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    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series): First and "Death-Bed" Editions
    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series): First and "Death-Bed" Editions
    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series): First and "Death-Bed" Editions
    Ebook1,482 pages14 hours

    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series): First and "Death-Bed" Editions

    By Walt Whitman and Karen Karbiener

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    &&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RLeaves of Grass&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RWalt Whitman&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R&&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R: &&LDIV&&R
    • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
    • Biographies of the authors
    • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
    • Footnotes and endnotes
    • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
    • Comments by other famous authors
    • Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
    • Bibliographies for further reading
    • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics &&L/I&&Rpulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RWhen &&LI&&RLeaves of Grass&&L/I&&R was first published in 1855 as a slim tract of twelve untitled poems, &&LB&&RWalt Whitman&&L/B&&R was still an unknown. But his self-published volume soon became a landmark of poetry, introducing the world to a new and uniquely American form. The "father of free verse," Whitman drew upon the cadence of simple, even idiomatic speech to "sing" such themes as democracy, sexuality, and frank autobiography.&&LBR&&R&&LBR&&RThroughout his prolific writing career, Whitman continually revised his work and expanded Leaves of Grass, which went through nine, substantively different editions, culminating in the final, authoritative "Death-bed Edition." Now the original 1855 version and the "&&LI&&RDeath-bed Edition&&L/I&&R" of 1892 have been brought together in a single volume, allowing the reader to experience the total scope of Whitmans genius, which produced love lyrics, visionary musings, glimpses of nightmare and ecstasy, celebrations of the human body and spirit, and poems of loneliness, loss, and mourning. &&LBR&&R&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RAlive with the mythical strength and vitality that epitomized the American experience in the nineteenth century, Leaves of Grass continues to inspire, uplift, and unite those who read it.&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R&&LSTRONG&&RKaren Karbiener&&L/B&&R&&L/B&&R received a Ph.D. from Columbia University and currently teaches at New York University. She also wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of &&LI&&RFrankenstein&&L/I&&R.&&LBR&&R&&L/P&&R&&L/DIV&&R
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9781411432529
    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series): First and "Death-Bed" Editions
    Author

    Walt Whitman

    Walt Whitman (Nueva York 1819-1892) fue poeta, periodista y ensayista. Combinó su labor como editor, que desarrolló en diferentes publicaciones, con la de escritor de relatos breves. En 1855 publicó su obra más importante, Hojas de hierba, que revisó y aumentó en sucesivas ocasiones. Durante la guerra de Secesión se alistó como voluntario en los hospitales de Washington; a partir de esta experiencia y de sus reflexiones sobre la misma, escribió dos obras de ensayo Democratic Vistas (1871) y Specimen Days & Collect (1882-1883). 

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    Reviews for Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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    • 5/5
      Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 4/5
      Leaves of grass my ass? More like leaves of ass my grass! What?
    • 4/5
      Ruminative verse in thought... Whitman is always a pleasure to read
    • 5/5
      This slim book was assigned to me in college and was my introduction to Walt William. This is the first 1855 edition of only 12 poems, later given titles: "Song of Myself," "A Song For Occupations," "To Think of Time," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Faces," "Song of the Answerer," "Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States," "A Boston Ballad," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?", and "Great Are the Myths." It would go through several editions until his death in 1892 where it reached 400 poems. But this is Whitman at his freshest, and most revolutionary. Especially coming from reading Romantic poets, such as Percy Bysse Shelley and John Keats, it's startling how sensual, personal and earthy these are, how modern they read. Unlike early works of romanticism, there are no elaborate allegories or classical or mythological allusions, this is the poetry of a democratic man, not an aristocrat: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
    • 5/5
      If there was a single book I could have on a deserted island it would be "Leaves of Grass". It is beautiful, inspired writing. It's been analyzed by many so I'll spare you any grand statements or a lot of detail, but for a taste of the themes Whitman puts across:

      - All men are brothers. The book celebrates the common man, and embraces the man that society has cast out or looked down upon.

      - Delight and oneness with nature. Delight in the small things in nature.

      - Spirituality achieved not by subjugating the senses or pleasures but by embracing them, and living life to the fullest.

      - The belief in the innate power, spirituality, and goodness of man.

      All of this is done in a very natural, unpretentious way ... I believe Whitman was truly inspired when he initially wrote this book, and was not regurgitating someone else's philosophy or metaphysics.

      There are so many wonderful passages and quotes, maybe someday I'll include some here but for now I'll just say I highly, highly recommend this book.

      Read it outside, under a tree.
    • 4/5
      I read this book after reading Paper towns by John Green. The main character is reading Leaves of grass in Green's novel, and i found his interpretations helpful. I was making my struggling way through Song of myself when the time came for me to leave for Europe. I took the book with me, and I am exceedingly glad that I did. I read it frequently, and the picturesque scenery combined with Whitman's poetry had a large effect on me. It's a good read, and there are many passages i loved deeply. My copy is a bit battered, I'm afraid, but only in the way of a well loved book, with underlinings and marks throughout. I would recomend this book to anyone, especially if they're planning to travel.
    • 5/5
      very nice Penguin reissue of the 1855 edition, with an introduction by Harold Bloom

    Book preview

    Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Walt Whitman

    INTRODUCTION

    Walt Whitman and the Promise of America

    006

    America, the voice says, decidedly.

    "Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

    All, all alike endear‘d, grown, ungrown, young or old."

    There is a pause. Then, with renewed vigor and a deliberate beat:

    "Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

    Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love"

    (from America, pp. 638-639).

    Listener up there! the poet calls from the pages of Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman listens—really listens—and responds—actually responds—to America through his poetry. The page functions as a necessary film between the reader and the elusive, contradictory I of the text, but Whitman himself often longed to dispose of this medium and confront his audience face to face. He was compelled by the powers of the human voice; Whitman might have realized early dreams of becoming an orator had he possessed a stronger tonal quality or more dramatic flair and talent. But even as a writer, he never stopped measuring the worth of words by their sound and aural appeal. I like to read them in a palpable voice: I try my poems that way—always have: read them aloud to myself, the aging poet told his friend Horace Traubel (With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 3, p. 375; see For Further Reading). Getting his listeners to listen to him, as he absorbed and translated them; sensing and deriving energy from the presence and participation of an audience, as his own physical self and voice inspired them: These were foremost concerns for the poet now known as America’s greatest spokesperson, a man who still speaks to and for the American people.

