Why Lawrence?

Because D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, wrote what may be the single most insightful essay on Walt Whitman yet composed. Next to Lawrence, I place Roger Asselineau's 2 volume study, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, and next to Asselineau, Henry Miller's brief essay "Walt Whitman," collected in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.

Mirabile dictu, it took an Englishman to appreciate Whitman's great struggle to read Emerson aright and, in the process, to re-invent the American experiment as "soul-craft"--where "soul" is none other than the body "accomplishing herself" as what Norman O. Brown would later term "love's body."

Of Whitman, Miller would write: "He is worldly through and through, yet serene, detached, the enemy of no man, the friend of all. He possesses a magic armor against wanton intrusion, against violation of his being. In many ways he reminds one of the 'resurrected' Christ" (Miller, 108).

And so he does. He is Lawrence's "escaped cock," the "man who died," and "the Risen Lord." And he is pre-figured in the Qur'an as ibn as-sabilah, the "son of the road," the "wayfarer," the "passer-by," and in all Gnostic speculation that claims the resurrection has already occurred for those who have eyes to see.

The African-American Muslim intellectual Sherman A. Jackson offered a very interesting twist on these themes in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (see his notion of "immanent spirituality" in that book).

By collecting these broken threads, one can begin to imagine a way forward for an original American religiosity that looks beyond the present impasse of sect and creed. But we are a long way from that.