FIFTEEN

STUCCO’D WITH QUADRUPEDS AND BIRDS ALL OVER

Whitman’s first edition came gushing into sight, borne high on the energy of a new vocabulary: a supple, colloquial, as-yet-unwritten speech, rich as the lexicon of Chaucer or Shakespeare—poets who also heard, in their times, their language renewed. This splendid flood is the fourth source of Whitman’s greatest work, and helps to account for his poems’ radical new-ness, since spoken American English is more than a lexicon: it brings with it a tone, a stance toward experience and the world.

Plants and animals that inhabit islands are one of the richest areas of inquiry for evolutionary biologists; what happens to a species separated from its origins and changing under the conditions of new demands? American English, in Whitman’s time, had for two hundred years lived at an increasing distance from its sources on the other side of the Atlantic, long enough to acquire a distinctive character.

What went into it? The camp-talk of hunters, trappers, woodsmen, miners around small fires in a large continent. Native American place-names, their melodious euphonics wildly foreign to white people’s ears: Nantucket, Mattapoisett, Montauk. And names for rivers: Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Mississippi. Rhythms of scripture and hymnals, immigrants and pioneers, echoing in the voice of the angel who translated the tablets of New World scriptures unearthed in upstate New York by Joseph Smith as he plowed his fields. More place names: Canaan, Mt. Pisgah. The sung and spoken words of slaves, bringing, through no choice of their own, new words, new inflections, and music. The patois created by white writers and performers attempting to represent (and thus to market) African American speech. Words and phrases from the far West, reflecting new geographies and geology, mountains and deserts presented in engraved images for those who’d never see the untamed territories, terms brought back by explorers, soldiers, miners, and failed settlers. The languages of trades, industry, and commerce, their lexicons multiplying radically at mid-century, with the mounting successes of new industrial and manufacturing processes. The talk of carpenters, stage coach drivers, and dock workers, city slang, speech of the up-to-the-minute, or the underclass, or the temporary worker, speech of the displaced, the incarcerated, of thieves. Of sailors, fishermen, and baymen. The demotic, as distinct from the talk of the salon and library. Part of Whitman’s project was the importation of a great deal of speech previously considered unpoetic, either because it was too colloquial, too American, too arcane, or too technical, or because it just hadn’t occurred to anyone to put a word like foofoo (a slang term for a fussy, fancy man or dandy) or yawp (an outcry) in a poem yet. American poets before Whitman wanted to prove themselves worthy of the name, and a conservative, traditional diction might be one demonstration of their mettle.

Whitman’s influence in this area is so profound that it seems difficult to imagine, now, a contemporary American poet not writing in some version of spoken American English.

Literary language is not alien to Whitman either; the cadences and anaphoric patterns of the Bible ring through Leaves of Grass. This passage from Matthew 6, in the King James Version of the Bible, exemplifies the way the gospel authors (or Jesus himself?) interpreted the “book of nature”:

28And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Updated just a bit in diction and syntax (why should you think, for instance, instead of why take ye thought), those lines strike me as a likely bit of some lost section of “Song of Myself.” Might even Whitman’s title be a revision of the Song of Solomon, another great love letter to the divine?

The 1850s saw the publication of another New Yorker’s under-praised masterwork. Likewise intoxicated by the unruly beauty and freshness of American speech, Herman Melville published a sui generis hybrid of a novel melding sailor slang with Elizabethan drama, Emersonian essay, and, of course, those precise and technical descriptions of whaling that have driven many a reader to distraction. The great American books of the 1850s—The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, Walden, Leaves of Grass—and the dazzling, private poetic career of Emily Dickinson represent an awakening, a willingness to go out into the new world and look, and to be, as Emerson promised, instructed. In this spiritually rich, investigative literature, a new country finds its gravitas, and a position from which to speak. But for all their American-ness, their lives out of doors, their directness and courage, their struggles with guilt, or the solitude of a vast continent or an equally vast interiority, or with a white whale—these writers nonetheless seem isolated characters who’ve been up all night reading, as it were, trying to reconcile the landscape and towns around them with Isaiah and Matthew, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton. They dwell out on an edge, one that allows them to see their own time and place, its sources, its crises and its prospects, and that never allows them to feel quite at home in the world. Of the lot, Whitman seems the most at ease, the most pleased to be in human company. Though even his essential loneliness still shows through—a sense that there is a “Me myself” apart from the camaraderie, one who watches. One of the Transcendentalist visitors from New England who’d traveled out to Brooklyn to meet him in the house on Classon Avenue objected, later, to the hearty way Whitman greeted, and was greeted by, practically everyone passing by. Should a poet be this sociable? Was Whitman acting a part; did he stand, lonely observer, somewhere behind his warm performance of belonging to the social world? It’s worth noting that, though Thoreau and Alcott may have distrusted Walt’s friendly exchanges, the activist Sarah Tyndale stayed after the two men had departed, and her long conversation with the poet became the basis of an enduring friendship.

