by Walt Whitman
For Queen Victoria’s Birthday, p. 776: This tribute poem appeared first in the Philadelphia Public Ledger (May 22, 1890) and was included in Complete Prose Works (1892), though Whitman decided not to include it in the 1891-1892 edition of Leaves of Grass.
L of G, p. 776: The poem appeared first in the literary miscellany Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and finally in Complete Prose Works (1892). The poet chose not to include it in his culminating edition of 1891-1892.
After the Argument, p. 777: Published in Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) and Complete Prose Works (1892), the poem was not included in Whitman’s culminating edition of Leaves of Grass.
For Us Two, Reader Dear, p. 777: Published in the literary miscellany Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) as well as Complete Prose Works (1802), the poem was excluded from the 1801-1802 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Old Age Echoes (1897)
To Soar in Freedom and in Fullness of Power, p. 779: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
Then Shall Perceive, p. 779: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
The Few Drops Known, p. 779: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
One Thought Ever at the Fore, p. 780: First published in Old Age Echoes (1807).
While Behind All Firm and Erect, p. 780: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
A Kiss to the Bride, p. 780: Published in the New York Daily Graphic of May 21, 1874, this poem was first collected in Old Age Echoes (1897).
Nay, Tell Me Not To-day the Publish’d Shame, p. 781: Published in the New York Daily Graphic of March 5, 1873, this poem was first collected in Old Age Echoes (1897).
Supplement Hours, p. 781: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897)
Of Many a Smutch’d Deed Reminiscent, p. 782: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
To Be at All, Cf. Stanza 27, “Song of Myself,” p. 782: Though this poem was first published in Old Age Echoes (1897), it appears to be a draft or revision of stanza 27 of “Song of Myself.”
Death’s Valley, p. 783: First published—ironically—the month after Whitman’s death in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (April 1982), the poem was collected in Old Age Echoes (1897).
On the Same Picture, p. 784: First published in Old Age Echoes (1897).
A Thought of Columbus, p. 784: First published in Once a Week on July 9, 1892, a few months after Whitman’s death, the poem was collected in Old Age Echoes (1897).
INSPIRED BY LEAVES OF GRASS
Whitman poems on every subject—war, love, travel, compassion—continue to inspire artists in many genres.
POETRY
In “Poets to Come” Walt Whitman addresses future generations of poets, commanding, “Arouse! for you must justify me.” They have done so. Among them is Ezra Pound, whose poem “A Pact” (1913) begins, “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—/ I have detested you long enough.” Other notable poems invoking Whitman include “Retort to Whitman” (late 1920s), by D. H. Lawrence, and “Old Walt” (1954), by Langston Hughes (who also edited a collection of Whitman’s verse in 1946). T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg both published essays in the 1920s addressing the importance of Whitman in American poetry. Though Eliot found the poet’s style to be primitive and even distasteful, Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916) and The People, Yes! (1936) reflect Whitman’s style.
In his “Cape Hatteras” (1920) Hart Crane asks: “Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity / Be still the same as when you walked the beach / Near Paumanok.” The last lines of the poem envision Crane and Whitman together on the beach, walking hand in hand. Crane summons his venerated predecessor into the future, attempting to carry his legacy onward.
Two important post-World War II American poets, William Carlos Williams and John Berryman, also took Whitman as an artistic guide. Williams’s essay “The American Idiom” (1967) addresses Whitman’s impact on language. Likewise, Beat-generation poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often cited Whitman as the major influence in their work. In “Supermarket in California” (1955), Ginsberg imagines his predecessor roving among modern store aisles, examining meats and vegetables, darting desirous glances at the grocery boys. Kerouac, too, invokes Whitman, in his poem “168th Chorus” (1959). Louis Simpson named his collection At the End of the Open Road (1963) in reference to Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” and in some of his closing verse he carries on a lengthy dialogue with the older poet regarding new problems in a modernized America. Across the Atlantic, Whitman has been the subject of poems by Spanish writers Pedro Mir, Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (edited by Dan Campion, Ed Folsom, and Jim Perlman; see “For Further Reading”) an thologizes works of the many poets Whitman has influenced and includes Whitman-related letters and essays by such writers as Ger ard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, Henry David Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Miller, and Robert Bly. In Whitman’s Wild Children, Neeli Cherkovski provides in-depth discussions of twelve poets who represent the Whitmanic tradition, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry begins and ends with Whitman’s verse.
