FOURTEEN

I LOVED WELL THOSE CITIES

Years back, on a steamy evening in early June only a year or so before her death, the fiction writer and activist Grace Paley and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. By twilight the city had already built up that store of heat that sends everyone who can hurrying out of town in July and August, but we faithful gathered at the foot of the bridge on the Manhattan side. We were there for the Bridgewalk, an annual event organized by Poets House, a library and literary center that’s a mainstay of the life of poetry in New York. We heard a poem or two, and then perhaps three hundred lovers of our private-yet-open art began the walk up the arc of what Hart Crane called “the most beautiful bridge in the world.” The traffic was loud, making the cables hum, but there was a breeze blowing from the south, cool air scuttling across the impossibly wide expanse of water, lifting the white gulls. I couldn’t look without Crane’s lines echoing and singing in my head, the first lines of his hymn to the modern, made thing that might lift us up:

How many dawns chill from his rippling rest,

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

What a vision of dazzled light that is, the dipping and pivoting bird leaving in air the white rings of his passage, the stirring tumult of motion that washes around our local goddess, our city’s dream of who we might be.

Grace was herself an avatar of Liberty, a lifelong advocate for the poor and the denied, and the sort of born New Yorker who was comfortably herself wherever she traveled, at least one woven bag over her shoulder full of leaflets, chewing gum, and the loose pages of her short stories and poems. She moved seamlessly between art and activism and holding her handsome dark-skinned grandson on her lap:

Here I am in the garden laughing

an old woman with heavy breasts

and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen

well that’s who I wanted to be

at last a woman

in the old style sitting

stout thighs apart under

a big skirt grandchild sliding

on off my lap

That early evening she stood with her legs spread wide, as if she herself (maybe all of five feet five inches?) were a sort of colossus, her white cotton blouse flapping in the wind, and read Marianne Moore’s “Granite and Steel.” When she came to the poem’s exclamatory line O steel! O stone! she read it in her finest New York accent, and shouted it out over the vibration of traffic thrumming the bridge cables with her fist in the air.

THE FIRST WELLSPRING of Walt Whitman’s greatest work was a radical experience of reality, magnificent and disruptive; and the second the transformative power of a life of uncharted desire. The third is perhaps a gift of circumstance. He was a citizen of a newly great city, one that had just awoken to its own modernity and vigor, a potential without precedent. When the poet was born in 1819, somewhere around 120,000 people lived there; by the time he was at work on Leaves of Grass in 1850 the city had grown to over half a million, becoming by far the nation’s largest.

Great cities require their poets, and New York seemed to summon Whitman into being, charging his voice with its own brash, self-inventing confidence: City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst, he wrote, will one day make you illustrious. He’s as sure of himself as the city that spawned him, full of swagger and bluster, as if he had a direct channel to the genius of the place.

Over the nearly thirty years that Whitman reworked his book, adding new poems, shifting and combining, sometimes deleting others, he revised many individual lines. Here, in chronological order, are all the versions of line 497 of “Song of Myself”—the first time a puzzled reader of the 1855 edition would have encountered the author’s name:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos

Walt Whitman am I, of mighty Manhattan the son

Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

The big voice of “Song of Myself” stands back from exhortations and praise to introduce itself, announcing that Walt Whitman is a universe. And what has given rise to the awareness of that vastness? A city. His spiraling, hectoring, crowded poem, with its universe of observed details melded to metaphysical rhetoric, seemed to Emerson “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald.” He’d already experienced some glorious dissolution of the ordinary limits of selfhood, but it’s New York City that makes the poem’s sense of scale possible, and supplies much of the characters who people its intricate, quickly yet sharply sketched landscape.

It’s safe to say that more people appear in “Song of Myself” alone than in the entire body of work of other nineteenth-century American poets. Whitman seems eager to see that Americans of every sort walk onto the grand stage of his poem: working men and women, slaves, artists, farmers, soldiers, African Americans, Native Americans, trappers, the disabled, the mentally ill, prostitutes, venerealees. All are given attention. After a passage in which the poet admires a negro who holds firmly the reins of his four horses, Whitman continues:

I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,

I go with the team also.

