English 251: American Lit. (1600-1865)

INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Assignment 29:
WALT WHITMAN (Part 1)

This assignment calls for you to read Whitman's "Preface" to the first edition (1855) of Leaves of Grass, as well as the first fifteen stanzas, or "cantos" of that book's premier poem--"Song of Myself."

Whitman was 36 years old when Leaves of Grass was published, and in one sense nothing could have foretold its appearance. The state of American poetry in 1855 has been fairly well represented by the examples we have read by Emerson and Poe: rhyming verse, in formal stanzas, using a rather conventionally ornamented style. To broaden your sense of poetry at mid-century, take a quick look at some verse by other writers in our anthology: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier for example. These writers, the so-called "Fireside Poets" (because of the homespun, familiar, conventional qualities of their verse), were the dominant poets of their time.

Contrast Whitman's poetry to theirs, and the differences leap forward. Whitman foreswears such details as meter or rhyme; his lines lunge breathlessly forward, encompassing seemingly all that falls to the writer's attention. If there is any formal, organizing principle to them, it would seem to be the catalogue or list, itself representative of Whitman's democratic desire to comprehend and include all. In his themes, as well, Whitman differs radically from his forebears. Emerson and the Fireside Poets would often deal with social themes such as slavery, but nothing in their verse prepared readers for Whitman's focus on the body, its processes and desires; the body, and its desires for free expression are, for Whitman, a metaphor of his broader politics. Indeed, Whitman's outspokenness on such themes would frequently cause problems for him. As late as 1882, after 27 years of its publication, the New York anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock would force Whitman's publisher, James R. Osgood, to drop Leaves of Grass because of its alleged pornography.

Yet there is another sense in which nothing in 1855 would have predicted a book like Whitman's. As your editors' introduction makes clear, Whitman came from a thoroughly ordinary background: his parents were barely literate, his siblings included two imbeciles, two future convicts, and four semi-literate farmers. Whitman himself had little formal education. Where Emerson and the Fireside Poets were educated at New England's best colleges, Whitman had just over 5 years of schooling before he was apprenticed out as a printer (shades of Ben Franklin!). He taught school, for a time, then moved on to a career in journalism: first as a reporter, then as a columnist, eventually as an editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in 1846. (Whitman was just 27 at the time, and like Hawthorne at the Custom-House, Whitman lost his job when his politics rubbed the Whig owners the wrong way.) Whitman, like Franklin, was the epitome of the American self-made man.

Despite these radical differences between his poetry and that of successful poets of the day, Ralph Waldo Emerson praised the first edition of Leaves of Grass as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at the beginning of a great career." To be precise, the career was already well-launched; only Whitman's career as America's "good grey poet" was newly minted. Why "Leaves" of "Grass," however? A leaf of grass is a stalk, of course; yet in printer's terms a leaf is also a page in a book. In this sense "Leaves of Grass" are pages in a book about--if we consider it further--the most commonplace plant-life on earth. The grass that Whitman invites us to "loaf" upon with him is stuff that grows everywhere; and while he can, if he wishes, observe "a spear" of that "summer grass," he also knows it comes in all types and kinds. The "grass" thus becomes his symbol of democracy. Just as Crevecoeur had insisted that "men are like plants," deriving their particular qualities as a people from the place in which they grow up, so too Whitman borrows the vegetative metaphor to suggest that, while different grasses (the "Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff" he names in line 109) appear in different places, nevertheless he must "receive them the same," for they are all just grass. In Whitman's poetic vision of democratic America, the one (the "leaf') symbolizes the man (the "grass," in general), and vice-versa.

In his "Preface," Whitman speaks of his desire for a poetry that realizes these democratic ideals. His "Song of Myself" puts this ideal--of the "one in the many, and the many in the one"--into practice.

Reading Assignment

Walt Whitman, "Preface to Leaves of Grass" (2076-2094) and "Song of Myself," sections 1-15 (2198-2209).

Writing Assignment

Read the first pages of Whitman's "Preface," then compare and contrast their description of American culture and society to that offered in Crevecoeur's Letter III ("What is an American").
What should be the characteristics of an American poem as Whitman defines them in the "Preface"?
Reading the "Preface," as well as "Song of Myself," we can't help but be struck by some of Whitman's more unusual and even bizarre word choices, like "embouchure," "savans," and "semitic muscle." Focusing just on the "Preface," say why, in your view, these words are selected. What purposes are such words supposed to fulfill?
Now turn to "Song of Myself," and say: When and where does the action of the poem take place? And, indeed, what is the main action of the poem? In answering, use specific evidence from the poem's own language.
What does the speaker of the poem mean, in line 35, when he says to us that "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books"? Also, isn't it true that we are, perforce, taking that from words in a book; and does that diminish the speaker's idea? Discuss.
In these early stanzas, and in particular number 6, what range of things is symbolized by the "grass"?
How does stanza 16 explain the reasons for the long catalogue of types of people in stanza 15. Moreover, how does that strategy of cataloguing relate, in your view, to the developing theme of the poem? Discuss.

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