THE FRESHNESS OF WHITMAN’S LEXICON comes from an interest in and affection for language itself, its unexpected connections, surprises, and sensuous delight, the way some words seem to move tongue, lips, and teeth in unexpected combinations. The way some words—wallow, guzzle, tumble, souse, and spray—spoken with attention to the physical experience of voicing them are simple sources of delight.

But the affection and interest shown to passersby on the Brooklyn sidewalks that rankled Whitman’s visitors was the mark of an energetic, inclusive curiosity about others. An eagerness to encounter, without regard to status, class, or education, must also be a source of Whitman’s wide-ranging vocabulary. How did they speak, the Long Island baymen who made their living from the salt marshes and coves along the sound? The stage coach drivers who urged their horse teams to rattle at bracing speeds going up and down Broadway, their pace sometimes approaching the death-defying?

Through me, the poet writes, many long-dumb voices. But we don’t really hear, in Whitman, the speech of others. Is there a line of dialogue in all his poetry? He renders perception and experience in a voice unmistakably his. But he subsumes other presences, human and animal, absorbs them as it were, and wants to serve as witness and advocate. The pages of Leaves of Grass, especially the three early editions, present us with a diverse cast of characters, most of them scarce indeed in the work of the poet’s contemporaries. These are the texts of the witness who wanders the world, day and night, city and fields, and is not blind or deaf to the suicide on the bloody floor of the bedroom, the lunatic who will never sleep anymore as he did in a cot in his mother’s bedroom, or the prostitute who draggles her shawl as her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck.

What the poet has to give—the nourishment of his verse, the bracing and salutary news his poem brings—

. . . is the meal pleasantly set . . . . this is the meat and drink for natural hunger,

It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous . . . . I make appointments with all,

I will not have a single person slighted or left away,

The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . . the heavy-lipped slave is invited . . . . the venerealee is invited,

There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

It seems odd, for modern readers, to find the slave included in this list of those who are morally compromised or ill, but it is primarily an accounting of those who have not been able or allowed to speak. Whitman wants to listen to them, and he seeks to make of his art a banquet that feeds the despised and outcast as well as the privileged. His inclusive impulse extends toward people of color again and again, especially in his relished accountings of reality in Section 13 of “Song of Myself:”

The negro that drives the huge dray of the stoneyard . . . . steady and tall he stands poised on one leg on the string-piece,

His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hipband,

His glance is calm and commanding . . . . he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,

The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache . . . . falls on the black of his polished and perfect limbs.

That, by the way, is a fine example of the energy Whitman gains through dilating his sentences. Conventional punctuation would make at least five sentences out of this passage, and if you try reading it that way it marches prosaically along. But if we read it as written, allowing the poet the brief pause of the ellipsis or comma instead of the full stop of the period, then the sensory information here seems to arrive in a single moment of perception, and the breathless speed it gathers underscores the speaker’s admiration for this commanding figure with his polished and perfect limbs.

Many a writer of color in the first half of the twentieth century found in Whitman a model of a white writer who embraced a wide range of humanity in his work without apparent prejudice. “Song of Myself” alone offers repeated instance in which slaves are presented empathically: the runaway slave limpsey and weak, or the quadroon girl sold at the stand, or the older black men—woollypates—who hoe in the sugarfield while the overseer views them from his saddle. Fewer of them, it’s safe to say, had read Whitman’s journalism (some of which was not reprinted until relatively recently) or perused accounts of some of his later remarks. It is expecting the miraculous, I guess, to expect that any person completely escapes the racial attitude of his or her times, but nonetheless it is strange to see the poet who presents the human presences in his poems with such egalitarian warmth slipping into confused and sometimes reprehensible positions. There’s one particularly depressing example, in a passage the poet later deleted from his prose text Democratic Vistas. Concerned with the difficulty of integrating new groups into a democracy, he notes that it will be much harder to integrate blacks than it was to bring into American society the millions of ignorant foreigners who had arrived during the previous fifty years. How then will we be able to assimilate, when slavery ends, a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons. He does not, as some have complained, call citizens of African descent “baboons,” but by using that particular simile, he may as well have; the damage is done. And what could be more of a textbook example of racist speech than that parenthetical assertion? How can he claim to know the intellect and worth of the whole of any group?