FICTION
Willa Cather took the title of her novel O Pioneers! (1913) from the Whitman poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Set on the Nebraska prairie, the novel chronicles the struggles of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, whose father’s death leaves her with a plot of sickly farmland that she transforms into a thriving enterprise. The novel includes this Whitmanesque line: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” British novelist E. M. Forster took the title of Whitman’s poem as that of his masterpiece A Passage to India (1924).
Jack Kerouac refers directly to Whitman as his muse in the freewheeling On the Road (1957), the title of which echoes Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” Perhaps the seminal text of the Beat generation, the novel details the adventures of writer Sal Paradise and recent jailbird Dean Moriarty as they hitchhike and travel by bus across America, smoking marijuana, drinking heavily, and visiting jazz clubs and brothels.
Another incarnation of Whitman hit the road in 1989, in Max ine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey. The protagonist, a young Chinese-American poet named Wittman Ah Sing, recites poetry to fellow passengers on the buses of San Francisco.
PAINTING
Whitman’s rich imagery translates well into painting. The poet has been a favorite among artists since the time of Vincent van Gogh, who praised Whitman vigorously in letters to his family while he painted Starry Night (1889). Indeed, van Gogh may even have taken his title from Whitman’s poem cluster “From Noon to Starry Night,” which was published in France just before the artist began work on the famous painting.
Realist painter Thomas Eakins enjoyed a close friendship with Whitman. While the poet was frequently photographed and painted, he most admired his portrait by Eakins, saying it represented him truly, without glossing over his physical imperfections. Eakins’s best-known work, The Swimming Hole (1889), is widely thought to be a response to “Song of Myself” in which “twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore.”
Inspired by the poem “I Hear America Singing,” Whitman’s ode to the noble and tireless workers of the country, in 1939 Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn painted the epic series Resources of America for the walls of the Bronx County Post Office in New York City. The eighteen-foot-high frescoes depict ordinary Americans performing the everyday tasks that keep the country running. Several panels focus on people engaged in such jobs as harvesting wheat and reading construction blueprints. Other panels depict technology, including hydroelectric dams and electrical blast furnaces, and one panel shows Whitman himself reciting poetry to citizens gathered below.
MUSIC
Weda Cook, a popular singer, friend of Whitman, and model for painter Thomas Eakins, was the first musician to set “O Captain! My Captain!” and other Whitman poems to music. Classical music has also strongly favored Whitman. Composer Charles Ives, deemed the “Walt Whitman of American Music,” provided a setting
of one of the outspoken passages of “Song of Myself”: “Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude...” (from “Walt Whitman”). In the early twentieth century, the good gray poet sparked the interest of three important British composers: Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Gustav Holst. Delius set Whitman’s poems to music in “Seadrift” (1904), “Songs of Farewell” (1930), and “Idyll” (1932). Williams’s “Toward the Unknown Reason” (1906) sets the poem “Darest Thou Now O Soul” to music; his “Sea Symphony” (1910) uses words from “A Passage to India” and several Whitman poems about ships; and his “Dona Nobis Pacem” (“Grant Us Peace,” 1936) is an antiwar piece incorporating Whitman’s Civil War poems. Holst set Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom‘d” to music in “Ode to Death” (1919), which memorialized friends killed during World War I. In the years leading up to World War II, a number of anti-Nazi composers set Whitman to music. Among them were Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hans Werner Henze, Friedrich Wildgans, Franz Schreker, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
Whitman’s immense influence on folk and progressive music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan is discussed by Bryan Garman in A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
-from a letter to Walt Whitman (July 21, 1855)
CHARLES A. DANA
[Whitman‘s] Leaves of Grass are doubtless intended as an illustration of the natural poet. They are certainly original in their external form, have been shaped on no pre-existent model out of the author’s own brain. Indeed, his independence often becomes coarse and defiant. His language is too frequently reckless and indecent though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind. His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society, and will justly prevent his volume from free circulation in scrupulous circles. With these glaring faults, the Leaves of Grass are not destitute of peculiar poetic merits, which will awaken an interest in the lovers of literary curiosities. They are full of bold, stirring thoughts—with occasional passages of effective description, betraying a genuine intimacy with Nature and a keen appreciation of beauty—often presenting a rare felicity of diction, but so disfigured with eccentric fancies as to prevent a consecutive perusal without offense, though no impartial reader can fail to be impressed with the vigor and quaint beauty of isolated portions.
