For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance with working class
interests—and for Whitman this usually meant white working class interests.
He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could overwhelm white
workingmen. He was adamant that slavery should not be allowed into the new western
territories because he feared whites would not migrate to an area where their own labor
was devalued unfairly by the institution of black slavery. Periodically, Whitman expressed
outrage at practices that furthered slavery itself: for example, he was incensed at laws
that made possible the importation of slaves by way of Brazil. Like Lincoln, he
consistently opposed slavery and its further extension, even while he knew (again like
Lincoln) that the more extreme abolitionists threatened the Union itself. In a famous
incident, Whitman lost his position as editor of the Eagle because the publisher,
Isaac Van Anden, as an "Old Hunker," sided with conservative pro-slavery
Democrats and could no longer abide Whitman’s support of free soil and the Wilmot
Proviso (a legislative proposal designed to stop the expansion of slavery into the western
territories).
New Orleans Sojourn
Fortunately, on February 9, 1846, Whitman met, between acts of a performance at the
Broadway Theatre in New York, J. E. McClure, who intended to launch a New Orleans paper,
the Crescent, with an associate, A. H. Hayes. In a stunningly short
time—reportedly in fifteen minutes—McClure struck a deal with Whitman and
provided him with an advance to cover his travel expenses to New Orleans. Whitman’s
younger brother Jeff , then only fifteen years old, decided to travel with Walt and work
as an office boy on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and
stagecoach—widened Walt’s sense of the country’s scope and diversity, as he
left the New York City and Long Island area for the first time. Once in New Orleans, Walt
did not have the famous New Orleans romance with a beautiful Creole woman, a relationship
first imagined by the biographer Henry Bryan Binns and further elaborated by others who
were charmed by the city’s exoticism and who were eager to identify heterosexual
desires in the poet. The published versions of his New Orleans poem called "Once I
Pass’d Through a Populous City" seem to recount a romance with a woman, though
the original manuscript reveals that he initially wrote with a male lover in mind.
Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleans, he certainly
encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered the French quarter and the
old French market, attracted by "the Indian and negro hucksters with their
wares" and the "great Creole mulatto woman" who sold him the best coffee he
ever tasted. He enjoyed the "splendid and roomy bars" (with "exquisite
wines, and the perfect and mild French brandy") that were packed with soldiers who
had recently returned from the war with Mexico, and his first encounters with young men
who had seen battle, many of them recovering from war wounds, occurred in New Orleans, a
precursor of his Civil War experiences. He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of
languages—French and Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to
see the possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the melding of races
and backgrounds (his own fondness for using French terms may well have derived from his
New Orleans stay). But the exotic nature of the Southern city was not without its horrors:
slaves were auctioned within an easy walk of where the Whitman brothers were lodging at
the Tremont House, around the corner from Lafayette Square. Whitman never forgot the
experience of seeing humans on the selling block, and he kept a poster of a slave auction
hanging in his room for many years as a reminder that such dehumanizing events occurred
regularly in the United States. The slave auction was an experience that he would later
incorporate in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric."
Walt felt wonderfully healthy in New Orleans, concluding that it agreed with him better
than New York, but Jeff was often sick with dysentery, and his illness and homesickness
contributed to their growing desire to return home. The final decision, though, was
taken out of the hands of the brothers, as the Crescent owners exhibited what
Whitman called a "singular sort of coldness" toward their new editor. They
probably feared that this northern editor would embarrass them because of his unorthodox
ideas, especially about slavery. Whitman’s sojourn in New Orleans lasted only three
months.
Budding Poet
His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one
poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," in which the steamboat journey
becomes a symbolic journey of life:
Vast and starless, the pall of heaven
Laps on the trailing pall below;
And forward, forward, in solemn darkness,
As if to the sea of the lost we go.
Throughout much of the 1840s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one, often
echoing Bryant, and, at times, Shelley and Keats. Bryant—and the graveyard school of
English poetry—probably had the most important impact on his sensibility, as can be
seen in his pre-Leaves of Grass poems "Our Future Lot,"
"Ambition," "The Winding-Up," "The Love that is Hereafter,"
and "Death of the Nature-Lover." The poetry of these years is artificial in
diction and didactic in purpose; Whitman rarely seems inspired or innovative. Instead,
tired language usually renders the poems inert. By the end of the decade, however, Whitman
had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry, conducted in a typically
unorthodox way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading British and American
writers, and as he studied them he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more
resistant respondent. His marginalia on these articles demonstrate that he was learning to
write not in the manner of his predecessors but against them.
The mystery about Whitman in the late 1840s is the speed of his transformation from an
unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and
meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery,
finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way. What is known as
Whitman’s earliest notebook (called "albot Wilson" in the Notebooks
and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts) may have been written as early as 1847, though
much of the writing probably derives from the early 1850s. This extraordinary document
contains early articulations of some of Whitman’s most compelling ideas. Famous
passages on "Dilation," on "True noble expanding American character,"
and on the "soul enfolding orbs" are memorable prose statements that express the
newly expansive sense of self that Whitman was discovering, and we find him here creating
the conditions—setting the tone and articulating the ideas—that would allow for
the writing of Leaves of Grass.
[. . . .]