In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing,

To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,

Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

The caress of Whitman’s gaze travels wherever, and he employs a nautical term, sluing, meaning to turn or twist a mast or boom around on its axis, which has the interesting effect of making his attention seem both fluid and entirely in his control. These remarkably economical lines suggest that the poet’s gaze equals touch, and that his perception absorbs the world’s body, democratically, into the body of his song.

MAYBE IT ISN’T SO GREAT, the distance from claiming oneself a citizen of the kosmos, inseparable from the great stream and pulse of life, to being a resident of Manhattan. Since I live there myself, I’m aware that some readers will see my conflation of New York and the cosmos as a symptom of a certain narrowness of vision. Maybe so, but New York is, after all, the very image of the fullness of being, a capital of the human. What is unavoidable here is the grand range of human feeling, every aspect of who we are more or less on continuous display. Ambition and aspiration, triumph, pettiness, despair and hunger, vanity, rage, sorrow and delight: everything about us shows here, and cannot quite be tucked away, which is why most Republicans and all those who’d like to control the lives of others tend to despise it. New York City insists, as it pretty much seems to have always done, on including everything.

Every great city participates in this sense of dimensionality, but there’s just one New York, and this city’s been celebrating and selling its beautiful self for two hundred years now; its myth is visible and shared. We’re the Emerald City, Metropolis, Gotham, and Tomorrowland. What is the city you see in ruins, in cinematic visions of the future? Liberty’s crown spikes above the deserted shore of Planet of the Apes, and our half-ruined towers rise out of the water in Spielberg’s A.I. New York is for us, as it was for Walt Whitman, and then for Hart Crane and Frank O’Hara after him, modernity itself.

That great chain of poets—to which I’d add Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, James Schuyler, and Adrienne Rich, and make room for Tim Dlugos and Eileen Myles as well—has come to embody this city’s collective life; civic scribes, note-keepers of the urban soul. It’s no mere accident, nor bias in my list-making, that every one of them is queer; San Francisco may be our zone of permission but New York, in an unexpectedly sublime way, is our zone of indifference, so big and ambitious and forward-looking that it simply doesn’t care who you happen to be, as long as you consent to be a part of its huge, flashing, various life.

Or don’t consent, and see if the city gives a damn.

Cities, Lawrence Durrell suggests, have more will than people do; we express their characters, embodying their obsessions and particular stances toward the world. If nineteenth-century New York invented Walt Whitman, he returned the favor. His voice seems to emerge from immensity, from this confluence of waters, the Harbor, the East River, and what he called “the lordly masculine Hudson.” It is spacious, even sprawling, and shaped by winds blown in from who knows where. Like his city in the era in which he published the best three editions of his mighty book, he is a speechmaker, a huckster, a salesman, a retailer of gorgeous possibilities, a fan of the future, a democrat, a mixer of races and creeds and languages, a collector, a list-maker, an optimist, a realist, a visionary, possessed of almost boundless ambition, and lacking a shy bone in his body.

These are not necessarily the characteristics of Walter Whitman Jr., born in Huntington, Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, but they are certainly the traits of his creation Walt, of Manhattan the son, who came to wear that city as confidently as he does the slouch hat in his book’s frontispiece.

Thoroughly conscious of his image, Whitman liked to be photographed, and went to some lengths to pose, and to shape the way he was represented to his audience. In the Walt Whitman Archive, an online trove maintained by the University of Iowa and a model of the way a digital archive can make vast amounts of material readily available, there are 128 photographs of the poet, a very large number for a man of his times. The pictures range from a rather oily-looking dandy in 1840s New Orleans to the scruffy exemplar of cosmic consciousness caught in the Brooklyn daguerreotype of 1856, and even to an appalling bit of later promotional flak in which the poet, in a rustic pose, placidly studies a butterfly perched on a finger he holds up in the air. Whitman claimed, to Horace Traubel, “we were good friends: I had quite the in-and-out of taming, or fraternizing with, some of the insects, animals . . .”