This passage from “I Sing the Body Electric” says, to my mind, what’s most crucial when it comes to Whitman and questions of race. Here the speaker observes a man, a slave up for auction, and slips into the role of an auctioneer who says to his audience of potential buyers the things they’d never want to hear. I’ve said that Whitman is not an ironic poet, but this passage is a splendid, cutting exception, spoken from behind the thinnest of masks, and you can’t miss the poet’s rancor, and his rage at those who think themselves so above another human being that they actually think they can buy him.

A slave at auction!

I help the auctioneer . . . . the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this curious creature!

Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for him,

For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant,

For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled.

In that head the all-baffling brain,

In it and below it the making of the attributes of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red black or white . . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve;

They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition,

Flakes of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, goodsized arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs his blood . . . . the same old blood . . . . the same red-running blood;

There swells and jets his heart . . . . There all passions and desires . . . . all reachings and aspirations:

Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?

This is not only one man . . . . this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives, with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?

What is required to confront history, I think, is an allegiance to complexity, a refusal to oversimplify. The truth here is that Whitman managed, in poems like the one above, to see right through the racist conventions of his day, and to understand that human beings shared the same red-running blood. And he made some appallingly racist comments, in conversation and in editorials, which are indefensible.

MELVILLE PACKED THE PAGES of his visionary novel Moby-Dick—a book of startling existential bleakness, but so energetic that it is somehow hopeful nonetheless—with nautical terms, and with the names of tools and of atmospheric conditions, providing a lexicon for American writers ever after. Hart Crane’s work alone borrows beautifully from Melville both individual words (leewardings) and whole phrases (Melville’s waves roll by like scrolls of silver; Crane describes them as scrolls of silver snowy sentences). A great book is a kind of raft of language, carrying words into the future. Whitman’s a word collector, filling his green pocket notebooks with terms he might later use, for their heft and color, their character and tone, as well as for the way they might open doors to new perspectives. He’s engaged by the language of the sciences, for example, as evidenced by his borrowings from the lexicon of New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition, at which examples of practically everything human endeavor had created up to 1853 were on display. All the latest findings of the sciences were there too—crystals and fossils and botanical specimens—as well as splendid examples of various arts. The exhibition filled one of those fashionable structures, a sort of huge conservatory of iron and glass made possible by new technologies, and to Whitman it must have seemed like a model of his own brain, or of the repository and index of all of life he wanted the self to be. He roamed the aisles, penciling words and notes in one of the small green notebooks he favored. Thus in “Song of Myself” appear lines like these:

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,

And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over . . .

Gneiss is a “high-grade metamorphic rock,” subjected to high temperatures and levels of pressure, and it’s characterized, like the poem’s vocabulary, by layers of different materials. Esculent is an adjective meaning “suitable to eat,” something of an improvement over the merely edible. Stucco’d is the completely unexpected term here; who but Whitman can we imagine thus plastered in animals and birds, a marvelous, comic image for the inclusive self? In this half-sentence are to be found words from geology, botany, construction, and zoology. Whitman was a magpie of a collector, one who could seamlessly conjoin discourses, and make from multiple lexicons a hybrid speech. Or, perhaps, what one might think of as a dwelling place.

LOAFE, WORMFENCE, I GUESS, hankering, the sniff of green leaves, pokeweed, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, have you reckoned, limpsey, gamut, silliness, woolypates, squaw, all out, tipsy, luckier, Chattahoochee, Altamahaw, Buckeye, stuck up, fancy-man, rowdyish, the fish-smack pack, carlacue, foofoos, a suck and a sell.

These are words and phrases that simply would not have appeared in poetry written in the English language before 1855. Many more could be added. It’s hard now to imagine the sense of the new they must have carried, to try to summon how startling it must have been to find them on the page. The word gulch, for instance, made its first appearance in print in 1850, but five years later Whitman is afoot with his vision and his spirit wanders along the ruts of the turnpike along the dry gulch and rivulet bed. The word has a strongly physical quality; the hard g, the low-pitched vowel sound uh, the way the throat is required to make a sort of swallowing motion to produce the sound ulch. No surprise then to find the Oxford English Dictionary suggesting the noun may come from an onomatopoeic North American dialect verb meaning to swallow. Many of the words in my quick list have this kind of thick, impasto texture of consonants; they wake us up to the sheer sound of words, their richness and variety; there’s a level of pleasure in just saying fish-smack pack or foofoos aloud. These words splash onto the page in Whitman’s first edition, as if a dam holding back a flood of new speech had been dynamited, all at once, by the force of a single poem.

