A Great Innovator to Content the Soul - Essay Example

Lawrence contents Whitman could not talk of sympathy since he could not get out of his personality to feel any other feeling or sensation. Emulating the situation of one's position Lawrence would merely act as if he lived the sensation. Caught up in his own view of the world, the Oneness, Whitman thought he knew sympathy. In his poems Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, where Whitman again refers to allness as everything being part of a unit and the unit being everything, it is again assumed that everything is part of the unit without having understood the uniqueness of each part or what is this part of the unit.

Whitman assumes everyone and everything to be a member of this unit and as he is also part of it then everything is part of him. His ideas of oneness and democracy resemble a car running over people on its way. On the role of woman, Whitman is assumed to have taken the role of the child carrier. A woman is presented to have long been waiting for the male to perform the biological function and restrain herself to this role. The notion of One is preserved throughout the text and is presented here too in two ways: resembling the female and male as a unity through the biological function, where the pair becomes unity and the completion of the sexes where the male carries the female inside as to complete him and vice versa.

The former is again viewed by Lawrence as an interpretation of Whitman's Oneness where he is the completion of the female. Even though Whitman views the biological function as nature's perfection presented by the unit where the man and the woman produce the child, Lawrence contents the female to be presented as a maze of muscles that produce the man. In "Calamus" the man-for-man love is presented as comrades upon which the new world will be built whereas in "Drum-Taps" death is touched where it is presented as the last love when Lawrence views the woman as inadequate to fulfill the man who wishes death as the final merging.

The last three notions of a woman's womb, the manly love, and death appearing in Whitman's work are interpreted by Lawrence as the biological activity of the man-for-woman love that cannot be fulfilled anymore so the man-for-man love of comrades replaces it in "Drum-Taps". Unsatisfied by the former the writer turns to death as the final stage of merging, becoming a unity with the universe. Whitman throughout his work draws on morality. He has greatly influenced the work of Lawrence and has been a great innovator to content the soul not being higher of the body but part and equal to it, the Oneness.

Firmly supporting the oneness as this is presented on the body of the negro, the prostitute, or the Eskimo Whitman does not think of their bodies as lower to their souls; doing so degrades the bodies. The former does not require sacrifices, love, charity, or good works but merely staying open. It does not require setting a goal, only an open mind. Whitman does not require a soul to have a goal but merely to exist. The goal of the soul is not heaven it is to live the journey of life and formulate its fate.

He did not manage however to separate sympathy from love or compulsion trying to give it the notion it has in others' minds rather than his own; in other minds, sympathy is linked to living the same sensation as the one that suffers rather than helping them out of it. It all boils down to stirring up mind and soul the mind dictates to the soul what it should feel. The free, unrepressed soul however inherently knows what to feel and how to act. It "is a very perfect judge of her own emotions".