3. Whitman’s Line: “Found” in the King James Bible?

Perhaps the likeness which is presented to the mind most strongly is that which exists between our author and the verse divisions of the English Bible, especially in the poetical books

— G. Saintsbury, review of 1870–71 Leaves of Grass (1874)

“Since Leaves of Grass was first published,” observes M. Miller, “readers have often assumed that Whitman developed his line from the Bible.”1 This is a startling observation. Yes, there has been a long-running interest in the more general topic of Whitman and the Bible, but the line only very rarely comes in for specific comment. For example, R. Asselineau in The Evolution of Walt Whitman: An Expanded Edition does remark that Whitman’s long verses “recall above all the Bible,” though without further elaboration or substantiation.2 And I return below to one of the early reviews of Leaves and what is perhaps the most probative perception about Whitman’s line as it relates to the Bible. But in fact such observations specifically about Whitman’s line are not so numerous, and nothing overly detailed, let alone evidence for a continuous and incisive scholarly debate on the topic. In the chapter that follows, then, I propose to undertake such an inquiry, a probing of the proposition that “Whitman developed his line from the Bible.” Once focused on the principal site of textual encounter, the King James Bible, I point to a number of ways in which that Bible may have played a role in shaping Whitman’s ideas about his mature line, its length(s), familiar shapes, contents, and even in places its very staging. Yet as with so much of Whitman’s collaging, the finding is only part of the art. Here, too, what (of the line) Whitman finds is typically worked and reworked such that the finding itself can get obscured and what is made in the process indubitably is made distinctly his own.

The Development of Whitman’s Long Line: A Chronology

Before turning to my topic in earnest, however, I sketch the chronological development of Whitman’s long line as currently understood. The renewed attention paid to the early notebooks and poetry manuscripts—stimulated in part by the recovery in 1995 of some of the notebooks that had been lost by the Library of Congress during the Second World War3—has enabled scholars to see much more clearly the emergence of that line and to have a better idea of its rough chronology. Presently, the three poems published in the spring and summer of 1850—“Blood-Money,”4 “The House of Friends,”5and “Resurgemus”6—appear to be the last poems (with line-breaks) Whitman composed prior to the trial lines found in the earliest extant notebooks, most of which date from between 1852 and 1854.⁷ The break with meter in 1850 turns out to be decisive for the development of Whitman’s line as it unshackles the major constraint on line-length and opens the way to using lines of varying lengths according to the requirements of clause or sentence logic.8 A majority of the lines in the three poems remain of conventional lengths. Emblematic of this is the fact that in the case of “Resurgemus,” Whitman often simply combines two (or more) lines to make a single (long) line in the revised version of the poem included in the 1855 Leaves, e.g., “But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction,/ And frightened rulers come back:” (“Resurgemus”; eight words/ five words) => “But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction, and the frightened rulers come back:” (LG, 88; fourteen words).⁹ Crucially, though, the lengths of the lines vary (however modestly) in these poems, and some stretch out beyond the eight-word limit that characterizes much of Whitman’s earlier metered verse: “Blood-Money” has the most lines eight words in length or longer, eleven (e.g., “Where, as though Earth lifted her breast to throw him from her, and Heaven refused him,” line 7; sixteen words);10 “House of Friends” has five such lines (e.g., “The shriek of a drowned world, the appeal of women,” line 28; ten words); and “Resurgemus” three (e.g., “Suddenly, out of its state and drowsy air, the air of slaves,” line 1; twelve words). None of these “long” lines attain the extended reach of Whitman’s longest lines in the 1855 Leaves, but they all fall squarely within the sweet spot for line-length in that volume, which is from eight to sixteen words per line. Lines of these lengths each occur more than a hundred times and account for 1,641 lines in total—71% of all the lines in the 1855 Leaves (see Fig. 15). Already in these initial free-verse efforts, then, Whitman has found the lineal scale that will carry much of his verbiage in the early Leaves.

Fig. 15: Line lengths by word count for the 1855 Leaves. Computation and chart by Greg Murray.

In the spring of 1851 in his “Art and Artists” lecture, Whitman is still content to quote lines from “Resurgemus” as originally crafted.11 Of the eighteen lines quoted, only one numbers more than eight words (“They live in brothers, again ready to defy you,” nine words, UPP I, 247). In the recombined version of these lines from the 1855 Leaves, the overall number of lines is reduced to ten, and eight of these tally nine or more words, including the nineteen-word “Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom…. in its turn to bear seed” (LG, 88). The percentage of lines of conventional lengths (eight or fewer words) in the 1855 Leaves is still smaller, amounting to roughly 15% of the total number of lines (354 lines, see Fig. 15).

Trial verse lines appear in at least four of the pre-Leaves notebooks. The “med Cophósis”notebook is perhaps the earliest of these, with most dating it between 1852 and 1854.12 Only two long leaves survive, and there is just one set of obvious verse lines, material that anticipates the opening of “Who learns my lesson complete?” (LG, 92–93):

And every one opens ^{each successive one} to another still13

Of the four original lines started here, only the second is long, containing twelve words.14 Whitman’s deletions and additions in lines 2–3 create the equivalent to the “hanging indentation” that appears in the holographs of other notebooks for rendering the continuation of long lines onto the next manuscript line. This lengthens the line to sixteen words. It also shows Whitman in the process of combining lines, much like what must be assumed, for example, to have taken place in his revisions of “Resurgemus.” Interestingly, Whitman settles on a different combination in the 1855 Leaves, going back to the original substructure and working it out differently:

Who learns my lesson complete?

And that to another…. and every one to another still. (LG, 92)¹⁵

The last line quoted here is a combined version of lines 3–4 from the notebook fragment, stretching the line to ten words.¹⁶ While the sample size is statistically irrelevant, the four notebook lines share the same basic profile as found in the 1850 poems.

“I know a rich capitalist” is usually dated to 1854 like most of the remaining early notebooks.17 Again, there is only one set of verse lines in this notebook. Of the eight lines of verse written out, only two are long (eleven and ten words in length). The profile—lines of variable lengths, mostly short and none that are really long—here, too, is suggestive of the 1850 poems.18 Moreover, these lines were clearly culled from a passage of prose inscribed earlier in the notebook. Intriguingly, on seven occasions the clausal phrasing of the prose version is circumscribed by long dashes. One of the dashes comes at the end of the passage. Of the other six, five head material that is broken into distinct verse lines in the poetic version (Figs. 16–17). This use of dashes is most reminiscent of Whitman’s long riff on Genesis 1 at the beginning of the “Art and Artists” lecture discussed in Chapter One—only here a versified version also exists.19

Two other early notebooks, the “Poem incarnating the mind” notebook20 and the famous “Talbot Wilson” notebook,21 preserve many more lines of trial verse than the two notebooks just discussed. The prevailing line profile in these notebooks is noticeably different. Short lines (eight or fewer words) and long lines (nine to sixteen words in length) appear in almost equal proportions, with long lines being slightly more numerous in each notebook. Moreover, for the first time each notebook preserves lines of seventeen words or more: “Poem incarnating the mind” has four such lines (e.g., “And in that deadly sea waited five ^{How they} gripped close with Death ^there on the sea, and gave him not one inch, but held on days and nights near the helpless fogged great wreck”; twenty-two words; all canceled)²² and “Talbot Wilson” has nine (e.g., “I will not have a single person left out…. I will ^have the prostitute and the thief invited…. I will make no difference between them and the rest”; twenty-seven words; all canceled).²³ And most of the short lines actually number between six and eight words in length. In fact, the majority of lines in these notebooks range between six and eighteen words in length, as also in the 1855 Leaves (roughly 86% of the lines in the latter are of these lengths, see Fig. 15).

Fig. 16: Leaf 6r from the “I know a rich capitalist” notebook, https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/nyp.00129.011.jpg, showing the prose version of the “Love is the cause of causes” passage. Image courtesy of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Fig. 17: Leaf 7v from the “I know a rich capitalist” notebook, https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/nyp.00129.014.jpg, showing the verse version of the “Love is the cause of causes” passage. Image courtesy of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

There is one last pre-Leaves notebook that may contain verse lines, the “Autobiographical Data” notebook.24 The notebook appears to have been used over an extended period of time (1848–55/56).25 Unfortunately, the original notebook itself is missing, and the passage (material set out in enumerated sections) that some identify as poetry²⁶ is not preserved in the extant set of (incomplete) photostats—the transcription of this material is dependent on E. Holloway’s edition.27 It is not obvious that (all of) this material is verse (e.g., Grier refers to the numbered sections as “paragraphs,” NUPM I, 212, n. 16)²⁸ and the date of composition cannot be narrowed beyond the range posited for the entire notebook. If the passage is verse, it does not closely resemble “the poetry of 1855–56.”²⁹ There could be as many as fourteen complete lines. Most range in length between seven and eighteen words; there are three longer lines of twenty-one (2x) and thirty-four words. Obviously, much uncertainty remains regarding this material.30

Surviving drafts of proto-versions of lines for the 1855 Leaves appear to stand between the early notebook trials and their published versions. For example, E. Folsom has collected a number of the holographs that anticipate “I celebrate myself” from several university collections.31 Long lines clearly prevail in these manuscripts—more than two-thirds of the lines are long. Yet proportionately short lines still occur twice as often as they do in the 1855 Leaves. Not infrequently, shorter lines in these manuscripts get combined in their published version, as with the revision of “Resurgemus.” The following are illustrative:

Examples like these suggest that such combining of shorter lines to make longer lines was especially characteristic of the latest stage(s) of Whitman’s composition of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The lineal profile of the latter shifts yet again. Whitman’s long lines in the 1855 Leaves continue to stretch out, and their numbers are even greater. Sometimes the expansion in length is striking, as witnessed above in Whitman’s combinatory collaging of shorter lines to make long lines, and sometimes it is more incremental. A good example of the latter is the following line, which accumulates more words in each version:

“Talbot Wilson”: I tell you it ^{I know} it is more ^{just as} beautiful to die; (twelve words)36

“taken soon out of the laps”: I tell ^{hasten to inform} you it is just as good to die;, and I know it; (sixteen words)

LG,17: I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. (eighteen words)

Almost 85% of the lines in the 1855 Leaves are long (65.3%) or really long (19.4%). Short lines persist, as they have from the beginning. For example, “Those corpses of young men” is among a handful of short lines from “Resurgemus” that stays unchanged (un-lengthened) from its first publication in 1850 through to the final lifetime edition of Leaves (LG 1881, 212). However, the number of such short lines decreases dramatically, accounting for just better than 15% of the lines in the 1855 Leaves.³⁷ Whitman’s unpublished long poem, “Pictures,” which most date to sometime around 1855,38 mainly features long lines, with only a very few short lines (less than 5%).³⁹

In sum, while Whitman’s long line is birthed immediately in his break with metrical verse, the basic trajectory of line usage in the run-up to the 1855 Leaves is one of increasing preference for long (and really long) lines matched by decreasing dependence on short lines. The latter persist throughout but in ever decreasing numbers. Really long lines steadily increase (in number and scale), eventually overtaking the number of short lines in the 1855 Leaves. From the time of the “Poem incarnating the mind” and “Talbot Wilson” notebooks, lines of between nine and sixteen words in length dominate Whitman’s verse exercises and published poems. Still, throughout this period Whitman’s line remains strikingly variable and fluid in terms of length. In fact, though many lines settle into canonical shapes for Whitman, many others will continue to vary (and at times disappear completely) in succeeding editions. Long lines continue to be added in the next two editions of Leaves, though the trend towards a favoring of foreshortened lines that marks much of Whitman’s poetry after 1865 already begins in these earlier editions. Whitman’s “finding” of his long line on this view is decidedly processual in nature. After becoming a possibility, it emerges over time in Whitman’s “many MS. doings and undoings,” stretching out, reconfiguring, even contracting when needed as the poet molds his line to fit his sentences.

G. W. Allen, Parallelism, and the Biblical Poetic Line

Of the two studies that Miller recognizes as having explored the connection between Whitman’s line and the Bible “perhaps most definitively,” only G. W. Allen truly takes up the topic of the line, and that not without problems.40 The engine that drives Allen’s analysis is parallelism, which he takes as the first rhythmical principle of the English Bible and which he understands chiefly according to Robert Lowth’s system (as mediated by various secondary discussions).41 This emphasis would seem to be well put, for as G. Kinnell observes, “Whitman is no doubt the greatest virtuoso of parallel structure in English poetry.”42 But in order to unravel Whitman’s understanding and use of parallelism, Allen well appreciated that he had to first give attention to the line: “the line is the unit, ‘the second line balancing the first, completing or supplementing its meaning.’”43 This is Allen quoting J. H. Gardiner about biblical verse. A few pages later he turns to Whitman, making the same point: “The fact that the line in Leaves of Grass is also the rhythmical unit is so obvious that probably all students of Whitman have noticed it.”44 Miller, more recently, underscores just how crucial the development of his poetic line was to Whitman: “In fact his [Whitman’s] notebooks suggest that it [his line] was probably the single most important factor in accelerating his development.”45 And even more emphatically a bit later: “if one event can be described as his strictly creative catalyst, judging from the notebooks it would seem to be his realization of new ways of composing derived from his discovery of his line.”⁴⁶ What is “so obvious” for students of Whitman, or indeed students of poetry more generally, has only rarely been noticed of biblical poetry. To date, in fact, there has been little substantive appreciation of the verse line and its significance in biblical verse—aside, that is, from issues of syntax (which is not an insignificant matter).47 This is a considerable desideratum given that the line by most accounts is the leading differentia of verse—“the only absolute to be drawn,” writes T. S. Eliot, “is that poetry is written in verse and prose is written in prose.”48 Allen’s observation is astute and goes to the heart of many issues concerning biblical poetry. It warrants the attention of biblical scholars.