The butterfly, now in the Library of Congress, was a cardboard prop. This must be one of the earlier examples of an artist manipulating his image for public consumption, offering readers a view of the person who writes the poems, a glimpse of his character and attitudes. Is a pasteboard butterfly a violation of the reader’s trust? Do such acts of advertisement necessarily violate or contradict a promise of authenticity, that feeling of the genuine that seems near the core of Whitman’s work?

The question points to one of the ways in which Whitman embodied modernity, and was perhaps one of its first true celebrants. To make sense of him, we have to move past a binary opposition, since in that light he must be either sincere or false. The fact that he performs sincerity, with his paper prop wired to his index finger, does not mean that his tenderness toward the world, or his stance toward his readers, is insincere. This performance is a display designed to project the poet’s persona to a future audience, and thus “sell” the reader his book by selling an image of its author. (Lying to Horace is perhaps another matter . . .)

This same dynamic is at work when Whitman, certainly one of the most intimate of poets, stages his intimacy with his readers. His great poems proceed from a kind of contract with the audience, a promise that we are being taken into confidence by one committed to us, although he does not yet know us, one who wishes he could push away the cold type and ink and paper between us, and speak to us individually, directly, with the intimacy and conviction of a lover:

This hour I tell things in confidence.

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he’s also making one of his sly jokes: he’s created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry’s strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet’s breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer’s disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words.

Can a poet be blamed for trying on the spirit of the times, for making use of the enticing illusions photography and the new visibility of advertisement offered? This was a man who, after all, wrote and published how many reviews of his own book, and splashed a private letter from Emerson, the most respected American literary intellectual of the day, on the back cover of the second edition of Leaves of Grass without so much as asking for permission. Whitman viewed neither self-publishing nor self-advertisement as a problem; they were part and parcel of the gallopingly expansive capitalist spirit of the day. New York, where marketing was, in essence, invented, remains a world capital of self-promotion to this day.

TWO DECADES BEFORE the sham butterfly, when Whitman was writing his best poems, he was already positioning himself for his public, shaping the way he’d be viewed, a process for which it would not be inappropriate to use the current, unpleasant word branding. Ted Genoways, an observant scholar, realized a few years ago there were at least two versions of the introductory engraving printed in the first edition of Leaves of Grass—one version showing considerably more of a bulge in the poet’s trousers than the other. Dissatisfied with the initial version, Whitman seems to have ordered up a revision. Copies of the first edition were bound as needed, and he made sure to replace the older engraving in newer copies en route to the bindery.

Another Whitman scholar, Ed Folsom, suggests that Whitman actually chose to replace the bolder image with the more modest one. My own sense of the Walt Whitman of 1855 suggests that he’d have chosen to reveal more rather than less, an idea perhaps supported by an 1856 review of the book by Sara Willis.

Writing as Fanny Fern in a May 1856 review of the book, Willis seems to nod—hilariously—to the image. After remarking with approval that the poems were “not submitted by the self-reliant author to the fingering of any publisher’s critic . . . till they hung limp, tame, spiritless . . .,” she acknowledges that some have charged the poems with “coarseness and sensuality.” She does not agree, and responds boldly:

Sensual? The artist who would inflame, paints you not nude Nature, but stealing Virtue’s veil, with artful artlessness now conceals, now exposes, the ripe and swelling proportions.

Where Whitman’s poems could have “hung limp,” they instead display “ripe and swelling proportions.” I like to think of the poet and the reviewer having a good laugh over what had to be a bawdy inside joke.

THE WALTER WHO CROSSED Brooklyn Ferry to enter into Manhattan’s teeming life found there, as did countless young men of his time, a freedom and mobility they had never known. They came from farming towns, as jobs were shifting to the cities; American urban centers of the 1830s and ’40s suddenly required vast amounts of new housing, spawning crowded rooming houses and teeming flats. Thus unleashed, the men required entertainment, fellowship, and company; it’s no accident that this is the moment when the first push for temperance laws appears, and new attempts to legislate demeanor. Back in Huntington, there was no escaping the fact that you were Walter Whitman Sr.’s son, Jesse Whitman’s younger brother; in the city, as much of a generation discovered, you were who you seemed to be, that moment, that day, in the brisk and delicious air of possibility.