    Thomas Edison’s recording of Whitman reading his poem America is the closest Walt came, in a literal sense, to addressing his audience (that is, if it is indeed authentic; see Ed Folsom’s article The Whitman Recording). Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, and the public flocked to see and hear demonstrations of the new device that spoke in a faint metallic tone. Whitman himself visited New York’s Exhibition Building to see displays of Edison’s phonograph and telephone in 1879. A great admirer of technological progress and inventive spirits, Whitman and Edison struck up a friendship and apparently decided to make a recording in 1889. The poet spoke into a small megaphone, attached to the recording apparatus with a flexible tube; the inventor turned the crank. The winding sound of the spinning wax cylinder is clearly heard for the first few seconds of the recording.

    And then the voice starts. Students of Whitman are often surprised by how old he sounds, forgetting his many paralytic strokes in the 1870s and the ill health that plagued him in his final years. His choice of poem for this apparently onetime opportunity also seems unusual, since America is not a popular favorite with Whitman or his readers. But given the strong beat of the poem’s many monosyllabic words, Whitman may have chosen the reading for its sound as well as its meaning. The urgency of his voice increases as he moves from the musical cadence of the first two lines to the solemn grandeur of the next. His pronunciation of ample as eam ple sounds explosive, and the accent perhaps betrays the Dutch heritage of his family and his beloved city. And the luxurious curl in the word love is intimate and inviting. The sensual Whitman can still be heard—even felt—well over a hundred years after his physical death.

    The sudden cut after the last word suggests that Whitman and Edison had run out of cylinder space before recording the last two lines: A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time. The omission does not damage the poetic quality of the first four lines; in fact, fans of Whitman’s earlier, energetic descriptions may consider the final image too static, too conservative or classical. But this late poem was written by a poet reacting as much to intimations of his own mortality as to America’s growing obsession with capitalism and divisions of labor. By the time Whitman wrote America in 1888, he no longer believed he would see the promise of America fulfilled in his day; if true democracy were to be achieved, Americans would have to will it into existence. Whitman forcefully projects this solid, secure image of America—an America where the values of community, equality, and creation are at the center rather than the margins—in defiance of the divisive, material culture he first recognized after the Civil War. In both the recorded four and the original six lines of the poem, Whitman’s last word on America is love.

    Whitman might be disappointed by how removed America still is from his idealized vision, but he would have been pleasantly surprised by the relevance and impact of his message today—especially to his fellow New Yorkers. Though the printshop where Leaves of Grass was first struck off was unceremoniously demolished in the 1960s to make way for a housing project, the city has since confirmed and created symbols of the enduring presence of the poems: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, hammered into the Fulton Ferry landing balustrade in Brooklyn, underscores one of the most dramatic Manhattan views; an inspiring section of City of Ships! faces the World Financial Center from the marina’s iron enclosure; other verse cruises the length of the city below ground, as part of the Poetry in Motion series exhibited on the subway.

    The events of September 11, 2001, affected every American’s sense of security and allegiance but brought New Yorkers together in a particularly powerful way. With a renewed sense of connection among this diverse group of people, and support for its heroes and survivors, came a turn to their first spokesperson. Even a century and a half later, Whitman’s images of American courage are strikingly modern. As more firehouse walls and church walls became temporary memorial sites, more of Leaves of Grass became part daily life in New York City. This passage, inspired by Whitman’s own eyewitness accounts of the great fires of 1845, became a popular posting:

    I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken ....

    tumbling walls buried me in their debris,

    Heat and smoke I inspired .... I heard the yelling

    shouts of my comrades,

    I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;

    They have cleared the beams away .... they tenderly

    lift me forth.

    I lie in the night air in my red shirt .... the pervading

    hush is for my sake,

    Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,

    White and beautiful are the faces around me .... the

    heads are bared of their fire-caps,

    The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches

    ([Song of Myself],a 1855, p. 68).

    The proof of a poet, wrote Whitman in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it (p. 27). For decades now, American popular culture has participated in a conversation with Whitman that continues to grow more lively and intimate. The absorption of Whitman by the mainstream is clearly demonstrated in film—an appropriate medium, considering the poet’s interest in appealing to the ears and eyes of readers. When Ryan O‘Neal quotes the last lines of Song of the Open Road as part of his wedding vows in Love Story (1970), he pronounces Whitman as the spokesman for love that knows no boundaries of class, creed, or time; Song of Myself is used similarly in With Honors (1994) when read over the deathbed of Simon Wilder, a beloved eccentric (played by Joe Pesci) found living in the basement of Harvard’s Huntington Library. Whitman stars with Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989), and represents proud individuality and independence of spirit—socially and sexually. I Sing the Body Electric inspires dancers to celebrate physicality in Fame (1980); as Annie Savoy, Susan Sarandon also uses the poem to celebrate her body in the sexiest scene of Bull Durham (1988).

    The musicality of Whitman’s long lines have inspired American composers from Charles Ives to Madonna, who quotes from Vocalism in her song Sanctuary: Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, / Him or her I shall follow. Well over 500 recordings have been made of Whitman-inspired songs, with such artists as Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein lending Whitman’s words a classic pop sensibility. Bryan K. Garman’s A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen, introduces Whit man’s influence on rock and folk musicians, far too vast for adequate treatment here. As a single example of the continuing presence of Whitman through generations of singers, consider this: The popular alt-country group Wilco (along with British singer-activist Billy Bragg) recorded a 1946 Woody Guthrie song entitled Walt Whitman’s Niece and included it on the 1998 release Mermaid Avenue. Guthrie himself never recorded the song; one wonders how far the joke of the title would go with his own audiences.

