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Timothy Stifel
Timothy_Stifel@baylor.edu
Baylor University
Whitman's few explicit references to photography in the 1855 Leaves of Grass belie the keen interest in the medium he displayed in his earlier writings. Only three statements in the first edition of Leaves of Grassrefer specifically to photography: "A Song for Occupations" includes "the implements for daguerreotyping" (96) in a catalog of workers' tools, and in "Song of Myself" Whitman writes that "The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype" (41), and later refers to "well-taken photographs" (76). These references to the daguerreotype are hardly surprising; the poet who attempted to include all of his America in the catalogues of his poems couldn't have overlooked this incredibly popular art form of the 1840s and 1850s. Before he became a literary figure with trains of poets and other writers visiting his home in Camden, Whitman enjoyed the world of visual arts his Brooklyn and Manhattan offered, including the galleries of renowned daguerreotypists such as John Plumbe, Jr., Matthew Brady, and Gabriel Harrison (Reynolds 281). With this background, it would be surprising if the 1855 Leaves of Grass had neglected to include the daguerreotype.
Early photography, represented by the daguerreotype, presented a democratic form of visual art that Whitman was quick to appreciate. The new medium offered a relatively speedy and inexpensive way for people to preserve their likenesses. The long hours of sitting for a painted portrait as well as the high prices paid to portrait painters could be eliminated by a chemical process that was widely distributed across America. With photography, portraits were no longer confined to the houses of the wealthy but were dispersed even into the cramped quarters of the working classes that Whitman would elevate in Leaves of Grass. As John Wood writes of the democratic phenomenon of the daguerreotype,
Daguerre . . . reinforced the great Romantic notions of man's essential worth and significance with a visual pungency that argues more convincingly than the words of Rousseau, Jefferson, or Marx that the individual was of value and should not be trod upon. . . . Here is real equality; here is the pure realism of the Romantic movement, rich with feeling and infused with passionate humanity. (1)
The mechanical nature of photography would invigorate the art world with its persuasively immediate presentation of reality. The exhibition of these photographs further emphasized the democratic nature of the new art form. Photographic portraits of people from various occupations and parts of society were hung beside each other in crowded groups, creating a mosaic that reflected the variety of American culture.
Whitman's written responses to this early photography emphasize these democratic and American elements. He enthusiastically describes one of his visits to Plumbe's daguerreotype gallery in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorial of 1846. This editorial begins with a survey of the crowded walls of photographs as well as the crowd of onlookers: "You will see more life there--more variety, more human nature, more artistic beauty . . . than in any spot we know of" (113). While this initial description of the scene focuses on the actual people present at the gallery, he interrupts that description with a rhetorical question that alters his focus; he asks, "for what created thing can surpass that masterpiece of physical perfection, the human face?" (113) and soon answers this question with an elevation of the photographs rather than the people. The people viewing the exhibition "are not the first thing. To us, the pictures address themselves before all else" (113-114). This editorial includes lists of the various types of individuals who attended the exhibits at Plumbe's gallery and lists of the various types of individuals whose portraits were preserved in the daguerreotypes, creating a democratic panorama of both reality and image.
Many have referred briefly to the importance of the daguerreotype galleries for Whitman's later use of catalogs in his poetry (Bohan 20-21; Reynolds 295). The influence of the exhibition hall on Whitman's poetic technique is especially apparent in the poem "Pictures" from Whitman's notebooks of the early 1850s. This poem begins with the metaphor of the poet's head as an exhibition gallery. Hung on the walls of this "little house" (13) are pictures representing scenes of human history from the creation of Adam and Eve to the American men and women of the nineteenth century. In the essay, "The Gathering of the Forces," Ruth Bohan suggests that the piling up of one historical and mythic image after another in the lines of this early poem "reveal[s] Whitman's continued fascination with the exhibition experience; and they provide striking evidence of his transformation of that experience into one of his most distinctive poetic strategies" (19). The catalogs of Leaves of Grass lose the explicit pictorial metaphor, but the visual qualities of the scenes in the lines of "Song of Myself" recall the earlier poem with its series of poetic pictures. As with the reproductions of portraits and landscapes hung in exhibition galleries, Whitman's later catalogs, according to Bohan, "are rendered in clear, graphic terms which arrest the reader's attention by the force and immediacy of their presentation" (22).
