I
“THEY WERE big strong days—our young days,” Whitman recalled, looking back on the early 1850s, “days of preparation: the gathering of the forces.” Many of his friends then were artists beginning to define themselves as insurgents in the service of the people. In William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post Whitman called for American painters and sculptors to band together in “a close phalanx, ardent, radical, and progressive” and create a “grand and true” art worthy of their country and the times they lived in. He went on to pay tribute to “the young artist race” of his acquaintance: they were warm, impulsive, and independent, “instinctively generous and genial, boon companions, wild and thoughtless often, but mean and sneaking never.”
One exception, as he acknowledged to his dying day, was his French-born brother-in-law, Charles L. Heyde, a landscape painter. In the first stages of their acquaintance Walt was admiring enough to bring the great Bryant, “High Priest of Nature,” to Heyde’s Brooklyn studio to see his work. With more fateful results Walt brought Charley home with him. “I wish to God he had been in hell before we ever saw him,” Jeff was to say. In March 1852 the painter married their sister Hannah and took her to Vermont, where they shared four childless decades of domestic warfare. According to Hannah, Charley was tyrannical, abusive and unfaithful; he attacked her physically and called her “crazy,” “a mean stinking selfish wretch” who had no more intellect than her half-wit brother Eddy. According to Charley, Hannah was sluttish, violent and hypochondriacal. “She makes a half barbarous life for herself,” he complained to Walt, “and almost baffles all my efforts at times to humanize her.” In all likelihood both Heydes were psychotic—after Charley had to be put away in a condition diagnosed as chronic dementia, Hannah spent her days in a darkened room and hallucinated about the Whitman family fortune. Charley was a whelp, cur, skunk, leech and snake, Walt said of him at various times, “the bed-buggiest man on earth,” “almost the only man alive who can make me mad; a mere thought of him, an allusion, the least word, riles me.” Still, it was Charley Heyde, painter, occasional poet, amateur musician and flower lover, who, alone of all the Whitmans by blood or marriage (with the exception of Jeff), took an informed interest in Leaves of Grass although he finally decided it was only a literary version of his wife.
Whitman had more level dealings with Gabriel Harrison, painter, photographer and playwright, a friend of Poe and the great actor Edwin Forrest. He admired Harrison’s daguerreotype portraits—they were “perfect works of truth and art” that went beyond mechanical likeness to capture the “spirit,” the psychological aura, of his sitters. On a hot July day in 1854, Harrison was to pose the “carpenter” portrait that, in Whitman’s judgment, captured the spirit of Leaves of Grass and should face the title page of the first edition. Another Brooklyn artist, Walter Libbey, painted a portrait of him in oils. Libbey appeared to have a promising career ahead of him, but he died young, “with nothing practically accomplished—not even a name won.” Yet for Whitman, then undergoing a concentrated education of the eye, Libbey had served as a tutor, an exemplar of apparently simple and spontaneous artistry that mediated between the material and the spiritual. Commenting on a picture by Libbey of a boy playing the flute Whitman articulated his own developing aesthetic:
I don’t know where to look for a picture more naïve, or with more spirit or grace. The young musician has stopped, by the way-side, and putting down his basket, seats himself on a bank. He has a brown wool hat, ornamented with a feather; rolled-up shirt sleeves, a flowing red cravat on his neck, and a narrow leather belt buckled round his waist—a handsome, healthy country boy. . . . There is richness of coloring, tamed to that hue of purplish gray, which we see in the summer in the open air. There is no hardness, and the eye is not pained by the sharpness of outline which mars many otherwise fine pictures. In the scene of the background, and in all the accessories, there is a delicious melting in, so to speak, of object with object; an effect that is frequent enough in nature, though painters seem to disdain following it, even where it is demanded.*
Libbey’s work was democratic as well as accessible and transcendent.
Abroad, a similar subject would show the boy as handsome, perhaps, but he would be a young boor, and nothing more. The stamp of class is, in this way, upon all the fine scenes of the European painters, where the subjects are of a proper kind; while in this boy of Walter Libbey’s, there is nothing to prevent his becoming a President, or even an editor of a leading newspaper.
Among other Brooklyn artists whom Whitman knew and visited were Frederick A. Chapman, who worked in stained glass as well as in oils, and the more eminent Jesse Talbot, whose elegiac portraits and landscapes hung in the National Gallery of Design in New York. Whitman wrote glowingly about Talbot’s work in at least four articles published between 1850 and 1853 and owned one of Talbot’s oils, “an original of marked beauty and value . . . illustrating a scene from Pilgrim’s Progress.” (He also owned the Libbey portrait and a large print of Osceola the Seminole chief given him by the artist George Catlin.) He often came to the studio where Henry Kirke Brown, National Academician and sculptor of the equestrian statue of Washington in Union Square, worked with his young assistant, the vigorous and brilliant Ohioan, John Quincy Adams Ward.
