what does whitman mean in the kine 'Successive absolute flats issuing.'

Whitman means that modern science keeps issuing bold, definitive claims, almost like “flat” proclamations from a lofty place, but the poem then pushes past science toward the soul’s deeper reality. In other words, the line sets up science as powerful and authoritative, yet still limited compared with Whitman’s spiritual vision.

Reading the phrase

The line appears in “Song of the Exposition” as part of a passage praising “keen-eyed towering science” and then qualifying it with “Successive absolute fiats issuing.” “Fiats” means authoritative decrees, so the phrase suggests science is producing one confident pronouncement after another. If you saw “flats” instead of “fiats,” that is likely a misreading or typo, because the Whitman Archive text has “fiats”.

What Whitman is doing

Whitman is not simply mocking science. He admires its reach, but he also insists that the soul stands “above all science,” so the line works as a pivot from scientific knowledge to something larger and more democratic in spirit. That’s very Whitman: he often gives a thing its full force, then immediately opens outward to a bigger metaphysical or emotional claim.

Plain-English paraphrase

A simple paraphrase would be: “Science keeps making impressive, definite claims, but the poem is about to move beyond science toward the soul and the whole human experience.”

Bottom line

So the phrase means something like a sequence of strong scientific pronouncements —important, but not the final word in Whitman’s poem.