This was exactly the sort of prospect that confronted the young Hart Crane, stepping off the train from Cleveland around 1917, and later the young Frank O’Hara, arriving in Manhattan near the end of the 1940s. From what I see among young gay male poets I know the city still offers them that high-octane mix of exhilaration, community, anonymity, adventure, and joy. If there’s a bite in the mix, a flash of something bracingly bitter in the cocktail, so much the better. It is an entirely modern response to the city. Every face William Blake confronted in his walks near the Thames betrayed to the Romantic poet “marks of weakness, marks of woe,” and William Wordsworth, looking out at the same city from London Bridge, found he liked London best when everyone was asleep. But for young American poets, especially the gay ones like Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson, the city was one teeming, living catalog of possible futures, a great stage, and each newcomer was welcome to join the perpetual performances, in all their rich variety. What Cleveland or Worcester, Massachusetts, or Logan, Utah, could barely imagine on the menu is daily fare here: taste what you will.

Thus it seems entirely right that Whitman’s words from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are cut into the railing on the East River at Fulton’s Landing in Brooklyn, where the ferry used to land and depart:

Flow on, river! Flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edged waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me,

Or the men and women generations after me . . .

Stand up, tall masts of Manahatta! Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

And on the other side of Manhattan, chiseled into a similar rail on the Hudson, is a line from Frank O’Hara: I can never relax if I am more than a mile from a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life . . . And between them? Brooklyn Bridge, which needs no inscription to belong to Hart Crane, who studied that frozen trackless smile day and night from the apartment in Brooklyn Heights where its chief engineer, Washington Roebling, had once lived, supervising the completion of that magnificent arc of stone and steel from his wheelchair after he’d lost the use of his legs, coming up too swiftly from a submerged diving bell deep beneath the river. Crane saw in the Brooklyn Bridge not only the myth of American possibility but an emblem of the spirit’s arc flung between islands, a cable-strung curve he saw as the harp and altar of the fury fused.

WHITMAN PUBLISHED A POEM in 1860 he called “City of My Walks and Joys.” When he republished it, he changed the title, raising the stakes considerably.

CITY OF ORGIES

City of orgies, walks and joys,

City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst
will one day make you illustrious,

Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your
spectacles repay me,

Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships
at the wharves,

Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright
windows with goods in them,

Nor to converse with learned persons, or bear my share
in the soiree or feast;

Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent
and swift flash of eyes offering me love,

Offering response to my own—these repay me,

Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

The poem celebrates much of what Whitman loved about the booming, hustling New York of those years, even if it concludes by saying that none of its marvelous attributes reward him save the continual current of desire, the flashing currency of looking and offering. (That sex is so often spoken of in economic terms in these poems—repayment, perpetual loan, recompense—reflects the expansive capitalist ethos of the day.) The poem corrals all its urban pleasures into a single sentence, so the sexual charge seems to spill into all its elements; even the construction of the sentence, with its cascade of negations, is a buildup to the delayed gratification at the end.

The speaker likes to boast, as New Yorkers do till this day. That second line’s wild claim seems charming when you imagine reading the poem when it was new, a declaration of a young poet’s bravado. His faith in his own poems is of a piece with his sexual self-confidence; he knows the frequent and swift flash of his own eye will be met with the same. It makes me think of those hip-hop lyrics wherein the speaker swaggers his way through town, talking up his own allure.

Subtle and overt gazes ricocheting among strangers, the spark of connection threading the streets: this is one of New York’s perpetual parades. For the most part these perhaps-encounters are imagined for seconds only; a few go a bit further, and a very few are realized. The luster of street cruising dimmed, during the AIDS epidemic, and never really returned to the full-fledged theater of sexual possibility it used to be, at least for gay men. The culture that came after values above all else ambition, and the money and recognition that flow from it, and tends to focus the gaze of those on the street not on one another but onto little handheld screens. Nonetheless, we present ourselves, we take notice, and not all that happens on those tiny screens concerns wealth, or the corporate world; which of their portfolios are the gazers checking? What sort of investment do they seek? Is it recompense richer they have in mind?

