American "Apostroph": Walt Whitman's Apostrophic O

"It is unlikely that any modern poet has used the ancient trope of the apostrophe as often as Walt Whitman," writes David Baldwin in "Whitman's Use of the Apostrophe"-a scholarly note that traces Whitman's various uses of the apostrophe in the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass.1 Although Baldwin fixes his attention solely on the 1891-92 Leaves, Whitman relied on the trope of the apostrophe consistently throughout his poetry career-a fact that many scholars have already noted. J. Mark Smith's "Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of Turning Away" analyzes Whitman's apostrophic incantation in the poem, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."2 Chanita Goodblatt's "Walt Whitman and Uri Zvi Greenberg: Voice and Dialogue, Apostrophe and Discourse" compares Whitman's apostrophic address to that of the Israeli poet.3 Frank D. Casale's Bloom's How to Write about Walt Whitman operates under the assumption that the trope of the apostrophe is a hallmark of Whitman's writing style.4 William Waters has identified Whitman as the "most insistent of all poets when it comes to hailing the reader."5 And, speech-act critics like C. Carroll Hollis6 and Tenney Nathanson have pursued the rhetorical and theoretical implications of Whitman's poetry, and, as they observe, the apostrophe is one such device to which Whitman often returns predominantly in his pre-Civil War editions of Leaves of Grass. As Nathanson argues, "The notion that Whitman's apostrophes seem to generate a familiarity between poet and audience not usually attained by the written word has rightly become a truism of Whitman criticism."7Where scholars heretofore have identified Whitman's apostrophic instincts, few have sought to explain the impetus behind them and fewer still have analyzed Whitman's apostrophization vis-a-vis his most obvious apostrophic exploration: his aptly-titled poem, "Apostroph." This poem from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass includes, out of its 65 lines of free verse, a prolific 102 instances of the O apos- trophe.8 Although Whitman's direct address to the reader (i.e., the readerly "you") has widely been categorized as apostrophization, I am interested in the specific figure of the apostrophic O as it appears in Whitman's pre-Civil War poetry and especially as it functions in this "Apostroph" poem. That is, I seek to offer an explanation for Whitman's forceful connection between apostrophization and the O sound-symbol as he makes their relationship constitutively apparent in the 1860 Leaves.9 It is my contention that Whitman's use of the apostrophe in the immediate foreground of the Civil War is neither a rhetorical accident nor simply a poetic cliche, for where Whitman invokes the trope of the apostrophic O-a visual symbol of wholeness in its circularity-he optatively envisions and prefigures a unitive and democratic future in the face of his nation's dividing crisis. Further, Whitman's apostrophic intonations contain within themselves the many aspects of the apostrophe as it has appeared throughout the ages. Not simply operating within the domain of rhetorical persuasion, debate, oration, lecture, religious incantation, song, nature, or primordial human sound, Whitman's apostrophization operates in all of these modes simultaneously and without distinction or negation, as this essay seeks to illustrate.Thus, I argue that Whitman's apostrophic invocations-particularly exhortations preceded by and through the declamatory O- endorse urgent epideictic messages in the years immediately preceding the Civil War while also carrying with them the hallmarks of lyrical address. Far from offering a poetry of insincerity or solipsism-the accusations often waged against lyricism and apostrophization10- Whitman's poetic impulse sought to capture the spirit of his young nation and to defend the experiment of American democracy, and it is through the trope of the apostrophe that he (perhaps naively) rallied, championed, and exhorted his American audience toward that "national spirit" about which he so often wrote. …