    Many Americans get the joke now, and can smile about it. Others still don’t find it funny. For few writers have provoked such extreme reactions as Walt Whitman—America’s poet, but also America’s gay, politically radical, socially liberal spokesperson. And few books of poetry have had so controversial a history as Whitman’s brash, erotically charged Leaves of Grass. When the First Edition appeared in 1855, influential man of letters Rufus Griswold denounced the book as a gross obscenity, and an anonymous London Critic reviewer wrote that "the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass [the first page of the poem eventually known as I Sing the Body Electric] deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner’s whip. Finding himself on the defensive early on, Whitman wrote a series of anonymous self-reviews that clarified the goals of Leaves and its author, the begetter of a new offspring out of literature, taking with easy nonchalance the chances of its present reception, and, through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future reception" (from Whitman’s unsigned Leaves review in the Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, 1855).

    Five years later, Whitman’s own mentor Emerson, who advised against including the highly charged Children of Adam poems, tested his easy nonchalance. Holding his ground yet again, Whitman explained to Emerson that the exclusion was unacceptable since it would be understood as an apology, surrender, and admission that something or other was wrong (The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 224). In 1882 Boston publisher James R. Osgood was forced to stop printing the Sixth Edition when the city’s district attorney, Oliver Stevens, ruled that Leaves of Grass violated the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature. After looking at Osgood’s list of necessary deletions from Leaves of Grass, Whitman responded: The list whole and several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances (Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life, p. 20). The sixty-three-year-old immediately sat down and wrote the essay A Memorandum at a Venture, a diatribe condemning America’s close-minded and unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality. Whitman’s poems continued to provoke harsh criticism and calls for censorship through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: As recently as 1998, conservatives were given another opportunity to condemn the book’s suggestive content when President Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky a copy as a gift. Lewinsky’s own critique of Whitman, enclosed in her thank you note, facilitated the controversy: Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar—take it, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!

    Whitman would have probably laughed in approval of Lewinsky’s reading. Despite the relentless public outcry and his permanent defensive posturing, he also took in and savored his poems as well as the writing process. From the publication of the First Edition in 1855 until his death in 1892, he continued to revise and expand his body of work. Leaves of Grass went through six editions (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881) and several reprints—the 1876 Centennial Edition that included a companion volume entitled Two Rivulets; the 1888 edition; and the Death-bed Edition of 1891-1892. He also published a collection of Civil War poems entitled Drum-Taps (1865) and added a Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-1866). Though he began writing poetry relatively late, he never stopped once he started: Plagued by bronchial pneumonia for three months before his death, Whitman completed his last composition (A Thought of Columbus) on March 16, 1892, ten days before he died. So ended a literary life that had not seen the rewards of wealth, love, or the recognition of his fellow Americans; the poet could only hope that future readers and writers would embrace his message and carry it forth. Acknowledging that he had not gain’d the acceptance of my own time in 1888, Whitman described the best comfort of the whole business: I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it unerringly on record—the value thereof to be decided by time (A Backward Glance O‘er Travel’d Roads, p. 681).

    I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,

    I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the

    darkness.

    I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,

    turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face,

    Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

    Expecting the main things from you (Poets to Come, pp. 176-177).

    I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Whitman a few weeks after the first publication of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was so pleased with the letter that he included it in the 1856 Edition of Leaves of Grass as promotional material, going so far as to imprint the first words on the spine of the book. Emerson was correct on two counts. The 1855 Edition marked the start of a poetic legacy that endures 150 years later. And yes, the foreground was a longer one than that of most first-time poets: Whitman was thirty-six when his first book of poetry was published. But Emerson could have never anticipated the preparations that led to this great publication, simply because Whitman’s literary apprenticeship was radically different from Emerson’s own, or any other traditional poet‘s, for that matter.

    Emerson himself had privileged beginnings—intellectual, social, economic. He was born into a line of ministers, was encouraged by his brilliant and eccentric aunt, went to Harvard, and traveled extensively. His friend Henry David Thoreau studied under clergyman William Channing at Harvard and was guided by liberal thinker Orestes Brownson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both descended from established colonial families; they were classmates at Bowdoin, and both had time and money for European travels. All of these men had supportive networks that extended beyond the family as well: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and others formed the core of the Transcen dentalist movement; several of them participated in communal experiments such as Brook Farm; and some of them were neighbors in Boston or Concord.

    In comparison to the Massachusetts colony of writers, their New York contemporaries were disconnected and had seen harder times. Herman Melville, born like Whitman in 1819, never met the poet; after his popularity began to wane with the publication of Moby Dick (1851), Melville worked as an outdoor customs inspector for the last two decades of his life. Whitman did meet Edgar Allan Poe, whom he described as a little jaded, in the offices of the Broadway Journal. Poe disliked New York and was too busy wrestling with inner demons to make any friends in his adopted hometown. Whitman never had the same opportunities to travel as Melville did, never profited from wealthy family connections as Poe had, and had less monetary or social success than either of them.

    Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills on Long Island, Whitman spent his first three years on the family farm. Books were scarce, writes Whitman’s longtime friend John Burroughs of the Whitman homestead. Walter Whitman, Sr., a skilled carpenter, struggled to keep his family fed and clothed; he moved his growing family to Brooklyn in 1823 to take advantage of a building boom. Four of the seven children who survived infancy were plagued with health problems: Jesse (1818-1870) died in an insane asylum; Hannah (1823-1908) became neurotic and possibly psychotic; Andrew (1827-1863) was an alcoholic who died young; and Edward (1835-1892) was mentally retarded at birth and possibly afflicted with Down’s syndrome or epilepsy. The second son after Jesse, Walt assumed a position of responsibility in the family. After about five years in public school, he dropped out to help his father make ends meet.

    The family certainly needed the help. The senior Whitman’s fine craftsmanship can still be seen at the Walt Whitman Birth place on Long Island (the beautifully laid diagonal wainscoting in the stairwell, for instance, was allegedly his handiwork), but he seems not to have had a head for business. The family moved frequently because of bad deals or lost jobs. There is no direct proof, but there is reason to suspect Walter was an alcoholic. His son was obsessed with the Temperance movement through the early 1840s, and many of Whitman’s early prose writings preach of the horrors of alcohol (Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, was published in 1842). Critics have also made much of the absent or abusive fathers who often appear in Whitman’s poetry, such as those from [There Was a Child Went Forth]: The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust, / The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure (p. 139)- Whatever his faults were, Whitman’s father was also responsible for training his sons as radical Democrats, introducing them to such Quaker doctrine as the inner light, and providing Walt with two lifelong heroes: the freethinker Frances Wright and the Quaker Elias Hicks. In his prose collection Specimen Days (1882-1883), Whitman fondly remembers going with his father to hear Wright and Hicks give speeches, events that helped shape and define the poet’s love of the spoken word.

