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." Whitman’s was poetry that would literally get the country in shape,
Emerson believed, give it shape, and help work off its excess of aristocratic fat.
Whitman’s book was an extraordinary accomplishment: after trying for
over a decade to address in journalism and fiction the social issues (such as education,
temperance, slavery, prostitution, immigration, democratic representation) that challenged
thenew nation, Whitman now turned to an unprecedented form, a kind of experimental verse
cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter, the voice an uncanny combination
of oratory, journalism, and the Bible—haranguing, mundane, and prophetic—all in
the service of identifying a new American democratic attitude, an absorptive and accepting
voice that would catalog the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast,
single, unified identity. "Do I contradict myself?" Whitman asked confidently
toward the end of the long poem he would come to call "Song of Myself":
"Very well then . . . . I contradict myself; / I am large . . . . I contain
multitudes." This new voice spoke confidently of union at a time of incredible
division and tension in the culture, and it spoke with the assurance of one for whom
everything, no matter how degraded, could be celebrated as part of itself: " What is
commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me." His work echoed with the lingo
of the American urban working class and reached deep into the various corners of the
roiling nineteenth-century culture, reverberating with the nation’s stormy politics,
its motley music, its new technologies, its fascination with science, and its evolving
pride in an American language that was forming as a tongue distinct from British English.
Though it was no secret who the author of Leaves of Grass was,
the fact that Whitman did not put his name on the title page was an unconventional and
suggestive act (his name would in fact not appear on a title page of Leaves until
the 1876 "Author’s Edition" of the book, and then only when Whitman signed
his name on the title page as each book was sold). The absence of a name indicated,
perhaps, that the author of this book believed he spoke not for himself so much as for
merica. But opposite the title page was a portrait of Whitman, an engraving made from a
daguerreotype that the photographer Gabriel Harrison had made during the summer of 1854.
It has become the most famous frontispiece in literary history, showing Walt in
workman’s clothes, shirt open, hat on and cocked to the side, standing insouciantly
and fixing the reader with a challenging stare. It is a full-body pose that indicates
Whitman’s re-calibration of the role of poet as the democratic spokesperson who no
longer speaks only from the intellect and with the formality of tradition and education:
the new poet pictured in Whitman’s book is a poet who speaks from and with the whole
body and who writes outside, in Nature, not in the library. It was what Whitman
called "al fresco" poetry, poetry written outside the walls, the bounds, of
convention and tradition.
The 1856 Leaves
Within a few months of producing his first edition of Leaves,
Whitman was already hard at work on the second edition. While in the first, he had given
his long lines room to stretch across the page by printing the book on large paper, in the
second edition he sacrificed the spacious pages and produced what he later called his
"chunky fat book," his earliest attempt to create a pocket-size edition that
would offer the reader what Whitman thought of as the "ideal
pleasure"—"to put a book in your pocket and [go] off to the seashore or the
forest." On the cover of this edition, published and distributed by Fowler and Wells
(though the firm carefully distanced themselves from the book by proclaiming that
"the author is still his own publisher"), Whitman emblazoned one of the first
"blurbs" in American publishing history: without asking Emerson’s
permission, he printed in gold on the spine of the book the opening words of
Emerson’s letter to him: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career,"
followed by Emerson’s name. And, to generate publicity for the volume, he appended to
the volume a group of reviews of the first edition—including three he wrote himself
along with a few negative reviews—and called the gathering Leaves-Droppings.
Whitman was a pioneer of the "any publicity is better than no publicity"
strategy. At the back of the book, he printed Emerson’s entire letter (again, without
permission) and wrote a long public letter back—a kind of apologia for his
poetry—addressing it to "Master." Although he would later downplay the
influence of Emerson on his work, at this time, he later recalled, he had
"Emerson-on-the-brain."
