to write about it.
The rest of his life was decline. Like any old soldier, Whitman faced, and faced nobly, a different gambit of heroism: the slow endurance of anticlimax—failing poetic powers, the wrenching death of his mother (for which, at 54, he was as emotionally unprepared as a child), the paralysis which he endured for 20 years of his remaining 27.