Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (5 page)

“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.

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:

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).