Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions (7 page)

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 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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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”:

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: