Iz knjige:

A Political Companion to Walt Whitman. Contributors: John E. Seery - Editor. Publisher: University Press of Kentucky. Place of publication: Lexington, KY.

Publication year: 2011.

CHAPTER 6
Mass Merger: Whitman and
Baudelaire, the Modern Street,
and Democratic Culture
Marshall Berman

WALT WHITMAN AND CHARLES Baudelaire didnt know each others work, and dont muchsound like on
e another. But they share certain deep preoccupations that were shared by very fewother writers in their tim
es. Both addressed their readers in intensely personal and sometimesconfessional voices. Both saw poetry as
an arena for taking existential risks. Both wrote directlyabout sexand got in big trouble for it. In the late tw
entieth century, some of their readersnoticed something else. They anointed both men as poets of the city
who identified deeply withparticular great citiesBaudelaires Paris, Whitmans New Yorkwho called the
m my city, andwrote about them with great depth and passion, as if their cities were part of their own flesh
.Both poets came of age at a time when their cities, but also hundreds of others around the world,were going
through unprecedented, spectacular growth. At first, it seems, Western culture wasntready. Today we routi
nely compare the process of urbanization to a great wave; but in the earlynineteenth century, it seems to hav
e hit people more like a ton of bricks. Virtually overnight, avocabulary of hysterical invective materialized ag
ainst cities and city life. Cities were demonizedeven as they became the matrix for more and more human lif
e. People learned to curse theircities as places that were perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, savage,
extreme, rude,cruel, not to trust. (This torrent of abuse comes from Shakespeares Sonnet 129, a poem nota
bout cities at all.) But Western culture gradually adapted to city life, and Whitman andBaudelaire played cru
cial roles in this collective adaptation. They conceived and dedicated

-149-

themselves to a new historical task: the task of making people feel at home in the modern city.
We can see this clearly in one of Whitmans classic poems, Mannahatta, a visionary celebration of New
York. The poem, twenty-four lines long, has an arresting pattern of motion. For three-quarters of the poem,
Whitmans horizon gradually expands in an ever-wider panorama, as if he were a tourist guide unfolding a
vast cityscape from a balloon; then, for the final fourth, the horizon abruptly contracts to street and ground
level, and the poem ends. The panorama features nests of water-bays, tall and wonderful spires,
numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and
money-brokers, vehiclesBroadwaythe womenthe shops and shows; a great array of people, the
manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-skinned sailors, the mechanics of the city, the masters, well-

formed, beautiful faces, looking you straight in the eyes; human collectives, immigrants arriving, fifteen or
twenty thousand in a week, parades, processions, bugles playing, flags flying, drums beating. Whitman
shows us a sensibility that is large enough and generous enough to embrace them all. Then he offers a
political judgment on the people of New York, and on what makes this people lovely: The free city! no
slaves! no owners of slaves (my italics). In the poems last two lines, he writes from ground level, where
real people are, and real human encounters happen. Here he insists that sexual feeling is loves core:
The city of such women, I am mad to be with them!
I will return after death to be with them!
The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I
often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!
Whitmans short poem City of Orgies has a similar arc: a tourist guides inventory of Manhattans great
sites, then a jump-cut to everyday life in the street. What makes a city great? the poet asks. Not these, the
formidable official sites, but rather this:
your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own
What makes a city great, Whitman believes, is the power to create that
-150flash, to generate instants of intimacy between strangers, whether or not the flash leadsanywhere beyond its
elf. Belonging to a city means being awake and responsive to everybodybecause anyone in the crowd coul
d turn out to be the one for you, even if only for an instant.Once we have taken Whitman to heart, we reali
ze that the true meaning of sexual liberation isthe liberation of sexual fantasy. The glory of great cities is t
he liberation of millions of peoplesfantasy lives, an environment where everybody in the crowd can imagine
themselves naked andintimate with everybody else. From now on, our most powerful aphrodisiac may be an
ordinarywalk on BroadwayNew Yorks or any other citys Broadwayor on any of the thousands of cit
ystreets that feed it. (Even on Old Broadway, a street one block long just off West 125th.) Thanksto Whitm
an, we will feel the continuity between what we do when we sleep together and what wecan do in public as ci
tizens on a democratic street.
If we turn from Whitmans city to Baudelaires, we will recognize common themes right away.Above all, ther
e is that flash of eyes, which is a social as much as a personal event, springing fromthe modern citys capacit
y to generate sparks of life between the millions of strangers in itscrowds. In Baudelaires short poem A une
passante,1 the narrator in the midst of a Parisiancrowd passes a woman in mourning. Her presence thrills h