THE PAGEANTS AND TABLEAUX of Broadway thrilled Whitman, and the panorama and processions of the city served as a template for the grand catalogs of his poems, in which the world parades by in all its engaging variety. Posters, newspapers, and photographic records of the times brim with spectacle: florid displays of the world’s marvels, of scientific achievements and industrial products, of wealth and athletic achievement. Horse-drawn carriages racing up what had once been a deer path running along the spine of the island, the pomp of inaugurations, rowdy firemen whose muscles rippled beneath their clothes, even the officious civic spectacle of his own funeral: Whitman loved a parade. New York was on the march all the time. It’s a challenge to imagine the radical novelty of it. America had seen itself as provincial, but suddenly wealth, appetite, and pride made our city near the pulsing heart of things, all abuzz and alight: the steam-whistles of departing ferries, the bristle of masts in the harbor, the steepled skyline, rows of houses, the gas-lit allure of music halls, theater, opera, places to dance or attend lectures, men and women crowding the streets, shop windows stocked with things to want. An invention new to America, plate glass, made these last come into their own; here was a world of things to be desired, elements of possibility, new ways to look and to be seen.

The new technologies of glassmaking also gave New Yorkers a marvel: the Crystal Palace rose at Forty-Second and Fifth Avenue in 1853, in what’s now Bryant Park. Built for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, it was constructed in the shape of a great cross, like a cathedral, its iron structure supporting a skin of glass, with a central dome a hundred feet wide. Solid and transparent at once, it was like nothing New York had ever seen.

The inaugural show, which everyone called the Crystal Palace Exhibition, boasted four thousand exhibitors. Its loose rubric was capable of admitting practically anything: industrial products, consumer goods, steam engines, the largest crocodile ever captured. Here’s a sampling of the exhibition catalog’s long list:

•Minerals, Mining and Metallurgy, and Geological Mining Plans and Sections.

•Substances used as Food.

•Machines for direct use, including Steam, Hydraulic and Pneumatic Engines, and Railway and other Carriages.

•Naval Architecture, Military Engineering, Ordnance, Armor and Accoutrements.

•Philosophical Instruments, and Products resulting from their use (e. Daguerreotypes), Maps and Charts, Horology, Surgical Instruments and Appliances.

•Manufactures of Cotton.

•" of Silk.

•Paper and Stationery, Types, Printing and Bookbinding.

•Wearing Apparel.

•Iron, Brass, Pewter, and General Hardware, including Lamps, Chandeliers, Kitchen Furniture.

•Perfumery, Confectionery, Toys, Taxidermy.

•Musical Instruments.

•Fine Arts, & Sculpture, Paintings, Engravings. etc.

Whitman, rapt, must have moved from aisle to aisle, again and again taking out the little green notebook he carried to scribble a phrase or the name of something that interested him: some quick descriptions of the newly discovered fossils on display, for instance—the saurian who’d figure in a late section of “Song of Myself”? He might as well be walking through one of the vast catalogs he hadn’t written yet, like the list of persons in action that comprises Section 15 of the poem:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft,

The carpenter dresses his plank . . . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,

The married and unmarried children ride home to their thanksgiving dinner,

The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm . . .

And so on, for sixty-six lines, in which I count seventy-four characters or groups of characters, something like a human version of the exhibition: here we are, on display in our labor and activities, in our disparate natures, working or idling, victorious or suffering, desperate or at ease. The poet’s eye takes us in swiftly, as though he were a spirit flying just above the rooftops, able to see into lives below. Or as if, walking the streets of New York, he saw into lit windows and down dim hallways, into the rooms of surgeons and of prostitutes, into the galleries and ballrooms, onto the wharves. Strangely, his visions do not feel like a progression; he does not move through or above space in a sequential way. A line about old black men hoeing in a field is followed by one set in a ballroom, then followed by a young man awake in a garret bedroom listening to the rain. Whitman’s perception of these human scenes is simultaneous; he observes them from a position outside of space, as it were, traveling anywhere, the motion of consciousness all that’s needed to propel him. His carefully curated list of human actions comes to us in the present tense; it’s all happening now, all seen at once.

