Walt Whitman - Leaves Of Grass - The Poetry Of Young America! - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

from 2021-11-20T00:00

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Walt Whitman - Leaves Of Grass - The Poetry Of Young America!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. This episode and next, we tackle one of the most intimidating poets in the American Canon- Walt Whitman. He is the generally accepted and almost uncontested greatest contribution America has made to the great canon of World Literature- the ones comprised of those that really intimidate- William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Ovid, Goethe, Neitche-, Dante- people like that- there are not too many Americans that make that list.

And he does intimidate me- truly. And honestly he baffles me. The things he says seem easy to understand except I don’t actually understand them. They are beautiful and interesting but also uncomfortable. People love his writing and always have, but he’s also very offensive- and he offends all equally- the prude and the religious, but also the secular and intellectual- he offends the socialist as well as the capitalist. Name an identity- he references it and somewhat dismantles it. Primarily because he absolutely rejects group identities as we think of them today- even in terms of nations but in every sense. To use his words, “I am large; I contains multitudes” that’s a paraphrase from my favorite selection of his work which we’ll read today.

For me he’s such a curious person in part because of the time he emerged in what was called then the American experiment- and I honestly think his perspective has a lot to do from this unique time period, of course this is not different than how I feel about all of the writers we discuss. But being born in 1819, the United States of America is only 36 years older than he is. His parents were present during the Revolutionary War and have a real respect for what people were trying to do here, and how unusual and fragile democratic government actually was or really is. We, at least we here in the United States, live with the feeling that this country just always has been- that democracy just happens. That elections are just things that have always happened. Most students today in this country don’t even think about it. Democracy is the normal order in how things occur; equality and liberty are just virtues that everyone agrees are important- by one definition or another. But None of this was reality and common understanding in 1819 in almost any part of the planet Earth. And most of the world looked at the United States with contempt- a bunch of non-educated hillbillies living in some weird schemata that wouldn’t stand the test of time. There was no culture in this country, by international standards. We had no great art, no history to speak of, we weren’t writing great philosophies or composing great music. We had not produced a Voltaire, or a Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We had no Catherine the Great or Cosimo De Medici sponsoring great artistic ventures.

And so enters Walt Whitman- to which he would say, and did say- whoopdeedoo Europe- you are correct- we have none of that, and I celebrate that we don’t.

I want to begin with this famous poem by Whitman. Of course, it’s from Leaves of Grass which we’ll introduce in a second, but if you are reading the Death bed edition which is the one I have- again I’ll explain all that later, it’s in the beginning, that very first part called “Inscriptions”. Let me read Whitman’s famous words on America.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Garry, I want to hear your first thoughts when you read this poem. Let me start by saying, notice how celebratory it is. America is singing carols- not dirges- and the song of the American is the song of hard work- not the Vienna Philharmonic- which by the way was founded in 1842. America was not building art, as commonly understood- we were building lives- free lives- lives where people lived with the choices they made, but they got to make their own choices. This is very different than anywhere else- places more cultured, more sophisticated, more idealized. We don’t have serfs working for great lords or ladies. We have no jet-setters so to speak- or people of privilege or high cultural standing- In America we work hard, but we work for ourselves-and everyone does it- and that is something we’re proud of. There is no shame in labor. There’s a song to that.

Yes, it’s very much about homestead. It’s about individualism and taking responsibility to create it- About creating your own little corner of the world. This is exactly the idea that Alexis DeToqueville referenced in his important work Democracy in America. As a Frenchman, he was totally surprised and impressed with this very thing that Whitman is talking about. This poem is a complete refutation of the English feudal system and that’s what Northerners loved about it. In the South, and what was so offensive to Whitman when he spent time in New Orleans was that they were trying to recreate that hierarchal system where some people outrank others to the point of claiming they weren’t even human- and that, to Whitman, was the complete opposite of what the entire American Experiment was about.

His parents were clearly on team America- he had one brother named George Washington Whitman, another named Thomas Jefferson Whitman and a third named Andrew Jackson Whitman.