With the habitués of Brown’s studio, young artists who had recently returned from their studies in Paris, Rome and Florence, Whitman felt more at home than with any comparable literary group. He shared their commitment to native subjects and to the gospel of John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters he had praised in the Eagle for its “intellectual chivalry, enthusiasm, and . . . high-toned sincerity.” At Brown’s, Whitman recalled fancying in particular “one sparkling fellow” who talked to him at length, apparently from personal acquaintance, about Pierre Béranger, the French Robert Burns. In the Brown circle, Whitman recalled proudly, “I was myself called Béranger.” The younger men looked up to him as a prematurely graying sage of progressivism in art, literature and politics, and a faithful promoter of their work. In gratitude they invited him to speak at the first awards ceremony of the Brooklyn Art Union.
“To the artist,” he said in his talk on March 31, 1851, “has been given the command to go forth into all the world and preach the gospel of beauty. The perfect man is the perfect artist.” But one did not have to be an artist to recognize that “in the life we live upon this beautiful earth there may, after all, be something vaster and better than dress and the table, and business and politics.” By recognizing “the truly great, the beautiful and the simple,” ordinary Americans of the age of steam and cast iron could adorn their nation and their lives as with a halo and recapture the freshness of Eden. Looking ahead to Harrison’s open-shirted portrait, Whitman mocked “the orthodox specimen of a man of the present time,” a mere tailor’s dummy confined in high-heeled boots, a swallow-tailed coat, many swathings at the neck, and a ridiculous hat. Citing “great rebels and innovators,” he argued that the highest art was the art most totally engaged.
I think of few heroic actions which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his sensitiveness to moral beauty. Such men are not merely artists, they are artistic material. Washington in some great crisis, Lawrence in the bloody deck of the Chesapeake, Mary [Stuart] at the block, Kossuth in captivity and Mazzini in exile,—all great rebels and innovators, especially if their intellectual majesty bears itself out with calmness amid popular odium or circumstances of cruelty and an infliction of suffering, exhibit the highest phases of the artistic spirit. A sublime moral beauty is present to them, and they realize them. It may be almost said to emanate from them. The painter, the sculptor, the poet express heroic beauty better in description; for description is their trade, and they have learned it. But the others are heroic beauty, the best beloved of art.
Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chiselled. Study not only their productions. There is a still better, higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of captives and martyrs—of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history—deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, and devotion, and fortitude. Read well the death of Socrates, and of a greater than Socrates. Read how slaves have battled against their oppressors—how the bullets of tyrants have, since the first king ruled, never been able to put down the unquenchable thirst of man for his rights.
In tribute to the “hot and baffled struggle” for these rights that had been raging in Europe for years, Whitman concluded his address with eighteen lines from his own “Resurgemus.”
“Make no quotations and no references to other writers,” Whitman instructed himself when he was composing Leaves of Grass. “Take no illustrations whatsoever from the ancients or classics . . . nor from the royal and aristocratic institutions and forms of Europe. Make no mention or allusion to them whatever, except as they relate to the new, present things—to our country—to American character or interests.” Culture and tradition appeared to him as repressive, barriers to self-transcendence and the construction of “a poem on the open principles of nature.” Whitman’s call for the shucking-off of old symbols had a counterpart in German romantic philosophy, and he had also heard it from the apostles of high European culture. Himself cautious and hot-blooded, furtive and brash, hen as well as eagle, Whitman subscribed to both culture and anarchy, tradition and revolution, and he sailed toward a new dispensation under the opposed slogans, “Let us now praise famous men,” and, word of the modern, “make it new.” He issued his own letters of marque and obliterated from his booty the evidences of its origin. His transactions with culture were as complex as those of Captain Nemo, the Byronic hero who exiled himself from man and his works and lived under the sea’s surface in an electric palace of literature, music, and art.
On Broadway, in the heart of the striving capital of the New World, Whitman discovered such a palace, the private museum where Dr. Henry Abbott displayed his celebrated collection of Egyptian antiquities. Whitman’s serious interest in Egyptology went back to books he read and lectures he heard in the 1840s—now it fed on Abbott’s treasure of papyrus scrolls, mummies, and funerary relics, incised tablets, ornaments of beaten gold, figures of gods with the bodies of men and the heads of hawks. “I went to the Egyptian Museum many, many times; sometimes had it all to myself—delved at the formidable catalogue—and on several occasions had the invaluable talk, correction, illustration and guidance of Dr. A. himself. He was very kind and helpful to me in those studies.”
