Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

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Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
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Walt Whitman 1819-1892

• Son of Long Island farmer turned spec
  house-builder, one of 9
• leaves school at 11, newspaper apprentice in
  Brooklyn at 12
• Print compositor, journalist, starts the weekly
  Long-Islander at 19, sells at 20
• 1840-1844 Long Island Democrat, Democratic
  Review, New World, Aurora, NY Evening Tatler
  murder reporter, Daily Plebeian, New York
  Statesman, New York Democrat
• Anti-slavery (abolitionist) Democrat, Free-Soil
  Party
• 1848, edits New Orleans Crescent exposure to
  slave markets
• 1852 becomes spec-builder to finance writing
• 1855 self-publishes Leaves of Grass, 800
  copies, 12 untitled poems
• sends copies to Emerson others his father dies

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• The sign and credentials of the poet are, that
  he announces that which no man foretold. He is
  the true and only doctor he knows and tells he
  is the only teller of news, for he was present
  and privy to the appearance which he describes.
  He is a beholder of ideas, and utterer of the
  necessary and casual. For we do not speak now of
  men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill
  in metre, but of the true poet.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (1844)

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Emerson, The Poet

• even the poets are contented with a civil and
  conformed manner of living, and to write poems
  from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own
  experience. But the highest minds of the world
  have never ceased to explore the double meaning,
  or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple,
  or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous
  fact

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Emerson, The Poet

• the poet is representative. He stands among
  partial men for the complete man, and apprises us
  not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The
  young man reveres men of genius, because, to
  speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
  They receive of the soul as he also receives, but
  they more. Nature enhances her beauty to the eye
  of loving men .

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Emerson, The Poet

• For all men live by truth, and stand in need of
  expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in
  politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter
  our painful secret. The man is only half himself,
  the other half is his expression.

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Supersensual Conversation

• Notwithstanding this necessity to be published,
  adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is
  that we need an interpreter but the great
  majority of men seem to be minors, who have not
  yet come into possession of their own, or mutes,
  who cannot report the conversation they have had
  with nature.there is some obstructionEvery
  touch should thrill. Every man should be so much
  an artist, that he could report in conversation
  what had befallen him.

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Reproduction in speech

• Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have
  sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not
  enough to reach the quick, and compel the
  reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is
  the person in whom these powers are in balance,
  the man without impediment, who sees and handles
  that which others dream of, traverses the whole
  scale of experience, and is representative of
  man, in virtue of being the largest power to
  receive and to impart.

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Emersonian axioms

• Poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world
  to the end of expression
• Words are also actions, and actions are a kind
  of words.

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With what joy I begin to read a poem

• This day shall be better than my birthday then I
  became an animal now I am invited into the
  science of the real....Day and night, house and
  garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as
  well as would all trades and all spectacles. We
  are far from having exhausted the significance of
  the few symbols we use.

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Second nature/reproduction

• But the poet names the thing because he sees it,
  or comes one step nearer to it than any other.
  This expression, or naming, is not art, but a
  second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf
  out of a tree.

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Leaves of Grass 1855

• AMERICA does not repel the past .
  perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from
  the eating and sleeping rooms of the
  house . . . perceives that it waits a little
  while in the door . . . that it was fittest for
  its days . . . that its action has descended to
  the stalwart and wellshaped heir who
  approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for
  his days.
•      The Americans of all nations at any time
  upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical
  nature. The United States themselves are
  essentially the greatest poem.

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America nation of nations

• Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation
  of nationsdetails magnificently moving in vast
  masses.Here are the roughs and beards and space
  and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul
  loves.the tremendous audacity of its crowds and
  groupings and the push of its perspective spreads
  with crampless and flowing breadth and showers
  its prolific and splendid extravagance.

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Republic as unrhymed poetry

• the genius of the United States is not best or
  most in its executives or legislaturesnor even
  in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always
  most in the common people. Their manners speech
  dress friendshipsthe freshness and candor of
  their physiognomythe picturesque looseness of
  their carriage . . . their deathless attachment
  to freedomthe practical acknowledgment of the
  citizens of one state by the citizens of all
  other statesthe fierceness of their roused
  resentmenttheir curiosity and welcome of
  noveltytheir self-esteem and wonderful
  sympathymanly tenderness and native
  elegance. . . their good temper and
  openhandednessthe terrible significance of their
  electionsthe President's taking off his hat to
  them not they to himthese too are unrhymed
  poetry.

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American Poetry as Free Trade

• American bards shall be marked for generosity and
  affection and for encouraging competitors . . 
• They shall be kosmos . . without monopoly or
  secrecy . . glad to pass any thing to any
  one . . hungry for equals night and day.

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Leaves of Grass 1855

• the expression of the American poet is to be
  transcendant and new. he spreads out his
  dishes . . . he offers the sweet firmfibred meat
  that grows men and women. he is
  individual . . . he is complete in
  himself . . . . the others are as good as he,
  only he sees it and they do not.

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Poetry as Effect and Affect

•  Without effort and without exposing in the least
  how it is done the greatest poet brings the
  spirit of any or all events and passions and
  scenes and persons some more and some less to
  bear on your individual character as you hear or
  read.

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Read these leaves1855

• 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

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Composition without Composition

• I will have nothing hang in the way, not the
  richest curtains. What I tell I tell for
  precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or
  startle or fascinate or soothe I will have
  purposes as health or heat or snow has and be as
  regardless of observation. What I experience or
  portray shall go from my composition without a
  shred of my composition. You shall stand by my
  side and look in the mirror with me.

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Editions of Leaves of Grass
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Cast Dies for 1860 Leaves

• An engraved stamp used for impressing a design as
  in coining money, embossing paper, etc.

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Leaves of Grass 1856, 1860

• Leaves of Grass, 2nd edn, 1856
• Now 33 poems and 4 times as long as 1855
• includes letter from Emerson and Whitmans reply
• Leaves of Grass, 3rd edn, Boston Thalyer
  Eldridge, 1860 abolitionist publishers
• 146 new poems including homoerotic Calamus
  poems
• Approx 450 pages, 2000-5000 copies
• " The Great Construction of the New Bible "
  (Notebooks 1353)

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Emersons Letter
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Whitmans Butterfly
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• "the big, good-natured, shrewd and large-souled
  poet, whose photograph shows him lounging in
  smoking-jacket and broad felt hat, gazing at his
  hand, on which a delicate butterfly, with
  expanded wings, forms a contrast to the thick
  fingers and heavy ploughman's wrist
• The Critic (1883)

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Butterfly
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Butterfly reverse
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Whitmans Tomb
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Whitmans Hair
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Online Resources

• Revising Himself www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/wh
  itman-home.html
• Walt Whitman Archive
• www.whitmanarchive.org
• Classroom Electric
• www.classroomelectric.org