Leaves of Grass Buy Now

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul."

Like the shamans of all archaic societies, Walt Whitman speaks a secret language of reptiles and birds and what comes out of him is purely electric. In 1855, he writes, "I SING the body electric." In this opening line, he describes the poem's aim; he says he is going to "charge them [us!] full with the charge of the soul." What he means is that there is an energy-charge in the soul, an electromagnetic vibration, that is not only psychic energy, but physical energy too, energy pulsating with Light in the living cells, glands, tissues, and atoms of our physical bodies. In section four of "Body Electric," moreover, he says: "I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea" (LG, 253). A few lines later, he writes about the female body: "A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot," and he follows with this beautiful metaphor: the "Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn" (LG, 253). This is one of the loveliest passages in American poetry. He has re-created language to reveal the union of opposites. Not only does he penetrate the psychoid barrier (the "hard coal and rocks and solid bed of the sea") but he sees the same field of psychophysical energy at play in the galaxy whirling around his head, as in his poem "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer." While looking up in the "mystical night air... in perfect silence at the stars" (LG, 410), he says in a sacred manner: "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars" (LG, 217). The idea that the cosmos is a universal sea of pulsating energy in which we are all swimming as in a sea of universal Delight is something Whitman--not to mention his shaman-brothers Herman Melville and William Blake--was very well aware of. "I CELEBRATE myself and sing myself," he says in "Song of Myself" "And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (LG, 188). Here, he is basically saying that the energy inside each atom of his body is charged with an electrical current that is active inside each of us, and that the atoms that make up his body are the atoms that make up our bodies as well--that there is no distinction, no separation; we are all one; one sea of universal intelligence. Thus, the sea in which Whitman swims is in essence the same water in which we swim, when we read him, and the one who can tap into this universal sea will benefit most from his spiritual bounty. In my book I have referred to Walt Whitman as a shaman and I suggest that he was a great medicine man too. Whitman is the first American poet to make a breakthrough for the field of depth-psychology to a concept of the soul where the soul is not seen as above the body or the body above the soul; each are viewed as one. This unity of the body and soul are captured most beautifully in his notion of spiritual democracy. This is perhaps the most important spiritual document in the history of humanity. Leaves of Grass is a celebration of cosmic consciousness and the Ecstasy that comes through the unification of the opposites. It spans the period from Whitman's initiation by the Fierce Wrestler in his 1847 Notebook to his final leave-taking poems in old age, "Passage to India," "Sands at Seventy," and "Good-Bye my Fancy."

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