Ha- I guess that IS a statement. This unique time of history in which he lived allowed Whitman to see such great contrasts in America- he saw democracy and success found in personal effort. He saw vast amounts of unpolluted natural beauty, but he also saw evil at its most deranged, and pain and loneliness at its most intense. We have to remember that his parents lived through the glorious revolutionary war, but he lived during the treacherous Civil War- and his perspective and life experience is very different. He admired the expanse of the West. He loved the natural beauty of this continent, but he also was horrified and despised to its core – the. National plague that has defined and still defines so much of the American story- this legacy of slavery- his views on such, btw- got him fired by more than one employer, btw. At this time, newspapers were owned and operated by political parties, and he was always slipping in views that the political operatives didn’t like- so he got fired.

HA! Well, I guess some things never change. One thing that baffles and almost offends most academics is Whitman’s absolute nothing of an academic background. His parents were basically illiterate, his family was excessively large and chaotic; today we would say dysfunctional. He had one sibling that actually had to be committed to an insane asylum. His formal education was inadequate because his father sent him out to work. It’s so ironic that the greatest American poet had no formal tutelage to except what he scrounged up for himself in his own self-taught way by reading in libraries and attending operas. He didn’t have that option. His father was also pretty much a financial failure. He was a carpenter by trade, but had also had a little property. His father speculated in real estate after moving to Brooklyn, NY, but wasn’t all that great at business and ended up losing most of it.

And of course, that’s the problem with the land of opportunity- you are kind of out there on your own to make it or break it. And people were very aware of this. There was no guarantee, at all, that America would even survive as a country. It was still an experiment. No one else was living like this. Europeans had monarchies; the South American countries were colonies. Our neighbors to the East were living in empires. Only this little backward nation in a corner of North America was trying to do this weird thing.

And Whitman loved it. He really did. He loved the land. He loved the cities. He loved the people. He spent the first 36 years of his life walking around and observing life, mostly in New York City and Long Island (which was NOT a suburb of New York at that time). He loved the libraries and spent tons of time there reading. He loved music, especially opera, which we’ll notice has a strong influence on how he writes. He loved learning, listening and observing, and this is what he wrote about. I heard one lecturer say that he was the first non-blind poet- which I thought was weird and what made it stand out. But what the professor meant was that most poets were writing about their inner life, things from their imagination- think Edgar Allan Poe and “The Raven”, but Whitman, in many cases, was transcribing things that he was seeing and hearing in urban life- and this was very different. He would catalogue it- to use a word that is often used to describe this thing that we just saw him do in the poem we just read, make these long lists of details in these long sentences.

I also want to point out that it was this desire to self-educate that led him, like many of his day, to be influenced and challenged by the great Ralph Waldo Emerson. We’ll do an entire episode or more than one of him, but Emerson’s non-conventional ideas about nature and the soul and our inter-connectedness, although ideas that were commonly accepted in the far East, were new on this continent.

True- well, In 1855, something happened. Whitman self-publishes the book Leaves of Grass. This first version was only 95 pages long- that’s compared to the death bed one which has 415 in my copy. There was no author’s name on the cover. Instead, on the first page there was this image of a man in laborer’s clothes. Whitman only reveals that he’s the author through one of the first unnamed poems calling himself, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.”

If you look up the word Kosmos in the dictionary it will tell you that that word means- a complex orderly self-inclusive system- which is interesting to think about someone describing themselves as- but it’s a Greek word. It’s also a Biblical word- which is how I believe Whitman would know it. It is used in the New Testament to mean the universe or the creation as a whole- that’s how Whitman defines himself in this poem “Song of Myself” and the context of how he wants us to understand his work and who we are as individuals. We too are kosmos.

Well, it didn’t start out very cosmic- that’s for sure. It’s a miracle Leaves of Grass came to be read by anyone. He self-published it, literally type-setting it himself. He printed 795 copies and sold almost none of them.

Don’t you wish you had one of those originals?

I know right, well, people do. In case you’re in the market, there are 200 that are still around, and in 2014, one sold at Christie’s for $305,000. It’s so ironic- Whitman struggled financially until the day he died and celebrated working people in everything he wrote. What do you think he would think of that, Christy?

I have zero doubt, he would love it. Totally. Beyond being the book’s publisher, he also was the book’s publicist. He sent copies to the leading poets of the day trying to drum up some good reviews. Whittier was said to thrown his copy into the fire he was so offended and outraged- the homoerotic imagery was more than he could handle, but Ralph Waldo Emerson saw it for what it was and wrote Whitman back an amazing letter of encouragement. Let me quote Emerson, “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” And of course, to this day, many world class literary scholars still think this about Whitman.