With four times as many pages as the first edition, the 1856 Leaves
added twenty new poems (including the powerful "Sun-Down Poem," later called
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") to the original twelve in the 1855 edition. Those
original twelve had been untitled in 1855, but Whitman was doing all he could to make the
new edition look and feel different: small pages instead of large, a fat book instead of a
thin one, and long titles for his poems instead of none at all. So the untitled
introductory poem from the first edition that would eventually be named "Song of
Myself" was in 1856 called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and the
poem that would become "This Compost" appeared here as "Poem of Wonder at
the Resurrection of The Wheat." Some titles seemed to challenge the very bounds of
titling by incorporating rolling catalogs like the poems themselves: "To a
Foil’d European Revolutionaire" appeared as "Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa,
Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and The Archipelagoes of the Sea." As if to counter
some of the early criticism that he was not really writing poetry at all—the review
in Life Illustrated, for example, called Whitman’s work "lines of
rhythmical prose, or a series of utterances (we know not what else to call
them)"—Whitman put the word "Poem" in the title of all thirty-two
works in the 1856 Leaves. Like them or not, Whitman seemed to be saying, they are
poems, and more and more of them were on the way. But, despite his efforts to re-make his
book, the results were depressingly the same: sales of the thousand copies that were
printed were even poorer than for the first edition.
The Bohemian Years
In these years, Whitman was in fact working hard at becoming a poet by
forging literary connections: he entered the literary world in a way he never had as a
fiction writer or journalist, meeting some of the nation’s best-known writers,
beginning to socialize with a literary and artistic crowd, and cultivating an image as an
artist. Emerson had come to visit Whitman at the end of 1855 (they went back to
Emerson’s room at the elegant Astor Hotel, where Whitman—dressed as informally
as he was in his frontispiece portrait—was denied admission); this was the first of
many meetings the two would have over the next twenty-five years, as their relationship
turned into one of grudging respect for each other mixed with mutual suspicion. The next
year, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited Whitman’s home (Alcott described
Thoreau and Whitman as each "surveying the other curiously, like two beasts, each
wondering what the other would do"). Whitman also came to befriend a number of visual
artists, like the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, the painter Elihu Vedder, and the
photographer Gabriel Harrison. And he came to know a number of women’s rights
activists and writers, some of whom became ardent readers and supporters of Leaves of
Grass. He became particularly close to Abby Price, Paulina Wright Davis, Sarah
Tyndale, and Sara Payson Willis (who, under the pseudonym Fanny Fern wrote a popular
newspaper column and many popular books, including Fern Leaves from Fanny’ s
Portfolio [1853], the cover of which Whitman imitated for his first edition of Leaves).
These women’s radical ideas about sexual equality had a growing impact on
Whitman’s poetry. He knew a number of abolitionist writers at this time, including
Moncure Conway, and Whitman wrote some vitriolic attacks on the fugitive slave law and the
moral bankruptcy of American politics, but these pieces (notably "The Eighteenth
Presidency!") were never published and remain vestiges of yet another
career—stump speaker, political pundit—that Whitman flirted with but never
pursued.
Whitman also began in the late 1850s to become a regular at Pfaff’s
saloon, a favorite hangout for bohemian artists in New York.
[. . . .]
It was at Pfaff’s, too, that Whitman joined the "Fred Gray
Association," a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new
possibilities of male-male affection. It may have been at Pfaff’s that Whitman met
Fred Vaughan, an intriguing mystery-figure in Whitman biography. Whitman and Vaughan, a
young Irish stage driver, clearly had an intense relationship at this time, perhaps
inspiring the sequence of homoerotic love poems Whitman called "Live Oak, with Moss,
poems that would become the heart of his Calamus cluster, which appeared
in the 1860 edition of Leaves. These poems recor a despair about the
failure of the relationship, and the loss of Whitman’s bond with Vaughan—who
soon married, had four children, and would only sporadically keep in touch with
Whitman—was clearly the source of some deep unhappiness for th poet.
1860 Edition of Leaves
Whitman’s re-made self-image is evident on the frontispiece of the
new edition of Leaves that appeared in 1860. It would be the only time Whitman
used this portrait, an engraving based on a painting done by Whitman’s artist friend
Charles Hine. Whitman’s friends called it the "Byronic portrait," and
Whitman does look more like the conventional image of a poet—with coiffure and
cravat—than he ever did before or after. This is the portrait of an artist who has
devoted significant time to his image and one who has also clearly enjoyed his growing
notoriety among the arty crowd at Pfaff’s.
