A Classroom Discussion
Walt Whitman is probably the one poet, besides Shakespeare, that you all have heard of. That is a testimony to his poetry because he hoped to reach out to everyone–not just academics–with his verse. As a result, he made it as accessible as possible, not just eliminating rhyme, but also eliminating meter, which we call free verse. I would like to emphasize that this does not mean, as is sometimes thought, that you can just write down words in random fashion, and it’s poetry. There has to be a reason for every punctuation mark, for every line-ending. Thus spake the teacher.
Whitman’s great work is “Leaves of Grass,” 2,315 lines of verse, which he worked on for fifty years until his death in 1892. 1,336 lines consist of the poem, “Song of Myself.” Unfortunately, we can only look at a few excerpts, but I hope you will make the time, at your own pace, of course, to read through all of “Leaves of Grass.”
Whitman’s point of view is all-encompassing and unilaterally democratic. As a result, he took all of human experience as his province, including sexuality. And as a result of that, some called his work obscene according to the conservative sexual atmosphere of the day. This stigma still persists to some degree, not only because of the frank descriptions of the human body, but also because of the sometimes homoerotic nature of his concept of comradeship. Whitman never admitted to being a homosexual, and the controversy continues, lacking any definitive proof in either direction. On the one hand is Whitman’s declaration that he fathered six children out of wedlock, and on the other Oscar Wilde’s contention that Whitman definitely was homosexual, adding that he still had the taste of Whitman’s kiss on his lips. There is no doubt, however, that he found much to admire in the male physique. Okay, enough about that.
Let’s look at some of the excerpts from “Song of Myself,” including the first lines.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
If you remember back to the beginning of “Paradise Lost,” we talked about the invocation to the muse which traditionally begins epic poetry; in Milton’s case he invoked The Holy Spirit, saying, “Sing, Heavenly Muse.” A famous Roman epic, “The Aeneid,” by Virgil, begins, loosely, “I sing of War and a Man…. O Muse, the causes and the crimes relate.” It is very indicative of Whitman’s point of view that he does not invoke any heavenly being. Instead he celebrates and sings himself. He is his own epic hero. We will learn that this is not egotism, of course; quite the opposite since throughout the poem he identifies himself with everyone else. Here he states that every atom belonging to him as well belongs to you. And notice that he is directly addressing the reader. All of this is typical of what makes Whitman completely unique.
“I love that he loafs. The craziness of civilization is not for him. Like the Romantics, Nature is his inspiration. Just a blade, or leaf, of grass is enough for him. How great it must be to really feel this way.”
“And he seems modern, in a way, for the first time, talking of how all matter is constant, the atoms just rearrange themselves.”
And ironically he doesn’t stop working on “Leaves of Grass” until death stops him.
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Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
“There’s the nature versus society theme again, using nature’s atmosphere versus man-made perfume.”
“He gets pretty extreme: It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it.”
“He really wants to join nature, as if it’s a lover, no? He wants to drop his human disguise of clothing and–I don’t know. Saying he wants to have sex with Nature is pretty strong, but he is obsessed with having contact with it.”
I think that’s a fair interpretation.
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Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
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.
That’s every teacher’s goal, to have students become self-reliant, able to make judgments–filter–on their own. I have said a number of times that you guys have become so good that I become useless. This is what I mean.
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Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
….
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
“Again, he seems so modern, talking about knowing and admiring every inch of his body. He’s writing at the same time as the Victorian Period in England, right. From what we studied of that in Western Civilization, he couldn’t be more different from them.”
As I will keep saying, he is unique.
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A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
….
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
What does Whitman mean when he says that to die is luckier than we suppose?
“I guess he’s assuming there is no heaven afterlife, right.”
So these lines seem to suggest.
“Then for people who don’t believe in Heaven, they think there is nothing after death. They’ve run out of luck. But through our death we are back in the soil, back in nature, and will cause other things to grow, and on and on. We’re luckier than we think.”
All goes onward and upward, nothing collapses.
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Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun,
“Wow, erotic much?”
Okay, how so.
“Naked men, a peeping, um, tom-girl, roaming hands, water running over bodies, bulging bellies.”
“Am I right that this is all in her imagination?”
Yes. She is separated from this kind of natural life by the restrictions of her fine house and clothes and morals.