    Whitman negatively compared the subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, willfulness), which I get from my paternal English elements to the qualities inherited from the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands ... (doubtless the best) (Specimen Days and Collect, p. 21). Though Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was almost illiterate and confessed to having trouble understanding her son’s poems, she was a great support for Walt. Indeed, she kept the family together despite her husband’s unreliability. Whitman’s feministic opinions were undoubtedly inspired by her strength: I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men, he writes in Song of Myself (p. 210). Significantly, Whitman’s father died within a week of the first publication of Leaves of Grass— in a year that represented a high water mark in the poet’s life—while Louisa’s passing contributed to making 1873 one of Whitman’s darkest years. He described her death as the great dark cloud of my life (Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 243).

    Louisa’s natural intelligence and Walter’s self-schooling inspired their son to think creatively and independently about his education. Whitman never regretted leaving Brooklyn District School Number 1 at the ripe age of eleven. Even when he returned to the classroom to teach between 1836 and 1841, Whitman was unhappy and felt out of place. His attempts to use the progressive pedagogical approaches of Horace Mann were criticized, and he felt trapped by the small mindedness of the farming communities in which he worked. For Whitman, the path to enlightenment demanded mental as well as physical engagement.

    ... in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn,

    or dead,)

    But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching

    lest any person for miles around approach unawares,

    Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of

    the sea or some quiet island,

    Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you ("Whoever

    You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," p. 277).

    Throughout his writings, Whitman returns again and again to the shores of his beloved Paumanok (Algonquian for Long Island), his place of birth as both man and artist. The young boy was never far from the water’s edge, from his first years on Long Island to his youth in Brooklyn, where he picked up bones of Revolutionary War soldiers in the sand by the Navy Yard. As the space between the world of the everyday and what he called his dark mother the sea, or the two extremes of reality and the subconscious, the shore represented a place of emotional equilibrium and communion. My doings there in early life, are woven all through L. of G, he wrote in Specimen Days (p. 13). Whitman describes the Long Island coastline as a sort of outdoor lecture hall, where I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour (p. 14). In the rite-of-passage poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, the speaker explains that his own songs were awaked from that hour the sea had sung to him in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach. The murmuring waves deliver the knowledge of death that will transform the boy into the poet of life, the solitary singer.

    Inspiration for the poetry came from nature; love of the words themselves was acquired in a Brooklyn printing office. One of Whitman’s first employers was Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Long Island Patriot. Here and at several other Brooklyn and Long Island newspapers, Whitman learned about the art of printing from the most basic task of setting type. It was fast, competitive, potentially fun work for boys with quick minds and fingers. In a series of articles entitled Brooklyniana, Whitman describes his apprenticeship as one might recall a first love or sexual encounter:

    What compositor, running his eye over these lines, but will easily realize the whole modus of that initiation?—the half eager, half bashful beginning—the awkward holding of the stick—the type-box, or perhaps two or three old cases, put under his feet for the novice to stand on, to raise him high enough—the thumb in the stick—the compositor’s rule—the upper case almost out of reach—the lower case spread out handier before him—learning the boxes—the pleasing mystery of the different letters, and their divisions—the great ‘e’ box—the box for spaces right by the boy’s breast—the ’a’ box, ‘i’ box, ’o’ box, and all the rest—the box for quads away off in the right hand corner—the slow and laborious formation, type by type, of the first line—its unlucky bursting by the too nervous pressure of the thumb—the first experience in ‘pi,’ and the distributing thereof—all this, I say, what journeyman typographer cannot go back in his own experience and easily realize? (Christman, ed., Walt Whitman’s New York: From Manhattan to Montauk, p. 48).

    Whitman learned to love language from the letter on up. Words weren’t just inanimate type on a flat page; they were physical, even three-dimensional objects to hold and to mold. Even the spaces between words were tangible to him. Here was a connection between manual labor and enlightenment, action and idea, hand and heart.

    A good part of Whitman’s literary apprenticeship, then, was started and encouraged by his work for New York’s burgeoning newspaper industry. He eventually tried and enjoyed each step in the process of publishing. In 1838 he temporarily abandoned teaching to start up his own newspaper called the Long Islander-serving as compositor, pressman, editor, and even distributor (he delivered papers in a thirty-mile circuit every week, on horseback). And though he sold this enterprise after about ten months and returned to teaching, he found his way back into the newspaper business within three years. In the next years he would pursue his interest in writing even as he helped print and edit a number of Brooklyn and Long Island papers. In the fifteen years before publishing Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman worked for some of the most popular penny dailies of his day and published a substantial body of journalism.

    Surprisingly, during these same crucial fifteen years, Whitman saw in print only twenty-one of his poems and twenty-two short stories. His first poem, Young Grimes, was published in the Long Island Democrat on January 1, 1840—clearly imitative, since it followed the model of a popular poem entitled Old Grimes, by Albert G. Greene. Young Grimes is as conventional as Old Grimes in its rhyme, meter, religious expression, and sentimentality; there seems to be no signs of America’s great outlaw poet in its didactic lines. Even as he progressed through the decade, Whitman did not make substantial improvements to the formulaic poetry he contributed to the penny dailies. For example, The Mississippi at Midnight, originally published in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on March 6, 1848, bears much more similarity to Whitman’s earliest verse than to the twelve poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: Its forced rhyme, predictable meter, and hyper-dramatic tone suggest that Whitman had not yet found his poetic voice.