Some readers find Whitman’s catalogs tiresome; for me they are almost endlessly exhilarating. His quick gestures of description sharply evoke what he wants us to see and hear. Take that carpenter, for instance, how the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp: say that line aloud a few times and you can’t help but hear and feel the up-shifting pitch of the plane-stroke, as the resistance felt in the consonants of the tongue of the foreplane gives way to the windy glide of whistles its wild ascending lisp. I admit I do not know what a foreplane is, but Whitman certainly did, and this draws my attention to the word king-pin, too, in the four lines I’ve quoted above. The language of trades is a lexicon we have largely lost, as manufacturing and craft are a diminished part of everyday American life; the things we use are made elsewhere. These are words Whitman might have learned from spending time with the capable workingmen he admired, or from his own work as a carpenter, housebuilder, and printer, or he might have written them down in his notebook, as he strolled the Crystal Palace, studying the enormous array.

Whitman also knew to vary his lists, a subtle but effective means of sustaining interest. Sometimes a parenthetical comment offers a careful bit of observation that makes the line before it more arresting, and far more sad:

The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case,

(He will never sleep anymore as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)

You don’t need to know about Whitman’s developmentally disabled younger brother Eddie, or his irrationally angry older brother Jesse, both committed to institutions, to feel the pathos in this line, though surely his own experience lies behind it.

A few lines later, Whitman’s gaze stops on not a person but a part of a body:

The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail;

Poets are often advised to go in fear of adverbs, avoiding them as much as possible. But try removing horribly from the line above and you’ll see what a brilliant usage this is; it emphasizes the detached quality of the limb, how truly dreadful and alien parts of our own bodies can be when they are no longer joined to the whole. It’s no longer even a specific thing, this limb, simply what is removed, which makes the line convulse, as it were; the horror of it creates a departure in tone from the sorrow of the lunatic a few lines above. Whitman knows that keeping the tone at play, in motion, is crucial here, as are the intrusions of subjectivity (which horribly surely is) that keep his list from turning dry or impersonal. Here is a marvelous example of that sort of intrusion, just a few lines later:

The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)

The bracing directness of the parenthetical statement breaks through what actors call the fourth wall, as if the poet stepped out from behind his catalog to address his readers directly. I love him—how plainspoken can you get? What energy this avowal gives the poem, adding an affectionate, lusty disclosure to the mix. Now it seems the poem can go anywhere; what might this voice not reveal, what all might it sweep up in its energetic path?

Energy is the key notion; the sections of Whitman’s poem generate movement as they create pattern and artful variation. Their patterns seem either to resemble the incoming rush of a tidal river, a mounting current carrying everything along, or—as in the case of Section 15, this beautiful exhibition of human types—they feel cyclonic, as if the poem establishes a spinning motion, the speaker turning or whirling in a kind of rising prayer, one offered not to a god above but to the vast possibility of awareness we are.

NEW YORK PULLS ME UP out of myself, just as it must have done for Whitman. The singularity of the self is constantly called into question. This can seem a diminishment or an enlarging, a source of despair or of elation: how welcome it is sometimes to be just one of an innumerable tribe, not the center but a flashing leaf in a grove of leaves both similar and endlessly varied. One of the multitude walking this moment on Broadway toward endless possible destinations.

The first time I taught a graduate poetry workshop at Columbia University, I was struck by the way we’d talk for three hours each week over every aspect of my students’ poems, from a semicolon in line 3 to a poem’s attempt to inhabit some profound human conundrum, and how the micro-and macro-levels of the poem might speak to one another to create a form for feeling and thought. It was a joy to build this exhilarating, exacting kind of focus together. But the moment we walked down the steps of Dodge Hall and turned the corner toward Broadway, a magnificent randomness took charge, and the poem that had loomed so large as we gathered around it at the table was dwarfed, put into perspective, as it should be. I imagine many urban dwellers love this feeling, that moment when you step out of your building and whatever has preoccupied you goes flapping away like a burst of pigeons rising all at once, wing and wind carrying them out into this pulsing, indifferent life.

