Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

"O Captain! My Captain!"


"In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet."
-From www.poets.org/whitman

Today I read sections 1-3 of Whitman's poem, 'Leaves of Grass'[Song of Myself]. Whitman embodies the American Poetic aesthetic of writing in a bold, fresh, and new way. If we compare his writing to that of Tennyson, his English contemporary, we can truly appreciate the modernity of his writing. Rather than focusing on ideas and forms of the past, Whitman is writing as he lives, an ideal in poetry personified in American writing. The premise of 'Songs of Myself' is a celebration of humanity, using himself as an example. The poem starts with 'I' and ends with 'You', embodying the spirit of connection I was talking about in my 'definition of poetry' post. In Whitman's work, the poet is a mouthpiece.

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
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,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."
(Section 2)

Though I like that he sees a definitive universal secret meaning to poetry, I struggle with his self-absorbed narrative voice. It is with no irony that he says
"I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself."
The point is clearly that he is great, and everyone is great, yet I find this tone of omniscience to be rather irritating.
Whitman embodies the poet as a prophet idyll, and the poem is loose with little formalised structure. As a result, it reads like an epiphony, and the narrator's voice is obviously a product of organic construction, rather than an architectural product. Though it was published in 1855, Whitman uses a style similar to the 'Stream of Conscious' narrative, which would not become popular until the early 1900s, illustrating his goal of creating the modern.