However, the line is also a matter Allen muddles considerably. He is very deliberate in setting up the parameters of his research. The English Bible, by which he means above all the King James Bible,49 is the paramount focus of his comments—“I am not concerned here with the Hebrew verse.”50 This is entirely reasonable since Whitman did not know biblical Hebrew,⁵¹ and therefore whatever sense he may have had of biblical poetics would have been mediated through translation (and whatever secondary discussions he may have encountered), above all through the KJB. But, of course, quite famously, the KJB is a prose translation of the Bible, including of those portions that are verse (e.g., Psalms, Proverbs, Job, etc.) and that were known to be verse by King James’s translators—and indeed by scholars generally well before that period.52 The trouble for Allen is twofold. First, the understanding of parallelism that he borrows and deploys in his analysis of Whitman and Whitman’s putative use of biblical analogs is a theory derived and elaborated with the Hebrew text of the (Hebrew) Bible in view. It is, in other words, a theory about biblical Hebrew poetry. How well that theory may illuminate a translation of the underlying Hebrew is an open question that depends greatly on the nature of the translation and translation technique. The translation of the KJB, for example, may surely be used when illustrating the role of parallelism in biblical verse, and may even show off some aspects quite spectacularly, such as the (semantic) synonymity that often accompanies the Hebrew Bible’s parallelistic poetic play—so Allen: “at least in the English translation this rhythm of thought or parallelism characterizes Biblical versification.”53 But this still has the underlying Hebrew as its ultimate target. It is a different matter altogether when the translation itself becomes the target of analysis. In other words, Allen does not pay enough attention, especially initially, to the interference and turbulence caused by translation, to the fact that translation does not offer a transparent view of the translated. There is a mismatch between his theory and the source(s) of his theory, all of which have the Hebrew in view, and his own application to an English prose translation of biblical Hebrew verse.

Symptomatic of this blindness and even more problematic for Allen is the sheer absence of lines of verse in the KJB. I repeat: the KJB, like all of its sixteenth-century English predecessors, is a prose translation.54 Moreover, there is no formatting difference between the prose translation of the (Hebrew) Bible’s prose narratives (and other non-poetic materials) and the prose translation of the (Hebrew) Bible’s poetry. They both look very much the same, perhaps with only the smallest bit of extra whitespace in the poetic sections (see esp. Figs. 12, 18–19). This uniformity of appearance effectively levels through much of what distinguishes the underlying poetry of the Hebrew Bible from the prose, and as a consequence disposes readers to read the whole of the Bible uniformly, without a strong awareness of the variety of literary forms and genres in the Bible.55

Fig. 18: Isa 7:19–9:1 from the Harper Illuminated Bible. In the original Hebrew, Isaiah 7–8 is prose and Isaiah 9 is poetry, but all is prose in the KJB and the page layout is the same.

Fig. 19: Isa 9:1–10:11 from the Harper Illuminated Bible. In the original Hebrew, Isaiah 7–8 is prose and Isaiah 9 is poetry, but all is prose in the KJB and the page layout is the same.

Though Allen is correct about the importance of the verse line to the prosodies of both biblical Hebrew verse and Whitman, it is not readily apparent what Whitman could have discerned about line structure from a prose translation lacking any formal marking of verse. This is a problem deserving of critical attention. On the strength of scholarly knowledge of the day and more crucially on Whitman’s own comments, such as in “The Bible as Poetry” and also earlier in his notebooks (for discussion, see Chapter One), one may posit on Whitman’s part a general awareness that the Bible contained poetry, or verse proper. But as to any more specific knowledge regarding the nature of Hebrew verse structure, that is a much more complicated and different proposition entirely, especially if we presume, as Allen does, the mediating force of the KJB. As D. Norton stresses, “It must be painfully apparent to anyone who has tried to read the poetic parts of the KJB using parallelism as a guide to the true form [i.e., line structure] that it is often no help.”56 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Allen chooses not to use the KJB for his illustrations but instead quotes biblical passages from R. G. Moulton’s “arrangement of biblical poetry in his Modern Reader’s Bible” (see Figs. 21–22), which Allen says “in the main” has as its “basis” the “Lowth system.”57 That is, unlike in the KJB, verse in Moulton’s edition is frequently lineated, following the example of the 1885 Revised Version (see Fig. 23).58 The first of the “many evidences” of Whitman’s indebtedness to the model of the “rhythmic pattern of the English Bible”⁵⁹ is the equivalence of line units, which Allen summarizes at the end of “Biblical Analogies” in this way:

The first rhythmical principle of the Old Testament poetry is parallelism, or a rhythm of thought, in which the line is the unit. The line is also the unit in Whitman’s poetry, one evidence of which is the punctuation, but conclusive evidence is the fact that the verses may be arranged in synonymous, antithetic, synthetic, and climatic “thought-groups”, just as Moulton prints the poetry of the Bible (emphasis added).60

As Moulton prints the poetry of the Bible this seems self-evident. However, the KJB has no such lines of verse, a fact which the use of Moulton’s edition effectively occludes (cf. Fig. 20 and contrast Figs. 21–23). F. Stovall raises the possibility of Whitman having access to verse translations of biblical poetry, such as those (of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs) by George R. Noyes.61 Though possible—certainly such verse translations in English were available, most stimulated by Lowth’s originary efforts in his Isaiah: A New Translation62—Stovall cannot tie Whitman to any of them. The line forms Whitman prefers are mostly enacted on a (much) larger scale (see below), and Whitman’s known biblical quotations and phrasal borrowings invariably come from the KJB (see Chapter Two). Thus it is not clear that this equivalence of which Allen speaks—the line as the chief rhythmical unit—has quite the force that he imagines, at least not on his representation via Moulton’s translation, as that is a formatting style that becomes most widely accessible only late in Whitman’s life (in the form of the RV).63

Fig. 20: Ps 23:1–24:23 from the Harper Illuminated Bible. Prose translation of the KJB, with no special formatting for the poetry of this psalm.

Fig. 21: Psalm 23 from R. G. Moulton, Modern Reader’s Bible (New York: Mavmillan, 1922), II, 320. Public domain. Formatted as verse following the lead of the 1885 Revised Version of the Bible.

Fig. 22: Psalm 23 (cont.) from Moulton, Modern Reader’s Bible, II, 321.

Fig. 23: Psalm 23 in the Revised Version (The Holy Bible [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1885]). Public domain. First major English translation to lineate the poetry of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job as verse.

Moreover, in giving visibility to the line structure of the underlying Hebrew original through Moulton’s translation what becomes strikingly apparent—and what would be obvious to any Hebraist—is just how unalike the two line units are. The biblical Hebrew verse line is consistently concise, while Whitman’s line is famously long (and variable); and the biblical verse tradition is dominantly distichic, featuring couplets (and, less commonly, triplets), while Whitman’s verse is prominently stichic. When he does group lines together, their patterns of grouping are quite dissimilar from those in the biblical Hebrew poetic corpus. These are visually apparent even on the most cursory of comparisons (see Fig. 24). Of the two, Allen senses the mismatch in the latter. In his treatment of parallelism in Whitman, he dutifully surveys parallelism involving couplets, triplets, and even quatrains, chiefly because of their prominence in the Bible. But as Allen recognizes, “the number of couplets in Leaves of Grass is not great;”64 that “parallelism in the Bible does not ordinarily extend beyond the quatrain;”⁶⁵ and perhaps most astutely, that “the couplet, triplet, and quatrain are found more often in the Bible than in Leaves of Grass.”66 I sense in Allen’s minimization of this difference—“the number of consecutive parallel verses is not particularly important”⁶⁷—an attempt to stave off potentially troublesome worries for his thesis: for example, if Whitman was so impressed by the Bible’s use of parallelism, why is not his own practice of line grouping more reflective of that of the Bible? Of course, it may be that Whitman was simply enamored of the parallelism itself and not the patterns of grouping. But Allen’s own logic of exemplifying and commenting on Whitman’s use of parallelistic couplets and the like suggests that Allen thinks otherwise,68 that he intuitively feels the logic of the worry, though he mostly sweeps it deftly aside.

Fig. 24: A comparison of the differences between Whitman’s typical poetic line and the biblical Hebrew poetic line. Image of p. 13 from the 1855 Leaves, public domain. Image of a 5/6HevPs fragment, showing parts of Ps 23:2–4 (Wikimedia Commons). Unpointed Hebrew translation of “Song of Myself” (lines 1–9), after Simon Halkin.

More surprising is the complete silence as to the difference in line length, which is only too apparent, at least if we are to think of the Hebrew original (usually two to four words) or Moulton’s translation of that original (normally no more than eight or nine words). If the Bible is Whitman’s chief inspiration, wouldn’t there be more lines akin to the length of the typical biblical verse line? This is a potentially more damning worry precisely because Whitman’s own lines (especially early on) are often so strikingly long with absolutely no parallels in biblical Hebrew verse. Neither worry holds substance, however. Whitman had no access to the Hebrew originals. And he probably did not have ready or ongoing access (if any access at all) to an English verse translation of the likes of Moulton’s, which arranges the poetry of the Bible in lines of translated verse, grouped as couplets, triplets and the like according to Lowth’s practice. That is, there is no reason to suspect that Whitman had much (if any) first-hand knowledge of either the nature of line grouping in biblical Hebrew poetry or the typical lengths of these lines (when translated into English). These are features of the biblical verse tradition that are elided in a prose translation like the KJB. It surely is not accidental that it is “chiefly the synonymous variety” of parallelism that Whitman picks up on and uses so pervasively throughout Leaves of Grass.69 Of all linguistic elements, semantics—meaning—is the one most readily translatable. The early translators’ (beginning with Tyndale) sense of a peculiar affinity between Hebrew and English idioms is spurred in part by semantics.70 By contrast, the “core” of parallelism in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible is “syntactic,” viz. the “repetition of identical or similar syntactic patterns” or frames, which when “set into equivalence” bring whatever is “filling those frames” (e.g., lexical items) “into alignment as well.”71

The Verse Divisions of the KJB and Whitman’s Line

More positively, by refocusing on the textual source that prompted Allen’s interest in the first place, the KJB, and the fact that this is a specifically prose translation in distinct formats and page layouts, potential points of similarity between this Bible and Whitman’s line more readily resolve themselves. Besides the parallelistic play of meaning (and syntax) and the rhythm effected in part through this play, both characteristics of the biblical Hebrew verse tradition that were accessible to Whitman through translation, Whitman would have literally seen the verse divisions of the KJB itself. This is a point made early, though little noticed, by G. Saintsbury in his review of the 1871(–72) edition of Leaves of Grass: “Perhaps the likeness which is presented to the mind most strongly is that which exists between our author and the verse divisions of the English Bible, especially in the poetical books, and it is not unlikely that the latter did actually exercise some influence in molding the poet’s work.”72 The “verse divisions of the English Bible” in the Old Testament correspond almost without fail to the full stop (sôp pāsûq) used by the Masoretes to mark the end of a biblical verse. In the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible, the sôp pāsûq tends to demarcate a complete sentence, though the sentences may vary considerably in length and complexity. In “the poetical books,” the sôp pāsûq does not demarcate the end of a single line of verse in Hebrew, but two, three, four, and sometimes even more such lines. So as in the prose sections there is variability here, too; however, it is far more constrained and regular, given the simpler clause structures and uniformly concise verse lines (see Figs. 12, 19, 20). The formatting in the KJB is the same, whether for prose or poetry, though because of the latter there is subtly more whitespace on the page in the poetic books (see Figs. 12, 18–19). Numerous aspects of Whitman’s mature and signature line—viz. its variability, range of lengths, typical shapes and character, and content—become more clearly comparable to the Bible when thought through in light of Saintsbury’s appreciation of the significance of the actual “verse divisions of the English Bible.”

The Lengths of Lines

Most obvious, perhaps, is that the range of line-lengths in the 1855 Leaves is roughly equivalent to that of the verse divisions of the KJB, especially, as Saintsbury perceives, in the poetic books (e.g., Psalms, Proverbs, Job), and as significant the mix of line-lengths and the mise-en-page that this mix effects is strikingly similar in both as well. Consider the familiar Psalm 23 (which Whitman read) lineated according to the verse divisions in the KJB (see Fig. 20):

Note the overall length of the individual verse divisions and their variety. Compare this profile, first, with Moulton’s version of the same psalm, which aims to follow the contours of the original Hebrew line structure,73 resulting in much shorter lines, grouped as couplets74—the indentation and spacing are Moulton’s invention (see Figs. 21–22):

The LORD is my shepherd;

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

He guideth me in the paths of righteousness for his name sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil;

For thou art with me:

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me

In the presence of mine enemies:

Thou hast anointed my head with oil;

My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

And I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.75

Now consider a few brief selections from the 1855 Leaves (see Figs. 25–26):

But they are not the Me myself. (LG, 15)

And:

I am the hounded slave…. I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me…. crack and again crack the marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence…. my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin,

I fall on the weeds and stones,

The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close,

They taunt my dizzy ears…. they beat me violently over the head with their whip-stocks. (LG, 39)

Initially, note the typical lengths of Whitman’s lines, which, with but a few exceptions (e.g., “But they are not the Me myself”; “I fall on the weeds and stones”), are much too long for a translated line of actual biblical verse but compare favorably with the verse divisions of the KJB. So:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. (Ps 23:2, KJB) [sixteen words]

I clutch the rails of the fence…. my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin, (LG, 39) [seventeen words]

Vs:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: [nine words; Hebrew: three words]

He leadeth me beside the still waters. (Moulton) [seven words; Hebrew: four words]

Or:

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. (Ps 23:5, KJB) [twenty-two words]

People I meet….. the effect upon me of my early life…. of the ward and city I live in…. of the nation, (LG, 15) [twenty-two words]

Vs:

Thou preparest a table before me [six words; Hebrew: three words]

In the presence of mine enemies: [six words; Heb.: two words]

Thou hast anointed my head with oil; [seven words; Hebrew: three words]

My cup runneth over. (Moulton) [four words; Heb.: two words]

Fig. 25: P. 15 from the 1855 Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, NY, 1855). Public domain.