    Whitman himself supplied a visual corollary for different stages of his literary career. His interest in physical representations and images, encouraged by his printing apprenticeships, led to a life- long fascination with the developing art of photography. No American writer (with the possible exception of Mark Twain) was more photographed than Whitman. More than a hundred images of the poet are now in public domain and available online on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). An image of Whitman circa 1848 depicts a haughty young dandy; his high collar and necktie lend him a traditional air, and his pose (he is strangely uncomfortable-looking as he leans on a cane) seems affected and self-conscious. His hooded and supercilious expression contrasts with the eye-to-eye contact of the poet of Leaves of Grass, who confronts the reader directly from the frontispiece of the 1855 Edition. This image, an engraving made from an 1854 daguerreotype taken by Gabriel Harrison, shows Whitman with loosened collar, exposed undershirt, and wrinkled chinos. Hands in pockets, hat cocked, physically forward, the 1855 Walt resembles one of the masses but looks radically different from other poets; he strikes one as straightforward and up-front, yet at the same time less predictable and conventional. Between 1846 and 1855, then, Whitman’s image ironically grew younger and more edgy. He exchanged a Brooks Brothers stuffed shirt look for the suggestive appeal of a sexy Gap ad, and his radically altered literary style reflected this new look.

    Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman, wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1923. No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman, nothing (Woodress, ed., Critical Essays on Walt Whitman, p. 211). The sentiments were echoed by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Langston Hughes named Whitman the greatest of American poets; Henry Miller described him as the bard of the future (quoted in Perlman et al., eds., Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, pp. 185, 205). Even his more cynical readers recognized Whitman’s position of near-mythical status and supreme influence in American letters. His crudity is an exceeding great stench but it is America, Ezra Pound admitted in a 1909 article; he continued: To be frank, Whitman is to my father-land what Dante is to Italy (Perlman, pp. 112-113). We continue to live in a Whitmanesque age, said Pablo Neruda in a speech to PEN in 1972. Walt Whitman was the protagonist of a truly geographical personality: The first man in history to speak with a truly continental American voice, to bear a truly American name (Perlman, p. 232). Alicia Ostriker, in a 1002 essay, claimed that if women poets in America have written more boldly and experimentally in the last thirty years than our British equivalents, we have Whitman to thank (Perlman, p. 463).

    How did a former typesetter and penny-daily editor come to write the poems that would define and shape American literature and culture?

    Whitman’s metamorphosis in the decade before the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 remains an intriguing mystery. Biographers concede that details about Whitman’s life and literary activities from the late 1840s to the early 1850s are extremely hard to come by. Little is known of Whitman’s activities in these years, writes Joann Krieg in the 1851-1854 section of her Whitman Chronology (most other years have month-to-month commentaries). Whitman was fired from his job at the New Orleans Daily Crescent in the summer of 1848, then resigned from his editorship of the Brooklyn Freeman in 1849. Though he continued to write for several newspapers during the next five years, his work as a freelancer was irregular and his whereabouts difficult to follow. He seems also to have tried his hand at several other jobs, including house building and selling stationery. One wonders if Walt’s break from the daily work routine had something to do with his poetic awakening. Keeping to a regulated schedule in the newspaper offices had been a struggle for him, and he had been fired several times for laziness or sloth. Charting his own days and ways—in particular, working as a self-employed carpenter, as had his idiosyncratic father—may well have enabled him to think outside the box and toward the organic, freeform qualities of Leaves.

    Purposefully dropping out of workaday life and common sight suggests that Whitman may have intended to obscure the details of his pre-Leaves years, and there is further evidence to support the idea that Whitman consciously created a myth of origins. In his biography of Whitman, Justin Kaplan quotes the poet on the mysterious perturbations of Leaves of Grass: It had been written under great pressure, pressure from within, and he had felt that he must do it (p. 185). To obscure the roots of Leaves and build the case for his original thinking, Whitman destroyed significant amounts of manuscripts and letters upon at least two occasions; as Grier notes in his introduction to Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, one is continually struck by [the] omissions and reticences of the remaining material (vol. 1, p. 8). Indeed, some of the notes surviving his clean-ups were reminders to himself to not name any names—and thus to remain silent concerning any possible readings or influences. Make no quotations, and no reference to any other writers.—Lumber the writing with nothing, Whitman wrote to himself in the late 1840s. It was a command he would repeat to himself several times in the years preceding the publication of Leaves.

    Whitman’s friends and critics also did their share to create a legend of the writer and his explosive first book. In the first biographical study of Whitman, John Burroughs claimed that certain individuals throughout history mark and make new eras, plant the standard again ahead, and in one man personify vast races or sweeping revolutions. I consider Walt Whitman such an individual (Burroughs, Preface to Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person). Others insisted that Leaves of Grass was the product of the cosmic consciousness Whitman had acquired around 1850 (Bucke, Walt Whitman, p. 178) or a spiritual illumination of the highest order (Binns, A Life of Walt Whitman, pp. 69-70).

    What sort of experience could inspire such a personal revelation? For a man just awakening to the inhumanity of slavery and the hidden agendas of the Free Soil stance, witnessing a slave auction might do it. This was but one of the life-altering events that occurred during Whitman’s three-month sojourn in New Orleans in 1848. Another, substantiated by his poetry rather than Whitman’s own word, was an alleged homosexual affair. Several poems in the sexually charged Calamus and Children of Adam clusters of 1860 are suggestive of an intense and liberating romance in New Orleans. The manuscript for Once I Passed Through a Populous City has the lines man who wandered with me, there, for love of me, / Day by day, and night by night, we were together. Man was changed to woman in the final draft of the poem; see Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860), edited by Fredson Bowers, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, p. 64. In I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing, the poet describes breaking off a twig of a particularly stately and solitary tree: Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love (p. 287). The emotional release of coming out might well explain the spectacular openness and provocative energy of Leaves of Grass; additionally, Whitman’s identification of his outsider status could have helped spark his empathy for women, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups that are celebrated in the 1855 poems.

    Whitman’s personal transformations, as well as America’s political upheaval, characterized the 1840s and early 1850s. His growing political awareness was no doubt inspired by the unprecedented corruption of the day: Vote buying, wire-pulling, and patronage existed on all levels of state and national government. In New York, Fernando Wood was elected mayor in 1854 as a result of vote fraud: In the Bloody Sixth ward, there were actually 4,000 more votes than there were voters. And three of the most corrupt presidencies in America’s history-Millard Fillmore (1850-1853), Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), and James Buchanan (1857-1861)—were certain to catch the attention of an aspiring young journalist. Our topmost warning and shame, Whitman wrote of the three incompetent leaders, who exhibited especially poor judgment on the issue of slavery.

