Now will you tell me exactly what a kayak is?
Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me _sitting in a kayak._
I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.
His poems. Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in addition and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.
And what then? It's all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.
Walt wasn't an Esquimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Esquimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Esquimoness, unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more. Esquimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am not, I know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Esquimo. Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.
But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw Everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.
I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake won't crawl into my neck; I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce poetic machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!
ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.
Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention trackless wildernesses. As anyone will know who cares to come off the road, even the Open Road.
ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.
ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.
ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motorcars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.
God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.
He might as well have said: "The femaleness waits for my maleness." Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function.
"Athletic mothers of these States----" Muscles and wombs. They needn't have had faces at all.
"As I see myself reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist. One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty. See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see."