States!
“States!” is the longest Calamus poem. It is also the poem Whitman changed the most in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. In the 1867 edition, he split it into two poems: “A Song” and “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice.”
Whitman’s hubris in this poem is vast, to the point of ridiculous. More powerful than the Constitution, Congress, Supreme Court, or Army, Whitman has come to hold the nation together as tightly as the earth is held together, to breathe life into it like God inspiriting Adam, to father “the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon,” and to make “divine magnetic lands.” Gone is the esoteric tone, and gone is the ambivalence about the good and evil his poems might do.
Particularly after the first four poems, it is surprising that Whitman portrays adhesion as militantly imperialistic – it involves being “completely victorious” over the world, starting with the absorption of Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, and laughing to scorn attacks from all quarters. Manly attachment, it seems, will do more than prevent the United States from falling apart; it will energize Americans to rule the world. Whitman is once again a fertility god, making a new race and planting companionship thick as trees. He is the mystic son of America, whom he addresses as “Mother,” and the mystic bridegroom for Democracy, whom he addresses as “ma femme.”