—from an unsigned article in the
New York Daily Tribune (July 23, 1855)
WALT WHITMAN
An American bard at last! One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded, his posture strong and erect, his voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old. We shall cease shamming and be what we really are. We shall start an athletic and defiant literature. We realize now how it is, and what was most lacking. The interior American republic shall also be declared free and independent....
Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer. Every move of him has the free play of the muscle of one who never knew what it was to feel that he stood in the presence of a superior. Every word that falls from his mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of the old theories and forms. Every phrase announces new laws; not once do his lips unclose except in conformity with them. With light and rapid touch he first indicates in prose the principles of the foundation of a race of poets so deeply to spring from the American people, and become ingrained through them, that their Presidents shall not be the common referees so much as that great race of poets shall.
—from an unsigned review of
Leaves of Grass in United States Review (September 1855)
FANNY FERN
Well baptized: fresh, hardy, and grown for the masses. Not more welcome is their natural type to the winter-bound, bed-ridden, and spring-emancipated invalid. Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious, after the forced, stiff, Parnassian exotics for which our admiration has been vainly challenged.
Walt Whitman, the effeminate world needed thee. The timidest soul whose wings ever drooped with discouragement, could not choose but rise on thy strong pinions.
-from the New York Ledger (May 10,1856)
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
We are to suppose that Mr. Whitman first adopted his method as something that came to him of its own motion. This is the best possible reason, and only possible excuse, for it. In its way, it is quite as artificial as that of any other poet, while it is unspeakably inartistic. On this account it is a failure. The method of talking to one’s self in rhythmic and ecstatic prose is one that surprises at first, but, in the end, the talker can only have the devil for a listener, as happens in other cases when people address their own individualities; not, however, the devil of the proverb, but the devil of reasonless, hopeless, all-defying egotism. An ingenious French critic said very acutely of Mr. Whitman that he made you partner of the poetical enterprise, which is perfectly true; but no one wants to share the enterprise. We want its effect, its success; we do not want to plant corn, to hoe it, to drive the crows away, to gather it, husk it, grind it, sift it, bake it, and butter it, before eating it, and then take the risk of its being at last moldy in our mouths. And this is what you have to do in reading Mr. Whitman’s rhythm.
—from Round Table (November 11, 1865)
HENRY JAMES
The most that can be said of Mr. Whitman’s vaticinations is, that, cast in a fluent and familiar manner, the average substance of them might escape unchallenged. But we have seen that Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance—the life—of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy—such we take to be the author’s argument—but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people. He tells us, in the lines quoted, that the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are everything, and very little at that. A great deal of verse that is nothing but words has, during the w
ar, been sympathetically sighed over and cut out of newspaper corners, because it has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. Whitman’s verse, we are confident, would have failed even of this triumph, for the simple reason that no triumph, however small, is won but through the exercise of art, and that this volume is an offense against art. It is not enough to be grim and rough and careless; common sense is also necessary, for it is by common sense that we are judged. There exists in even the commonest minds, in literary matters, a certain precise instinct of conservatism, which is very shrewd in detecting wanton eccentricities. To this instinct Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste. The point is that it does this on theory, wilfully, consciously, arrogantly. It is the little nursery game of “open your mouth and shut your eyes.” Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense, but never in direct violation of it. Mr. Whitman sits down at the outset and counts out the intelligence.
—from an unsigned review of
Drum-Taps in The Nation (November 16, 1865)
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O‘CONNOR
Walt Whitman’s [Leaves of Grass] is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen of naïve literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said.
