Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman
Celebrating the pleasures of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman on the Bronx Local
Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother,
After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,
Or a soldier camp’d or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California, Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring,
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess . . .
Riding the Bronx local out of Mount Vernon toward the end of one morning several years ago, on my way into Grand Central Terminal, I sat reading Leaves of Grass. Surely, it occurred to me as I passed Wakefield station, I had traversed the same stretch of rail reading the same poetry forty years ago. There was some solace in this retrospective realization, perhaps because I had spent the last hour communing with family ghosts at a funeral in Immaculate Conception church on Gun Hill Road. It had been a long time since I’d read Whitman, and the delights of his vitality and the pleasure of his knowing self-regard —
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
— were fresh, as was the occasional embarrassment of his exposures. Still, it was pure joy to read him in the strange simultaneity of past and present that day delivered. Under the circumstances, I was especially moved to discover these lines in “The Sleepers”:
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world.
I am curious to know where my feet stand — and what is this flooding me,
childhood or manhood — and the hunger that cross the bridge between.
Solitary, reading in the West Bronx, I was struck by those old words. I think of them again as I see the parade of online salutations that celebrate their author this week on the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Leaves of Grass
In 1855, having been a printer’s assistant, teacher, and newspaperman in New York and New Orleans, Whitman, largely self-taught and unknown, self-published — not just footing the bill but designing the cover and setting the type — a small book called Leaves of Grass. Containing twelve untitled poems and a preface, it caused little stir, except in a reader named Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sent Whitman a letter of high praise. A year later Whitman released a second edition, this time with thirty-three poems (and, unbeknownst to its sender, Emerson’s epistolary endorsement). The poet would continue revising and republishing Leaves of Grass over the next thirty-odd years; the final edition, printed in 1892, by which time the “Good Gray Poet” had become a national treasure, contained 383 poems.
Leaves of Grass captures a new American voice — bold, relaxed, exultant, shameless — in long, breath-fueled lines that exude an organic energy traditional stanzas could never contain:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves of work . . .
“(I am large, I contain multitudes),” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself,” and his poetry follows suit, embracing in its ruminative waves both country and cosmos, swelling to flights of soulful grandeur, then rushing back to earth to celebrate and bear witness to the tenderness and violence of the physical world. Labor, life, love, spirituality, slavery and the war it provoked, democracy and its discontents, the joys of sensual and sexual reality — all are absorbed and transformed by his verses into unforgettable utterance. His lines live (“I sing the body electric”) and his rhythms endure (“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking”) with an undimmed native vitality. His best poems are life-affirming hymns that strike what Abraham Lincoln — whom Whitman mourns in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — once called “the mystic chords of memory.” Few poets have had his influence, and fewer still have so urgently charged the common language of their country’s people.
