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Authors: Walt Whitman

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Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (8 page)

BOOK: Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions
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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 physiognomist; “Unfolded Out of the Folds” takes place at the entrance of the birth canal (also described as the “exquisite flexible doors” in “Song of Myself”); “To a Common Prostitute” honors the profession of the most marginalized of women; “[Song of Myself]” contains passages suggestive of oral sex (“Loafe with me ... ,” p. 32), voyeurism (“Twenty-eight young men ... ,” p. 38), and homoeroticism (“The boy I love ... ,” p. 86). Whitman also describes scenes of shame, as in the “wet dream” episode of “[The Sleepers]” (“Darkness you are gentler ... ,” p. 111). Whitman apparently realized that, in order to institute change regarding societal sexual hang-ups, he had to sympathize with his embarrassed readers as well as provide models for a healthy, open-minded attitude.
Once the doors of perception were cleansed, the relationship between body and soul would be seen as it really is: connected, infinite, divine.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch
or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds
(“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 53).
It would be a mistake to overlook Whitman’s down-home sense of humor, tickling the edges of some of his touchiest passages (“I dote on myself,” he purrs later in the same passage. “There is that lot of me, and all so luscious”). But there is serious, deliberate provocation here. He is raising the significance and worth of the physical realm to meet that of the spiritual. Whitman was not denying the existence and importance of God, or attempting to lower the soul’s worth: He simply saw God in everyone and divinity in everything, and wanted to encourage his fellow Americans to do so, too.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each
moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face
in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is
signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will
punctually come forever and ever
(“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 88).
Simple language, complex ideas: This is Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass.
Achieving balance between contrary notions, questioning the accepted or unquestionable, pushing every known limit or boundary-all characterize the work. And Whitman made things more difficult by sometimes modifying some of his basic tenets, such as the idea that all men are created equal: His elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom‘d” celebrates the “redeemer-president” Abraham Lincoln above all humanity, even himself. Whitman’s glorification of the physical, too, changed as his body aged. In later masterpieces, such as “Passage to India,” he finds inspiration in the amazing output of the intellect (such as the Suez Canal and the transatlantic cable crossing) rather than in the miracles of the human form. Though unconditional truisms seem to run through his oeuvre, they are often more nuanced than casual readers recognize: His interrogations in such poems as “To the States,” for example, have taught generations of radicals that one can be actively critical and still patriotic. Even his ultimate vision of America as an abstract ideal, as expressed in his aptly titled 1888 poem “America,” seems far removed from the voluptuous, fluid, fertile image of the nation in the 1855 preface.
All these revisions and reconsiderations are signs of an active and flexible mind, one unwilling to settle or stagnate despite the appeal of worldly success and the acceptance and burdens of heartache, disease, loss, and age. Whitman was himself pleased with his unending evolution and wrote some of his finest poems about his passages as man and artist. In “There Was a Child Went Forth,” the poet details the people, places, and events that form the character of he “who now goes and will always go forth every day.” The “doubts of night- time” that trouble him are further explored in “The Sleepers,” in which he learns to embrace the continuous, ever-changing cycles of life rather than fear the darkness and the unknown.
But Whitman’s most inspiring rite-of-passage poem was borne out of actual personal and professional crises he experienced between 1855 and 1856. Despite the critical and commercial failure of the first publication of
Leaves,
Whitman set to work almost immediately on the revisions and new poems of the Second Edition. The artist may have felt the need to write, but the man found life getting in the way. “Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious,” Whitman wrote in a notebook entry in late 1855. “I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I had supposed them, are not shallow—and people will most likely laugh at me.—My pride is impotent, my love gets no response”
(Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts,
p. 167). “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which Whitman uses his twice-daily ferry ride as a metaphor, describes the poet’s journey through the “dark patches” to a moment of emotional equilibrium and spiritual poise. His movement through crisis brings him in communion with “others that are to follow me” and secures “the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others” (
Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts,
p. 199). “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” perhaps more successfully than any other poem, unites Whitman and his reader across the “impassable” boundary of time.
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid
in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at
you now, for all you cannot see me?
(“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” p. 320).
A few years ago, I took a group of my Cooper Union students on a literary tour of Brooklyn Heights. As we emerged from the subway onto Henry Street, I pointed left to our first “site”: the general area of the printshop where Whitman had helped typeset the First Edition of Leaves, now a housing development fittingly named Whitman Close. Our efforts to find Whitman’s spirit alive and well were not off to a promising start. In fact, the poet really seemed dead for the first time, even to me.
A sophomore art major named Alice Wetterlund decided to use the lull to perform her recitation (each student was required to memorize and present at least ten lines of Whitman’s verse or prose). As she began to recite, she struggled to make the words heard over the street bustle. Then she spotted a utility truck being used by the members of a local carpenter’s union who were staging a strike in front of the old St. George Hotel. One of the carpenters was using a megaphone from inside the truck to promote union sentiment and camaraderie among the strikers.
Before I realized what she was up to, Alice ran over to the van and addressed the speaker. His announcements suddenly ceased. Alice disappeared for a moment; in the next, her distinct voice carried over the hubbub of Henry Street, proclaiming the entirety of “A Woman Waits for Me.”
Traffic slowed down. Strikers stood still. And when Alice had finished reciting the poem, a brief silence was swallowed up by honks of approval, shouts, and cheers from the carpenters, and our own wild reactions to her stunt.
Whitman repeatedly asks his readers to be progressive in every sense of the word, and to work constantly toward the fulfillment of America’s promise. He hoped that “greater offspring, orators, days” than himself and his own would rise, and must have considered the idea that he himself would eventually fall behind the times. His followers have certainly refreshed and expanded his message, but Whitman’s own words have such powerful and continuous relevance that he seems to address us face to face, rather than talk at our backs. Deliberately leaving off the end punctuation at the close of the 1855 edition of “Song of Myself ” (p. 91), he remains ever a step ahead:
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you
Karen Karbiener
received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2001 and teaches at New York University. A scholar of Romanticism and radical cultural legacies, she is the general editor of the forthcoming
Encyclopedia of American Counterculture
(M.E. Sharpe, 2006). She is currently curating an exhibit for the 150th anniversary of
Leaves of Grass
, entitled “Walt Whitman and the Promise of America, 1855-2005.” She lives in and loves her hometown, New York City.
Leaves
of
Grass
Brooklyn, New York : 1855.
 
“Christ likeness”—About 35 years old, c.1854, possibly taken by
Gabriel Harrison, although the photographer and place of sitting are
unknown. Courtesy of the Bayley-Whitman Collection of Ohio Wesleyan
University, Delaware, Ohio, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association,
Huntington, New York. Saunders #5.
BOOK: Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions
3.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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