DELVING INTO ETYMOLOGIES, I’m surprised to find that many of the words or phrases I hear as American aren’t necessarily native in their origin. In this signature line, I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world, that thoroughly Yankee-sounding yawp turns out to originate, at least as a verb, in Middle English. It must be the poet’s tone, his ability to subsume words into the most decidedly American-sounding of voices.

In a few years’ time, Whitman would begin to put what he’d previously have considered affected speech and poeticisms back into place—attempting to lively up what I imagine he knew were rather flat later poems with bits of French, tired apostrophizing, and other unconvincing gestures. Who, I ask you, is likely to be won over by a phrase like Democracy, ma femme!?

When an artist works alone, without the company of the like-minded, in a climate not especially supportive of the project, it’s difficult to sustain the courage required for the new. Or when vision is cooling, and the artist can’t find a way back to the sources of her vitality, then gestures trying to be artful might begin to substitute for the real thing.

Or, when an artist hungry for validation finally receives some, there’s a temptation to play to those who offered it, and with that comes the risk of imitating oneself, producing paler, anemic versions of the vital art that you made with no notion of where it was headed, before you’d made anything to imitate.

THE IDEA OF MODERNIZATION, the adaptation of poetic speech and forms to American voices, doesn’t seem to have concerned Whitman’s contemporaries much; it wouldn’t be until a decade after Whitman’s death that free verse began to mount any serious challenge to the formal tradition. Early reviewers noted the barbarism of his utterance, as if this were not a carefully crafted literary production but something out of the poet’s control, the work of an unschooled or outsider artist.

Here, for instance, is the reptilian Rufus Griswold, writing in the Criterion in 1855:

It is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love. This poet (?) without wit, but with a certain vagrant wildness, just serves to show the energy which natural imbecility is occasionally capable of under strong excitement.

Whitman actually chose to reprint this review, along with others, in the back of the 1856 edition. Did he think that a bit of controversy might help attract an audience? Did he think it was funny? I can’t help but feel, reading stupid filth and without wit, a pang of sympathy. More or less the same has been said of me, though not quite so directly, and there is no consolation for it, save perhaps to note that one would be hard-pressed to locate a copy of the collected works of Rufus Griswold, canon-maker though he was in his day.

An unsigned review of one of Griswold’s anthologies, published in 1843 and quite possibly written by Edgar Allan Poe, deftly makes the point:

What will be {Griswold’s} fate? Forgotten, save only by those whom he has injured and insulted, he will sink into oblivion, without leaving a landmark to tell that he once existed; or if he is spoken of hereafter, he will be quoted as the unfaithful servant who abused his trust.

Griswold had some strong words for Whitman’s content, but much of his objection seems formal and class-based, as if the poet had made an intolerable breach of etiquette. Stupid, donkey, without wit, vagrant wildness, and natural imbecility are here to remove the poet from the category to which poets should belong, the highly literate, whose cultivated work wears its formality for all to see, as opposed to the “natural imbecility” of Leaves of Grass. Natural here means artless, which is surely how Griswold thought of Whitman’s choice of poetic forms. The free verse Whitman invented, with its rangy lines of varying length, its relaxed, speech-based rhythms, and its use of the stanza as a unit of thought, with the white space between stanzas intended as a space of reflection—well, that form became, because Whitman made it work so elegantly and “naturally” to advance his poems, the template for most American poetry after early-twentieth-century Imagism. Whitman demonstrates that neither rhyme, regular meter, nor regular stanza patterns are needed for a poem to be a song. And that, in fact, new and complex sorts of meaning and singing can emerge when the poem is not confined by a predetermined form. Unbound, the free-verse poem finds a new template: the act of inquiry.

I want to return to the electrifying lectures of 1843 delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the Boston Athenaeum and at the New York Society Library in Manhattan, one of which was titled “The Poetry of the Times”—an early version of an essay that would later be called “The Poet.” Whitman was in the New York audience, and would have heard these words, or a draft of them:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.

If you think of the freely shifting rhythms of Whitman’s lines as a sort of meter, then Emerson’s words become an apt description of the kind of free verse Whitman would teach himself to write, in which content generates form, the poem an embodiment of the motion of thought.