Paintings as well as photographs were displayed in the same crowded fashion in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Whitman's democratic juxtaposition of images in his catalogs has been connected by Matthiessen and others to the variety of social classes and occupations brought together in genre paintings by painters such as William S. Mount and George Caleb Bingham (Matthiessen 596-601; Baigell 121-141; Bohan 17-18; Reynolds 289-296). The comparison is especially apt with respect to the poem "Picures" in which Whitman speaks of images in imagined paintings, not photographs--imagined pictures that include "scenes painted from my Kansas life" (21) that are reminiscent of Bingham's paintings of American pioneers. However, the immediacy of Whitman's images--the apparently effortless movement from the observation of a scene of person to the completed image of that scene or person--is suggestive of photography rather than painting. Moreover, the references to "a magical wondrous mirror" that becomes a "clean and bright mirror" (14) in the opening lines of the poem also appear to refer to the mirror effect of the daguerreotype; America's first published report of daguerreotypes began, "Talk no more of `holding the mirror up to nature'--she will hold it up to herself, and present you with a copy of her countenance for a penny" (qtd. in Trachtenberg 61), and the mirror comparison became frequent as the new photography became established. Furthermore, Whitman's attempt to capture the variety of American culture in series of brief scenes corresponds to the sort of pictorial economy especially important to the daguerreotype. In contrast to the possibility for painters of managing large pictorial surfaces, as Wood points out, the small photographic plates necessitated by the process of daguerreotypy required photographers "to build a composition that would retain authority when reduced to a few inches . . ." (14). Photography proves a more appropriate metaphor than painting for the catalogs of Whitman's poetry.
Whitman did often blur the distinctions between painting and photography in his newspaper writings. In the editorial on Plumbe's gallery mentioned above, Whitman concludes his comments on the photographs with a discussion of his interest in the painted eyes of miniature portraits in his possession. The same blending of painterly and photographic imagery is also apparent in a series of journalistic writings he published in the 1862 New York Leader. As Bohan points out, Whitman signed these articles "Velsor Brush"--a combination of two ancestral names, but one with painterly connotations--while titling the series "City Photographs" (17). Although these instances of mixed references to different forms of visual art suggest that the influence of the visual arts on Whitman was without distinction between the mediums of painting and photography, the daguerreotype possesses certain features that make it better suited than painting to other elements in Whitman's poetry.
While the exhibition of both painting and photography offered Whitman a model for his democratic catalogues, daguerreotypy also represented a specifically American technological and artistic innovation. Founded in 1839 by European inventors, the daguerreotype really found its home in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. The daguerreotype flourished especially in the America of the mid-1850s, with the city of Manhattan boasting more studios than all of England and with the annual production of daguerreotypes in America reaching several million (Reynolds 281). According to Matthiessen, Whitman would later "take pride that in his Leaves `everything is literally photographed,' since he could thus believe that he was putting his work in line with the technical discoveries of his age" (601).
The daguerreotype presented Whitman with a reputedly American form of technology created by the democratic individuals of America, and this form of photography also presents features that correspond with Whitman's intent to describe and initiate the spiritual union of those individuals. The newspaper editorial about his visit to Plumbe's daguerreotype gallery shows Whitman's objective appreciation of the individual varieties of the photographed subjects, but at the same time he experiences moments of intimacy and union with the photographic images. The editorial continues from the lists of those photographed to a description of his "strange fascination" with portraits. This description, as I mentioned earlier, makes reference to painted portraits and miniatures, but its placement in an editorial about a visit to a daguerreotype gallery suggests that the phenomenon Whitman describes is more appropriate to photographic portraits. Whitman writes:
It is singular what a peculiar influence is possessed by the eye of a . . . portrait.--It has a sort of magnetism. We have miniatures in our possession, which we have often held, and gazed upon the eyes in them for the half hour! An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there so well. . . . Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality. (116-117)
While earlier he appreciates the realistic merits of the individual photographs and infers from them the intimate details of individual lives, this description of viewing daguerreotypes shows how, according to Reynolds, "The photographic representation of the loved one is the catalyst for a fuller appreciation of the loved one's actual presence" (285-286). Whitman's use of the words "magnetism" and "electric chain" here recall his later use of the words to describe the union of comrades and lovers in Leaves of Grass, and the movement from an image of a person to the essence of the person is recalled in "Song of Myself" where "well-taken photographs" are contrasted to "your wife or friend close and solid in your arms" (76).