Fig. 26: P. 39 from the 1855 Leaves.

The sharp contrast in length is noticeably apparent between the lines in Whitman and in the KJB verse divisions, on the one hand, and in Moulton’s versions, on the other hand. This point may be underscored to good effect by comparing the Hebrew of the latter biblical passage, Ps 23:5, with its characteristic short lines,

with a set of Whitman’s long lines from the beginning of “Song of Myself” in Simon Halkin’s Hebrew translation:76

—לְשֹׁנִי ֥ כָּל פְּרָד שֶׁבְּדָמִי ֥ מְקֹרָצִים מִן הָאֲדָמָה הזֹּאת ֥ מִן הָאַוִּיר הַזֶּה

֥יָלוּד כָּאן לְהוֹרִים שֶׁנּוֹלְדוּ כָּאן לְהוֹרִים כְּגוֹן אֵלֶּה ֥ וְהוֹרֵיהֶם הֵם כְּגוֹן אֵלֶּה

֥ אֲנִי ֥ בֶּן שְׁלֹשִׁים ושֶׁבַע כַּיּוֹם וּבְתַכְלִית הַבְּרִיאוּת ֥ הֲרֵינִי

.מְקַוֶּה לְבִלְתִּי חֲדֹל עַד אִם הָמַּוֶת

(My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death. [LG 1892, 29])

Again, the contrast in line length is stark. Halkin’s rendition of the first two lines of Whitman each contains more words (eleven) than in the four lines of the psalm combined (ten words). And though hardly the kind of empirical sifting that would be required to make a full case, my strong impression is that the general picture registered by these few examples holds across the board. Dip anywhere into Whitman’s 1855 Leaves and the poetic books of the KJB and the same rough equivalences in lengths of lines and verse divisions appear. The same point is made by Robert Alter in a wholly different context but in a way that is nevertheless quite telling for my own thesis. He says of the KJB’s long cherished rendering of Ps 23:4 (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”) that it has “the beauty of a proto-Whitmanesque line of poetry rather than of biblical [Hebrew] poetry.”77 Alter here, implicitly, joins the likes of Saintsbury in recognizing the connection between Whitman and the KJB, at least in terms of line length.

These word counts serve as a crude barometer of dis/similarity. They cannot be pressed too literally. And yet they are also possibly the surest means of measuring and comparing the gross scales of Whitman’s lines (in the 1855 Leaves) and the KJB’s verse divisions. With the aid of computerization such measures can be quantified (to a degree; see charts in Figs. 15, 27–29).78 Fig. 29 is perhaps the most striking, as it shows a considerable degree of overlap between the basic length profiles for Whitman’s verse lines in the 1855 Leaves and the verse divisions of the KJB in the three specially formatted (in the Masoretic tradition) books of biblical poetry: Psalms, Proverbs, and Job.79 The match is not perfect, but it is incredibly close. For example, as noted Whitman’s sweet spot in terms of line-length in the 1855 edition is between eight and sixteen words, accounting for 71% of all lines in the volume. The comparable core of verse divisions in the three poetic books from the KJB contains between twelve and twenty words, accounting for roughly 76% of the verse divisions in this material (Fig. 29). This overlapping correlation in length gives substantial back-up to Saintsbury’s early impressions (“especially in the poetical books”). By contrast, Fig. 30 (comparing the line lengths of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves and the 1901 ASV [Job], which like the RV offers lineated versions of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job) shows the overall dissimilarity between Whitman’s line and the average lengths of translated versions of the constrained biblical Hebrew poetic line.80 Fig. 28, which compares Whitman’s line to KJB-Pentateuch (comprised primarily of biblical prose), not surprisingly shows a good chunk of the KJB’s verse divisions in this material containing more words per verse than does Whitman per line—not surprising because however prosaic Whitman’s verse, it is finally verse and not prose. Importantly, however, Whitman’s longest lines (forty-seven words or more) are comparable only with the verse divisions of biblical prose (see esp. Figs. 27–28)—he was reading the whole Bible.

Fig. 27: Comparison by word count between the lengths of lines in the 1855 Leaves and the verse divisions of the entire KJB. Computation and chart by Greg Murray.

Fig. 28: Comparison by word count between the lengths of lines in the 1855 Leaves and the verse divisions of KJB-Pentateuch. Computation and chart by Greg Murray.

Fig. 29: Comparison by word count between the lengths of lines in the 1855 Leaves and the verse divisions of KJB-Job/Psalms/Proverbs. Computation and chart by Greg Murray.

Fig. 30: Comparison by word count between the lengths of lines in the 1855 Leaves and the lineated translation of ASV-Job. Computation and chart by Greg Murray.

Fig. 31: B19a (Leningrad Codex), folio 423 recto (Ruth 4:13B-Song 2:5A). Freedman et al., The Leningrad Codex. Photograph by Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman, West Semitic Research, in collaboration with the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. Courtesy Russian National Library (Saltykov-Shchedrin).

Fig. 32: B19a, folio 394 recto (Psalm 133). Freedman et al., The Leningrad Codex. Photograph by Bruce and Kenneth Zuckerman, West Semitic Research, in collaboration with the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. Courtesy Russian National Library (Saltykov-Shchedrin).

I do not postulate Whitman literally using word counts to generate his poetry or even to mimic (in some hyper-literal way) the variable lengths of the KJB’s verse divisions. As Posey wryly remarks, “I suppose nobody thinks that he sat down with a psalm before him and wrote a poem laboriously fitted to the pattern.”81 Rather, the KJB and its verse divisions furnished Whitman with the model for a long(er) and highly variable line that he then fitted and honed to his own liking, as he can be seen doing in his notebooks and poetry manuscripts. This is precisely the manner of Whitman’s “inspiration” when he bothers to record it, a brief animating (“spinal”) idea that is then worked out over and over (“incessantly”) until it is made to Whitman’s liking.⁸² Having said that, on at least two occasions Whitman actually counted the number of words and even letters used in (some of) his poems. Most famously, as previously noted, at the beginning of Whitman’s so-called “Blue Book” edition of the 1860 Leaves,83 the poet records (printer calculations of) overall word counts for Leaves (183,500 words, inclusive of Drum-Taps), the Bible, and other classic works (see Fig. 33).84 Here one has the sense that Whitman is using the word counts to measure his poetic accomplishments to date.85 Of equal interest is the verso of a single, 1855 manuscript leaf currently housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin (Fig. 34).⁸⁶ Whitman scribbles notes on this side of the leaf about the size of and a projected arrangement for the 1855 Leaves (though the latter differs markedly from the edition eventually published). In an effort to estimate the number of printed pages needed for the volume, Whitman tallies up the number of letters on average used in what he describes as “one of my closely written MS pages”—he estimates using “1,600” letters. He compares this to the number of “letters in a page of Shakespeare’s poems”—“1,120” is recorded. From this he calculates that the printed Leaves will run to “about 127 pages”—this turns out to be a little off (the 1855 Leaves is 95 pages long), perhaps because of the unusually large page size (“about the size and shape of a block of typewriting paper”)87 used in the 1855 edition. Both items plainly show that literal counts of words and letters factored in Whitman’s thinking about his poetry on occasion.

Fig. 33: Whitman’s comparative word counts on the second leaf of the so-called “Blue Book” edition of the 1860 Leaves. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Fig. 34: Verso of “And to me every minute,” https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/tex.00057.002.jpg. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Estimated average number of letters in what Whitman considers “one of my closely written MS pages,” comparing to the number of “letters in page of Shakespeare’s poems.”

In fact, however, word (and letter) counts alone do not adequately register the expanded spatial scale of Whitman’s typically long lines in the 1855 Leaves, especially for comparative purposes. The language material that makes up Whitman’s lines and the KJB’s verse divisions are dissimilar in a number of important ways. First, the KJB inherited Willian Tyndale’s preference for Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, which contrasts strikingly with the many polysyllabic and compounded, often Latinate words—not to mention Whitman’s fondness for foreign-derived words of all kinds—that populate Whitman’s poems. So even when word counts converge (as they often do, for example, when comparing the lines of the 1855 Leaves with the verse divisions in KJB-Psalms, -Proverbs, and -Job), it is frequently still the case that Whitman’s lines are more spatially expansive than the KJB’s verse divisions—they literally are lengthier on the page. And Whitman’s unconventional use of suspension points (….) and long dashes (combined with the large page format) in the first edition of Leaves elongates the line still further. The effect of the latter may be illustrated by comparing lines from the first edition of Leaves with lines from most of the succeeding editions where Whitman reverts to more conventional forms of punctuation and smaller page formats.88 The following examples are emblematic (LG, 14; LG 1856, 7; see Figs. 35–36):

LG 1855: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books”

LG 1856: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books”

LG 1855: “I have heard what the talkers were talking…. the talk of the beginning and the end”

LG 1856: “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end”

LG 1855: “Always a knit of identity…. always distinction…. always a breed of life”

LG 1856: “Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life”

The extra-linguistic means (esp. suspension points) for elongating Whitman’s lines, allied with their extreme lengths (by whatever count), makes clear that the poetry of the early editions of Leaves in particular “was a visual poetry,” as Asselineau notices.89 Whitman himself (at least late in life) recognized this as well:

Two centuries back or so much of the poetry passed from lip to lip—was oral: was literally made to be sung: then the lilt, the formal rhythm, may have been necessary. The case is now somewhat changed: now, when the poetic work in literature is more than nineteen-twentieths of it by print, the simply tonal aids are not so necessary, or, if necessary, have considerably shifted their character.⁹⁰

Whitman experienced the Bible chiefly visually, in print and through reading, yet the biblical traditions (even when originating in written composition) emerge out of dominantly oral environments. Almost every dimension of biblical poetry is shaped for maximal oral and aural reception, including its typically constrained verse line.91 This is antithetical to Whitman’s visually oriented poetics—as Asselineau emphasizes, “who would, without getting out of breath, declaim the first Leaves of Grass; some of the lines contained over sixty words.”92

Fig. 35: P. 14 from the 1855 Leaves, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/figures/ppp.00271.021.jpg.

Fig. 36: P. 7 from the 1856 Leaves, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/figures/ppp.00237.015.jpg. Image courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Interestingly, as K. Campbell and Asselineau observe, over time Whitman’s line began to shrink back down toward more conventional lengths.93 The change already starts to appear in some instances by 1860 but begins in earnest with the (build-up to the) 1867 Leaves. Here is Campbell’s characterization:

In his earliest editions (1855, 1856, and 1860), there are a good many lines that run to thirty or forty words each, and a few that run as high as fifty and even sixty words. To be very specific, there are in the edition of 1856 two lines that run past sixty words each, seven that run past fifty words, sixteen that run past forty words, and forty-two that exceed thirty words each. At the same time there are no poems first published after 1870 with lines that run to as much as twenty-five words, and only one poem published in 1855 or 1856 that retained any considerable number of long lines,—namely, “Our Old Feuillage.” In fact, the longest line in any of the poems first published in the eighties comprises only twenty-one words (and there are only two examples of this), whereas the average long line in the poems written after 1880 runs to about a dozen words.94

Whitman achieves this foreshortening or lightening (as Asselineau calls it) in a number of ways, including breaking longer lines into multiple shorter lines, reducing the number of words in long lines through revision and emendation, and sometimes simply eliminating the long line entirely. Whitman’s “Blue Book” edition provides ample evidence of such revisionary practices, as it anticipates (though also differs significantly from) the 1867 edition.⁹⁵ Consider the following by way of example.⁹⁶ This fifty-four word line from “Come closer to me,”

Because you are greasy or pimpled—or that you was once drunk, or a thief, or diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute—or are so now—or from frivolity or impotence—or that you are no scholar, and never saw your name in print…. do you give in that you are any less immortal? (LG, 58)

is revised in the “Blue Book” into four shorter lines, with several cancellations:

Do you give in that you are any less immortal?97

Emendation is the method of reduction in this line from “Proto-Leaf” (LG 1860, 15): “And I will show that there is no imperfection in male or female, or in the earth, or in the present—and can be none in the future.” The nine canceled words in the “Blue Book” are dropped from succeeding versions of “Starting from Paumanok” (e.g., “And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present—and can be none in the future,” LG 1867, 16). And the following long line also from “Proto-Leaf” (LG 1860, 21) is canceled entirely in the “Blue Book” and does not appear in “Starting from Paumanok” in succeeding editions of Leaves (e.g., section 19; LG 1867, 21):

See the populace, millions upon millions, handsome, tall, muscular, both sexes, clothed in easy and dignified clothes—teaching, commanding, marrying, generating, equally electing and elective.