What I find humorous about Whitman is that he wrote glowing reviews of his book himself secretly and published them as if they were written by other people.

Yeah, he was working the influencer thing way back before that was a thing- He also, printed Emerson’s actual glowing review when he reprinted the book in 1856, except he didn’t get Emerson’s permission to do so. He put Emerson’s words, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” on the spine of the book and he published the entire letter with a long reply andress to Dear Master.” It was NOT received well by Emerson.

I can see that as being slightly presumptuous.

Of course it was, but I would be tempted as well. He really admired Emerson, in fact this is what he said about Emerson’s influence on his writing.  “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”

I want us to read the very first part of Song of Myself which was the first poem

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.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

This is what I mean when I say, it seems like it’s very simple to understand except I’ve read this poem hundreds of times and am still slightly confused as to what he means. The term for this is ambiguous- he makes you, as a reader, put your own interpretation, put yourself into the lines to force the meaning out of it.

True, and if you take it at face value just superficially, it may seem that this is a narcissist celebrating egotism, but it clearly doesn’t. It also could be misunderstood to mean he celebrates idleness and laziness, but that doesn’t seem to be right either.

Exactly- I love these first lines. First of all, they are so iconic. One thing Whitman is known for besides the cataloguing which I mentioned when we read I Hear America Singing, is this thing that today we call Free Verse. Whitman is often given credit for inventing the concept, although that is debatable. But what is obvious is that there is no rhyme or meter of any kind at all and there isn’t supposed to be. He doesn’t want anything to rhyme. Instead, he wants to write in these really long sentences. Every stanza is a single sentence, and he is going to do that through the entire poem. Whitman felt you couldn’t get your idea out in these little short phrases of iambic tetrameter like his Whittier, the guy who threw his book in the fire, was doing. Whitman wanted, above all else, to create a sense of intimacy between himself and the person reading- and so he wanted to make sure you could follow his idea- from idea to idea. He got this idea from two places- first he copied the idea from the one book he had been familiar with since his childhood- the King James Version of the Bible. He copied the style like you see in the Psalms or even the Sermon on the Mount. He also got the idea from the opera- if you think about opera- you also have these long phrases- that end with things like figaro figaro fiiiigaro-

Is that your impression of the opera?

Well, as you know, I enjoy the opera. I haven’t always, to be honest. A few years ago, my good friend, I’ve mentioned her on the podcast before, Millington AP Literature/ Lang teacher Amy Nolette, coerced me to attend with her- and I did. She is an accomplished musician so she really taught me how to admire what was going on- and we went every year for several years until Covid hit. But, having said that, I’m fairly sure, that’s my best attempt at singing opera.

But back to Whitman, so one of the first things that Whitman is famous for today is this concept of Free Verse- it was innovative then, but now, it doesn’t seem that big of a deal. That was a big deal, but a bigger deal to Whitman were the ideas he was putting out there.

I celebrate myself- not because I’m so important- not because I have all this amazing heritage or skill or anything- I celebrate myself because I have an essence that is 100% unique to me. Let’s read it again.

I Celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

It’s not accidental that he throws in there that scientific language. And this is where he will offend the capitalist or competitive side of us. He makes this bold assertion- in this poetic way- to say- what, do you think you’re that much better than me- you are made of the exact same material I am- we’re both made of atoms- science teaches us that- and for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

In some sense it’s the I’m okay- you’re okay attitude, but taking it up a notch- I celebrate myself- you celebrate yourself.

For sure, and something we all give lip-service to today but no one actually really believes. I have a creative writing assignment that I ask my students to do every year. We take another Whitman poem called “There was a Child Went Forth” that talks about identity and the physical objects and places that influence who you are- it’s a wonderful poem, anyway, I ask my students to write a poem using Whitman’s style and technique about THEIR lives. I tell them we’re going to read them in small groups, and if they like what they wrote and feel comfortable, we are going to print them and put them outside my door in the hallway for everything to read. At first they are very very resistant to the idea. They all hate it- first because it’s writing, secondly because it’s poetry- but mostly because they don’t think they want their lives sprawled on the hallway of the school. I had a sweet darling child, actually a quiet student, raise her hand in protest and literallty say, I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this. All I do is go to school and work- there is nothing interesting at all about my life.

Ha! She seems to have missed the point. She didn’t want to celebrate herself and she’s exactly the kind of person Whitman loved celebrating.

