In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience. The first of these is that such an experience “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”* All poets know such frustration generally; the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable. But Whitman as he worked on Leaves of Grass may have been grappling with a more splendid difficulty than the usual—there is in his work a sense of mystical thickness and push, and a feeling that the inner man was at work under some exceptional excitement and compulsion. Whether Whitman had an actual mystical experience or not,* his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud. Clearly his idea of paradise was here—this hour and this place. And yet he was, in his way, just as the mystic is, a man of difference—a man apart.