im: Lovely fugitive whose glance hasbrought me back to life. They make the very briefest eye contact, then
they pass on; themomentum of the crowd that brought them together soon propels them in different directi
ons,away. Yet he is certain she is someone whom I might have loved, and certain she knows andmourns hi
m, even as he mourns her. Baudelaire sees, with remarkable clarity, how connectionbetween human beings i
s fraught with emotional complexity. The subject reaches out, but alsopulls away, often without knowing wh
at it is doing; the rapturous flash of love can flip into atragic stab of pain.
Baudelaires prose poem Crowds,2 written in 1861 as an op-ed piece for a Parisian newspaper,is the greates
t one page ever written on people in crowds on streets. He is writing for readers whothemselves are the crow
d; as a writer for a newspaper audience (as he was in his last decade), sois he. This poem, more than most by
Baudelaire, has a very clear message: Do It! His readersshould embrace the crowd they are, should go with t
he flow. To be a serious and thoughtfulstroller, he says, is to take a bath of multitude. We should imagin
e other people as a stream ofwarm water,
-151smooth and comforting; we can take our clothes off and relax with them. A bath isnt meant tolast forever; w
e can end it when we want. But its possible to go deeper, the poet says: we shouldtry to marry the crowd.
This experience of human merging is much more deeply engaging:being both oneself and someone else, a
dopting every profession, every joy, every misery, asones own. This can bring immense erotic and psychic r
ewards: unique intoxication, universalcommunion, feverish delights of which the selfish will be eternall
y deprived.
What people call love is awfully small, awfully restricted, and awfully weak,
compared with that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution that gives itself
totally, poetry and charity, to the unexpected that appears, to the unknown
that passes by.
Marrying the crowd wont dispel the shadows and the sadness of human lifeshe whom I mighthave loved
but it can sublimate them, absorb them into a wider light that at once enlarges andenvelops the whole hori
zon of being.
Baudelaire and Whitman sing in very different registers. But there is one crucial theme that theyshare, and t
hat they celebrate: let us call it mass merger. Among the prime realities of modernlife are rapid urban growt
h and enormous, noisy crowds of people. Many people are horrified bythe sharp contrasts, the density, the d
irt, the smells, the noise. For more than two hundred years,this sense of primal horror of the urban crowd
Edmund Burke, in his polemic against theFrench Revolution, called that crowd the swinish multitude
has inspired antidemocraticmovements around the world. Ironically, this loathing has been shared by many

