Whitman preached empathy, concord in discord, oneness in diversity. Psychic
intercourse with everything, everybody —plus sensual union (when he could get
it)—is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly, over and over and over, in
the prefaces and the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also
dictated his poetry’s form and tone. Whitman’s poems are a psychic technology
for chanting the reader into a new state of being (a microcosm of the “new
order” envisaged for the polity); they are functional, like mantras—ways of
transmitting charges of energy. The repetition, the bombastic cadence, the
run-on lines, and the pushy diction are a rush of secular afflatus, meant to get
readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to that height where they can
identify with the past and with the community of American desire. But this
message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament
now.