Ever since the 1856 edition appeared, Whitman had been writing poems at a
furious pace; within a year of the 1856 edition’s appearance, he wrote nearly seventy
new poems. He continued to have them set in type by the Rome brothers and other printer
friends, as if he assumed that he would inevitably be publishing them himself, since no
commercial publisher had indicated an interest in his book. But there was another reason
Whitman set his poems in type: he always preferred to deal with his poems in printed form
instead of in manuscript. He often would revise directly on printed versions of his
poetry; for him, poetry was very much a public act, and until the poem was in
print he did not truly consider it a poem. Poetic manuscripts were never sacred objects
for Whitman, who often simply discarded them; getting the poem set in type was the most
important step in allowing it to begin to do its cultural work.
In 1860, while the nation seemed to be moving inexorably toward a major
crisis between the slaveholding and free states, Whitman’s poetic fortunes took a
positive turn. In February, he received a letter from the Boston publishers William Thayer
and Charles Eldridge, whose aggressive new publishing house specialized in abolitionist
literature; they wanted to become the publishers of the new edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman, feeling confirmed as an authentic poet now that he had been offered actual
royalties, readily agreed, and Thayer and Eldridge invested heavily in the stereotype
plates for Whitman’s idiosyncratic book—over 450 pages of varied typeface and
odd decorative motifs, a visually chaotic volume all carefully tended to by Whitman, who
traveled to Boston to oversee the printing.
This was Whitman’s first trip to Boston, then considered the literary
capital of the nation. Whitman is a major part of the reason that America’s literary
center moved from Boston to New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, but in
1860 the superior power of Boston was still evident in its influential publishing houses,
its important journals (including the new Atlantic Monthly), and its
venerable authors (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Whitman met briefly while in
town). And, of course, Boston was the city of Emerson, who came to see Whitman shortly
after his arrival in the city in March. In one of the most celebrated meetings of major
American writers, the Boston Brahmin and the Yankee rowdy strolled together on the Boston
Common, while Emerson tried to convince Whitman to remove from his Boston edition the new Enfans
d’Adam cluster of poems (after 1860, Whitman dropped the French version of the
name and called the cluster Children of Adam), works that portrayed the human
body more explicitly and in more direct sexual terms than any previous American poems.
Whitman argued, as he later recalled, "that the sexual passion in itself, while
normal and unperverted, is inherently legitimate, creditable, not necessarily an improper
theme for poet." "That," insisted Whitman, "is what I felt in
my inmost brain and heart, when I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments
with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common." Emerson’s caution
notwithstanding, the body—the entire body—would be Whitman’s
theme, and he would not shy away from any part of it, not discriminate or marginalize or
form hierarchies of bodily parts any more than he would of the diverse people making up
the American nation. His democratic belief in the importance of all the parts of any
whole, was central to his vision: the genitals and the arm-pits were as essential to the
fullness of identity as the brain and the soul, just as, in a democracy, the poorest and
most despised citizens were as important as the rich and famous. This, at any rate, was
the theory of radical union and equality that generated Whitman’ s work.
So he ignored Emerson’s advice and published the Children of Adam
poems in the 1860 edition along with his Calamus cluster; the first cluster
celebrated male-female sexual relations, and the second celebrated the love of men for
men. The body remained very much Whitman’s subject, but it was never separate from
the body of the text, and he always set out not just to write about sensual embrace but
also to enact the physical embrace of poet and reader. Whitman became a master of
sexual politics, but his sexual politics were always intertwined with his textual
politics. Leaves of Grass was not a book that set out to shock the reader so much
as to merge with the reader and make him or her more aware of the body each
reader inhabited, to convince us that the body and soul were conjoined and inseparable,
just as Whitman’s ideas were embodied in words that ha physical body in the ink
and paper that readers held physically in their hands. Ideas, Whitman’s poems insist,
pass from one person to another not in some ethereal process, but through the bodies of
texts, through the muscular operations of tongues and hands and eyes, through the material
objects of books.
Whitman was already well along on his radical program of delineating just
what democratic affection would entail. He called his Calamus poems his most
political work—"The special meaning of the Calamus cluster,"
Whitman wrote, "mainly resides in its Political significance"—since in
those poems he was articulating a new kind of intense affection between males who, in the
developing democratic society and emerging capitalistic system, were being encouraged to
become fiercely competitive. Whitman countered this movement with a call for manly love,
embrace, and affection. In giving voice to this new camaraderie, Whitman was also
inventing a language of homosexuality, and the Calamus poems became very
influential poems in the development of gay literature. In the nineteenth century,