supporters ofdemocracy. It is expressed, for example, in what Americans could call the Jefferson tradition:t
hey see the mobs of great cities as incubators of despotism; they think democracy will thriveonly if brakes
can be put on urban growth, and citizens can be kept spread out on homesteadingfamily farms. (Of course, i
n order to keep these free people on the farm, and keep them frommoving to the city, we would need a polic
e state; but never mind.) But whether we like it or not,the move to cities has become the prime demographic
arc in modern times. And any livingdemocratic culture is going to have to be rooted in that urban crowd. W
alt Whitman and CharlesBaudelaire see the urban crowd as a source of vitality, of enchantm
ent, of sexual radiance, a vistaof possibilities for the expansion
-152of the self. One of the most sophisticated antidemocratic thinkers of the nineteenth century, thephilosophe
r Sren Kierkegaard, often called the first existentialist, says, The crowd is alwaysan untruth. Im sure ne
ither Whitman nor Baudelaire ever heard of Kierkegaard. But if we listenhard, we will hear a way in which t
heir writing is in dialogue with him. Kierkegaard wantseveryone to become what he isan individual. But
in order to protect his individuality, he mustmake a stand against the crowd.3 Our poets believe in the ind
ividual just as much asKierkegaard does. But they believe that being on the street, being in the crowd, can e
nlarge
individuals, can deepen them, can make them more profoundly the people they are. Thisaffirmative vision o
f the individual in the crowd makes them pioneers of a democratic culturethat is still urgent and vital today.

Epilogue
When I read Jane Jacobss beautiful romance of the street, The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities,4 no
t quite half a century ago, I felt instantly that she was right about city life,but also that she had reduced the h
orizon of her vision, had censored herself in a way that madeher appear less profoundly right than she was.
Once a reader is won over by the essential truth ofJacobss world-picture, its easy to ask, Whats wrong with
this picture? Whats she leaving out?If we think of Whitman, we can see he was one of her primal sources, a
nd a primary source of herexistential depth, whether she knew it or not. Once we put Whitman in the mix, it
s easy to seewhat she leaves out: she leaves out sex. Yet any street life as thick and richly interactive as theo
ne Jacobs celebrates has got to be sexy, saturated with sexual fantasy and feeling, lit up with theexperience I
call mass merger. Her book evokes the Hollywood movies I grew up on, ruled byThe Code, when studios
were forbidden to show couples, even married couples, sleepingtogether. (That Code was finally coming apa
rt just when her book came out.) If we put thecensored footage back on the screen, if we let Sonnet 129 run t
hrough those lively streets, we willget a model of the city that will still be profoundly Jacobean, but more del
icious, more wild, moredisruptive and anarchic in its everyday (and its every-night) life. Can modern streets

support thissexy footage, can they sustain this overflowing life, without coming apart? Fifty years after Deat
hand Life, I think its pretty clear, as it was clear to my generation fifty years ago, that this is a sillyquestion:

-153-

Yes, my dears, they can. Whitman and Baudelaire could have told us! As a matter of fact, they didtell us. In t
he words of Janet, Queen of the Bunny Planet,5They were there all along. Theyurged us to place our faith i
n the city. They offered us a vision of the city street that can embraceus all, can come through whatever trou
bles open sexuality may open up, and can make all of usout there feel we are more alive.

Notes
1. Les fleurs du mal (1857), trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), #95, 275f;97f.

2. Spleen de Paris (1868), trans. Edward Kaplan as The Parisian Prowler (Athens: University ofGeorgia Pre
ss, 1989), #12, 21f.

3. That Individual, in Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (1956;New York:
Plume, 1975), 94100.

4. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). I discussJacobs extensiv
ely in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York:Viking Penguin, 1988).

5. Voyage to the Bunny Planet, by Rosemary Wells, 3 vols. (New York: Dial, 1992). Voyage is oneof the alltime great childrens books, in the vein of Maurice Sendaks Where the Wild ThingsAre. Available at all chil
drens bookstores, it is a remarkable cure for many modes of adultmelancholy.

-154-

Iz knjige

Walt Whitman. Contributors: David S. Reynolds - Author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of publication: New York. Publication year: 2005.

Two
POPULAR CULTURE,
CITY LIFE, AND POLITICS
REMEMBER, WHITMAN ONCE SAID, THE BOOK [Leaves of Grass] arose out of my life inBrooklyn an
d New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with anintimacy, an eagerness,
an abandon, probably never equalled. 1 He produced what he called theidiomatic book of my land by liste

ning attentively to his land's many idioms. 2 As the ultimatedemocrat, Whitman wanted his verse to reflect p
opular tastes, urban experience, and democraticpolitics. At the same time, he saw clearly the deficiencies of
each. Poetry was Whitman's way oftransforming images from everyday life so that readers would discover A
merica's highestpotential. If, as he once said, his poetry was a great mirror or reflector of society, it was a
mirror in which America saw itself artistically improved.