This program of foreshortening also impacted the overall scale of the poems. New poems in the later editions are generally shorter in length.⁹⁸

It is useful to recall that Saintsbury’s appreciation of the “likeness” of Whitman’s poetry to the “verse divisions of the English Bible” was articulated in a review of the 1871–72 edition of Leaves, an edition well evidencing the consequences of Whitman’s program of lightening and trimming. There is, of course, more to the “likeness” observed than line-length (e.g., parallelism, rhythm, repetition, diction). However, it does show that the perception of lineal/divisional equivalence persists even without quantification and amidst much abbreviation on the poet’s part. Here Saintsbury’s specification of “especially… the poetical books” remains germane, as the verse divisions in this material only rarely approach the expanse of Whitman’s lengthiest lines (Fig. 29)—Whitman hardly needed to mechanically count words or letters (which of course he could do, and on occasion did) to apprehend the force of the biblical paradigm.

Ideally, Whitman quoting a bit of biblical verse within the format of his mature line, either from the notebooks and early poetry manuscripts or in Leaves—akin, for example, to his close version of Matt 26:15 in “Blood-Money” (lines 12–14) would nicely cinch the observations just made. Unfortunately, so far I have not uncovered any such quotations (or seen such discussed). This makes sense, since by the early 1850s Whitman was evolving a poetic theory that forbade explicit quotations from literature like the Bible in his verse. While there are echoes of, allusions to, and even some phrasing from the Bible in Leaves, there are no explicit quotations or close paraphrases. And, indeed, none either in the pre-1855 notebooks or early poetry manuscripts where Whitman’s long line is being worked and stretched into existence. Whitman only quotes the Bible in his prose writings—and he does that voluminously—and in his poetry from 1850 or earlier.99 The closest I have been able to come to this sort of “catching out” is in passages where Whitman’s lines have a stronger than normal resemblance to biblical material. An example was briefly discussed in Chapter Two. The line from “I celebrate myself,” “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth” (LG, 15), has the shape, feel, rhythm, and some phrasing (“peace… that pass all”) of Phil 4:7. The biblical material that provokes Whitman in this instance is prosaic and from the New Testament, although that the provocation is circumscribed precisely by the KJB’s verse divisions is both readily apparent and significant.

Also from “I celebrate myself” is this example, where the probable biblical stimulant is poetic: “The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me” (LG, 26). This line does not quote or allude to a biblical passage, nor is it aiming to riff on a biblical theme. But it does borrow a phrase (“pains of hell”) from Ps 116:3 and is shaped parallelistically very much like the first two-thirds of the biblical verse: “The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.”100 The verse from the psalm is actually a triplet in the Hebrew original, so the final “I found trouble and sorrow” has no counterpart in Whitman’s two-part line. The bipartite shape of the latter is more directly comparable to Ps 18: 5 (=2 Sam 22:6): “The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.” While the psalms’ synonymous parallelism focuses two different names for the underworld (“death,” Hebrew māwet; “hell,” Hebrew šĕʾôl), Whitman opts for a more antithetical feel (pleasures/pains) with a biblical merism, heaven and hell (e.g., Amos 9:2; Ps 139:8; Job 11:8; Matt 11:23; Luke 10:15). Still, the sets are remarkably close in feel and form. And again the general pattern of line-length correspondences briefly sketched earlier holds. The lengths of Whitman’s line (fifteen words) and of the KJB verse division of the two psalm verses (Ps 116:3, excepting the last phrase, fifteen words; Ps 18:5, thirteen words) are closely comparable, and they all contrast markedly with the consistently short biblical Hebrew poetic line. The latter are more aptly rendered in a translation such as the ASV:

The component lines are half the length of the KJB verse division and Whitman’s line and offer a much better approximation of the terse biblical Hebrew lines being translated, which in the Hebrew of these psalmic verses do not exceed more than three words.

Consider further this run of lines from the beginning of “I celebrate myself”:

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? (LG, 14)

And the similar set from “To think of time”:

Have you feared the future would be nothing to you? (LG, 65)

Both have the feel and cadence of similarly phrased rhetorical questions posed to Job in the Yahweh speeches toward the end of the book of Job:

Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? (Job 40:9)101

Whitman greatly admired Job and certainly was familiar with the Yahweh speeches.¹⁰² The language has been modernized (e.g., “Have you”)¹⁰³ and the subject matter is unique to Whitman,¹⁰⁴ but the run itself is reminiscent of Job (esp. 38:16–18) and the two-part lines in particular (“Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?” [thirteen words]; “Have you guessed you yourself would not continue? Have you dreaded those earth-beetles?” [thirteen/fourteen words]) in pattern and length are very close to the biblical prototype. Still, Whitman’s lines do not quote or allude to Job but rather have a biblicized feel or “flavor” about them, including their scale.

Two final examples, one from “To think of time” and the other from “I celebrate myself,” both of which feature the archaic “he that” in proverb-shaped sayings: “He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall surely be buried” (LG, 66; sixteen words) and “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own” (LG, 52; sixteen words). The first is shaped as a two-part, internally parallelistic line of a kind that is especially common in the Bible’s wisdom books:

He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it: and he that hateth suretiship is sure. (Prov 11:15; eighteen words)

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Eccl 11:4; seventeen words)

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. (Matt 10:39; twenty words)

He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth his ways shall be known. (Prov 10:9; fifteen words)

Although the content of Whitman’s line is not overly didactic, his use of the biblical phrases “he that” (764x in KJB) and “shall surely” (65x in KJB) gives the whole a distinctly biblical feel. The usage of the archaic “he that” is all the more marked (in hindsight) as it all but drops out of modern English translations of the Bible (e.g., RSV: 36x—mostly replaced by “he who”). In fact, Whitman uses the phrase four other times in the 1855 Leaves (LG vii, 27, 75, 91) and “she that” once, in a phrase (“she that conceived,” LG, 91) with its own biblical genealogy (Hos 2:5; cf. 1 Sam 2:5; Prov 23:25; Jer 15:9; 50:12).

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. (Ps 91:1; nineteen words)

Intriguingly, Martin Farquhar Tupper, a contemporary of Whitman’s who was only too happy to mime biblical maxims, uses the archaic “he that” twenty-two times in his 1838 edition of Proverbial Philosophy, a copy of which Whitman owned and marked up (see below).105 Most of these are similar in shape and scale to their biblical models and to Whitman’s two lines, including “He that went to comfort, is pitied; he that should rebuke, is silent” (p. 135; thirteen words) and “And he that hath more than enough, is a thief of the rights of his brother” (p. 150; sixteen words). The latter is among the four lines Whitman brackets on that page. This is quintessential Whitman as a poet-compositor, absorbing the language of others (here from the Bible) and turning it to his own ends: “The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet…. he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you” (LG, vi; for the biblical allusion, see Luke 5:23; John 5:8; Matt 9:5; Mark 2:9; cf. John 11).106

Variability in Line-Length

Moreover, it is the mix of line lengths in Whitman’s poetry that is also telling. Whitman’s line is not monolithic, as the chronological overview offered above makes apparent. If characteristically long (especially in the early editions of Leaves), it is also stubbornly variable. As Allen notices, what is most consistent about it is its “clausal structure,” “each verse [is] a sentence.”107 But the “sentence” can be relatively short (“I celebrate myself,” LG, 13; three words)—Whitman, of course, started out writing metered verse with lines of conventional lengths, and these shorter lines remain a part of his lineal repertoire;108 or really long (“If I and you and the worlds and all beneath or upon their surfaces, and all the palpable life, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run,” LG, 51; thirty-six words); or most often somewhere in between (“A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,” LG, 35; twelve words). The undoing of meter not only made possible the increased scale of Whitman’s poetic line, it also opened the way to lineal variability, the capacity to shape the sentential wholes out of which Whitman’s lines were normally configured as desired, without external constraints.

The Bible, too, in the familiar bi-columnar format of the KJB, is most immediately experienced as a mass of sentences of varying lengths segmented by verse (and chapter) divisions. The degree of variability and its underlying sources depends on what part of the Bible is in view. The poetic sections of the (Hebrew) Bible offer the most regularity, since the verse divisions in this material usually circumscribe groupings of two, three, four, and sometimes more poetic lines of roughly equivalent lengths. But even here variability is normative. The biblical poetic line itself, though roughly equivalent (especially within couplets and triples) and ultimately constrained, nevertheless varies in length (normally from five to twelve syllables or three to five words). And since the verse divisions distinguish groupings of this variable line, the pattern of grouping that prevails in any one corpus—sometimes more regular (as with the almost unfailing preference for couplets in Proverbs and parts of Job), sometimes less so (Psalms, Song of Songs, and much prophetic poetry, for example, feature unscripted blends of grouping strategies)—adds yet a further parameter of variability.

The magnitude of such variability increases dramatically when the underlying (Hebrew and Greek) prose portions of the Bible are considered alongside the poetic. In these sections, the verse divisions of the KJB usually reflect the sentential structure of the underlying prose. There are no (explicit) length constraints on these prose sentences, whether translated from Hebrew or Greek.109 They can be long or short, and length considerations are not prominent in determining the overall discourse logic of a passage of prose. That is, short sentences may follow upon long ones, or not, for seemingly indiscriminate reasons. Regardless, what is presented to the English reader of the KJB, almost no matter which portions of scripture are in view, are blocks of prose sentences of varying lengths set off in verse divisions (and thus made visually uniform). Like the long lengths of Whitman’s prototypical line—two, three, and often four times as long as the typical biblical Hebrew verse line (in translation)—the variety of these lengths finds a ready analog in the verse divisions in the KJB. Whitman’s own image for his line play—“the [regular] recurrence of lesser and larger waves on the sea-shore, rolling in without intermission, and fitfully rising and falling”110—also well describes the mix of the verse divisions in the KJB, and in the poetic books in particular, and the ebb and flow of their rhythm.

That Whitman’s writing should bear the imprint of both biblical poetry and biblical prose follows from various considerations. Whitman’s trackable quotations, allusions, and echoes come equally from prose and poetic sources in the Bible; the whole Bible was thought of as “poetry” in the nineteenth century, as C. Beyers observes,111 and certainly Whitman, even allowing on his part for an appreciation of the genuinely poetic parts of the Old Testament, shared this larger understanding, especially explicit in “Bible as Poetry”—“all the poems of Orientalism, with the Old and New Testaments at the centre”;112 and the uniform nature of the KJB’s formatting, with only the subtlest differences in whitespace to distinguish (underlying) verse from prose, would itself dispose readers to a uniform treatment of the whole Bible.¹¹³ This double-sided impact is no small matter, since there are few sources that can match the English Bible’s diversity of styles. That is, one of the key indicators of the significance of the verse divisions in the KJB for considering Whitman’s line is precisely the great diversity of styles, rhythms, and the like that they enfold, composed as they are of material ultimately drawn from poetry as well as prose—and a plethora of kinds, genres, styles in both media. There are likely not many other sources available to Whitman that match his own breadth and variety.114 As will become more apparent, the KJB does not just provide a singular point of contact with Whitman’s evolving sense of a line, viz. its expanded length, but many such points, and they are diverse in nature.

Caesuras in Whitman

Beyond the gross scale of Whitman’s lines, what takes place in them is also often redolent of what is found in the KJB’s verse divisions, especially in the poetic books. Consider the nature of caesuras in Whitman—caesura here being understood as “syntactic juncture or pause between phrases or clauses, usually signaled by punctuation, but sometimes not,” that is present in every sentence of any length.115 Whitman’s caesural division is usually marked by punctuation—“his internal commas and dashes are also often caesural pauses”¹¹⁶—as in the following handful of examples, taken from the beginning of “I celebrate myself”:

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, (LG, 13)

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, (LG, 14)

Or the absence of explicit punctuation:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. (LG, 14)

As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day,

And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty,

Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,

Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next, (LG, 15)

One significance of Whitman’s pattern of caesural division lies in its close correspondence to the major syntactic (and phrasal) divisions, also mostly marked through punctuation, in the larger verse divisions of the poetic material in the KJB. Consider as but one example part of the opening section of the Song of the Sea (Exod 15:2–8):

These divisions are punctuated by clausal and phrasal units, typically set off by commas, colons, and semicolons, in a manner analogous to Whitman’s caesuras—especially as regards the number of such divisions (per verse) and their characteristic length and syntactic integrity. The source of the major syntactic junctures in these verse divisions, as will be clear from the earlier discussion, is the underlying biblical Hebrew poetic line structure that gets embedded in the verse divisions of the KJB. This becomes immediately obvious, again, by either comparing the original Hebrew or a translation, such as Moulton’s below,117 that explicitly intends to show off the original verse structure:

The LORD is my strength and song,

And he is become my salvation:

This is my God, and I will praise him;

My father’s God, and I will exalt him.

The LORD is a man of war:

The LORD is his name.

Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea:

And his chosen captains are sunk in the Red sea.

The deeps cover them:

They went down into the depths like a stone.

Thy right hand, O LORD, is glorious in power:

Thy right hand, O LORD, dasheth in pieces the enemy.