Of course you also have to get out of New York, else you can feel depleted, drawn, your life parceled out into a movement between many small chambers, room to room, from a dark apartment bedroom to a brighter tiny kitchen, to the pet food store where they’re open even though the power isn’t back on yet and you shop the aisles with a flashlight, and stumble on the teenage Arab boy who works there taking a nap in a dark spot at the end of a row of shelves. You need to be somewhere where you hear less of other people, are not caught up in the endless waves of their conversations, where there is more space between—well, everything.

Everythingness—by which I mean a great, symphonic fullness, where the streets seem to swell with the rising pressure of all that might occur, where every note on the scale will be struck, then struck again in combinations that no one could have expected or foreseen—is one of Manhattan’s signature characteristics. That’s what it was like the night we drove in from the east end of Long Island after Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. A black, ominous lake had appeared where the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan should have been; the many lanes of the Long Island Expressway merged down to three and then simply plummeted into the waters of . . . Averno? But the Brooklyn Bridge was open, and we drove across that still-lit span down into a city so dark as to seem bewitched, punished by some sorcerer for what transgression? The streetlamps of the south end of the island were out, as were the stoplights; the headlights of very slowly moving cars, and not many of them at that, provided the only illumination save for candles in apartment windows and the occasional flashlight in a passerby’s hand. People walked more tentatively; I had the thought that these weren’t people, but ghosts, and that it must have been this dark in some parts of the city in Whitman’s day, the years of the seamy, sometimes wildly dangerous downtown Luc Sante chronicles in his book Low Life. Suddenly it seemed possible to understand that crazed, tumultuous passage Whitman later excised from his poem “The Sleepers,” when the speaker joins a fractious, bacchic parade and winds up naked under a pier someplace—doing what exactly? What all might the citizens of this city get up to, in such a permissive and unmapped darkness?

Just as you were one of a crowd, I was one of a crowd . . . Daily, as a citizen of Manhattan, I am part of living throngs—on the sidewalk, underneath the intersection of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue while we wait to catch an uptown train, most pressingly at Penn Station, when at busy morning or late afternoon hours we pour through the corridors away from and toward our trains. We are great streams released, pouring around the pretzel vendors and bagel stands, the drugstores and ATMs and soldiers in desert camouflage carrying before them huge weapons to save us from phantom dread. If you see something, say something the signs proclaim, but something is seen every second, in the world of strangers like ourselves so vast it threatens to drown us, though in some miraculous way the clashing millions stride in disparate directions and we mostly do not collide, are rarely knocked down, and most of us do not recede to the sides of the huge rooms or narrow halls in terror, most of us keep moving. When I come back late at night from anywhere the station is a temple of fluorescent sorrow, a few people striding forward but many who are still or nearly so, ruined or broken, like ancient statues set at random on a plain of stone. I move among them on my way to the A or C or E train; they move very little, though some begin to turn to me a pleading look, or begin to mutter pleas they have down by heart: help me get something to eat, I’m cold, I can’t, I have children, I have nowhere, will you . . . If you stop you may begin to enter into a contract with damage, moving into a relation whose end will be the limit of what you can do growing louder and more terrible. To move through without looking, to withhold your eyes from theirs, makes you complicitous, erases you as much as it does this city’s cracked-out and crumpled. Stand up, Whitman enjoined, for the stupid and crazy. What would he have done, midnight in Penn Station, hurrying home from a late night at his teaching job, an official custodian of the language passing through a dim place where speech is reduced to please and moan, and declarations of the ways the broken have been made more so by what tunnels inside them, the radio waves, the Lord’s secret transmissions, the voice of night itself?

Even in that crowd, there is another voice, another witness, the poet who walks with us and stands at the edge of every living American crowd now. One thing Walt Whitman has become is an attitude toward the fact of being numerous. Sometimes his gaze informs the throng crowded into the subway, many of us stealing glances at the little boy sprawled wide, asleep and happy on his seven-foot-tall black father’s wide lap, or at the mariachi band that out of nowhere strikes up a warbling ode to the joy of merely circulating. Or the prophet seated beside me who speaks to me, after I give a dollar to some self-proclaimed homeless woman who holds a stunned-eyed child by the hand and recites the story of her eviction in a toneless monologue. You don’t know, he says, I believe speaking of alms given to one who might or might not be telling the truth, He comes like a thief in the night.