Before producing the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Whitman had been immersed for over a dozen yearsin the roug
h-and-tumble world of New York journalism. As a writer and an editor for various

-24-

Manhattan and Brooklyn newspapers, he had participated in the cultural life of these cities.
The temperance movement, for example, was a rich source of imagery to him. Responding to theastounding
rate of alcohol consumption in America, the Washingtonian temperance movementarose during the early 18
40s. Whitman wrote a number of temperance works as a youngjournalist. The longest, the novel Franklin E
vans (1842), has no less than four different plotsthat illustrate the dire effects of alcohol on family life. The
most popular work that Whitmanwrote during his lifetime, Franklin Evans, issued in cheap format as a twel
ve-cent pamphletnovel, sold some twenty thousand copies. It was, in Whitman's italicized words, written f
or themass. 3
How serious was Whitman about temperance? In old age he dismissed Franklin Evans asdamned rotrot
of the very worst sort and joked that he wrote it in three days while he wasdrunk. 4 Still, temperance had a f
ormative influence on him. He knew the damage excessivedrinking could cause by witnessing his own famil
y probably his father and certainly his brotherAndrew. Whitman himself was only a moderate drinker for
most of his life.
He imported the images and attitudes of temperance into his poetry, associating drunkards withimpure or d
isgusting things. A drunkard's breath, he wrote in A Hand-Mirror;unwholesome eater's face, venereale
e's flesh,/Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour andcankerous,/Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged wit
h abomination. 5 In Song of the Open Roadhe declared that no rumdrinker or venereal taint is permitted
here.
He also transformed imagery from another popular genre of his time: sensational literature.During the 1830
s and '40s a revolution in print technology occurred. The cheaply producedpenny
-25-

newspaper, replacing the stodgy six-penny newspaper of the past, featured a new kind ofjournalism that was
populist, readable, and, above all, sensational. More printing advancesbrought inexpensive pamphlet novels
that were hawked on streets and in railway stations.Popular writers of pulp novels such as George Lippard,
Joseph Holt Ingraham, and GeorgeThompson tried to outdo each other in the amount of sex and gore they c
ould put into theirnovels, many of which dripped with blood.
Whitman was aware of the growing popularity of sensational literature. As a young journalist, hewrote sensa
tional poems and stories for newspapers. Among them was The Inca's Daughter, inwhich an Inca maid is
tortured on the rack and then stabs herself with a poisoned arrow; TheSpanish Lady, whose aristocratic h
eroine is stabbed by one whose trade is blood and crime; 6and Richard Parker's Widow, in which a madd
ened woman disinters her executed husband'scoffin and embraces the corpse. In the newspapers he edited,
he sometimes catered to populartaste by printing horrid accounts of crimes and accidents.
In a newspaper article he noted the great popularity of blood and thunder romances withalliterative titles a
nd plots of startling interest, written for the many readers who requirestrong contrasts, broad effects and
the fiercest kind of 'intense' writing generally. He concededthat such writing was a power in the land, not
without great significance in its way, and verydeserving of more careful consideration than has hitherto bee
n accorded it. 7
A power in the land indeed, but, he finally decided, not a power for good. He eventuallyrecognized the limita
tions of these narratives, which he believed had little redeeming literary ormoral value. To counteract what
he saw as the deleterious effects of popular sensationalliterature he included in his poems sensational image
s
-26such as a tale of a bloody battle in Texas followed by one of a skirmish at sea in Song of Myself 8that gain
ed dignity when rendered in Whitman's flowing, biblical rhythms and whenjuxtaposed with refreshing natur
e images.
A similarly ameliorative strategy governs his treatment of city life in Leaves of Grass. Whitmanlived in a per
iod of rapid urbanization. The American city as he knew it was in many respectsdisagreeable. In the days bef
ore asphalt, the ill-lit streets of Manhattan were mostly unpaved. AsWhitman often complained, they becam
e mud sinks in the winter and dust bowls in the summer.Since sewage was primitive, garbage and slops wer
e tossed into the streets, providing a feast forroaming hogs, then the most effective means of waste disposal.
Cows were regularly herded uppublic avenues to graze in outlying farm areas. Since police forces were not y
et well organized,the crime rate was high in Manhattan, which Whitman called one of the most crimehauntedand dangerous cities in all of Christendom. 9