And in the greatness of thine excellency thou overthrowest them that rose up against thee:

Thou sendest forth thy wrath, it consumeth them as stubble.

And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were piled up,

The floods stood upright as an heap,

The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea.

The correspondence in length, cadence, and syntactic integrity between Whitman’s caesural divisions, the major syntactic junctures in the poetic parts of the KJB, and the individual biblical Hebrew verse line (in translation) is most striking.

Not surprising, then, the caesural divisions of Whitman’s longer lines may even stand on their own as singular lines. For example, the first caesural division set off by suspension points in “Or I guess the grass is itself a child…. the produced babe of the vegetation” two lines later appears as a line of its own, “Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic” (LG, 16). Compare also the following sequence:

Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush;

Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheatlot,

Where the bat flies in the July eve…. where the great goldbug drops through the dark;

Where the flails keep time on the barn floor…. (LG, 36)

And:

Ever the hard and unsunk ground,

Ever the eaters and drinkers…. ever the upward and downward sun…. ever the air and the

ceaseless tides…. (LG, 47)

Allen observes similarly that “sometimes the caesura divides the parallelism and is equivalent to the line-end pause” (emphasis added).118 That, in fact, Whitman thought very much along these lines is suggested by how he reshapes the 1850 “Resurgemus” into what becomes the eighth poem of the 1855 Leaves. Mostly his adaptation consists in relineating, in combining the shorter lines of the 1850 poem into single, longer lines in Leaves.119 For example, “For many a promise sworn by royal lips/ And broken, and laughed at in the breaking” becomes the single line, “For many a promise sworn by royal lips, And¹²⁰ broken, and laughed at in the breaking” (LG, 88). In another example a five-line section is recombined into two long lines:

But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction,

And frightened rulers come back:

Each comes in state, with his train,

Hangman, priest, and tax-gatherer,

Soldier, lawyer, and sycophant; (“Resurgemus”)

Each comes in state with his train…. hangman, priest and tax-gatherer…. soldier, lawyer, jailer and sycophant. (LG, 88)

In both examples, what becomes caesural divisions in Leaves once stood literally as singular lines in “Resurgemus.”

Line-Internal Parallelism

A related consideration arises in what Allen calls “internal parallelism.” In noting dissimilarities between Whitman’s and the Bible’s use of parallelism, Allen observes, “As a rule it is easier to break up Whitman’s long lines into shorter parallelisms (‘internal’, we shall call them), though this can be done with some biblical lines and cannot be done with many of Whitman’s shorter lines.”121 He goes on, with some minor equivocation, to say, “Perhaps Leaves of Grass contains more internal parallelism than the poetry of the Bible.”122 No equivocation is necessary. While there is line internal parallelism within biblical Hebrew verse,123 it is not nearly so prominent as in Whitman.¹²⁴ And the reason why this is so is also the telling point. Again, Allen is befuddled because he is comparing apples (mostly) and oranges, the Hebrew line of biblical verse (or a presumed translation equivalent thereof) and Whitman’s line. They are not comparable. But when one recalibrates and compares, instead, Whitman’s line and the verse divisions in the KJB, then the view quickly comes into focus. If the biblical Hebrew verse line only sparingly exhibits line-internal parallelism (because it often lacks the necessary scale), the verse divisions of the KJB in the poetic books are rife with it because they are themselves most often translations of sets of parallel lines. The only biblical example of line-internal parallelism that Allen quotes is Ps 19:2–4, which he lays out in the following manner:125

Tellingly, this does not appear to be Moulton’s rendition, which both originally and in the volume Allen claims to cite, replicates the RV, a fair English version of the underlying Hebrew line structure:

And their words to the end of the world.126

The wording of Allen’s citation is the same—whether taken from Moulton or from the RV itself—though lined according to the verse divisions of the KJB—albeit in a schematized manner:

Interestingly, Allen’s confused version of Ps 19:2–4 shows what he claims it shows, namely, line-internal parallelism of the kind commonly found in Whitman, though admittedly not quite in the way that he imagines. The underlying Hebrew lines have no such line-internal parallelism, as Moulton’s version makes clear. Rather, the source of the putative internal parallelism in this example is the verse divisions of the KJB, each containing the translation equivalent to a parallel couplet in the original Hebrew. So here, too, there is a match between the KJB (verse divisions) and Whitman’s line. And as significant the trope is common in both corpuses (see Chapter Four).

Allen illustrates line-internal parallelism in Whitman by breaking up the parallel caesural divisions in the opening lines of the “Song of Myself” (with Whitman’s later addition, e.g., LG 1881, 29) and lining them out:

Even better is “They were purified by death…. They were taught and exalted” from “Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair” (LG, 88), which can be decomposed with confidence into the parallel lines of the 1850 “Resurgemus”:

They were purified by death,

They were taught and exalted.

Such decomposition, while admirably illustrating the parallelism Allen sees, also reveals from a slightly different angle how any biblical model for Whitman’s long(er) lines must be on the scale of the verse divisions of the KJB. Otherwise there would be a good deal more such sets of short(er), parallel lines, for these are the more precise equivalents to the parallelistic couple so prominent in biblical Hebrew verse, as a comparison with Moulton’s rendition of Ps 19:2–4 readily reveals. And as noted above, the rough equivalence of Whitman’s caesural divisions and the underlying Hebrew verse line is what may be predicted if it is the verse divisions of the KJB that have helped to inspire Whitman’s typical long lines.

Internally parallelistic lines (whether of two or three parts) are extremely common in Leaves and are one of the surest signs of the KJB’s imprint on Whitman’s mature style. The parallelistic couplet and triplet are the most dominant forms of line grouping in biblical poetry. They provide the basic skeletal infrastructure for the biblical poet’s art and are inevitably rendered into two and three part verses in the prose translation of the KJB. Mostly, of course, Whitman has just adopted this parallelistic substructure and fitted it out with his own language material. But the substructure itself and the prominence of semantic synonymity are important markers of the biblical genealogy.128 This is even more clear when accompanied by other biblical inflections. For example, the line introducing the thrush from “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom,”: “If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die” (Sequel, 4), is fitted out with archaisms (“thou wast” [50x in KJB], “thou wouldest” [29x in KJB]) and phrasing (“surely die” [22x in KJB]) redolent of the KJB, but also a conditional clause (protasis and apodosis) mapped onto the binary substructure of the underlying Hebrew couplet:

I cite Ps 137:6 because Whitman uses the language from the apodosis in one of his early pieces of fiction (“His tongue cleav’d to the roof of his mouth”),129 and thus there can be confidence of his familiarity with such poetically shaped biblical conditionals.¹³⁰ But the main point is to reveal the skeletal imprint of the underlying Hebrew pattern as it is processed through the prose translation of the KJB.

An even more spectacular example may be cited from the 1860 edition of Leaves. The following comes from section 34 in the new opening poem, “Proto-Leaf” (later called “Starting from Paumanok”):

The greatness of Love and Democracy—and the greatness of Religion. (LG 1860, 13)

Such “graded number sequences” are both a commonplace in the poetry of the Bible and distinctively biblical. Proverbs 30:18–19 is typical:

In both the number sequence (x// x+1) is intended to enumerate a definite number (x+1) of items, as the items are then listed in the following line/verse division (“Love,” “Democracy,” and “Religion” in Whitman; the way of an “eagle,” “serpent,” ship,” and “man” in Prov 30:19; cf. Ps 62:12–13; Prov 6:16–19; 30:21–23, 29–31; Job 5:19–22). What is so distinctly biblical about the trope is how rudimentary number knowledge (e.g., counting, basic arithmetic) is accommodated to a parallelistic frame and biblical poetry’s strong preference for couplets—it is a dominantly distichic kind of verse. The latter comes across more clearly in a translation, such as the ASV, which explicitly lineates according to the underlying Hebrew—the KJB is a prose translation:

The abbreviated counts attested in the graded numerical sequences in the Bible (viz. “three…”// “and four….”) principally result from the shaping force of the distich, and hence one more indication of Whitman’s source.131

Then there is the parallelism. Since Lowth,132 parallelism has been the principal frame of reference for understanding these graded sequences of numbers in the Bible, considered by many a variety of synonymous word-pairs (A-B terms), a “peculiar” sort of “number parallelism.” W. G. E. Watson’s explanation is typical: “since no number can have a synonym the only way to provide a corresponding component is to use a digit which is higher in value than the original.”133 The rub—implicit in Watson’s “no number can have a synonym”—is that these numbers “are clearly not synonymous,” as M. O’Connor emphasizes.134 Rather, whatever parallelism is involved in these numerical sequences is the result of the larger informing framework, and not because of any putative synonymous identity between the numbers themselves.¹³⁵ Nevertheless, the parallelism itself is another strong indicator of Whitman’s source for such a trope. Whitman’s language is his own, but the trope, as with the proverbial rhetoric in the “med Cophósis”notebook, is quite clearly borrowed from the Bible. In this instance, there is also the added dimension of the stanza or section number (34). Whitman introduces these numbers into (many of) his longer poems in the 1860 Leaves in imitation of the verse numbers from the KJB. Hence, not only are the supporting language tropes borrowed from the Bible (parallelism, graded number sequence) but so is this aspect of formatting. A comparison of page images from Harper’s 1846 Illuminated Bible (Prov 30:18–19) and from the 1860 Leaves (p. 13, sec. 34) offers a stunning snapshot of just how visually alike these are (Figs. 1, 37). This is perhaps as close as one can come to catching Whitman out in his act of imitation of and collation from the Bible.

Fig. 37: Prov 30:7–31:20 from Harper’s Illuminated Bible.

End-Stopping

Another consideration is the end-stopped nature of Whitman’s lines. Early on E. C. Ross points out the structural importance of the line to Whitman’s verse136 and the fact that “a run-on line is rare in Whitman—so rare that it may be considered a ‘slip.’”¹³⁷ Almost every line of Whitman’s ends in a major syntactic pause, marked most frequently by commas and periods—this is Allen’s “clausal structure” where “each verse [is] a sentence.”138 Allen seizes on the overwhelmingly end-stopped nature of Whitman’s lines to underscore the importance of parallelism to the poet’s prosody: “This [end-stopping and the line it reveals] is because parallelism is the first rhythmic principle in Whitman’s verse.”139 Here Allen shows well that he understands the central force of parallelism as a phenomenon to be the iteration of the singular—in this case the singular is the lineal unit. Curiously, Allen neither notes the fact that biblical poetry is also prominently end-stopped, line-boundary normally converging with the end of discrete syntactic units, nor marshals this datum toward his larger thesis. And yet it is one of the outstanding features of biblical verse,140 so much so that M. Kinzie in her A Poet’s Guide to Poetry chooses the biblical tradition to exemplify how sentence logic (syntax) may be used to end a line, noting that “Hebrew poetry consists of lines that close at the ends of phrases.”141 Most of Moulton’s translations cited by Allen effectively replicate in English the end-stopping that pervades Hebrew line structure. Yet Kinzie, however keen her observation, botches things roundly when it comes to illustrating her point. For this she chooses to offer selections from the KJB, lineated as I have been doing according to the verse divisions in that translation. Ps 70:2–4 (vv. 3–5 in Hebrew) is her first example, which she formats in the following manner:

Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.142

To make matters worse she analyzes these “lines,” noting in particular that they have “identical opening or closing phrases” (emphasized in the translation) and “begin with capital letters.”¹⁴³ Her focus here is patently on the English. None of this—citation, like openings, capitalization—tells us anything about the end-stopped nature of the underlying Hebrew line. It is instructive nonetheless for my larger consideration of Whitman. First, however unwittingly, Kinzie provides a stunning example of a poet construing the KJB’s prose rendering of biblical poetry as verse precisely in the manner I am supposing of Whitman. That is, the language material segmented by the verse divisions of the KJB is seen (and heard) as singular, lineal entities of verse, one (postulated) stichic unit following on another (with mainly only thematic elements available for grouping purposes)—the initial capitalization with repetitive opening or closing phrases emphasized by Kinzie’s analysis also typify Whitman’s lineal palette, especially in his catalogues. Another contemporary poet (and critic), J. Hollander, in his delightfully witty Rhyme’s Reason, offers a similar kind of confirmatory example of what I imagine to be Whitman’s practice. In turning to discuss and illustrate “unmeasured verse”—free verse—which he notes has existed “for ages,” Hollander begins with “the verse form of the Hebrew Bible,” which “as it was translated into English” is for him possibly the “most influential” form of free verse.144 As is Hollander’s practice throughout this little book, instead of citing actual examples he provides his own often very amusing and enlightening renderings. His imitation of biblical poetry in English is instructive:

The verse of the Hebrew Bible is strange; the meter of Psalms and Proverbs perplexes.

One river’s water is heard on another’s shore; so did this Hebrew verse form carry across into English.145

This effectively mimics biblical verse, and exactly in the manner of Kinzie’s stichic construal of the verse divisions of the KJB, i.e., longer lines (corresponding to the range of lengths of the verse divisions), caesural segments that fall out according to the underlying Hebrew line structure (Hollander’s “half-line”). At the same time, it is strikingly reminiscent of Whitman, whom Hollander goes on to discuss in the following paragraph. If Kinzie, by dint of her way of formatting and analyzing the KJB’s versions of biblical poems, exemplifies the plausibility of assuming a similar kind of uptake on Whitman’s part, then Hollander’s efforts spectacularly illustrate what can result when a poet intentionally aims to emulate an Englished version of the biblical poetic tradition (as mediated by the KJB). This is the other side of the proverbial coin. Kinzie shows how the KJB verse divisions can be construed poetically and Hollander how such a construal can lead to an original poetic creation. The two together are quite intriguing for my larger thesis.