In a more general sense, the idea of "assuming" the personas and viewpoints of the characters throughout "Song of Myself" and Whitman's other early poems parallels the mirror effect of a daguerreotype. The mirror metaphor suits the daguerreotype on two levels. First, due to the single lens of the daguerreotype camera and the lack of a negative image in the process of making daguerreotypes, the image of a daguerreotype is the same sort of reversed image one sees in a mirror. When one looks at a daguerreotype of one's own image, the daguerreotype has the familiarity of the mirror image and not the "true vision" of contemporary photographs which capture a person's image from a position completely outside one's own natural perspective. A second mirror effect is created by the glass surface of a daguerreotype in which the viewer can see the photographic image only from certain angles. Ben Maddow's description of viewing a daguerreotype illustrates this effect:
One undoes the two small clasps [of the daguerreotype case] and unfolds the case into its two matching parts. . . . The right-hand panel, seen straight on, is baffling: here is a mirror in which one sees oneself, but only partly, because the face is somehow enlarged and therefore, by its distinctness, just a bit uncomfortable. Superimposed on one's too-familiar face, or floating upon it, are three ghosts, gray negative faces with blank eyes and mouths and the shade of some sort of disembodied clothing. But then the miracle: you turn the mirror ever so slightly and three full characters blaze out at you. . . . (31)
As Maddow's description makes evident, the reflective glass of the daguerreotype creates a mirror effect; the viewer sees the photographic image superimposed with the reflection of her or his own image. While both viewer and photographic image remain distinct entities, the glass of the daguerreotype appears to unify the two images, making the glass surface of the daguerreotype an object in which, as Whitman begins "Song of Myself," "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (27).
The connection between vision and the moments of unity in Whitman's poems is especially noticeable in the 1855 "Song of Myself." The section of this poem prefaced by the line "I am the man . . . . I suffered . . . . I was there" (64) proceeds with concisely detailed visual descriptions of various suffering men. With these visual descriptions are statements that the speaker of the poem is "the hounded slave" and becomes "the wounded person" and is "the mashed fireman" (65). The merging of the speaker's persona with the personas of those he sees is reiterated by the statement that "I take part . . . . I see and hear the whole" (66). The easy and prolific merging with various personas and personal histories seems a poetic reworking of Whitman's early editorial on daguerreotypes. In that editorial on Plumbe's gallery Whitman writes, "We don't know how it is with others, but we could spend days in that collection, and find enough enjoyment in the thousand human histories, involved in those daguerreotypes" (116). Aside from the enjoyment Whitman derives from viewing daguerreotypes, vision itself is an elevated sense for Whitman. The 1855 "Preface" describes the role of the greatest poet with an analogy to vision: "What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world" (10). While Whitman includes all the senses in the poetry of Leaves of Grass, vision is the sense that most often leads to spiritual insight or union. The photograph, as product of a mechanical vision, is a symbol rich with possible spiritual meaning. As Paul Zweig suggests in Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet, Whitman "seizes on the technique of photography as a metaphor for the perceiving mind and for the act of poetry, thereby bridging the Platonic chasm between nature and art . . ." (205). Whitman's interest in the people and visual histories captured by the daguerreotype corresponds to his vision of and merging with the people and histories in his poetry.
Whitman's religious interest in democracy and unity, in the spiritual essences of individuals, seems to contrast with the physical nature of the mechanically produced daguerreotype and the daguerreotype's divorcing of the image from its reality. However, early reactions to the daguerreotype by the American press often emphasized the apparently spiritual nature of the new art form. Maddow's more recent description of viewing a daguerreotype refers to "ghosts" and the "miracle" of the image appearing in full to the viewer, retaining the supernatural language the early reviewers used to introduce the daguerreotype to their readers. As Alan Trachtenberg points out in his essay, "Mirror in the Marketplace," the language of the daguerreotype as mirror often referred to the mirror as a magical folk image. He writes that "`take the shadow ere the substance fade,' the popular slogan of daguerreotypists, calls up the notion of shadow as soul, as animate extension, double, and immortal part of self" (68). This language created, or at least reflected, the reports of women who felt mesmerized by the camera as they sat for their pictures (67). Whitman's writings on the daguerreotype also make use of this spiritualized language. While he applauds the "realities" shown by the pictures in Plumbe's gallery, he also speaks of the exhibition as "an immense Phantom concourse" (116) and describes the "magnetism" (116) and the "electric chain" that grow between him and the daguerreotype he views. Whitman's reactions to photographs are as spiritual as the reactions to the scenes of "real life" he presents in Leaves of Grass.