Exactly- and lots of my kids are like that- they work at Sonic, Chick-Fila- the mall- mowing lawns- but in her case, it turns out she is way more interesting and her poem is on the wall right now. I may take a picture and post it on our website, so you can see them all. I’m very proud of my kiddos- not just because they produced good poems but because lots of them are hardworking.

I will say, that next phrase leads us to think that Whitman is a lazy person. He extols the virtue of loafing. But of course, what I know about his biography which we’ll get more into next week when we talk about his experiences in the Civil War and all of that, but Whitman was the very opposite of lazy. He was an extremely physical hard worker.

True- Let’s read the lines you’re talking about..

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

When he says I loaf and invite my soul- he’s getting into the philosopher side of him that is so complex and we really don’t even have time to go there today, but it’s that old idea of contemplating- today what we call mindfulness. And I have to admit, I’m not good at this.

He really believes in mindfulness although he didn’t know we renamed his concept for him. Loafe- meaning chill out- turn off the phone, turn off the tv, turn off the computer and invite your soul into yourself. Chill out!!! Stop and observe a spear of grass. Just look at it- let your mind go there- let it focus on something small- it’s the kind of thing the yoga instructors keep telling us to do, that we rarely heed but we all know we should.

Exactly- attention and silence- he things they are indispensable to a sane existence- and two things I’m not all that good at. And then we get to these last two sentences in this opening little poem-

There’s a lot to say- but he’s going to say- I’m proud to be from this place- my parents are from this place. I’m 37- that is not young. He is not a child prodigy- he’s writing his first book late in life, relatively- he knows that- but he says I’m in good health and I begin- and I’m not going to stop until death- I’m going to live well all the way til the end- I’m not going to give up on myself. Ever.

I can see why he’s inspiring. And I to get back to this idea of origins. You know being an American today is something lots of people are proud of (although it is very American to trash our own country) but that’s part of our national ethos- but even these same people proudly display their passport. America is a powerful country and a rich country. At that time it was a new country- and new countries don’t have the safety of heritage and sometimes the people who come from them have trouble taking pride in their heritage.

I totally know what you’re talking about. There was a listener who connected with us through our Instagram page and showed us some beautiful pictures he had taken. They were truly amazing- not only were the mountains breathtakingly gorgeous in their own right, but his eye for framing was genius. I messaged him back and told him what I thought of his art. We went back and forth and I finally asked him. Where are you from? And he would never tell me. He said he was from Central Asia and so fort which I eventually gathered he is from one of the new countries formally part of the USSR. I’m not saying he was ashamed of where he was from, I didn’t get that sense, but he seemed intimated that we were from America- a place that seems so far away and idealized from his point of view. Whitman would tell this young man- you’re from that wonderful air, from wonderful heritage, from atoms just like ours- not just accept it celebrate it.

Because, as I read onward, he seems to imply, this is the attitude that breeds great things that breeds beautiful things but if it doesn’t- that’s okay as well- keep going all the way til death- compete not with others but with yourself- as he goes to self- publish the same book 8 more times until he does .

Ha! I guess that’s true.

I want to read the last sentence again of that opening because he sets up a lot of the rest of his writings with something of a warning-

Again- that language seems simple but at the same time I have to really work at what he’s going to say. But I have an interpretation- he’s going to say this- put away your school learning and your religious training when you read this. Sit back because I’m going to say some really hard things- that’s what he means with that word “hazard”- but they are not mean- they are natural- it’s about the energy of being alive. It’s the beauty of being you, of being a physical body, of being an inter-connected spirit with connections to other people and part of this physical space.

And of course, it’s that celebration of the physical body that kept getting him censored. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson later when he was reproducing his book begged him to self-censor what was thinly veiled homo-erotic passages, but he just wouldn’t. He didn’t see them as erotic- he didn’t even see sex like that. For him sexuality and the physical body had a self-evidence important place in our lives and had to be brought out in the open- be it a hazard or not. And again, it kind of was a hazard, he lost a really good job in Washington at one point because his boss found a copy of leaves of Grass in his desk and found it obscene.

Poor guy- well, that takes us to the title- Leaves of Grass- and what that even means. I mentioned that Whitman was famous for his style or innovative literary technique, he has been increasingly praised for his innovative ideas about the body, the self, consciousness- he was one of the first America poets to even write about consciousness- the other one btw is Emily Dickinson. But probably the thing I like the best about Whitman, and this is me, personally, is his ability to really capture a wonderful metaphor. He could just say things in an understandable and pretty way- and this is what poetry really is all about- for my money.

