The Two Personas of Walt Whitman as Seen in “So Long!” Molly Epps

As a result of being crowned the “Great American Poet”, Walt Whitman’s poetry voice is not only familiar to Western scholars, but almost instantly recognizable for almost every American English scholar. However, what if we were to assert the claim that when we recognize Whitman’s voice in a piece of writing, we’re actually recognizing two distinct personas, two different voices? It’s easy to pick these voices apart in several of Whitman’s poems, but for this blog post, I’ll be using “So Long!”, as I think there are several instances in which each voice has a few lines to come through clearly.

Whitman is famous for his commanding, “God-like” persona, most easily identifiable in his most famous piece of work, “Song of Myself”, as he details taking on the traumas of several marginalized peoples and states lists of his beliefs with the utmost authority; his beliefs should be our beliefs too, if we want a happy, productive country. Whitman’s God-persona presents itself in a similar fashion in “So Long!”, seen here in lines 17-25:

“I announce natural persons to arise;  

I announce justice triumphant;  

I announce uncompromising liberty and equality;  

I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride.

I announce that the identity of These States is a single identity only;  

I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble;  

I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics of the earth insignificant.  

I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d;  

I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.”

In this quote, it’s easy to recognize some key characteristics of one of Whitman’s voices that we’ve seen before. To use “Song of Myself” as an example again, we get the same long list of first-person, omniscient, slightly eerie commands, repeated in the same fashion over and over. This specific technique of Whitman’s to create this particular voice in a poem is so effective and tied to Whitman’s writing that we see it replicated in works by other authors. In Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, we can easily identify this same repetition technique and voice style in the third section of the poem; “Howl” is particularly relevant to this phenomenon because Ginsberg references Whitman often in his poetry and has talked at length about Whitman’s influence on both him and his poetry. This suggests that not only is this voice of Whitman’s identifiable to scholars, but to those authors he has influenced as well.

Although this voice of Whitman’s is certainly the louder and more easily identified of the two, it is by no means more important than the other voice we find in Whitman’s poetry. Whitman has moments where, instead of proclaiming things down to his readers from afar, he speaks directly to us, baring his soul in a genuine, intimate way. This voice is, in a way, quieter and more subtle than his outspoken, God-like persona. When he addresses his readers personally, when he includes lines about his admiration for the male body, barely bothering to mask his true sexuality, Whitman takes on a friendly, approachable persona, one that I believe to bear a closer resemblance to Whitman’s personality as a human, and not just as an author. The last sections of “So Long!” give us some of our most up-close contact with Whitman, as seen in lines 55-63:

“Camerado! This is no book;

Who touches this, touches a man;

(Is it night? Are we here alone?)

It is I you hold, and who holds you;

I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.

O how your fingers drowse me!

Your breath falls around me like dew–your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears;

I feel immerged from head to foot

Delicious–enough.”

In the shoes of this persona, Whitman switches gears rapidly from the on-high distance of the God-persona to an in-your-face and in-your bed closeness in this voice. There is the similarity of Whitman’s infatuation with time and the future, but time seems to take a different position in this voice’s mind than the previous. In the first voice I discussed, Whitman seems to look at the future from a political standpoint, telling us of all of the “superb persons” that will walk the streets of the United States and his expectations of how our society ought to operate. In this persona, however, Whitman seems more concentrated on his lasting effect on each personal reader. It is no secret that Whitman had a dream of a pocket-sized Leaves of Grass, designed to be kept close to the heart in the pocket of a jacket. This voice, this persona, is Whitman’s way of achieving this dream no matter the format of his poetry when it is read.

Whitman is famous for his ego, and his more egotistical voice is denoted as the more recognizable and “Whitman”-esque of the two consistently throughout literature. However, Whitman’s quieter, subtler, more intimate voice is the one in which he is attempting to speak to us in the most genuine way he knows how, and deserves an equal amount of study and attention as his God-like, Whitman-from-afar persona.