Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Page A

book’s preface, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” Whitman, a transcendentalist in the mode of Emerson, saw the world in terms of invisible connections and mystical threads that bound all things together; like the mathematician or the lexicographer, the phrenologist understood the secret laws of these invisible networks and offered the maps to traverse them. No skull-stealer himself, Whitman nonetheless shared with men like Rosenbaum a conviction that in phrenology creative genius could be understood, as it was one of the “lawgivers of poets.”
    As
Leaves of Grass
grew both in stature and in size, so did thebumps on Whitman’s head. His phrenological chart was reprinted in subsequent editions, but Whitman felt free to edit it, and he increased the size of several of the bumps from the original measurements given by Lorenzo. By this point, of course, Whitman had become
the
American poet, and he saw himself as one of the few capable of speaking on the country’s behalf. And the America that he spoke for was a phrenological one, as he wrote in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”:
    Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
    T HIS WASN’T TO
say, of course, that phrenology was without its detractors. Oliver Wendell Holmes lampooned the Fowlers in his newspaper column “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” where he described a trip to the offices of “Professors Bumpus and Crane,” pillorying in particular phrenology’s reputation for neologisms with his own string of nonsense words. “Feels of thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles. . . . Mild champooing of head now commences. Extraordinary revelations! Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6+!, Paedipilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a linguist.—Invaluableinformation. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.—I have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.” 105
    Perhaps most famously, Mark Twain conducted his own phrenological experiment, paying for a reading first as an ordinary, unpresuming citizen. “Fowler received me with indifference,” Twain later recalled, “fingered my head in an uninterested way, and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice. He said I possessed amazing courage, and abnormal spirit of daring, a pluck, a stern will, a fearlessness that were without limit.” The inordinate courage that Fowler found in Twain was negated, though, by a bump on the other side of his head, which Fowler identified as “caution”: “This hump was so tall, so mountainous, that it reduced my courage-bump to a mere hillock by comparison, although the courage bump had been so prominent up to that time—according to his description of it— that it ought to have been a capable thing to hang my hat on; but it amounted to nothing, now in the presence of that Matterhorn which he called my Caution.” This caution bump, Fowler explained to Twain, was why he hadn’t been able to amount to much in life. Some time later the author returned, this time introducing himself as Mark Twain and wearing his now trademark white suit. The difference, as could be expected, was quite startling: “Once more he made a striking discovery—the cavity was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest—figuratively speaking—31,000 feet high, the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in his life-long experience!”