    The debate over slavery divided the country in the decades before the Civil War; even within regions, the answers were not as clear-cut as they would seem once sides were drawn in 1861. According to one estimate in 1847, two-thirds of Northerners disapproved of slavery, but only 5 percent declared themselves Abolitionists. Immediate emancipation, it was feared, would flood the North with cheap labor and racial disharmonies. The word compromise, with all its political and moral ambiguities, was a favorite with politicians. Fillmore was responsible for the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California to the Union as a free state but also lifted legal restrictions on slavery in Utah and New Mexico; to satisfy the South, he instituted a stringent Fugitive Slave Law at the same time. In 1854 Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves the issue of slavery. The result was Bleeding Kansas, the 1854 congressional election that was decided by 1,700 Missourians crossing the border and casting illegal votes for the proslavery candidate. Additionally, in this crucial year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass, fugitive slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston, put on trial, and shipped back to Virginia. At a huge rally in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of the Declaration of Independence, and Henry David Thoreau delivered the powerful address Slavery in Massachusetts.

    Whitman, too, was incited to protest. Through the 1840s and 1850s, he watched with increasing anger as the Whig Party collapsed, and as the Democratic Party gave itself over to proslavery forces. His editorials throughout this period indicate that his political understanding and stance was becoming more concrete, less forgiving. And in 1850, a series of four political poems appeared, indicating that Whitman had finally stepped away from imitative verse and started investing his poetry with a more personal, immediate voice and message. Song for Certain Congressmen, first published in the New York Evening Post of March 2, 1850, mocks Americans for considering compromise of any sort—particularly compromise of human rights (before the Compromise of 1850 became law in September, the country debated the status of slavery in the new western states for several months):

    Beyond all such we know a term

    Charming to ears and eyes,

    With it we’ll stab young Freedom,

    And do it in disguise;

    Speak soft, ye wily dough-faces-

    That term is compromise (pp. 736-737).

    Blood-Money, published March 22, is an indictment of Daniel Webster’s support of the Fugitive Slave Law; The House of Friends, a criticism of the Democratic Party’s support of the Compromise, was published June 14. Resurgemus, published two months later, celebrates the spirit of the European revolutions of 1848. The fact that it became the eighth of the twelve original poems in Leaves of Grass (1855) demonstrates that Whitman saw this effort as more than an apprentice-poem; indeed, the prophetic, confrontational last lines foretell of the arrival of a Whitmanesque redeemer: Is the house shut? Is the master away? / Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching, / He will surely return; his messengers come anon (p. 743).

    Along with personal revelations and the awakening of a political conscience, a spiritual conversion contributed to the metamorphosis of a Brooklyn hack writer to democracy’s poet: Walt Whitman became a New Yorker.

    Of the three types of New Yorkers, commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion, writes E. B. White in his essay Here Is New York (reprinted in Lopate, Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, pp. 696-697). Whitman belonged to the third category. Though born on a Long Island farm, he discovered at an early age that the city fed his soul. When his parents moved back to the country in 1833, the fourteen-year-old boy decided to stay on alone in Brooklyn and work in the printing industry. An employer helped him acquire a card for a circulating library; on his own, he started attending the theater and participating in a debating society. Looking for work during difficult times, Whitman left New York during his late teens and early twenties to teach school on Long Island. He disliked the job and eagerly returned to the world of city journalism in 1841. Until 1848 Whitman bounced from one Brooklyn or Manhattan publisher or newspaper to the next; he reported on local news, reviewed concerts and operas, and wrote his own fledgling poems and short stories. When he was fired from his editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1848, Whitman made an impetuous decision to try working in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the now-confirmed New Yorker was back within three months. Later that year, Whitman secured his position in his beloved Brooklyn by buying a Myrtle Avenue lot and building a home on the site (with a printing office and bookstore on the first floor). Though he sold this property in 1852, he continued to call Brooklyn (and occasionally, Manhattan) home until 186X, when he left to search for his brother George, who was wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and settled in Washington, D.C.

    When the Whitman family first moved to Brooklyn in 1823, it was a village of around 7,000 inhabitants. Paintings such as Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (1820) depict its country lanes, free-ranging chickens and pigs, and clapboard barns. By the time Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Brooklyn had become the fourth-largest city in the nation. Manhattan, too, had rapidly expanded; its population rose from 123,706 in 1820 to 813,669 in 1860 (Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, p. 70). City life, largely confined to the area below Fourteenth Street in the first decades of the nineteenth century, moved so rapidly northward that plans for a central park (starting at Fifty-ninth Street) were proposed in 1851. Travel around the city was facilitated by several new rail lines, five of which were incorporated in the 1850s; and the number of omnibuses shot up from 255 in 1846 to 683 in 1853 (when they carried over a hundred thousand passengers a day) (Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, p. 653). People were flocking to the city from the outside: While 667,000 immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1839, 4,242,000 came between 1840 and 1859. By 1855 over half the city’s residents hailed from outside the United States, note Burrows and Wallace (pp. 736-737). Most of them were impoverished peasants and workers from Ireland and Germany.

    Visitors and residents alike were quick to comment on the negative aspects of the city’s social and economic boom. British actor Fanny Kemble marveled at the diversity of the city’s population in her 1832 journal, but was outraged by the prejudice and racism she witnessed (Lopate, pp. 25, 27). Touring New York in 1842, Charles Dickens was taken aback by the treatment of the poor, as well as the pigs roaming noisy, filthy streets (Lopate, pp. 57-58). Thoreau spent a few months in the city in 1843 but was appalled by the crowds: Seeing so many people from day to day one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones, he wrote to a friend. It must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once—mere herds of men (Lopate, p. 73). Poe mocked the dirty dealings of city businessmen in Doings of Gotham, a series of articles written for out of towners in 1844. And native New Yorker Herman Melville was the first to capture the urban alienation still felt by Manhattanites, in his 1853 tale Bartleby the Scrivener.

