October Full Moon On The Mississippi: Walt Whitman Haunts The Midwest
The Midwest More Open to Evolutionary
Ideas
Moving the U.S. Capital to
the Midwest
Whitman and the Prairies
Whitman's View of the
Mississippi
Midwest Art
Whitman's Ideas of Language
Local Laws of Nature and Cosmos
Challenge to Future Writers
I have been reading a number of midwestern writers recently, which
has reminded me of the research I have been doing on Walt Whitman and his
uncanny predictions about the midwest.
The Midwest More Open to Evolutionary
Ideas.
A number of American Transcendentalist writers discovered the midwest a
century ago, then thought of as the "west," a kind of vast wilderness of
grass, trees, and rivers which nevertheless held some mysterious potential
for the country, they felt. Emerson came on midwest lecture tours, even
crossing the Mississippi on foot over the ice, after his friend, Bronson
Alcott, one of the founders of the New England Transcendentalist group
and father of Louisa May Alcott, reported great receptivity among the people.
Alcott said that this area most typified the American culture: "In the
West people think more independently than in the East. The East is more
learned perhaps, but the West is doing more for civilization. In the West
people are more ready to listen to the Diviner minds" (Dubuque Daily News,
Dec. 1, 1872). Alcott was not being egotistical in thinking of himself
and Emerson as "diviner minds," for Alcott simply felt they were speaking
out for all diviner minds, every American being part of the Divine Mind.
Their mission, in their lectures and "conversations," was to wake up that
spiritual potential latent in every citizen. Their tours and ideas about
spiritual evolution for everyone were especially successful in this part
of the country.
Moving the U.S. Capital to
the Midwest.
Whitman was a later Transcendental writer who had similar feelings on visiting
the midwest. Although he was an ecstatic New Yorker in his youth, he came
to believe the future of the country lay in the "west." He predicted in
1870,
"In a few years the dominion-heart of America will be far inland, toward
the West. Our future national capital may not be where the present one
is. It is possible, nay likely, that in less than fifty years, it will
migrate a thousand or two miles, will be re-founded, and everything belonging
to it made on a different plan, original, far more superb. The main social,
political, spine-character of the States will probably run along the Ohio,
Missouri, and Mississippi rivers, and west and north of them, including
Canada" (Democratic Vistas 951-2).
When he travelled through the midwest in 1879, he said, "What most
impress'd me, and will longer remain with me, are these same prairies.
Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my senses--the
esthetic one most of all--they silently and broadly unfolded. Even their
simplest statistics are sublime" (Specimen Days 864).
Whitman and The Prairies.
The prairies, Whitman felt, more than Niagara, Yosemite, or any stunning
scenery, represented North America's "characteristic landscape." It was
in the "broad expanses of living green" he found "that vast Something,
stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in
these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams."
This "favor'd central area...seems fated to be the home both of what I
would call America's distinctive ideas and distinctive realities" (Specimen
Days 853-4).
Whitman's View of the
Mississippi.
The "most important stream on the globe" to Whitman was the Mississippi
and its tributaries. The Nile, the Amazon, the Danube, the rivers of China,
were nothing to the part in history the Mississippi and its valley would
play: "Its valley, or reach, is rapidly concentrating the political power
of the American Union. One almost thinks it is the Union--or soon will
be" (Specimen Days 865).
The October nights he spent by the river were magic. "Wonderfully fine,
with the full harvest moon, dazzling and silvery," he wrote. "I have haunted
the river every night lately....I hear the slight ripples, the air is fresh
and cool, and the view, up or down, wonderfully clear in the moonlight....The
cool night air, all the influences, the silence, with those far-off eternal
stars, do me good."
Midwest Art.
But would the day ever come, Whitman asked, when "The pure breath, primitiveness,
boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy and power,
of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements
of these prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri
rivers" ever "appear in and in some sort form a standard for our poetry
and art?" He thought American artists should produce "a great throbbing,
vital, imaginative work, or series of works" with the Mississippi and the
prairies as the "stage of the New World" on which "America's humanity"
could furnish the "ideal" for the "eclaircissement" (enlightenment) of
"Time's hitherto drama of war, romance, and evolution" (Specimen Days 867).
Whitman's Ideas of Language.
Whitman believed in the power of language to change things. "Names are
magic...one word can pour such a flood through the soul...a delicate something
there is in the right name--an undemonstrable nourishment that exhilarates
the soul" (An American Primer). Words were so powerful that merely to say
the native place names could bring the country together when he sang
Chants of the prairies,
Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea,
Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,
Chants going forth from the centre of Kansas, and thence equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.
Local Laws of Nature and Cosmos.
Art should get us in touch with the deepest local roots of nature which
then could be connected with the cosmos: "...there is a secret (in Nature).
This something is rooted in the invisible roots, the profoundest meanings
of that place...." The artist must "absorb and again effuse it, uttering
words and products as from its midst, and (carry) it into highest regions...."
(Democratic Vistas 490).
Challenge to Future Writers.
But Whitman believed the fulfillment of his dreams for a spiritual democracy
in America where every citizen could unfold his or her complete Self, as
he showed us could be done in "Song of Myself," lay in the future, and
that other writers would write about it:
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before
known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.
I admit I am haunted by Whitman's prophesy. Perhaps he was off by a
few years, but I myself have seen artists and families fleeing both coasts
to settle on the quieter prairies that he found so open, so unconfined,
so appropriate for a new capital, a new art, and a new civilization springing
up around the spine of the Mississippi.
--Susan Setzer, Contributing Editor (reprinted in part from Embroidered
Horizons, An Anthology of Poetry and Art, ed. Victor Tichy, 1991) ©Susan
Setzer 1991
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