A second significance of Kinzie’s understanding the KJB as a transparent rendering of the original Hebrew demonstrates how the KJB lined out according to verse divisions is also end-stopped. And the KJB is end-stopped precisely in the manner that Whitman’s verse is end-stopped, i.e., mostly in longer segments, punctuated by caesural pauses of various kinds. Hollander’s riff on biblical poetry also shows this. Indeed, he goes on in another of his made-up verse illustrations to describe the kind of end-stopped free-verse line that exemplifies both the Bible (whether in Hebrew or English) and Whitman:

Free verse is never totally “free”:

Of prepositional type.146

End-stopped lines are prominent in biblical Hebrew poetry, but they are not so overwhelmingly dominant as in Whitman or the KJB’s verse divisions. Almost a third of the lines in the biblical Hebrew corpus are enjambed, the syntax running over line boundaries—definitely not a slip.147 But most of these run-on lines appear within couplet, triplet, and quatrain boundaries. So even in a couplet containing an enjambed line—for example, the opening couplet in Lamentations 1 (“How lonely sits the city/ that once was full of people!”, NRSV)—the couplet boundary itself is almost always closed, end-stopped—syntax running over couplet or triplet boundaries in biblical verse, if not quite a slip, nonetheless is rare, e.g., “Now I would be lying down and quiet;/ I would be asleep; then I would be at rest// with kings and counselors of the earth/ who rebuild ruins for themselves,” Job 3:13–14 (NRSV). The end-stopped nature of the verse divisions of the KJB ultimately refracts end-stopping in the underlying Hebrew, but at the boundary of the couplet (or triplet or quatrain), not that of the line. Kinzie’s larger point is on target, and if she muffs the details, she does so in a way that clarifies just how close (and closed) the KJB verse divisions are to Whitman’s own lines.

This likeness is ramified when the prose portions of the Bible are considered alongside the poetry. The verse divisions of the KJB in this material, almost without exception, close at a major syntactic juncture, usually a sentence and usually marked by a period (in English translations). At base, then, the KJB, regardless of genre, presents itself as a mass of sentences set off by indentation and numbered verses. This is to emphasize the coercive nature of the verse divisions as they persistently interrupt the reading experience and divide the language material into varied sizes of sentences (or groups of sentences). Since Allen’s “Biblical Analogies,” scholars have pointed to the prevalence of parallelism in Leaves as a leading indicator of Whitman’s stylistic debt to the Bible (see Chapter Four). An even more thoroughgoing marker of this debt, however, may be Whitman’s predilection for a “rhythm of thought” parsed out sententially, line by end-stopped line. Certainly, the Bible in the familiar rendition of the KJB offers a ready and abundant source of such sententially versified language. In fact, the trial lines in the early notebooks appear to show Whitman primarily preoccupied with shaping his emerging line to fit his sentential mode of thought. Most of these lines, regardless of length, are composed of single thoughts. And the incidence of line-internal parallelism in these lines is remarkably low.

To recognize in the Bible a ready-made model for Whitman’s predominantly end-stopped line is not to presume anything about how that model was actually encountered or accommodated. To judge by the three 1850 free-verse poems and especially the trial lines in the early notebooks and poetry manuscripts, Whitman’s mode of composition is decidedly non-static, frenetic, constantly in process, doing and re-doing (and un-doing). His proclivity for lines made up of sentential wholes is evident already in the 1850 poems. A remarkable example appears in Whitman’s close rendition of Matt 26:15 in “Blood-Money”:

Here Whitman orchestrates his line-cuts according to the major syntactic junctures (cued by punctuation and capitalization) in the (translated) biblical passage: “And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matt 26:15). The impulse toward sententially oriented lines is clearly detectable and the verse division is what holds Whitman’s immediate attention. And yet run-on lines also appear in this early material, and sometimes Whitman can be seen resolving these into often larger, rounder syntactic wholes. He often achieves this through his combinatory strategy as frequently in his revisions to “Resurgemus.”148 For example, the shorter, sharper syntactic cuts in

Not a disembodied spirit

Can the weapon of tyrants let loose,

But it shall stalk invisibly over the earth,

Whispering, counseling, cautioning. (“Resurgemus,”)

are significantly softened in their revised form in the 1855 Leaves:

But it stalks invisibly over the earth . . whispering counseling cautioning. (LG, 88)

In the latter, the inter-lineal syntactic dependencies are not totally erased, but they are eased such that the resulting two lines are more easily consumed holistically.

Another good example comes from the “I know a rich capitalist” notebook. Here what is originally conceived of as a prose sentence is broken into short(er) run-on lines of verse. Then the portion of this material included in the 1855 Leaves is re-combined into a larger lineal whole:

— Out of the first Nothing and —out of the black fogs of primeval of the nostrilsOr original Vacuity, of Death which that vast and sluggish hung ebbless and floodless in the spread of space—it asked of God with undeniable will, something to satisfy itself149

Out of the vast, first Nothing

The ebbless and floodless vapor from the nostrils of Death,

It asked of God with undeniable will,

Something to satisfy itself.— ¹⁵⁰

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, the vapor from the nostrils of death (LG, 50)

My main takeaway from such examples is to re-emphasize the processual and diachronic nature of Whitman’s stylistic development as a poet and to resist the temptation to resort to stridently punctual explanations. I presume that Whitman’s engagement with source material—the Bible or otherwise—is of a similar nature, that his culling of the idea for a syntactically closed line, for example, need not have been a momentary revelation nor disentangled from his compositional practice.

It is also worth stressing the centrality of the end-stopped line to Whitman’s ever evolving democratic poetics. Like other elements of Whitman’s style that connect with the Bible, his preference for end-stopping is invested politically. The singular, end-stopped line as it circumscribes wholeness (syntactically, ideationally, characterologically, imagistically)151 inscribes palpable, material instantiations of particularity and individuality. And when these singularities get grouped into larger gatherings, as they do in Whitman’s many catalogues, they become signifiers of equality, of tolerance for difference, of unity amidst diversity—Whitman’s idea of “many in one” (LG 1856, 180). The long catalogue of people at work early in “I celebrate myself” (LG, 21–23) offers a good example. The basic lineal unit is a clausal whole of the following kind: “The” + N(P) [actor noun, occupation] + V [present tense, action] + DO/PP.152 This basic syntactic template is established in the first nine lines of the catalogues:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft,

The carpenter dresses his plank…. the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,

The married and unmarried children ride home to their thanksgiving dinner,

The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,

The mate stands braced in the whaleboat, lance and harpoon are ready,

The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,

The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar,

The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,

The farmer stops by the bars of a Sunday and looks at the oats and rye (LG, 21).

Whitman occasionally varies the pattern. Sometimes he adds a second clausal segment that expands on what the worker does or what the work entails (as in lines 2 and 4); other times the added clause introduces a related actor (e.g., “The pedlar sweats with his pack on his back—the purchaser higgles about the odd cent,” (LG, 22). At times, Whitman extends the subject of one line into another (e.g., “The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,/ He turns his quid of tobacco, his eyes get blurred with the manuscript,” LG, 21). But generally the pattern of the base lineal unit prevails repeatedly over the course of the catalogue’s sixty-nine lines. The line particularizes and individuates the worker and the work. The individual in all their peculiarity is spotlighted and prized. As these similar syntactic frames are repeated and brought into alignment, the resulting parallelism both unifies and equalizes that with which the frames are filled—namely, the multitude of people—Americans all!—going about the tasks of daily, democratic existence. Erkkila describes it this way: “Presented in a sequence of separate and end-stopped images, these figures are independent and yet related” through various aspects of Whitman’s “democratic poetics,” including most prominently “the parallel structure of the lines.”153 Erkkila continues: “The total effect of the passage is to equalize and fuse in one chain brides and opium eaters, prostitutes and presidents, men and women, by presenting them parallelistically on a horizontal plane.”¹⁵⁴ At the heart of Whitman’s vision for American democracy is “the origin-idea of the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself.”¹⁵⁵ The end-stopped line is one of Whitman’s primary poetic means for giving expression to this political conviction.

Prosiness

The signature length of so many of Whitman’s lines—that outstanding feature of all long-line verse—makes for an expanded discursive palette onto which the poet often uncoils his thoughts in a leisurely amble otherwise so characteristic of prose. Indeed, Beyers stresses (commenting on a passage from “Song of Myself”) the capacity of long-line poetry to incorporate prose and its sententious rhythms.156 The increase in the scale of the line offers discursive possibilities that short-line verse simply cannot accommodate. Although there is more to Whitman’s prosody than its prosiness, the latter has been regularly observed (positively and negatively) by readers. In fact, it is probable that “prosiness” itself (in part) led Whitman to the long line that he gradually shapes for himself. Zweig even supposes that much of the 1855 Leaves “was first written down as prose.”157 The pre-1855 notebooks are a blend of lines of verse and prose, and, if anything, there is more prose than poetry. As Miller stresses, Whitman “culled more lines from the prose… than he did from the work in lines.”158 Emblematic is the prose of “There was a child went forth every day—and the first thing that he saw looked at with fixed love, that thing he became for the day.—”159 from the “med Cophósis”notebook that Whitman turns into the initial lines of the tenth poem of the 1855 Leaves, “THERE was a child went forth everyday,/ And the first object he looked upon…, that object he became” (LG, 90). Whole chunks of the 1855 Preface were eventually culled in a similar fashion and lineated to make up part of the 1856 “Poem of Many In One” (later “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”; e.g., LG, iv–v// LG 1856, 188–89 [later sec. 10]).¹⁶⁰ And outside of Leaves, Whitman would continue to hold his prose and verse close together. There may be no more graphic expression of this than Two Rivulets (1876), in which verse and prose appear on the same page, separated by a wavy line running horizontally across the middle of the page (Fig. 8)—“two flowing chains of prose and verse, emanating the real and ideal.”161

As Zweig explains, the importance of prose to the development of Whitman’s line should not be surprising:

His most influential models were not poems at all but Carlyle’s gnarled prose, Emerson’s essays, the King James Bible, Ruskin, maybe even Thoreau. There was far more great prose than poetry in Whitman’s “foreground.” His achievement was to incorporate the advantages of prose—its flexibility, its ability to mold itself freely to an actual speaking voice—into a new line that was subtly accented yet never far from the extended rhythms of prose.162

Zweig’s emphasis here seems to me to be very much on target. The Bible was only one source among many in Whitman’s “long foreground” and his sources in no way fully explain his achievement; they are but only a starting point. Still, Whitman’s prosiness, especially in the 1855 Leaves, offers (as Zweig notices) yet another point of contact with the KJB, itself the premier prose translation of the Bible (in English), and what became a revered English classic.163 That is, not only do the lengths of the verse divisions match up well with Whitman’s lines, so, too, does the prosaic nature of what takes place within the framework established by these lines, the KJB’s manifest prosiness feeding the prosiness of Whitman—recall that it is above all prose (especially in his journalism) that dominates Whitman’s writerly output until 1850, and indeed throughout the early 1850s in the immediate build-up to the 1855 Leaves. And afterwards, too. He never stops writing prose.

Line-Initial “And”

And beyond the sheer facticity of the KJB as a work of English prose, Whitman’s style shows signs, as well, of having been shaped by the prose style of the Bible. This is a topic I return to in more detail in Chapter Five. Here it will suffice to point out one of the more conspicuous indicators of that style as a means of tying Whitman most specifically to the prose of the English Bible. “There was a child went forth” opens with one of Whitman’s characteristic extended runs of lines beginning with “And”:

And all the changes of city and country wherever he went. (LG, 90–91)

Nine of the eleven lines begin with “And.” Such runs are most redolent of the English style of the KJB, especially in the narrative passages of the Old Testament. Consider this sample from Genesis 32 (vv. 21–32; see Fig. 4):

I cite enough of the passage so that the repeated “And”s at the head of each verse division may be appreciated. Biblical Hebrew is a highly paratactic language, making do with only a handful of true conjunctions. The main narrative line in classical biblical Hebrew prose is normally carried by a peculiar verbal formation known as the waw-consecutive or wayyiqtol form.164 The form may be decomposed historically as a combination of the simple conjunction, wa-, and the prefix form of a verb (yiqtol is the paradigm form favored by Hebrew grammarians). Tyndale, the first to translate the Bible into English from its original languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic), initiated the practice of translating the simple Hebrew conjunction (wa-) primarily with “and,” and thus the wayyiqtol form is often rendered with “and” plus subject and a verb (usually) in the past tense, and many of those “and”s come at the beginning of a sentence:

So went the present before him and he taried all that nyghte in the tente/ ad rose vp the same nyghte ad toke his.ij. wyves and his.ij. maydens & his.xi. sonnes/ & went ouer the foorde Iabok. And he toke them ad sent the ouer the ryuer/ ad sent ouer that he had ad taried behinde him selfe alone.

And there wrastled a man with him vnto the breakynge of the daye. And when he sawe that he coude not prevayle agaynst him/ he smote hi vnder the thye/ and the senowe of Iacobs thy shranke as he wrastled with him. And he sayde: let me goo/ for the daye breaketh. And he sayde: I will not lett the goo/ excepte thou blesse me. And he sayde vnto him: what is thy name? He answered: Iacob. And he sayde: thou shalt be called Iacob nomore/ but Israell. For thou hast wrastled with God and with men ad hast preuayled.