“Okay, I don’t mean to be stereotypical, but have any of the straight poets–I mean straight in their poetry–described men the way Whitman does. ‘Little streams passed all over their bodies.’ You have to be looking pretty close and liking what you see in order to write that.”
“I know he does this pretty often with men, but I suppose you could say he just as in love with all of life, with no exceptions. And he does also include an erotic description of the female, with her trembling hand caressing the men’s bodies.”
“Yes, but it’s not an erotic picture of her. I still think it is the poet imagining with her what it would be like to caress the men.”
“And I don’t know about anybody else, but when he mentions the men floating on their backs, with bellies bulging, that word is awfully suggestive.”
Let me interject here. In another part of this section, he uses the word “erect” to describe the young woman. It’s possible that just as he is crossing all social classes here, he is also crossing gender. Well, this passage has generated lots of discussion, from Whitman until now, especially over why there are specifically twenty-eight men, with no general agreement, so we’ll pass over that.
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What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
That pretty much says it all. No pretensions, no masks, no fences. He’s just out there.
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The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
I have included this passage for biographical reasons. Remember that Whitman calls this “The Song of Myself,” so the self must be providing at least some of the material. In the first instance, Whitman did have to commit one of his brothers to an insane asylum–which doesn’t even bear thinking. And in the second instance, Whitman labored as a volunteer nurse during the carnage that is known as our Civil War, and we can’t imagine what he saw then; the limb dropping horribly into a pail is only one example.
“I hate to say it, but with no anesthesia.”
“Really, did you have to say that?”
“Yes, it’s just one more example of what civilization has done to people.”
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As for the title of the poem:
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
Like the leaves of grass. Earlier he said the grass was the hopeful green stuff of his disposition, or personality.
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This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.
With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
….
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.
He removes all societal distinctions, and includes everyone in his song.
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I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
….
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
….
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
….
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
….
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
….
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles Bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.
That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
“Man, if he really felt this way, he was one lucky guy. How many of us take the time to look at one flower enough to feel satisfied with life.”
“Yeah, but how many of us can take the time. Apparently, Whitman’s life allowed him to do this.”
“But he built his life, right? He made his own choices, as much as he could. I bet he never took a desk job.”
Actually, he did, out of necessity, but he was not ambitious or driven and never held an “important” position of note.
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I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
“While I was reading this, I tried to come up with a word to describe his state of mind in these situations, and the one I came up with is ‘ecstatic.’ I remembered the lines from Keats about the Nightingale pouring its soul out in ecstasy. That’s what Whitman is doing.”
Terrific connection. And Whitman is singing, just as the Nightingale was. Imagine being so connected to everyone that just touching them is almost unbearably wonderful.
“I want to marry this guy.”
“I just want to meet him.”
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I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.
“What’s a pismire?”
An ant. You might know a word that derives from this, pissant, meaning an insignificant person. It’s often confused with puissant, which is just the opposite, meaning powerful, related to the word potent.
“Chef dover?”
A masterpiece.
“To be able to see a mouse as a miracle.”
“And to actually feel the pain of someone in pain. This guy is too much.”
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My lovers suffocate me,
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
Lighting on every moment of my life,
Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.
“I give up. Just one knockout line after another. Noiselessly–like Donne and his wife–passing handfuls out of their hearts. This is even kind of religious. Like the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
I don’t know that Whitman intended that allusion, but the general meaning is the same: unequivocal love.
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I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
My words itch at your ears till you understand them.
….
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
….
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
….
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
These are among the most famous lines from Whitman. They are often quoted to explain someone’s encompassing views, different from seeing everything as this or that; to Whitman, everything is this and that.
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The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Also very famous lines. Barbaric yawp is frequently used in reference to Whitman, both in a positive and negative way.
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I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
And I would say the most famous lines from “Song of Myself”: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
To some—many?—people, Whitman’s world-view is a comfort for dealing with all the “big” questions. Who am I? Why am I? Who are you? What comes after death? Etc. It’s up to you to decide if this has meaning for you as well.
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(Note: You can view most poems on the website, Poetry Foundation.)
(Note: My Poetry Recordings Playlist: At the very bottom of the post Is a recording. To view my entire playlist of poetry recordings, hover over “1/18” in the upper right corner, then click on ‘My Poetry Recordings Playlist:´and make selection.)
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