Whitman's ideal of unity and his vision of the poet as the one who sees and announces spiritual connections certainly owe a strong debt to Emerson's conception of the Oversoul and the poet. Emerson appreciates "the unity in variety" and also memorably elevates the role of vision, writing that he becomes "a transparent eyeball" that reaches a transcendent height from which "the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance" (18). As Whitman would later call for a divine average, Emerson describes a spiritual unity that leaves the hierarchies human social relationships behind. However, the striking difference between the two writers' approaches lies in Whitman's appreciation of the physical. For Emerson, the physical is a manifestation of the Oversoul, but these manifestations are important less for their physical individuality than they are for the spiritual ideas they represent. The logical proof that begins his "Language" section of Nature, for example, clearly defines the hierarchy of physical and spiritual:
1. Words are signs of natural facts.2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of the spirit. (27)
To put this idea in Platonic terms, Emerson views a physical bed as a debased copy of the ideal bed, and the image of a bed as an even further debased imitation of the ideal. Emerson's moments of transcendence from the "trifles" of brotherhood, friendship, and economic relationships often seem to leave behind the actual brothers, friends, and acquaintances along with the relational roles.
While Whitman does make reference to the Platonic formula, telling the reader of "Song of Myself" to "no longer take things at second or third hand" (28), and later warning himself not to make poems "in the spirit that comes from the study of pictures of things--and not from the spirit that comes from the contact with real things themselves" (qtd. in Bohan 18), his early poetry is notable for its physicality. The spiritual essence of a person is of utmost importance to Whitman, but he does not divorce that essence from the physical body that contains it. As he writes in "Song of Myself," he is "the poet of the body, / And . . . the poet of the soul" (44). The physical world is not a hindrance to Whitman as it is for Emerson. Even the long catalog of workers' tools and everyday objects in "A Song for Occupations," including the "implements for daguerreotyping" (96), are not entirely dismissed in preference for the living workers who use them. The tools do not contain the essence of the people who use them, but they contain "far more than you estimated, and far less also" (98). Whitman's poetry calls for a relationship with the physical that lies between a Platonic underestimation of the physical and a materialism that grossly overvalues it.
Whitman's description of the daguerreotypes in Plumbe's gallery also appreciates the daguerreotype as a physical object in itself as much as he appreciates the person whose spiritual essence it suggests. He goes beyond the use of the photograph as a catalyst for finding a person's spiritual essence when he concludes that "the strange fascination of looking at the eyes of a portrait, sometimes goes beyond what comes from the real orbs themselves" (117). Here the portrait is appreciated as a presence of its own, and the sort of union with the living presence captured in the photograph is left behind for a union with the photographic image itself. While photographic images are simply two-dimensional, it is important to note that the metals and glass used in a daguerreotype make it a much more substantially physical object than the paper-backed photographs of today. The daguerreotype as metaphor for Whitman's poetic philosophy captures an Emersonian unity while retaining the physicality of the unified objects.
Whitman's deletion of all references to daguerreotypes in later editions of Leaves of Grass reflects the sudden obsolescence of that form of photography. The medium became impractical in the early 1860s as processes to retain photographic images on paper were developed and improved. Whitman's deletion may simply be an effort to keep his poetry up-to-date, but I suspect that it was partly an effort to hide the sources of his ideas. To deemphasize his poetry's obvious debts to Emerson's transcendental writings, Whitman would deny having read Emerson before the composition of Leaves of Grass (Reynolds 82). And the final version of his war notes in Specimen Days contains few traces of the windy political commentary and critique that had initially prompted Whitman to assemble his war notes for publication. The removal of references to daguerreotypes seems a similar effort to eliminate traces of a formative influence.
The daguerreotype offered Whitman a metaphor that encompassed many of his poetic ideals. The new photography presented a realism he would strive for in his poetic images; the ease of production and purchase as well as the exhibition of daguerreotypes presented a democratic respect for the individual that Whitman would reiterate in his catalogs of poetic images; the mirror effect of the daguerreotype's glass surface presented a phenomenon of merging that Whitman would demonstrate poetically in Leaves of Grass; and the spiritual connotations surrounding the daguerreotype coexisted with its status as physical object just as Whitman's poetic subjects remain distinct from his persona even as his persona inhabits them Whitman's daguerreotype is an object of democratic union.
Bohan, Ruth L. "`The Gathering of the Forces': Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts in Brooklyn in the 1850s." Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts. Ed. Geoffrey M. Sill and Roberta Tarbell. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. 1-27.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. Ed. Robert D. Richardson, Jr.. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Maddow, Ben. "Rembrandt Perfected." The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989. 30-42.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford UP, 1949.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Trachtenberg, Alan. "Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype." The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989. 60-73.
Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982.
-----. "Pictures." Pictures: An Unpublished Poem of Walt Whitman. New York: The June House, 1927. 13-28.
-----. "Visit to Plumbe's Gallery." The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. Vol. 2. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920. 113-17.
Wood, John. "Silence and Slow Time: An Introduction to the Daguerreotype." The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989. 1-29.
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.