And Iacob asked him sainge/ tell me thi name. And he sayde/ wherfore dost thou aske after my name? and he blessed him there. And Iacob called the name of the place Peniel/ for I haue sene God face to face/ and yet is my lyfe reserved. And as he went ouer Peniel/ the sonne rose vpon him/ and he halted vpon his thye: wherfore the childern of Israell eate not of the senow that shrancke vnder the thye/ vnto this daye: because that he smote Iacob vnder the thye in the senow that shroncke.¹⁶⁵

Normally the King James translators ramify this practice. However, in this instance all the verse initial “And”s are already present in Tyndale’s version. Tyndale uses a plain page layout, organized in paragraphs. The look is clean, very much akin to that of a contemporary novel. Verse divisions (with accompanying indentation) do not enter English Bible translations until 1560 and the Geneva Bible (Fig. 38). The latter has a huge impact on the reading experience. In particular, they interrupt the smooth flow of sentences. Tyndale’s “And”s blend in nicely with the paratactic style he fashions for his English in imitation of the underlying Hebrew. In the KJB, the verse initial “And”s stand out precisely because of the interrupting force of the verse divisions and accompanying indentations (Figs. 4, 13–14). The presentational difference between the two is helpful in isolating the KJB’s impact on Whitman’s style. It is not just Whitman’s preference for parataxis in general, but how his line initial “And”s mirror—or better, take their inspiration from—the verse initial “And”s of the KJB.

Fig. 38: Geneva Bible (1560) was the first English Bible to add verse numbers and to begin each verse on a new line.

Many runs of line-initial “And” populate the 1855 Leaves, beginning as early as the biblically inflected swiftly spreading of “the peace and joy and knowledge” passage from “I celebrate myself” (seven lines start with “And”; LG, 15-). The opening three stanzas from “There was a child went forth” is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the slight slice of prose from the “med Cophósis”notebook out of which the first three lines are fashioned (see above) helps spotlight Whitman actively turning his prose into poetry, including in this instance promoting the sentence internal “and” to head the beginning of a line, now also capitalized: “And the first object he looked upon….” A very literal example of this kind of translation appears in “Blood-Money.” Here, Whitman turns a verse internal sentence headed by “And” from Matt 26:15 (“And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver”) into an independent verse line, while at the same time translating the KJB’s past tense into his preferred present tense: “And they make the covenant and pay the pieces of silver.”166

This is to emphasize that such a stylistic feature is not naive or given and that the KJB by dint of its pattern of translation and page layout offers one obvious model for this practice. Also remarkable is Whitman’s use of the past tense in these lines (e.g., “he looked,” “object became,” “all became”). This, too, is an especially marked aspect of the English biblical narrative style. Other examples of the past tense with initial “And” appear in Leaves, including this from “I celebrate myself”:

 . . . I waited unseen and always,

And slept while God carried me through the lethargic mist,

And took my time…. and took no hurt from the foetid carbon. (LG, 50)

However, the vast majority of such “And”-initiated lines in the early Leaves, like so much of the rest of the poetry in the early Leaves, is staged as nonnarrative discourse of the moment, as if in the timeless present, and thus showing a distinct preference for the present tense (see discussion in Chapter Five).

As with many aspects of Whitman’s style, this penchant for heading successive lines with “And” possesses a pre-Leaves genealogy. In the twenty-one poems collected by T. L. Brasher in The Early Poems and the Fiction,167 lines headed by “And” appear on average about four times per poem. With the exception of several instances from “Blood-Money”168 and “Resurgemus,” these lines are always short and there are never more than three such lines in succession, and that happens only twice.169 Of the early notebooks, the “Talbot Wilson” notebook is the one that most anticipates Whitman’s use of “And”-headed lines in the 1855 Leaves,170 especially in the increased lengths and usage of such lines and the runs—one leaf (38) alone has a run of four such lines on the recto171 followed by another six on the verso.¹⁷² In much of this material Whitman is also already translating the biblical pattern into the present tense orientation he is establishing for his verse. This selection from the “Talbot Wilson” notebook is generally representative of this early notebook material, though distinguished specifically for showing Whitman working in the past tense (Fig. 39):

And now I know that each a leaf of grass is not less than they173

Nine of the ten legible lines started in the “And to me each minute” manuscript are headed by “And” (Fig. 40):

[illegible line]174

And as observed previously (Chapter Two), “Pictures” is remarkable precisely for its fifty-two line-initial “And”s that form the spine of this long poem.175

Fig. 39: Leaves 38v, 43r of the “Talbot Wilson” notebook, https://www.loc.gov/item/mss454430217. Leaf 38v shows a run of “And”-headed lines. Image courtesy od the Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1842–1937, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. MSS45443, Box 8: Notebook LC #80.

Fig. 40: Recto of “And to me every minute,” https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/tex.00057.001.jpg. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. A run of “And”-headed lines, though in a different order than the same lines appear in the 1855 Leaves.

The KJB Mediated Otherwise

I have noted the wide popularity of the King James Bible during the nineteenth century and endeavored to connect that Bible to Whitman, presuming (for the most part) his engagement with the printed artifact itself in one edition or another. Mine is an avowedly philological approach, motivated in part to answer Posey’s call for “careful investigation and massing of evidence.” My “massing” of the manifold ways in which the KJB’s verse divisions are suggestive of Whitman’s (long) verse line in the preceding pages is one manifestation of this philological method. Of course, the KJB in nineteenth-century America was found otherwise than in the printed pages of its many editions and its influence mediated in myriads of ways beyond readerly encounters with the biblical text itself. General and specific examples are easily identified. Very generally, for example, hymns and sermons were popular conveyors of all manner of biblical ideas, language, and imagery, the ultimate source for which was mostly the KJB. Whitman was an avid devotee of both. A lover of music broadly (e.g., opera),176 he particularly enjoyed the “popular old camp-meeting songs,”¹⁷⁷ one of which he quotes from in the novella, “Jack Engle.”178 And “Pulpit oratory,” as Reynolds observes, “was among his special objects of interest.”179 Abraham Lincoln provides a most specific example. Though no preacher, he used scripture with a “preacherly canniness.”180 Consequently, his speeches, as Alter shows, often bear the stylistic imprint of the KJB, especially at crucial junctures requiring a heightened sensibility of one sort or another.181 Whitman attended Lincoln’s second inauguration in person,¹⁸² and therefore heard the second half of that Second Inaugural Address with its many biblical and biblicizing phrasings (e.g., “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” “to care… for his widow and his orphan”) and cadences (e.g., the parallelism of “With malice toward none, with charity for all”).183 In hearing Lincoln that day Whitman heard language shaped to resonate (in identifiable ways) with the language of the KJB.

Such examples are offered as a reminder that Whitman will have absorbed the KJB in a multitude of ways and through various cultural practices apart from reading the Bible (or recalling its familiar figures and idioms). Whitman’s world was a world suffused with the language and imagery of the KJB. Many writers influential for Whitman were also themselves influenced by the KJB (e.g., Milton, Wordsworth, Longfellow),184 and thus their writings in turn could serve as additional (indirect) conduits of this influence. James Macpherson and Martin Farquhar Tupper were two such writers. Contemporary readers of Leaves of Grass most frequently associate Whitman with these poets, and both have been identified as important influences on aspects of Whitman’s line.185 Macpherson was responsible for the English “translations” of the Ossian poems.186 These were fashioned in “emotive, rhythmic prose” and not as verse.¹⁸⁷ The affinities of this prose with that of the English Bible are patent, carrying a “remarkable resemblance to the style of the Old Testament,” in particular, as Hugh Blair noticed in his critical dissertation on the Ossian poems.188 Instances of overlap in content and genre obtain, but perhaps most striking is the prominence of parallelism that propels the rhythmic cadences of Macpherson’s prose. And it is likely that Macpherson, who was a divinity student at King’s College Aberdeen when Lowth’s Praelectiones (1753) were first published, was familiar with Lowth’s work and especially his theory of parallelism.189

Whitman routinely noted his admiration for Ossian¹⁹⁰ and recalled to Traubel having always owned a copy of these poems.191 A lightly annotated 1839 edition of The Poems of Ossian belonging to Whitman is currently in the Feinberg Collection of the Library of Congress.192 Most remarkable, perhaps, are the notations Whitman made about a clipping on Ossian from Margaret Fuller’s “Things and Thoughts on Europe. No. V” discussed earlier (Chapter One).193 In them, Whitman queries the possible relationship between Ossian’s poetry and the Bible: “?Can it be a descendant of the Biblical poetry?—Is it not Isaiah, Job, the Psalms, and so forth, transferred to the Scotch Highlands? (or to Ireland?).”194 While there is no actual genealogical relationship between the Bible and whatever (written and/or oral) traditions may inform Macpherson’s “freely creative” compositions, Macpherson’s prose was truly “a descendant” of the style of prose the translators of the KJB used to render “Biblical poetry” and pretty much as Whitman claims, “transferred” from the likes of “Isaiah, Job, the Psalms” to “the Scotch Highlands”—articulated, incidentally, in terms of the kind of collaging that typifies Whitman’s own mode of composition in Leaves. In fact, in the “Preface” to the edition of Ossian owned by Whitman, Macpherson problematizes the very use of prose in his “translations.” He underscores the “novelty of cadence” in his “prose version” and the presence of a certain “harmony” even in “the absence of the frequent returns of rhyme.”195 He lists among the advantages of prose its “simplicity and energy” and the “freedom and dignity of expression” it enables.¹⁹⁶ Macpherson even goes so far as to offer a “Fragment of a Northern Tale,” first rendered in the prose that typifies his “translations” of all the Ossian poems and then in verse, with meter and rhyme—the former is easily the more successful of the two.¹⁹⁷ In any event, though Whitman was not enamored with some aspects of Macpherson’s style—“(Don’t fall into the Ossianic, by any chance.),”¹⁹⁸ he does also write that “Ossian must not be despised”199 and would have appreciated many of those aspects of style that Macpherson himself highlights, especially “the simple [illeg.] antique primitively Irish and Caledonian thought and personality in these poems”200 and Macpherson’s disparagement of meter and rhyme (highlighted by the contrasting prose and poetic versions of the trial fragment). In so far as Macpherson’s style was indebted to the KJB, then, the Ossian poems provided another venue through which this style could—and surely did—impact Whitman. Indeed, not only do the Ossian poems refract biblical style but they offer Whitman a most palpable model of how that style could be fitted out with different content—“Is it not Isaiah, Job, the Psalms… transferred to the Scotch Highlands?” Leaves of Grass is not so dissimilar, the carrying forward “in another” of “those autochthonic bequests of Asia” such that they “still survive” and “dominate just as much as hitherto” through their “divine and primal poetic structure.”201

Fig. 41: P. 273 from Whitman’s copy of James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (London: Joseph Rickerby, 1838) showing bracketed text. Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. Washington D. C. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

Fig. 42: P. 274 from Whitman’s copy of Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian showing bracketed text. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

Fig. 43: P. 299 from Whitman’s copy of Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian showing bracketed text. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

Tupper was a contemporary of Whitman’s whose Proverbial Philosophy (issued in many editions) was wildly popular—between two and three hundred thousand copies were sold in America alone.202 Whitman knew of Tupper. He had reviewed positively Tupper’s prose work, Probabilities: An Aid to Faith in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (20 February 1847): “the author… is one of the rare men of the time.”203 J. L. Coulombe believes it very unlikely that Whitman could have missed press coverage of Tupper’s visit to the States in 1851. Stovall thinks that the only reason Whitman did not review Proverbial Philosophy in the Eagle “is that it was already too well known.”204 Several of the early reviews of Leaves made direct comparisons to Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy—“the poem [Leaves] is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical ‘lengths,’ like the measured prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy.”205 And two of these Whitman reprinted in the second issue of the 1855 Leaves and again in the 1856 edition.²⁰⁶ Whitman owned and annotated a copy of the 1838 edition of Proverbial Philosophy.²⁰⁷ The annotations (consisting mostly of circles or brackets around sets of lines) are in blue pencil and appear on sixteen separate pages, including the title page which is initialed and dated in the upper righthand corner (“WW ‘75”).²⁰⁸ The latter certainly confirm that by 1875 (taking the title-page inscription at face value) Whitman had read Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy. J. J. Rubin argues that “even a superficial examination of Tupper’s writings brings the conviction that they did contribute to the composition of Leaves of Grass.”209 Intriguingly, two of the seven passages Rubin cites from Tupper as suggestive of Whitman the poet himself circled or bracketed in his edition of Proverbial Philosophy. In the first, Rubin cites three lines from “Of Recreation” on p. 113. Whitman circles two lines on this page: “To trace the consummate skill that hath modeled the anatomy of insects” and “To learn a use in the beetle, and more than a beauty in the butterfly” (Fig. 44). The first of these comes immediately after the third line Rubin cites (“The dog at his master’s feet, and the walrus anchored to the ice berg”).210 From “Of Invention,” Whitman brackets the following group of lines (Fig. 45), the first two of which Rubin also cites:

And anon the cold smooth stone is warm with feathery grass,

And the light sporules of the fern are dropt by the passing wind;

The wood-pigeon, on swift wing, leaveth its crop-full of grain;

The squirrel’s jealous care planteth the fir-cone and the filbert.

