Leaves of Grass — Commentary

In brief

Leaves of Grass is one title on a series of different books. Walt Whitman, printer, editor and journalist, published the first in 1855: a long prose preface and twelve untitled poems in unrhymed lines that ran to the page’s edge, opening “I celebrate myself”. He kept adding, cutting, retitling and rearranging until his death in 1892. The last version holds almost four hundred poems.

What links them is a single wager: that one American, saying “I”, could speak for everyone, body included. It is the founding book of American poetry and one of its most self-promoted, and the writer who claimed to contain everyone did not, in his life, treat everyone as equal.

Which book?

Scholars count six or nine editions, depending on whether a new setting of type is required. The six are 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871–72 and 1881; the extra three are the issues of 1876, 1888–89 and 1891–92.

1855. Printed at Whitman’s expense in a local shop, 795 copies, on sale from about 4 July. His name is absent from the title page, which faces an engraving of him in shirtsleeves. It appears in the copyright notice as Walter Whitman and, far inside, as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”.
1856. Twenty new poems, among them what became “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, with Emerson’s sentence on the spine.
1860. The expansion. A Boston firm, Thayer and Eldridge, offered to publish, and the 456-page book brought in the clusters “Enfans d’Adam” and “Calamus”, “Out of the Cradle” under an earlier title, and “As I Ebb’d”. The firm soon went bankrupt.
1867 and 1871–72. The war poems were folded in, then Passage to India.
1881. Whitman’s final order, from James R. Osgood of Boston. The Boston district attorney called it obscene in 1882, Osgood gave up the plates, and a Philadelphia reissue sold well on the scandal.
1891–92. The deathbed edition: the 1881 text with two annexes. Partly paralysed by strokes, Whitman wrote “L. of G. at last complete”, and a notice in the New York Herald in January 1892 said he wished it “to absolutely supersede all previous ones”.

The free text linked here is Project Gutenberg eBook 1322. It does not name its copy-text, but its contents and order match the 1891–92 arrangement with both annexes, “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy”. Its numbering of Book I to Book XXXV is the file’s own, not Whitman’s, and it omits his closing prose essay. The first edition is free as a proofread transcription on Wikisource. Quotations below are from the 1891–92 text unless marked 1855.

The argument

Whitman’s 1855 preface says it flatly: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” A democracy needs a poet who ranks no subject above another, and so the catalogues: a prisoner, a prostitute, a president, each given one line and equal attention. The self in “Song of Myself” is not a confession. It is a position open to the reader: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

The claim taken here is that the early book is the greater and the late book the more instructive. The 1855 poems have a nerve the later revisions dull: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs” becomes “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son”, and the last line, “I stop some where waiting for you” in 1855, closes up its word and gains a full stop by the last text. But only the whole life’s version shows what he was trying to do, which was to make a book that aged as its author did and could be held like a body: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man”.

The shape of the book

The final order is a rough life, from birth to farewell. Whitman arranged it himself, and it mostly ignores the order of composition.

Opening

“Inscriptions” announces the themes, then come “Starting from Paumanok” and “Song of Myself”, the first and longest 1855 poem, with its title and its numbered parts added later.

Children of Adam and Calamus

The two clusters from 1860 are paired on purpose, one on sexual love between men and women, the other, “Calamus”, on love between men.

The open-air poems

“Song of the Open Road” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are the book’s most generous. The ferry poem addresses readers not yet born, and it remains the best argument for the method.

Sea-Drift

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” give the sadder Whitman, the one who doubts: the second of the two is what the great self sounds like when it fails.

Drum-Taps and Memories of President Lincoln

The war clusters come at the book’s centre, as the war came in his life.

Late clusters and annexes

“Whispers of Heavenly Death” and “From Noon to Starry Night” are uneven, with “A Noiseless Patient Spider” among them. “Songs of Parting” ends the 1881 book, and the annexes are an old man’s postscripts, ending in “Good-bye my Fancy!”

The voice

Whitman’s line has no regular metre and comes from speech, oratory, the Bible and opera, of which he was a devoted reviewer. It is built by repetition at the start of the line, not by rhyme at the end, and by lists that make you wait. He can be windy, and the same voice manages “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” and “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”.

The voice also talks back to its own contradictions: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” That is either the most liberating line in American verse or the most convenient. The next sections are where it has to be tested.

Emerson’s letter

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had called for an American poet in his essay “The Poet” (1844), received a copy and wrote on 21 July 1855. He called the book “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed”, and went on: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”

The letter was private. Without asking, Whitman gave it to Charles Dana, and it ran in the New York Tribune on 10 October 1855. In 1856 he went further, printing “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career” in gold on the spine with Emerson’s name, and adding at the back the letter itself and a long open reply addressed to his “Master”. Laura Dassow Walls has called this the birth of the modern cover blurb. Emerson was embarrassed and angered.

They did not break. In 1860 Emerson walked Whitman up and down Boston Common and urged him to drop the sex poems. Whitman’s own later account says he answered Emerson’s “vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common”, and printed them anyway. Whitman’s use of the letter was shameless, and it was also right about the value of what he had been given.

The self-reviews

Whitman reviewed himself at least three times in 1855, anonymously. In the United States Review that September he began: “An American bard at last!” “Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy” followed in the Brooklyn Daily Times of 29 September, and the American Phrenological Journal carried another, set against Tennyson’s Maud. Horace Traubel later published them as his work. A fourth, in the Sunday Dispatch, was identified by Zachary Turpin in 2024.