ONE MORNING I WAS STARTLED by a sudden movement in my third-floor window, which turned out to be the waving of the not-too-full but still reasonably brushy tail of a gray squirrel, who was burying an acorn in a terra-cotta window box. How long did that creature have to look to find a bit of earth accommodating enough to dig? In our stretch of Chelsea it’s many a block to a park, and the plane trees and gingkos grow out of squares cut into the sidewalk, fenced with metal railings, or in big Parisian-style planters in front of buildings with money and a sense of style. That day it was those ten tiny talons versus Manhattan, and though the fellow seemed a cheerful soldier of tenacity, I wished I could give him a break.

THE NEW YORK OF 1853, like the Crystal Palace, offered viewers the known world on display. How much Whitman wanted to include in the exhibition hall of his poem! The Egyptian Gallery on Broadway in SoHo, whence came his notion of grass as a uniform hieroglyphic; the thrilling vocal performances of the Italian opera singers he’d review for the Brooklyn Eagle, which give us his orbic tenor.

Most potent perhaps were the ideas crowding into his awareness from the flourishing decade before the prospect of war began to loom over the hopes of those years. Whitman drank in Emerson’s lectures, with their insistence that the natural world and our own native inclinations could educate the soul, and he encountered, through him and other Transcendentalists, the first translations of sacred texts from Asia breaking upon these shores. New currents of feminism spoke to freedom beyond traditional constraints, posited the equality of the sexes, and dared to propose the reality of women’s sexual desire; such thinking inevitably questions the nature of masculinity, interrogating what we claim as “natural.” Dr. Sylvester Graham, whose surname lingers still on boxes of crackers served in every preschool in the nation, preached that a high-fiber diet could cleanse the blood, and the spirit along with it. Phrenology provided a map to the self, through the study of the shape of the head, where specific areas of the skull revealed strengths or deficits of character. Nude sunbathing could restore our native energies, and sexual freedom might keep them flowing; communal living might reform the social order, address inequity, and forge new social contracts founded on respect and affection. It was not an uncommon thing, to propose a new gospel.

A maximalist, a fan of multiplicity, Walt Whitman loved the climate in which he found himself. Was there ever a poet less likely to sign on to the maxim that less is more?

The challenge that abundance presented to him was that of synthesis and structure: how to make something of a burgeoning whole that is both coherent and various? Too much coherence and the poem excludes the exuberant chaos of the world; too much disorder and the thing falls apart. A poem needs to be orderly enough to hold our attention, to make us feel that we are being guided through the exhibition, and needs to leave room for slippage and surprise, for those productive disruptions that characterize the real.

It’s probably indicative of Whitman’s struggle to shape the poem that he had a hard time titling it. What we know as “Song of Myself” was first printed, confusingly, beneath the words Leaves of Grass, which may refer to this poem or may mean the whole book. In his 1856 edition, he calls it “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” a blandly descriptive label. In 1860, he simply calls it “Walt Whitman” and so the title remains until 1871, when the poem received the title we know, the far better one.

I understand why he thought to call the poem “Walt Whitman.” The poem is a great spiraling tour of a personality, flush with its obsessions and desires, both overt and repressed, a catalog of the information and evidence the world brings to the speaker’s body, a guide to what he loves, a consideration and recasting of the idea of selfhood, and a meditation on what can be said and what cannot. What holds this vast interior road trip together is an unmistakable voice, a creation of remarkable durability and range: garrulous, intimate, haughty, ironic, sly, confiding, dismissive, grand, teasing, wise, sometimes obtuse or mysterious, and decidedly American, surging with the vital energies of New York City in its brash hour of new strength. With this extraordinary instrument, at full strength at the very beginning of his career, he strides onto the stage of American poetry and simply takes possession of it, even though hardly anyone knew he had done so.