This phrase that is the title – Leaves of Grass- it means something. First let’s read the first part of Song of Myself that talks about grass- I’d ask you to read all of it but I think we might get lost. Song of Myself number 6.

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.

When Whitman loafs around and stares at grass- he sees a picture of America- or a picture of any democracy any group of people that understand that they are one poeple- of which America was the example he knew, but he’s not exclusionary by any means. He says, look, every single blade of grass is totally different and yet in some sense the same. He calls it a uniform hieroglyphic- what an interesting turn of phrase. It’s and I use his words here “black folks as among white, kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congreeman, Cuff, I give to me the same, I receive them the same.”

For Whitman, the picture of America was a field of grass. If we look at it, we see hopeful green woven stuff. The handkerchief of the Lord- but if we look at it closely we’re all so different- and both things are truly beautiful. It’s a paradox. He goes on to say, it’s from the land, it’s made up of the dust that is made up of the people of the land- I know it gets philosophical- and you can take it as far deep as you want to plunge with him.

But you don’t have to get all that deep or esoteric if you don’t want to. You can just lay on the grass, and smell it and enjoy it- loaf on it- to use his words.

You know what I like about that entire image and about Whitman’s entire philosophy. He absolutely spoke of diversity, but he did not celebrate diversity- not like we think of doing that today. He celebrates unity- and that’s why this metaphor is the title. Whitman had a very refined understanding of how easy we can rip each other apart- there is not more divisive time in American history than the 1850s and of course the 1860s- which are the war years. He lived through the most divided time in American history and he could see it coming even in 1855. But during his life time, he would see 2.5% of America’s population die killing each other that was 750,000 people- if we would compare it to the population of America today- that would be over 7 million people. Next week we will see how much he admired Lincoln and what he stood for, but as he understood the American experiment, he believed in admiring differences and loving them, but identifying as a single group- first and foremost. The dominant image here is of a single landscape- beautiful and united across time and space respecting the past not judging or condemning it- allowing ourselves to spring from it renewed and refreshed.

And I think that’s where the universal appeal comes from. If Whitman was just about American patriotism, maybe we’d like him in this country, but it would feel propagandistic. His ideals are universal and apply to any group of people- anywhere. And he’s not afraid to admit-some of thing may be self-contradictory. The first time I ever read Whitman was in college. I went to school studying political science, but in my junior year I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore and I was going to get an English major, well this meant I had to take almost exclusively classes that demanded intense reading- and all at the same time. I read so much that they all ran together and my grades were not as good as they could have been had I had a healthier pace. And in all that reading, not a whole lot stood out- but this little poem by Whitman actually did- I underlined it, and I kept the trade book I purchased at the time. I actually still have it after all these years and so many moves. In this little section, Whitman is talking in that intimate way that he talks to his reader- it’s personal- it’s in the second person- and at that time of my life- it was a very chaotic time to be honest- I had no idea what I was doing in my life, my mother had recently died, I had very little idea what I should do in the future- I had changed directions at the last moment- and these famous words just stood out. Will you read them?

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Christy- what did that mean to you.

I really have no idea. I think the line that I liked is the line everyone likes, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict. Myself.” It just made me feel better. I knew I was full of inconsistencies. And Whitman just seemed to be saying- of course you are- everyone is- to understand that is just being honest. Let it go. Just concentrate on what is near- what you’re doing today, supper- that sort of thing. If you’re successful- that’s great- if you’re a failure- what difference does it make- we’re all the same atoms, we’re all just leaves of grass. He just made me feel okay.

Which I guess that would probably have made him happy- the bard of democracy- known as the good gray poet- speaking across time and space about what it means to be a human- to be a leaf of grass. Thanks for listeninging- next episode- we will delve a little more into his adult life, read some of his most famous poems – those tributes to Abraham Lincoln- and finish our discussion of this amazing American. AS always, please share about us with a friend or colleague- push out an episode on your social media feed, text an episode to a friend. Connect with us on our social media at howtolovelitpodcast on facebook, Instagram, twitter, or Linkedin. If you are a teacher, visit our website for teaching materials that provide ideas scaffolding for using our podcasts as instructional pieces in your classroom.

Peace out.

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