Week 29, Whitman and the Civil War

This week's text is “Chanting the Square Deific."

There are a number of poems in Drum-Taps and Sequel that may initially seem like odd inclusions in a book of Civil War poems, and “Chanting the Square Deific” is one of them. What does this strange theological poem about a four-sided God have to do with the war? And what are we to make of its grammatically inchoate title, with a participle followed by a definite article and two hanging adjectives? Whitman had been thinking about the poem throughout the war, and in his working copy of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, he made notes to himself about adding the poem to his next edition—at the time, he was considering calling it “Quadriune” or “Deus Quadriune” (he also invented other possible names for this four-person god, including “Quatuor,” “Quatruna,” and “Quadrel”). When he decided on “Square Deific,” he turned an adjective—meaning “making divine”—into a noun, an act of making divine. What is being “chanted” in this poem is a god-making act, a poetic performance of a new and ever-shifting divinity. And in typical Whitman participial fashion, this act is an ongoing one—a never-ending chanting of an always active and conflicted and shape-shifting god. Americans, Whitman suggests, will forever be in the act of making a god but never settling on one.

And that new, morphing divinity, we come to realize, is a god carefully constructed for a nation that had nearly broken in two, a god for a reunified America that contains within itself the continual urge for rebellion, the continual testing of any set limits. This necessary satanic urge to rebel is something Whitman had been exploring from the beginning of Leaves of Grass (he named the rebellious slave in “The Sleepers” Lucifer), but it became even more crucial to explore during the war, when the Confederacy used the same rationale for its revolutionary secession from the Union that the original colonies had used for their revolutionary secession from Britain.

Late in his life, Whitman struggled to explain the significance of the poem: “It would be hard to give the idea mathematical expression: the idea of spiritual equity—of spiritual substance: the four-square entity—the north, south, east, west of the constituted universe (even the soul universe)—the four sides as sustaining the universe (the supernatural something): this is not the poem but the idea back of the poem or below the poem.” Whitman’s turn to geography here—a god that brings “spiritual equity” to “north, south, east, and west”—is revealing because those are the regions of the country—the North, the South, the East, and the West—that Whitman was continually trying to unite and blend after the war (think of “O Pioneers!”).

But this fourfold god—a nervous expansion of the Trinity—was evocative of American history, as the critic Kerry Larson has proposed. The first side of the new godhead is the lawgiver—Jehovah, Brahma, Saturnius, the “father” with “those mighty laws rolling,” the Old Testament God dispensing “judgments inexorable without the least remorse.” In a political sense, this God is the United States Constitution, the legal document that defines how the nation must govern itself. But that Constitution was of course written by revolutionaries, by the side of the godhead that is always “plotting revolt” and appears “full of guile,” “proud,” “defiant,” and “warlike.” The Confederacy represented the most obvious and dangerous example in American history of this always-present satanic force, but Whitman also associates this “comrade of criminals” with the “brother of slaves,” and gives him a “sudra” and “black” face. Slave revolts in antebellum America were often justified (by abolitionists and by slaves themselves) with an appeal to the nation’s revolutionary founding, to its Declaration of Independence, to its belief in the right of those who felt oppressed to revolt against their oppressors. Built deep into American history, then, is the tension Whitman later defined as “personalism,” the endless struggle between individual rights and communal responsibility, between each state’s autonomy and federal control. When the Revolution was constituted into a governing document, the Constitution itself soon came to seem oppressive to some, and American history became a ceaseless battle over how the nation, its member states, and its individual citizens interpreted the Constitution’s protection of diverse individual rights versus its fostering of a common social bond.

So America, Whitman decided, needed a wound-dresser built into the godhead, a “consolator” like Christ or Hermes (or like Whitman the visitor of hospitals), who is “the cheer-bringing God, with hope and all-enclosing charity,” bequeathing “sweet love” to all the wayward and unsatisfied children of the nation who came to feel dispossessed. Whitman’s “Square Deific” is a godhead, then, that contains the law-giving Union, the rebellious Confederacy, and the loving and forgiving spirit of healing that mends the inevitable fractures that occur when law gets tested by revolt and when law then gets amended to absorb that revolt (as the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery and invest the rights of citizenship in former slaves, in women, even in former Confederates). Whitman’s “square” god embodies the Satan-aspect into the godhead, making this peculiarly American god a self-challenger, a god that inevitably tests its own authority, pushes at the boundaries of the set law, amends and expands what had previously been considered to be the limits.

The fourth side of this godhead, then, is “Santa Spirita, the “breather, life,” the “general soul” that is at once “ethereal” and “the most solid.” This aspect of the godhead is the spirit of reconciliation itself, the joiner of God and Satan who proves that each needs the other to define itself (without revolt, the limits of law are invisible; without the limits of law, there is no arena of revolt). Transgression needs limits in order to be seen as transgression; limits need transgression in order to indicate what the limits are. The sustaining and uniting “breath” of the “Santa Spirita” is the very inspiration and respiration of the nation’s history, as it continues its wild, unending fluctuation between celebrating the rights of the individual and celebrating the rights of the diverse multitude, between favoring the strong and favoring the weak, between turning “red” and turning “blue” (as our current electoral maps visualize the conflict). As this national breathing in and breathing out goes on, the tensed “spirit” of the country takes on solidity in the very history that we live. What we are as a nation is what the breathing of the “general soul” produces. That solid reality may, at times, be ugly and violent, but ultimately, Whitman believes, the Union holds, new limits are set, reconciliation occurs, even as rebellion sows its seeds again, always in surprising and revolutionary ways. America keeps chanting its god-making song, and its spirit is the very breath of this poem on its rectangular page—four sides containing incessantly tensed and warring and healing and reconciling parts.

—EF