Whitman complained in newspaper articles that even his relatively clean home city, Brooklyn,had problems
similar to Manhattan's. Since the city's drinking water still came from publicpumps, Whitman feared Brookl
ynites were being slowly poisoned:
Imagine all the accumulations of filth in a great citynot merely the slops androttenness thrown in the stree
ts and byways, but the numberless privies, cess-pools,sinks and gulches of abominationthe unnameab
le and unmeasurable dirt that isever, ever filtered into the earth through its myriad pores, and which as sure
ly finds itsway into the neighborhood pump-water, as that a drop of poison put in one part of thevascular sy
stem, gets into the whole system. 10
-27As for street animals, Brooklyn featured an even greater variety than Manhattan, since it was athoroughfare
to the farms on nearby Long Island. The problem provoked this outburst byWhitman in the Brooklyn Eveni
ng Star: Our city is literally overrun with swine, outraging alldecency, and foraging upon every species of e
atables within their reach. Hogs, Dogs and Cowsshould be banished from our streets. 11
The city that appears in Whitman's poetry is not the squalid, perilous place he lamented in hisjournalism. In
his most famous urban poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he views both Brooklynand Manhattan from the i
mproving distance of a ferryboat that runs between them. The poemcleanses the city through distancing and
through refreshing nature imagery. Manhattan is notthe filthy, chaotic Gomorrah of Whitman's journalis
m but rather stately and admirablemast-hemm'd Manhattan. 12 Brooklyn is not the hoginfested, crowded
city of his editorials but ratherthe city of beautiful hills viewed from the sparkling river on a sunlit afterno
on.
If in his journalism he often lamented the city's filth and crime, in Song of Myself he turned toits dazzle an
d show: The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of thepromenaders. In his poetry he cal
led New York City Mannahatta, an ennobling NativeAmerican word that he called a choice aboriginal na
me, with marvelous beauty, meaning. Hispoem Mannahatta delectates in the name while it minimizes le
ss admirable features of thecity.
Just as he poeticized the city, so he improved upon the denizens of the city streets. He presentedflattering p
ortraits of two types of urban males: the b'hoy (or Bowery Boy), and the rough.When Whitman in Son
g of Myself describes himself as Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating,drinking, and breeding, he
-28-

