Leaves of Grass

Overview

About five hundred pages in the final edition, the book of poems Whitman printed himself in 1855, twelve untitled pieces in long unrhymed lines with a prose preface declaring that the United States are essentially the greatest poem, and then revised and enlarged through six further editions until his death in 1892. The first and longest poem, later called Song of Myself, celebrates the poet’s body, the crowds of the city, the grass over the graves and the equality of everything that exists.

Later editions added the Calamus poems, the Civil War poems of Drum-Taps and the elegy for Lincoln.

What happens

The preface. Whitman announces that America is the greatest poem, that the poet must be commensurate with a people, and that the old forms, rhyme and ornament, are to be left behind for a poetry as direct as the country.

Song of Myself. The poet loafs on the grass, invites his soul, answers a child’s question about the grass, and then absorbs the whole country into himself, the trapper’s wedding, the runaway slave, the twenty-eight bathers, the butcher-boy and the president, before dying into the dirt and waiting for the reader under his boot-soles.

The other 1855 poems. The Sleepers moves through the night among the dreaming; I Sing the Body Electric catalogues the body and denounces the slave auction; There Was a Child Went Forth makes the self out of everything it sees.

Calamus and the sea. The 1860 edition added the Calamus poems on the love of comrades, and the shore poems, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, in which a boy hears a mockingbird mourn its mate and the sea whisper the word death.

Drum-Taps and Lincoln. The war poems record the wounded Whitman nursed in Washington hospitals, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d mourns Lincoln with the lilac, the star and the hermit thrush.

The deathbed edition. Through the 1870s and 1880s Whitman rearranged, revised and added, and the 1892 edition, which he called the deathbed edition, is the book as he finally wished it read, though many prefer the rougher 1855.

How to read it

Read the 1855 edition first, as the recommended text prints it, since the long lines and the loafing poet were never again as strange as when nobody had heard them.

Pay close attention to the catalogues, the runaway slave and the prostitute and the president in the same line, and read the form as the argument for democracy that the preface announces.

Notice the grass in section six, the uncut hair of graves and the sign that there is no death, and follow the poem’s faith through the later poems that had to face the war.

Consider the growth of the book across six editions, and ask whether the deathbed edition or the rough first is the real Leaves of Grass.

Read these poems alongside Emerson’s Essays to see the doctrine of self-reliance and the over-soul become a body and a voice, and to understand why Emerson greeted Whitman and then drew back.

Questions it raises

• Who is the self that Song of Myself celebrates, and is a self that contains multitudes still a self?
• Is the free verse a liberation or a loss, and what did Whitman give up in leaving rhyme and metre that later poets have tried to recover?
• Can a poet be commensurate with a people, as the preface demands, and what happens to the claim when the people goes to war with itself?
• How should the Calamus poems be read, and does the answer change the rest of the book?
• What did the war and Lincoln’s death do to a poetry that had begun by denying death, and are the later poems a deepening or a retreat?
• Which is the real Leaves of Grass, the twelve poems of 1855 or the four hundred of 1892, and can a book that kept changing for forty years be one book at all?