Racial Politics and the Origins of Leaves of Grass
A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman at this time of poetic
transformation. His politics—and especially his racial attitudes—underwent a
profound alteration. As we have noted, Whitman the journalist spoke to the interests of
the day and from a particular class perspective when he advanced the interests of white
workingmen while seeming, at times, unconcerned about the plight of blacks. Perhaps the
New Orleans experience had prompted a change in attitude, a change that was intensified by
an increasing number of friendships with radical thinkers and writers who led Whitman to
rethink his attitudes toward the issue of race. Whatever the cause, in Whitman’s
future-oriented poetry blacks become central to his new literary project and central to
his understanding of democracy. Notebook passages assert that the poet has the
"divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend?
to the President in the midst of his cabinet, and Good day my brother, to Sambo among the
hoes of the sugar field."
It appears that Whitman’s increasing frustration with the Democratic party’s
compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts
through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped
would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking. In
any event, his first notebook lines in the manner of Leaves of Grass focus
directly on the fundamental issue dividing the United States. His notebook breaks into
free verse for the first time in lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black
and white, to join master and slave:
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
And I am
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with he masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both will understand me alike.
The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were
lining up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space—sometimes
violent, sometimes erotic, always volatile—between master and slave. His
extreme political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of
corrupt American politics in the 1850s with his own persona—a shaman, a
culture-healer, an all-encompassing "I."
The American "I"
That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grass,
the explosive book of twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the 1850s,
and for which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the
details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health,
begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an age
quite advanced for a poet. Keats by that age had been dead for ten years; Byron had died
at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both
were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his best-known poem,
at age sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman admired had done their most
memorable work early in their adult lives. Whitman, in contrast, by the time he had
reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he were to achieve fame in any field, to do
so as a journalist or perhaps as a writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that
this middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would suddenly
begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as America’s
greatest and most revolutionary poet.
The mystery that has intrigued biographers and critics over the years has
been about what prompted the transformation: did Whitman undergo some sort of spiritual
illumination that opened the floodgates of a radical new kind of poetry, or was this
poetry the result of an original and carefully calculated strategy to blend journalism,
oratory, popular music, and other cultural forces into an innovative American voice like
the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his essay "The Poet"? "Our
log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our
boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men,
the Northern trade, the Southern planting, the Western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet
unsung," wrote Emerson; "Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography
dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." Whitman began writing
poetry that seemed, wildly yet systematically, to record every single thing that Emerson
called for, and he began his preface to the 1855 Leaves by paraphrasing Emerson:
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." The romantic
view of Whitman is that he was suddenly inspired to impulsively write the poems that
transformed American poetry; the more pragmatic view holds that Whitman devoted himself in
the five years before the first publication of Leaves to a disciplined series of
experiments that led to the gradual and intricate structuring of his singular style. Was
he truly the intoxicated poet Emerson imagined or was he the architect of a poetic persona
that cleverly mimicked Emerson’s description?
There is evidence to support both theories. We know very little about the
details of Whitman’s life in the early 1850s; it is as if he retreated from the
public world to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few remaining manuscripts of
the poems in the first edition of Leaves, leading many to believe that they
emerged in a fury of inspiration. On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain
indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked passages of his poems, heavily
revising entire drafts of the poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the Rome
brothers, the printers who were setting his book in type, carefully overseeing every
aspect of the production of his book.
Whitman seems, then, to have been both inspired poet and skilled
craftsman, at once under the spell of his newly discovered and intoxicating free verse
style while also remaining very much in control of it, adjusting and altering and
rearranging. For the rest of his life, he would add, delete, fuse, separate, and rearrange
poems as he issued six very distinct editions of Leaves of Grass. Emerson once
described Whitman’s poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the
New York Herald," and that odd joining of the scriptural and the vernacular,
the transcendent and the mundane, effectively captures the quality of Whitman’s work,
work that most readers experience as simultaneously magical and commonplace, sublime and
prosaic. It was work produced by a poet who was both sage and huckster, who touched the
gods with ink-smudged fingers, and who was concerned as much with the sales and reviews of
his book as with the state of the human soul.
The First Edition of Leaves of Grass
Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition
of his book and had only 795 copies printed, which he bound at various times as his
finances permitted. He always recalled the book as appearing, fittingly, on the Fourth of
July, as a kind of literary Independence Day. His joy at getting the book published was
quickly diminished by the death of his father within a week of the appearance of Leaves.
Walter Sr. had been ill for several years, and though he and Walt had never been
particularly close, they had only recently traveled together to West Hills, Long Island,
to the old Whitman homestead where Walt was born. Now his father’s death along with
his older brother Jesse’s absence as a merchant marine (and later Jesse’s
growing violence and mental instability) meant that Walt would become the
father-substitute for the family, the person his mother and siblings would turn to for
help and guidance. He had already had some experience enacting that role even while Walter
Sr. was alive; perhaps because of Walter Sr.’s drinking habits and growing general
depression, young Walt had taken on a number of adult responsibilities—buying boots
for his brothers, for instance, and holding the title to the family house as early as
1847. Now, however, he became the only person his mother and siblings could turn to.
But even given these growing family burdens, he managed to concentrate on
his new book, and, just as he oversaw all the details of its composition and printing, so
now did he supervise its distribution and try to control its reception. Even though
Whitman claimed that the first edition sold out, the book in fact had very poor sales. He
sent copies to a number of well-known writers (including John Greenleaf Whittier, who,
legend has it, threw his copy in the fire), but only one responded, and that, fittingly,
was Emerson, who recognized in Whitman’s work the very spirit and tone and style he
had called for. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Emerson wrote
in his private letter to Whitman, noting that Leaves of Grass "meets the