The reviews describe the poet from outside, as a physical fact, and the frontispiece does the same. Whitman had worked in newspapers since boyhood and knew what they were for. The reviews were puffery, and they were also the poem’s own project carried on by other means: making a character called Walt Whitman, and getting the public to believe in him.

The Civil War

The war changed Whitman’s life more than any reader or review. In December 1862 he saw a name close to his brother George’s in the casualty lists after Fredericksburg and went south to find him. George was lightly hurt. Whitman stayed in Washington, took part-time work in the paymaster’s office, and spent years visiting the army hospitals, giving out small comforts, writing letters and dressing wounds.

The war’s poems change key. “Beat! beat! drums!” is recruiting verse from the war’s start. By “The Wound-Dresser”, he has the “impassive hand” with “a fire, a burning flame” inside. “Reconciliation” is six lines ending with a dead enemy: “a man divine as myself is dead”.

Drum-Taps was being printed when Lincoln was shot in April 1865. A sequel, with “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, followed. Lilacs is the great elegy. “O Captain! My Captain!”, the rhymed one, was the most popular poem he wrote in his lifetime. In June 1865 he was sacked from the Interior Department, possibly because his superior James Harlan found the 1860 book; friends moved him to the Attorney General’s office the next day and made him the Good Gray Poet in print.

Sexuality

Sexuality in the poems is plain and does not need decoding. “Song of Myself” has the woman watching “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore”, and imagines herself the twenty-ninth, her hand passing down their bodies. “Children of Adam” was what made the book scandalous, and “A Woman Waits for Me” was on the Boston list. In November 1855 Rufus Griswold wrote anonymously of “a mass of stupid filth” and alluded in Latin to the sin not named among Christians, the only such hint in print at the time.

“Calamus” is the crux, with its “manly love of comrades” and “We two boys together clinging”. It grew out of an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems, “Live Oak with Moss”, written by 1859, whose order was recovered only in 1953 by Fredson Bowers. Read in sequence they tell of love for one man and its failure. The manuscript of “Once I Pass’d through a Populous City” is about a man; the printed poem remembers “a woman I casually met”.

John Addington Symonds pressed him for years, and in August 1890 Whitman called such readings “morbid inferences” and claimed six children, none of whom has ever been found. The evidence for his closest bond is Peter Doyle, a young streetcar conductor whom he met in 1865, whose initials he coded in a notebook. The balance of scholarship takes him to be homosexual or bisexual in feeling; what he did is much less well documented, and Whitman’s denial is itself a historical fact about 1890. Women read him too: Anne Gilchrist’s essay was among the earliest serious defences, and she came to Philadelphia in 1876 to meet him.

Race

Whitman’s record on race is the book’s hardest test, and the poems and the man do not match. Politically he was a Free Soiler, against slavery’s spread in order to protect free white labour, and lost his job at the Brooklyn Eagle over it in 1848. At first he opposed the abolitionists. An unpublished 1856 tract told white Southerners “you are either to abolish slavery or it will abolish you”.

The 1855 book did something no such politics required. “The runaway slave came to my house” and is fed and sheltered; “I am the hounded slave”; “A slave at auction!”, praised against the auctioneer, a heading that later softened to “A man’s body at auction”. In “The Sleepers” in 1855 a black voice declares “Now Lucifer was not dead”, and “I am his sorrowful terrible heir”, cursing the master. That passage was later cut, and it is missing from the 1891–92 text.

The later Whitman writes “Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human” in “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”. In 1874 he wrote of black voters as having “about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons”, and in the late 1880s he told Traubel that black Americans, like Native Americans, “will be eliminated: it is the law of races, history, what-not”. George Hutchinson and David Drews conclude that he absorbed the white prejudices of his time and place. The view here is that the 1855 lines were real and no less valuable for this. They were better than their author, and readers such as Langston Hughes, whose “I, Too” answers “I Hear America Singing”, took them at their word and held him to them.

Readers and critics

Early reaction was split between disgust and awe. William Michael Rossetti’s English selection of 1868 helped build his reputation abroad before he had much of one at home. Malcolm Cowley’s 1959 edition of the 1855 text made the case for the first book as the masterpiece. Much modern work, notably David Reynolds’s cultural biography, reads him as a product of the America he claimed to speak for. Harold Bloom put the first edition at the centre of American secular scripture.

Afterlives

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” takes the long line and the catalogue, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti accepted it by telegram with Emerson’s sentence. Composers have set him constantly: Delius’s Sea Drift and Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony are the best known in Britain.

How to read it

Read 1855 first. The Wikisource text is short enough for a weekend, and “There was a child went forth every day” is in it. Its ellipses are Whitman’s own.
Then sample the last book. Take “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, “As I Ebb’d”, “The Wound-Dresser” and “Lilacs”, and leave the patriotic exhibition odes.
Compare. The same poem in both texts teaches more about him than any essay.
In print. Justin Kaplan’s Library of America volume has both 1855 and 1891–92. Cowley’s Penguin has 1855 alone. The Walt Whitman Archive, online at whitmanarchive.org, gives page images of the editions, and the reviews and letters.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). The other American book of the 1850s that tries to hold everything, and doubts it can.
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). American speech made literature, with the same open question about slavery and race.
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956). The long line taken up a century later, and with it the scandal.
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882). His prose memoir, with the war hospitals at first hand.