Foreword

As Whitman contemplates the way that Time continues to unfold an ever-renewing present moment, he thinks too of how language itself unfolds through time, from humans’ first imitative utterances through rough proto-Indo-European languages to the endless series of vowel and consonant shifts, meldings, and borrowings that become the ever-changing set of languages we now recognize and speak. He is aware that when he speaks American English in the mid-nineteenth century, he is actually speaking a wondrous mix of languages. Today, we are used to the idea of etymologies—of the history of every word we speak, easily available in dictionaries—and to the ways that our words echo back to Greek and Latin and Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit roots, but for Whitman, etymology was one of the explosive new sciences that was changing the way humans viewed the past, and some of the first dictionaries that contained etymologies were published during his lifetime. He thus includes the “lexicographer”—the compiler of dictionaries—as one of the scientists he celebrates for bringing the poet “useful” facts that he can translate from dry truth into searing poetic insight. He also includes the linguists who “made a grammar of the old cartouches”—those hieroglyphic carvings on ancient Egyptian memorials that provided the key to unlocking the Egyptian language and giving humans in the nineteenth century access to a culture otherwise lost to time.

These word-scientists join the chemists and geologists and mathematicians and all the other scientists whose work was exploding open time and space, turning a small earth-centered universe created by God a few thousand years ago into a vast cosmos of tens of billions of galaxies created by an atomic “big bang” fifteen billion years ago. Suddenly, science had created time and space enough for miracles to occur—the formation of stars and solar systems and the earth itself, the slow and inexorable evolution of life into endless forms, eventually resulting in humans and in this poet, writing these words, that we (an equal result of the ongoing aftershock of that fifteen-billion-year-old explosion) now read. So this poet will “accept Reality and dare not question it” and will “accept Time absolutely,” since he knows Time and Reality are permeated with “Materialism,” defined in the dictionary that Whitman used as the doctrine that the human soul is not “a spiritual substance distinct from matter, but rather is the result or effect of the organization of matter in the body.” Reality is the way the atoms of the universe are organized and re-organized throughout Time, and Time “completes all,” Whitman says, because it contains all, accepts all, rejects nothing. Given infinite space and endless time, the possible becomes probable, the probable becomes fact, everything happens, and nothing is excluded. Masters become slaves; slaves become masters; kings become paupers; paupers become kings.

So Whitman’s words are not the “reminders” of whatever “properties” people and countries hold or possess today, because Time will change all that. His words are instead devoted to being “the reminders . . . of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,” because—given Time and given Space—everything imprisoned will be extricated. His words are dedicated not to what seems frozen in time but to what seems always possible in the malleable ever-changing Reality that Time guarantees. He is devoted to the unwritten histories of democracy to come, not to the histories that have already happened. So his poetry is dedicated not to “neuters and geldings,” to those who cannot generate new and ongoing life, but to the “fully equipt” men and women who produce new generations (and new ideas) that will continually “plot and conspire” to undo what may at the moment seem permanent and unchangeable. Whitman knows better: the “gong of revolt” is the very sound of Time, forever keeping Reality an altering, unpredictable state. This is the insight the new sciences have brought to him, and he sets out to translate those new insights into “a word of the modern,” and that word is “En-Masse”: the knowledge and faith that the living soul of the universe is operating through mass, through bodies, through materials that are ever-changing (every atom belonging to me as good belonging to you). The “gongs of revolt” sound forever through time, calling on bodies to rise en-masse to continue to undo the oppressive forms of the present.