Abstract
I begin with a detail of Whitman’s language: the phrase “under their umbrage,” which appears in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. “There will soon be no more priests,” Whitman claims. “Their work is done. [....] A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women”1 (italics added).
the body includes and is the meaning ...
Whitman, “Proto-Leaf” (1860)
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Notes
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “An Address” to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838, in Essays & Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 84–85: “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more .... A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral....”
See E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 7: “That Veritas is found hidden sub umbra et figura is an essential concept of medieval hermeneutics in general ....” See also Matter’s discussion on p. 94: “allegory reveals the divine truth hidden sub umbra et figura.”
Brian Stock, Listening for the Text, On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 39.
The seventeenth-century writer John Rawlinson, cited in Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison, Milwaukee, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), note 31, p. 193.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, edited with introduction by N. H. Keeble (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. xxiii (The World’s Classics).
Cited in Jon Whitman, “From the Cosmographia to the Divine Comedy: An Allegorical Dilemma,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard English Studies 9 (Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 63.
See Robert Gordis, The Song of Songs, A Study, Modern Translation and Commentary (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 5714–1954), p. 2: “its canonicity was reaffirmed at the Council of Jamnia in 90 C.E., never to be seriously challenged again.”
Christian David Ginsburg, The Song of Songs, Translated from the Original Hebrew, with a Commentary, Historical and Critical (London, 1857), pp. 84ff.
Daniel Boyarin, “The Song of Songs: Lock or Key?” in The Book and the Text, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford, Cambridge Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 214.
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 185.
Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, Preface to the Song of Solomon, newly translated from the original Hebrew, with a Commentary and Annotations (London, 1764), cited in Ginsburg, pp. 84–85.
J. G. Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, trans. James Marsh (Burlington, Vermont, 1833; rpt. Naperville, Ill.: Aleph Press, 1971), Vol. II, p. 120. Although neither the Brooklyn Library nor the Astor Library had a copy of Marsh’s translation of Herder, Floyd Stovall believes that it was “no doubt accessible” to Whitman. See The Foreground of Leaves of Grass (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), pp. 185ff. (James Marsh, President of the University of Vermont from 1826–1833, edited Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection [1829], a work that had a formative influence on Emerson.) Whitman also had access to Robert Lowth’s Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated into English in 1787 by G. Gregory, and reprinted in 1816 and 1847 (a copy of the 2nd edition of 1816 was in the Brooklyn Library).
From J. G. Herder’s Salomon’s Lieder der Liebe (1778). Cited in Ginsburg, p. 90.
George R. Noyes, A New Translation of the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and The Canticles with Introductions, and Notes, Chiefly Explanatory (Boston: James Munroe, 1846), pp. 119ff.
John Cotton, A Brief Exposition of the Whole Book of Canticles Or, Song of Solomon (London, 1648), p. 7. (Copy at Houghton Library, Harvard University). For valuable background on “The Canticles Tradition” as it moves into American thought,
see Mason I. Lowrance, Jr., The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 41–54.
Paul Ricoeur, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975), 29–148; p. 48.
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn revised (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 1.
William E. Phipps, “The Plight of the Song of Songs,” in Harold Bloom, ed., The Song of Songs (New York, New Haven: Chelsea House, 1988), p. 11; reprinted from JAAR 42, No. 1 (March 1974). On Origen’s approach to the “literal” meaning of the text, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Vol. 1, Third Edition Revised (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 58.
Angus Fletcher, Allegory, The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 18.
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, revised (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 207.
Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 76. On shells and kernels of meaning, see Vincent Arthur De Luca’s important study of Blake and the sublime: “‘Allegory’ means ‘other-speaking,’ but in such a state of sublimity as we get at the end of Jerusalem, ‘Sublime Allegory’ becomes an ‘other-speaking’ that cancels its own otherness and becomes simply speaking; the only ‘other’ here is the text itself. The text, the signified of its own signifiers, should not be conceived as a shell covering the meaty kernel of meaning, to use a favorite trope of traditional accounts of the allegorical relation. Even the most profound of his critics can lapse into talk of cracking shells and extracting kernels, but Blake never speaks in such terms. Although Blake’s worlds are full of conventional allegorization, Sublime Allegory is not a conventional system of obscured referentiality”: Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 35.
Walt Whitman, Notes and Fragments, ed. R. M. Bucke (1899; rpt. Folcroft Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1972), Part I, p. 27, note 65.
George Burrowes, A Commentary on The Song of Solomon, (Philadelphia, 1853; rpt. London, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1958), p. 91. A footnote in Ginsburg, p. 100, indicates that the Rev. George Burrowes was Professor in Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.
Cited from Clifton Joseph Furness’s Introduction to the facsimile reprint of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. viii.
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Bollingen] 1953),p. 311.
Robert Burns, Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), poem 69, pp. 101–102. For Whitman on Burns, see, Notes and Fragments, Part I, p. 91, note 32:
John James Audubon, The Birds of America (New York: Macmillan, 1965), plate 253.
Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure [Les mots sous les mots], trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 17.
See Notes & Fragments, ed. Bucke, Part IV, p. 172, note 84: “ribs — waist — breast-side — back — spine — hips — man-nuts — thig hs — man-balls — man-root — thigh strength.” Cf. “I Sing the Body Electric,” final version, section 9, 140ff. In a review of the 1856 Leaves of Grass, the Boston Christian Examiner called it “an ithyphallic audacity that insults what is most sacred and decent among men”: cited in Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), Vol. 1, p. 90.
See Frederick Ahl, “Ars Est Caelare Artem (Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved),” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 31. “We do not regard anagrams as proper figures of speech, and we are less trained to recognize or generate them than to create puns or sophisticated patterns of metrics and rhyme. What we do not do, we tend to assume our predecessors did not do, or were silly to have done. If forced to acknowledge anagrams, we resort to the knee-jerk response that they are not meaningful, or are accidental” (p. 29).
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© 1992 Linda Munk
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Munk, L. (1992). Giving Umbrage: The Song of Songs which is Whitman’s. In: The Trivial Sublime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22575-0_4
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