The Voice of America
Whitman’s earliest published work shows signs of the political and philosophical engagement that would later run through Leaves of Grass. By the 1840s he had become an ardent supporter of the temperance movement, and in 1842 published Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, a novel in which alcohol provides the catalyst for a great deal of death and despair. Whitman was never afraid to side with controversial political viewpoints: he was a vocal Democrat and opposed slavery, even losing his job as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 because his views on the subject were at odds with those of the paper’s publisher.
Whitman above all wanted America, still in its early decades of independence, to be the very best it could be – to fulfil the ambitions of its revolutionary heroes – and he was frustrated whenever he saw the country letting itself down. He was later appalled by the needless bloodshed of the Civil War, doing what he could to heal the country’s wounds – quite literally – by visiting, comforting and rehabilitating injured soldiers in the makeshift hospitals of Washington, DC. He did not return to New York after the war, instead taking up another new career as a government clerk.
Whitman’s arguably idealised view of America, as well as his liberal politics, were the legacy left to him by his father, a great admirer of Thomas Paine, Founding Father and author of Common Sense and Rights of Man. Walt was brought up to be a true American: a self-made man, and proud of his country.
In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman paid tribute to that heritage: ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem … Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.’ As this ode unfolds, Whitman looks beyond the traditional signs of a country’s civilisation – ‘its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches’ – and instead declares that ‘the genius of the United States’ lies ‘in the common people’ and ‘their deathless attachment to freedom’; ‘these too are unrhymed poetry’.
Sacred Bodies
Herein lies the heart of much of Whitman’s poetic inspiration: time and again he writes from the viewpoint of an American Everyman, a figure not defined by the increasingly polarised capitalist spectrum that was America on the cusp of its Gilded Age. ‘Neither a servant nor a master I,’ he declares in ‘A Song for Occupations’. ‘I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.’ In the same poem, written at a time when slavery was tearing his beloved country apart, Whitman made a series of bold claims for equality, for the body as an extraordinary form, part of the soul, rather than a commodity:
The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred …
These limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve.
This is a theme picked up in ‘The Sleepers’, in which the narrator is able to observe mankind under the equalising cover of darkness: ‘The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced him … I swear they are averaged now – one is no better than the other.’
Whitman was fascinated by the diversity of mankind and at the same time saw that diversity as a great unifier. In ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, the narrator wanders among the common people, much as Whitman did as a young man in New York – ‘I loosen myself, pass freely … and pause, listen, count’ – observing and auditing the variety of the human form in all its sensual, toiling, beauty:
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle …
The female soothing a child.
It was not just Whitman’s liberal politics that made him alive to the pain of social inequality. It is widely assumed now – and was scandalously rumoured during his lifetime – that he was homosexual. He never married and instead had a series of intense friendships with men, the most prominent being Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor and former Confederate soldier. When Leaves of Grass first appeared, with its appreciative descriptions of the male form – ‘The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty … the embrace of love and resistance’ – it was denounced for being immoral and obscene. Fellow equality campaigner Thomas Wentworth Higginson went so far as to say, ‘It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.’
Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass is remarkable not just for its content but also for its form: the poems are almost entirely devoid of rhyme or formal structure, and as such Whitman has been hailed as the father of free verse. The Beat poets of the mid-twentieth century certainly drew great inspiration from him; Allen Ginsberg specifically invokes Whitman in ‘A Supermarket in California’ (1955), in which he wanders the sidestreets ‘shopping for images’.
The collection was the work of a lifetime. The first edition of 1855 contained just twelve poems, all untitled, and was funded and typeset by Whitman himself. Not quite content with the collection, he revised and expanded it in 1856, and continued to revise and expand it at least once every decade, even after a debilitating stroke in 1873 forced him to move to New Jersey, near his family. The final ‘deathbed edition’ of 1892 contained almost 400 poems. Whitman put a notice in the New York Herald informing the public that Leaves of Grass was now finally ‘completed’, and died two months later. The poems that appear in this Collins Classics edition are the twelve poems that comprised the original 1855 edition; however, they are reproduced here as they were in the final 1892 edition. ‘Great Are the Myths’ was dropped from the last two editions, however, so appears here as in the 1871 edition – the last in which it featured.
There is no doubt that in his poetic celebration Whitman had given America the ‘gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it’ that he had wished for in the preface to the first edition. He had become America’s Everyman but he was also in everything. ‘I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe … and am not contained between my hat and boots,’ he wrote in ‘Song of Myself’, the most famous poem from the collection. ‘Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
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