    Writing for Brooklyn and New York newspapers for much of the 1840s and part of the 1850s, Whitman was employed to take note of the changes and report on the city’s big events. He wrote about the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, which brought running water to city residents; he commented on the Astor Place Opera House riots, in which more than twenty people were killed in 1849; he attended the opening of the Crystal Palace on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in 1853. But his interest in city life extended beyond his duties as a reporter. After work, he’d leave his office on Newspaper Row (just east of City Hall Park) and take long walks, wandering through the Bloody Sixth ward and the crime-infested, impoverished streets of Five Points. Another favorite activity was looking in at the shop-windows in Broadway the whole forenoon .... pressing the flesh of my nose to the thick plate-glass ([Song of Myself], p. 65), especially with the opening of so many elegant photography studios in the 1840s. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and the Phrenological Cabinet of the Fowler Brothers and Samuel Wells were other frequent destinations. To cover longer distances, he rode the omnibuses up and down the glorious avenues, singing at the top of his lungs. Whitman started carrying a small note- book, jotting down his thoughts during his daily morning and evening commutes on the Brooklyn ferry. And somewhere along the way, he fell in love with the noise and filth, crowds and congestion, problems and promise of New York.

    This is the city .... and I am one of the citizens;

    Whatever interests the rest interests me .... politics, churches,

    newspapers, schools,

    Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships,

    factories, markets,

    Stocks and stores and real estate and personal estate

    ([Song of Myself], p. 79).

    Whitman found cause to celebrate the same elements of city life that others had criticized or overlooked. He was the first American writer to embrace urban street culture, finding energy, beauty, and humanity in the meanest sights and sounds of the city.

    The blab of the pave .... the tires of carts and sluff of

    bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,

    The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,

    the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,

    The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and

    pelts of snowballs;

    The hurrahs for popular favorites .... the fury of roused mobs

    ([Song of Myself], p. 36).

    The cultural offerings of New York were another source of inspiration to Whitman. He fully embraced the city’s opera rage, which began in April 1847 when an Italian company opened at his beloved Park Theatre. The Astor Place Opera House also opened that year; with 1,500 seats it was America’s largest theater until the Academy of Music opened in Manhattan in 1854. From the late 1840s through the 1850s, Whitman saw dozens of operas, on assignment and for his own pleasure. By the time Leaves of Grass went to press, he had heard at least sixteen major singers make their New York debuts. Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum’s Swedish nightingale, had been a smash success at her debut in Castle Garden in 1850; but a personal favorite of Whitman’s was Marietta Alboni, who arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1852 and is said to have inspired these passionate lines:

    I hear the trained soprano .... she convulses me like the climax

    of my love-grip;

    The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

    It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,

    It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,

    It sails me .... I dab with bare feet .... They are licked by the

    indolent waves,

    I am exposed .... cut by bitter and poisoned hail,

    Steeped amid honeyed morphine .... my windpipe squeezed in

    the fakes of death

    Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

    And that we call Being ([Song of Myself], 1855, p. 57).

    The wonder of this ecstatic revelation is that it is both a private and a public experience. His feelings are inspired by human connections: Alboni’s voice, the orchestra’s resonance, the excitement of his fellow concertgoers, the hum of electric city life just outside. If anything has ever defined the idea of a New York moment, it is this brief and wonderful merge of inner being with common understanding. An accumulation of such moments, plus years of taking in the city and reimagining it on paper, led to the creation of the self-declared Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos ([Song of Myself], p. 52). And since Whitman perceived New York to be at the heart of America, his love for the city enabled and inspired the love of his country. The diversity, energy, and ambitions of New York represented the promise of America: By finding his voice on city streets and ferries, he was able to sing for his country’s open roads and great rivers.

    City of the world! (for all races are here,

    All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)

    City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!

    City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in

    and out with eddies and foam!

    City of wharves and stores-city of tall façades of marble and iron!

    Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!

    (City of Ships, p. 444).

    If the poet’s heart was based in Manhattan, the title Leaves of Grass for not one but several of his books seems an odd choice. And what of the green cover and gold-embossed, organic-looking lettering that made the book resemble a volume of domestic fiction more than a serious effort? The title and appearance were not the only surprises of the 9- by 12-inch, 95-page volume: Most notably, no author’s name appeared anywhere on the cover or first pages. Though the image of Whitman as a provocative and confident working man looked up from the frontispiece, his name came up only about halfway through the first poem-which was, confusingly, also entitled Leaves of Grass, as were the next five poems.

    The quirky details were all deliberate. The title echoed the names of literary productions by women (such as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, Fanny Fern’s popular book of 1853), and the outward appearance also was designed to get readers to question the sexist boundaries of the book industry (note, too, that Whitman’s preferred trousers through the late 1850s were bloomers, the loose-fitting pants that were the male equivalent of those worn by women’s rights activists, such as Amelia Bloomer). Leaves of Grass was also an obvious metaphor for the unregulated, organically grown lines of the poems in the leaves of the book. But Whitman was also using grass as a symbol of American democracy. Simple and universal, grass represents common ground. Each leaf (Whitman thought the proper word blade was literally too sharp) has a singular identity yet is a necessary contributor to the whole. Likewise, each reader will find that he or she is part of Leaves of Grass—a book about all Americans that could have been written by any American (hence, the absence of the author’s name).

    When the first publisher Whitman approached refused to print the manuscript on the grounds of its offensive contents, he took it to the Rome printing shop on Cranberry and Fulton Streets in Brooklyn Heights. The Rome brothers were friends and neighbors, and they agreed to work on the volume if Whitman would lend a hand with the job. 800 copies were struck off on a hand press by Andrew Rome ... the author himself setting some of the type, noted Whitman (Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 30). Legend has it that most of the copies remained in a back room of the shop until they were finally discarded as liabilities (Garrett, The Rome Printing Shop, p. 4). The price of two dollars was apparently deemed too high by Whitman, because a second issue printed later that year with a plain paper cover cost one dollar. All in all a thousand copies were printed but practically none sold, writes Florence Rome Garrett, the granddaughter of Tom Rome (Garrett, p. 4).

    Leaves of Grass was bound to be a quiet release, since the book was not printed or supported by a large publishing house with wide distribution, and did not even have a recognizable author’s name on the cover. A British name, in particular, would have helped, since midcentury America still looked toward England for artistic models and inspiration. Though political freedom had been established for decades, America was still a long way from gaining cultural independence. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs? asked Emerson in Nature. Whitman replaced Emerson’s interrogation with imperatives in his preface. Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest, he insists in the preface to the First Edition (p. 10). This twelve-page, double-columned preface that stood between the reader and Whitman’s twelve poems remains his definitive declaration of independence: These new American poets would represent and inspire the people, assuming the roles of priests and politicians; the new American poetry would be as strong and fluid as its rivers, as sweeping and grand as its landscapes, as various as its people.