Years pass, and the sterile rock is rank with tangled herbage;

And the tall pine and hazel-thicket shade the rambling school boy.

Shall the rock boast of its fertility? shall it lift the head in pride?

Shall the mind of man be vain of the harvest of its thoughts?

The savage is that rock; and a million chances from without,

By little and little acting on the mind, heapeth the hot-bed of society:²¹¹

Fig. 44: P. 113 from Whitman’s copy of Martin Farquhar Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy (London: Joseph Rickerby, 1838) showing circled text. Feinberg Collection of the Library of Congress. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

Fig. 45: P. 153 from Whitman’s copy of Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy showing bracketed text. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

Other passages are equally suggestive of Whitman. For example, Whitman brackets material from Tupper’s section “Of Memory” that is very reminiscent of parts of “Pictures,” including the following:

Athens and Rome, Persepolis and Sparta, am I not a freeman of you all?212

Compare these lines from “Pictures,” where Whitman similarly recalls prominent people from world history:

And here, arguing, the questioner, ^{the Athenian} of the classical time—Socrates, this in the market place,

Young men, pupils, collect in the gardens of their ^{some a favorite} master, waiting for him,213

Not only do these sequences resemble one another, but Tupper’s image at the beginning of the section of the “storehouse of the mind” as a “small cavern” or “airy chambers” whose “beams” are laid in a “strange firmament,”214 though conceived more biologically, nevertheless is quite like Whitman’s picture-gallery image of the mind as a “little house,” “round” and “but a few inches” from one side to another, in which “pictures” are hung.²¹⁵

A last example may be cited from the final four lines in the section “Of Wealth,” which Whitman brackets and annotates (“wealth” is written in on the bottom right hand corner of the page, immediately under the final line of verse, see Fig. 46):

Wealth hath never given happiness, but often hastened misery:

Enough hath never caused misery, but often quickened happiness.

Enough is less than thy thought, O pampered creature of society;

And he that hath more than enough, is a thief of the rights of his brother.²¹⁶

Compare this triplet of lines from “Great are the myths”:

Who goes for men and women showing poverty richer than wealth? (LG, 93-)

These do not seem so much to riff on or mimic Tupper’s lines as respond to them with Whitman’s own take on the theme.

Fig. 46: P. 150 from Whitman’s copy of Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy showing bracketed text and annotation. Photograph by Leslie Dobbs-Allsopp.

One does not have to read too far into Tupper’s volume before encountering references to biblical figures (e.g., “Sirach’s son,” p. 6, the putative author of the biblical book of Ben Sira [or “Ecclesiasticus”]; “Wisdom” personified [pp. 9–10] as in Proverbs [e.g., Prov 8:1; 9:1]; the “Most High,” p. 10; cf. Isa 14:14; Ps 82:6; 83:18 [= Hebrew ʿelyôn]) and biblicizing idioms (e.g., “dark sayings” [p. 6] ≈ “dark sentences” [as in the Prologue to Ben Sira]; “lips of Wisdom” [pp. 9, 10, 11] picking up on Wisdom’s reference to her “lips” in Prov 8:6 and 7; “garden of the Lord” [p. 15] is an allusion to Eden, “the garden of God,” Ezek 28:13; 31:8, 9). In fact, Proverbial Philosophy is filled with the kinds of “stock” biblicisms (e.g., “lo,” “yea,” archaisms of all sorts, including many verbs ending in “-eth”) of the kind Whitman scrubbed out of the early Leaves. But perhaps most redolent of the KJB is Tupper’s use of a two-part line patterned (largely) after the KJB’s typical (prose) rendering of the underlying Hebrew parallelistic couplets that dominate in the wisdom poetry of the Bible:

These I give to thy gentle heart, thou lover of the right.217

These are the lines that fill the first page of the “Prefatory” to Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy. The two-part parallelistic line prevails from the beginning. The first line is emblematic, exhibiting the synonymous form of parallelism (“Thoughts, that have tarried in my mind”// “and peopled its inner chambers”) in which the subject (“Thoughts”) is both fronted (note the initial comma and “that”) and gapped in the second clause, all common characteristics of biblical parallelism (see Chapter Four).

Other aspects of Tupper’s line beyond a fondness for internal parallelism are equally suggestive of the Bible’s informing influence. For example, the lines are unmetered and unrhymed, consistently longer than lines of conventional metrical verse, and start with capital letters and are mostly end-stopped, usually ending with a major syntactic pause marked by punctuation (period, comma, colon, semi-colon, long dash). Significantly, Tupper only very rarely uses lines of more than sixteen words (e.g., “But have lost, as they ran, those apples of gold—the mind and the power to enjoy it,” p. 146; eighteen words) or fewer than eight words (e.g. “Like wreathed adders crawling round his midnight conscience:”, p. 29; eight words).218 The model is quite evidently the Bible’s proverbial wisdom, which in the translation of the KJB is regularly segmented into unmetered, unrhymed, and mostly closed verse divisions ranging between eight and sixteen words. And like the proverbial poetry of the biblical wisdom traditions on which Proverbial Philosophy is modeled, Tupper’s line is not used to tell stories. His style is broadly discursive, nonnarrative.

It is above all this line that most Whitman scholars (grudgingly or not) recognize as influencing Whitman’s ideas about his own line.219 Indeed, not only do the two share the biblical-inspired attributes just outlined, but they are arranged similarly on the page. Both use indentation to signal the continuation of the verse line onto the next line of printed text and extra spacing to group sequences of affiliated lines. That Whitman was attentive to Tupper’s line structure (at least belatedly) is made clear from the fact that the bracketing and circling in his own copy of Proverbial Philosophy always respect Tupper’s line boundaries—and in several instances these isolate singular lines.220 In sum, then, Tupper takes much from the Bible, including many formal features of his line (e.g., scale, prosiness, lack of meter and rhyme, parallelism, discursive style). And Whitman very “probably got ideas” about form and content from Tupper, with “the most obvious link” being the long, unrhymed, and unmetered line “in the manner of the Bible.”221 What may be emphasized with Miller and M. Cohen is that “if Whitman was influenced by Tupper’s line the influence is still biblical, since ‘Solomon’s proverbs were the model for Proverbial Philosophy.’”222

Whitman will have found the KJB in many places in addition to its scores of printed editions. Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian and Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, copies of which Whitman owned and read, are two such places.

Conclusions

The several considerations reviewed above suggest a number of conclusions that may be drawn with respect to Whitman’s line and the Bible. First, the point of comparison is between Whitman’s mature line and the verse divisions of the KJB, as originally noted by Saintsbury. Second, the central thrust of Saintbury’s observation, that Whitman’s line resembles the verse divisions of the KJB, appears also to be well made. I have articulated a myriad of ways in which these are alike. So much so, in fact, that it is hard to imagine, given the place of the Bible in Whitman’s world and worldview (he preferred it “above all other great literature”223), that the KJB’s verse divisions were not a major source of influence on Whitman’s ideas about his line. No other proposed source has so many points of contact. The nature of the influence is likely to have been multifaceted and not simply a matter of Whitman aiming to mime biblical style. Miller raises the possibility that Whitman “chose the line he did because of the work it could do for his words” and because it “was capacious and plastic enough to involve and absorb the full range of language he had already been composing.”224 That is, when it comes to Whitman’s discovery of his line, the emphasis should fall as much on the line’s suitability to Whitman’s own writing capabilities and temperament as on any conscious or unconscious desire to model himself after a specific style. This seems entirely reasonable to me. Models, of course, are important to all writers. But the reasons for choosing (or even happening upon) certain models and not others are never entirely naive, unmotivated, accidental. I do not think it too far-fetched to imagine that the KJB, through Whitman’s repeated reading and rereading of it during his life or exposure to it through countless other means, played an important part in shaping the poet’s tastes and stylistic sensibilities that eventually would lead him to his preference in line types. But this need not rule out the further possibility of the Bible, as translated and formatted in the KJB, playing a more immediate and conscious role in the formation of Whitman’s signature line, a new awakening to the rich and congenial possibilities for a formal verse line informed by the KJB’s verse divisions. Something shifted for Whitman between the spring and summer of 1850 and 1855 and one result was a line that in its lengths, variety, caesural rhythms, parallelistic shapes, and prosaic nature came to resemble very strongly the verse divisions of the KJB. Such an array of resemblance is not likely achieved solely by chance. Whitman’s program of self-study from 1845–52 included readings about the Bible. The evidence of Whitman’s notebooks and poetry manuscripts makes clear the intentionality with which Whitman worked and reworked his verse from the very beginning. And there are the many revisings and restagings of Leaves of Grass over the course of Whitman’s lifetime, along with the care Whitman took to promote and shape the reception of these volumes. These are the signs of a hyperly intent and intense consciousness at work. This purposefulness pertains to the language material of Whitman’s poems but also to how that language material is staged, framed, formatted. Whitman the carpenter, editor, journalist, and printer had an avid “eye for form.”225 Covers, page layouts, types, titles, bindings, kinds of paper, even, all mattered to this most materialist of poets. It is difficult to imagine someone with such proclivities would just happen upon his line, no matter how loathe he was to disclose its source(s) of inspiration. The restaging of “Resurgemus” for the 1855 Leaves provides one concrete glimpse at this hyperly-attuned consciousness at work. The most fundamental adjustments made to the last of his 1850 pre-Leaves poems is to relineate it, to resize the older, shorter line forms (usually by combining multiples of them together) to accommodate his new, longer, closed-off lines.226

And then there is Whitman’s practice of collaging and montaging of found materials, which, as Miller compellingly reveals in his study Collage of Myself, anticipates in remarkable ways the embrace of the readymade and found art celebrated in the work of the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Duchamp.227 Language in many respects is perceived by Whitman as preceding his own creativity. As he explains, in reference to his own poems, “there is nothing actually new only an accumulation or fruitage or carrying out these new occasions and requirements.”²²⁸ The allusion to Eccl 1:9 (“and there is no new thing under the sun”) is intentional, for Whitman understood his making of poems (e.g., a “New Bible”) to include combining “all those that has belongs to the Iliad of Homer and the Jewish ^Hebrew Canticles called the Bible, and of Skhakespear’s delineation of feudal heroism and personality and would carry ^all the influences of both and all that branches from them for thousands of years.—”229 The recycling of the trope found in Ecclesiastes itself enacts (emblematically) the kind of composition by collage he is writing about. Whitman even uses the language of the “ready-made” in his letter to Emerson: “The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language—all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own” (LG 1856, 347). As a consequence, whether it is language, tropes, ideas, or material matter, Whitman is only too ready to take it up when found and carry it out; albeit in this “carrying out” he works the found material over and over until he makes it his own and in the process all but rubs away any sign of its finding. In effect, Miller argues, Whitman re-conceives “poetic language as a kind of moveable type to be constantly toyed with and restructured—to see the role of the editor and the corresponding work of revision and visual arrangement of text as equally as important to poetry as the immediate act of creation.”230 The notebooks and early poetry manuscripts, with their abundant strikethroughs and pasted-in and cut-up materials, amply attest to this reworking. They are like photographic stills of the process, all caught in some phase or another. The occlusion that can result has also been well tracked (in places). Whitman’s debt to Emerson, for example, has long been appreciated, but what is especially noteworthy for my concern is that no matter how strikingly similar the ideas, “the language is never identical.”²³¹ Whitman’s absorption of Emerson is so thoroughly processed that the latter’s ideas come out sounding just like Whitman. This is true, too, of Whitman’s allusions to the Bible in Leaves. They are ever elusive, highly burnished, and thus mostly hidden, as Allen saw early on.232 As with ideas and language so too with tropes. There is again no doubting Whitman’s debt to the Bible when it comes to his borrowing of parallelism. Allen’s central contention in “Biblical Analogies” remains unchallenged.233 But so too does Whitman adapt the trope to suit his art, and thus whatever originating debt there is the trope in being taken up, and thus continued, is also made Whitman’s own. And in so doing Whitman becomes, as Kinnell well appreciates, “the greatest virtuoso of parallel structure in English poetry”234 (for details, see Chapter Four).

That Whitman’s mature line may be another bit of his found art would not be so startling given this poet’s omnivorous appetite for the readymade and his printerly eye ever attuned to the visual arrangement of text. That Whitman found his line over a period of time starting with his three free-verse poems of 1850 and continuing till the composition of the 1855 Leaves seems true enough. That he worked relentlessly to perfect this line and shape it also is plainly attested. And that as he worked and reworked the language material out of which his line was made Whitman scrubbed away many of the lineaments that would disclose the line’s finding seems yet another empirical datum. And this too is entirely consistent with Whitman’s poetic practice and theory. Was Walt Whitman’s mature line “found” in the King James Bible? The many points of resemblance between this line and the verse divisions of the KJB (especially in the poetical books) make this a tantalizingly appealing thesis. Even my inability to connect (or find) all the dots in order to fully reveal Whitman’s finding of his line for what I think it is seems confirming of the thesis. And yet the fact of the erasure, that final as yet unbridgeable gap, requires at the same time that this thesis be held less tightly, more heuristically. There is much to admire in the “Perhaps” that heads Saintsbury’s initial observation, albeit read ever so slightly against the grain of his intended meaning. From my vantage point it respects the data and as important the artistic temperament behind the data. The question mark at the end of my own chapter title offers “a tip of the hat” to Saintsbury and “a wink and a nod” to Whitman.