Whitman heard Emerson’s words—we have yet had no genius in America—as challenge and clarion call. So, I imagine, did Henry David Thoreau. Fueled by that same heat, his own questions and sense of the nature of things affirmed, Thoreau penned some of the most muscular and engaging of American prose, and launched a tradition of autobiographical writing, chronicling encounters with the natural world, that continues to thrive a century and a half since the publication of Walden.

But the poems of the prophet of civil disobedience are another matter. Here is “The Thaw.”

I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears —

Her tears of joy that only faster flowed,

Fain would I stretch me by the highway side,

To thaw and trickle with the melting snow,

That mingled soul and body with the tide,

I too may through the pores of nature flow.

But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume,

One jot to forward the great work of Time,

’Tis mine to hearken while these ply the loom,

So shall my silence with their music chime.

Fain and hearken distinctly belong to Poetic speech; the other words here are ones we might use every day, but there are no distinctly American words, in part because the speaker seems to be holding himself above common speech. The inversion of syntax reinforces this elevation: I too may through the pores of nature flow, as opposed to I may flow through the pores of nature, too—or, more painfully, But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume, which defies rephrasing. Readers of poetry in the nineteenth century were used to such posturings, and perhaps it’s not even fair to call them that; they were part of the poetic rhetoric of the day, just as aspects of the poetry of our moment will doubtless seem like mere conventions to readers of the future. But the result feels so stiff and arch!

If I play with the second stanza, freeing it from its corset of form in order to make the sense more clear, the impulse behind the poem starts to come to life. Something like

I would like to lie down by the side of the highway,

and thaw and trickle with the melting snow,

then my body and soul would be mingled with that water,

and I too would flow through the pores of nature.

That’s not great, but it removes a certain degree of distance between us and the poem’s central, Whitmanic impulse: to fuse, to melt away.

Thoreau wrote prose of undeniable vigor and richness, with the aura of the genuine to it. No reader of Walden could forget that sleeping insect caught in the wood of the tabletop who whirrs urgently, disruptively into life when the wood’s warmed by the heat of an iron. The image of a thaw seems central to him; he wants the ice-locked soul to awake.

Why then is “A Thaw” so awful? It isn’t Thoreau’s fault that tinkle has taken on a secondary meaning now, as countless mothers have found it a useful onomatopoeic euphemism, thus rendering But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume even more ridiculous. The problem goes deeper than that; there’s a fatal mismatch here between form and content. By form I mean the poem’s regular iambic pentameter and regular rhyme scheme, which lead the poet to traffic in inversions, twisting syntax till it’s actually a good deal of work just to make grammatical sense out of stanzas two and three. By content I mean not just the poet’s idea—that he’d like to lie down and melt, but can’t—but something like his speaking character, the cadences of his voice and thought, the way he moves his body, breathes, his stance toward experience. Compare Thoreau’s lines to Whitman’s:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

These feel far more adventurous, in part because Whitman’s lines are much richer in verbs, and he chooses more active ones: depart, shake, effuse, and drift come to us in just two lines. Runaway is a completely unexpected adjective here; the passage comes only eight lines from the end of “Song of Myself” when Whitman says that the past and present wilt because he has filled and emptied them. He speaks, here, from another position in time than that which his readers occupy; he is preparing to bequeath himself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love but he also waits for us, we who will find our way to his voice in the future. He doesn’t doubt for a moment that he can effuse his flesh and drift it, which is pretty much what Thoreau seems to have in mind with wishing his body to tinkle and fume, those things he cannot do.

Obviously, I prefer Whitman’s bolder stance, though in fact a perfectly good poem could be written about the inability to join in with the flow of the world. The reason Thoreau hasn’t written it is that his formal bindings provide him with too tight an enclosure; he can’t explore the idea, ask questions, investigate the problem his poem wants to consider because he is committed to this antique packaging whose only sign of modernity is the odd little unrhymed couplet at the beginning, though that too is delivered in perfectly regular meter.

A great part of Whitman’s accomplishment was to simply sidestep the matter of rhyme and meter, and thus free himself to compose poems that constructed a different kind of music, out of repetition, marvelous sonic effects and forward-moving cadences. Since these often took as their formal structure the shape of argument, it’s no surprise that he wanted to be an orator, since he would have had a wider influence that way. He couldn’t have known what his innovations—the ways he opened both formal possibilities and new territories for content—would mean to poets to come, both in his home country and around the world. He’d hoped to change his country, to provide the founding text of a new order. What he changed was poetry, which indeed does change the world, but quietly, a reader at a time.