is not giving an accurate account of himself. In real life, Whitman was, ordinarily, placid. He wasnot known
for overindulgence in eating, drinking. As for breeding, he did not have children.
If the persona's unrestrained machismo says little about Whitman, it says a lot about theroistering types he
observed on city streets. The b'hoy was typically a butcher or other workerwho spent after-hours running t
o fires with engines, going on target excursions, or promenadingon the Bowery with his g'hal. The b'hoy cli
pped his hair short in back, kept his long sidelocksheavily greased with soap (hence his sobriquet soaplocks), and perched a stovepipe hatjauntily on his head. He always had a cigar or chaw of tobacco in his mo
uth. When featured as acharacter in popular plays and novels as Mose or Sikesey, the b'hoy became a la
rger-than-lifeAmerican figure who was irrepressibly pugnacious and given to violent escapades.
As a New Yorker who fraternized with common people, Whitman mingled with the workers whomade up th
e b'hoy population. He later recalled going to plays on the Bowery, and the youngship-builders, cartmen, b
utchers, firemen (the old-time 'soap-lock' or exaggerated 'Mose' or'Sikesey,' of Chanfrau's plays,) they, too,
were always to be seen in these audiences, racy of theEast River and the Dry Dock. 13 In his book on languag
e, An American Primer, he recordedseveral slang expressions used by the New York Bowery Boy and prais
ed the splendid andrugged characters that are forming among these states, or have already formed, in th
e cities,the firemen of Mannahatta, and the target excursionist, and Bowery Boy. 14
One of his goals as a poet was to capture the vitality and defiance of the b'hoy:
-29The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his ownright, Wicked rather than
virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart,relishing well his steak, Unrequited love or a sligh
t cutting him worse than sharp steelcuts, First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye, to sail a skiff, to sing
a song or playon the banjo, Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with smallpox over alllatherers, A
nd those well-tann'd to those that keep out of the sun. 15
His whole persona in Leaves of Grasswicked rather than conventionally virtuous, free, smart,prone to sla
ng and vigorous outburstsreflects the b'hoy culture. One early reviewer opined thathis poems reflected th
e extravagance, coarseness, and general 'loudness' of Bowery boys, withalso their candor and acceptance of
the body. Another generalized, He is the 'Bowery Bhoy' inliterature. 16
Another street group Whitman watched with interest was variously called the roughs, rowdies, or loafe
rs, a distinct class of gang members and street loungers who roved throughMan-hattan's poorer districts a
nd often instigated riots. Rival companies of roughs formed gangswith names like the Plug Uglies, the Roac
h Guards, the Shirt Tails, the Dead Rabbits.

Whitman's poems presented an improved version of street types whose tendencies to violenceand vulgarity
he frowned upon. Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour, he wrote in 1857in the Brooklyn Daily Ti
mes. The revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant. 17RowdyismRampant was the title of an alarmed piec
e in which he denounced the law-defying loafers whomake the fights,
-30and disturb the public peace; he prophesied that some day decent folks will take the matter intotheir own
hands and put down, with a strong will, this rum-swilling, rampant set of rowdies androughs. 18
He presented an improved version of rowdies and loafers in his poetry. Already a nonchalantbreed, silently
emerging, appears on the streets, he wrote in one poem, describing the type inanother poem as Arrogant,
masculine, naive, rowdyish/[] Attitudes lithe and erect, costumefree, neck open, of slow movement on foot
. 19 In a draft of another poem he wrote that he alonesang the young man of Mannahatta, the celebrated ro
ugh. 20
Early reviewers of Leaves of Grass saw the link between the poet and New York street culture.The very first
review placed Whitman in the class of society sometimes irreverently styled'loafers.' 21 The second review li
kewise called Whitman a perfect loafer, though a thoughtful,amiable, able one. 22 The decorous James Rus
sell Lowell declared, Whitman is a rowdy, a NewYork tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of
cab drivers! 23
Some, however, realized that Whitman was a rough with a difference. Charles Eliot Norton calledhim in a re
view a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy. 24 Thosewho saw Whitman's inf
usion of a philosophical, contemplative element into street typesaccurately gauged his poetic purpose. Appal
led by squalid forms of urban loafing, he outlinednew forms of loafing in his poems. Walt Whitman, an Am
erican, one of the roughs, akosmosthis famous self-description in Song of Myself uplifts the rough by pl
acing himbetween words that radiate patriotism (an American) and mysticism (a kosmos). 25 Purposelyin
his poems Whitman shuttled back and forth between the grimy and the spiritual with the aimof cleansing th
e quotidian types that sometimes disturbed him.
-31The same recuperative process that governed his poetic treatment of popular literature and citylife character
ized his depiction of politics. (...)