    As a living embodiment of the new poetry, the American reader was responsible for its grace, power, and truth. The urgent tone of the preface exposes Whitman’s desperation over the state of 1850s America—a country corrupted by its own leaders, torn apart by its own people, and facing an imminent civil war. His demands on readers were meant to shake awake a slumbering, passive nation and inspire a loving, proud, generous, accepting union of active thinkers and thoughtful doers:

    This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body (p. 13).

    What is requested here is just as astonishing as how it is stated. The unidentified speaker of the preface possessed an extreme, provocative confidence that could be seen in the eyes and stance of the image on the frontispiece. His prophetic message for America was delivered in lines that evoked the passages and rhythms of holy books; the above section, for example, may be compared with Romans 12:1-21 in the New Testament. But while the writer had perhaps elevated himself to the status of a prophet, his run-on sentences, breathless lists, and general disregard for proper punctuation suggested that he was neither scholar nor trained or proper writer. Most outrageous of all was his direct confrontation of the reader—the use of you that really meant you. This personal advancement from writer to reader, this attempt to jump off the page into the audience’s immediate space and time, was a new and startling literary technique. And if the combination of audacious demands and prophetic, finger-pointing tone in the preface did not deter readers from moving on to the poems, they would find the same revolutionary style and content in the very first lines.

    I celebrate myself,

    And what I assume you shall assume,

    For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you

    ([Song of Myself], 1855, p. 29).

    First-time readers of these lines still find the egotism tremendous and off-putting. The irregular length and randomness of the lines, along with the use of ellipses of various sizes, looks strange enough to the eye trained on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s neat verse or Alfred Tennyson’s stately measures. But the idea of engaging in a conversation with this relaxed figure, who sensually melds with the natural landscape around him (to the point where one is uncertain of the definitions of loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine), puts a more cautious reader on the defensive. In 1855 the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne was appalled by the poet’s position on the grass, claiming that he abandons all personal dignity and reserve, and sprawls incontinently before us; 150 years later, one might still wonder at a man who unabashedly declares that he will become undisguised and naked—and what’s more, celebrate every atom of himself.

    Song of Myself (as the poem was finally titled in 1881) may begin with I, but the poem’s last word is you." In between, the poet does inject a great deal of ego; his posture is clearly that of the poet-prophet with instructions and predictions for his listeners. The most important part of his message, however, concerns the reader’s intellectual and spiritual independence:

    Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of

    all poems,

    You shall possess the good of the earth and sun .... there are

    millions of suns left,

    You shall no longer take things at second or third hand .... nor

    look through the eyes of the dead .... nor feed on the spectres

    in books,

    You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

    You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself

    ([Song of Myselfl, 1855, p. 30).

    In Leaves of Grass, Whitman recognizes the role of the poet as of the highest order. But he also notes that the role is open for everyone (hence, the lack of an author’s name on the front cover). This seeming irony is the first that Whitman’s readers must get past: the idea that the poet is inspired and must be heeded, but must be heeded regarding a lack of adherence. He most honors my style, explains the poet in [Song of Myself], who learns under it to destroy the teacher (p. 86). Throughout the poem, Whitman encourages the reader’s active participation and independent thinking with unpredictable breaks as well as provocative questions without right answers (many of them bear a resemblance to Buddhist koans). At the end of the poem one is left with a sense of the poet’s spirit not shining over but running under the bootsoles of his protégés.

    Equality between writer and reader was not the only difficult balance Whitman attempted to achieve in the poems of Leaves of Grass. As part of his plan for a new democratic art, he questioned and disrupted many other long-standing cultural boundaries: between rich and poor, men and women, the races and religions of the world. His most direct way of doing so was by observation and aggressive questioning, as in his discussion of a slave at auction in I Sing the Body Electric:

    This is not only one man .... he is the father of those who

    shall be fathers in their turns,

    In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

    Of him countless immortal lives with countless

    embodiments and enjoyments.

    How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his

    offspring through the centuries?

    Who might you find you have come from yourself if you

    could trace back through the centuries?

    ([I Sing the Body Electric], 1855, p. 125).

    Such passages were obviously meant to shock and provoke the American conscience, especially considering that slavery was still a legal and accepted activity. Whitman, who was close friends with Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Price, and several other reformers, also attacked the common acceptance that women were the weaker sex. Eight years after the first women’s rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, he set out to liberate a population still falsely confined by their society’s written and unwritten rules, their own fears—even their clothing:

    They are not one jot less than I am,

    They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,

    Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,

    They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,

    retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,

    They are ultimate in their own right—they are calm, clear,

    well-possess’d of themselves

    (A Woman Waits for Me, pp. 263-264).

    A less confrontational method for democratizing his image of America was the catalogue, a list of people, places, items, events that sometimes went on for pages. Whitman might have been inspired by the new art of photography in creating these lists; reading through them has an effect that’s similar to looking through a photograph album, though a closer comparison may be to watching a video montage. By verbally connecting the marginalized and the mainstream, Whitman puts them on the same page—in the book, and hopefully in the mind of the reader.

    The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the

    nominee that is chosen and the nominee that has failed,

    The great already known, and the great anytime after to day,

    The stammerer, the sick, the perfectformed, the homely,

    The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and

    sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,

    The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow,

    the red squaw ...

    I swear they are averaged now .... one is no better than the

    other ([The Sleepers], 1855, pp. 116-117).

    Whitman’s idea of a passionate democracy encouraged an awareness and appreciation of others as well as one’s own self. The strong sensual and erotic passages in Leaves must have been especially shocking in the mid-nineteenth century, when underwear was called unmentionables and piano legs were covered with pantaloons because of their suggestive shape; but even in the twenty-first century Whitman’s openness about sexuality makes readers question their own body consciousness and personal taboos. Spontaneous Me is but one of the poems describing masturbation; I Sing the Body Electric includes a lengthy catalogue of all body parts-including sex organs—described with the meticulousness of a

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