Absorbed in those studies Whitman shut out the clatter of traffic and commerce from the street and became a tiny creature standing alone in an enormous vista of time and space. “Three thousand years ago—five thousand—ten thousand years ago—and probably far back beyond that—those huge African cities, peopled by the race we call Egyptians, existed in just as much vigor and reality as the United States exists today,” he was to write in 1855. “They had cities equal or superior in architectural grandeur to any now upon the earth. . . . They not only had books, but these books were plentiful. Epics were common. They had novels, poems, histories, essays, and all those varieties of narrative forever dear to the people.”
On his deathbed the Frenchman Jean François Champollion, who unlocked ancient Nilotic culture by deciphering the Rosetta stone, pointed to the manuscript of his Grammar of Egyptian Hieroglyphics and said, “Be careful of this—it is my carte de visite to posterity.” This was the way Whitman was to describe his own book, “my definitive carte visite to posterity.” Leaves of Grass was a modern Book of the Dead, in Whitman’s day also titled “the book of going forth in the day” (possibly echoed in his line, “There was a child went forth every day”). The grass was
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones . . .
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
He was to model his poet-hero on the god Osiris, a wise and beneficent ruler who reclaimed his people from slavery and before whom “all human beings were equal.” In some of the texts Whitman studied, Osiris, the god of eternal renewal, was depicted with stalks growing from his corpse.
Scented herbage of my breast,
Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death . . .
Whitman’s Art Union talk, a polymorph perverse stage in his development toward the sourcelessness of Leaves of Grass, was a mosaic of “quotations” and “references to other writers,” among them Rousseau, Longfellow, Bryant, Shakespeare, Pope, Horace, and a Persian poet of “hundreds of years ago.” It cited Jesus, the Bible, Mary Queen of Scots, Columbus, and the ancient Greeks, specifically Socrates, Plato, and Alcibiades. Framing ideas came from Ruskin, George Sand, Frances Wright, Coleridge, Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle, Emerson’s own master and conduit to German philosophy.
For the generation that came to maturity in the 1830s and 1840s Carlyle was so towering a spiritual guide and social critic that his influence became like the air bathing the globe and was consequently taken for granted, as Margaret Fuller suggested in the Dial in 1841. “Where shall we find another who appeals so forcibly, so variously to the common heart of his contemporaries?” No living writer “exercises a greater influence than he in these United States,” she said. She summarized the timeless creed, “as old and as new as truth itself,” that Carlyle had “reenforced” with unexampled power and brilliance:
To be and not to seem; to know that nothing can become a man which is not manlike; that no silken trappings can dignify measures of mere expediency; and no hootings of a mob, albeit of critics and courtiers, can shame the truth, or keep Heaven’s dews from falling in the right place; that all conventions not founded on eternal law are valueless, and that the life of man, will he or not, must tally with the life of nature.
In Carlyle’s idiom, it was the duty of “two-legged animals without feathers” to look the universe in the eye and ask it for the time, to be as clear-eyed and uncoerced as if “dropped from the moon,” to assert their membership in “a living, literal Communion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of the World.”
Carlyle’s heroic affirmations, “Natural Supernaturalism,” and radical critique of capitalist-industrial society had a long induction period in Whitman’s intellectual system. Carlyle’s essays introduced him to Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul (Richter) and the Nibelungenlied. During 1846 and 1847 he reviewed six of Carlyle’s books. On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History proved to be as incantatory in content as in title. It celebrated founders of religions, prophets, leaders and universal poets, an apostolic succession that for Whitman pointed the way for a modern Poet Prophet, a man of the people, simple, unschooled, coarsely garbed, who in passionate, spontaneous and unrhymed verse would speak for his century—
I am your voice—It was tied in you—In me it began to talk
—and create for it a “New Bible,” Leaves of Grass. Sartor Resartus, Whitman wrote in the Eagle, “has all of Mr. Carlyle’s strange wild way;—and all his fiery breadth and profundity of meaning—when you delve them out,” fair warning to readers that this was a queer and enigmatic as well as a brilliant book. Purportedly it was the biography of “a quite new human Individuality, an almost unexampled personal character”; Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft (“Professor of Things in General”) and author of Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (“Clothes, Their Origin and Influence”). Teufelsdröckh’s biography was a mélange of social criticism, fantasy, pedantry, obscurantism and colossal egotism, St. Augustine’s Confessions and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, strange words and ridiculous phrases, apostrophes, perorations, catalogues and asides, pledges of allegiance and disbelief, passages of self-quotation and self-parody, the ravings of a maniac and the pure intellection of an angel whose vision penetrates costumes and the smoky counterpanes of cities. Like Whitman in “The Sleepers,” wandering all night in his vision and exploring the collective dream life, Teufelsdröckh, “alone with the stars” in his attic apartment over the town of Weissnichtwo, peers through the “vast, void Night” and shares life with the dying and the newborn, the lover, plotter, gambler, condemned man, grieving mother.
In this “rapt,” “weird” and “grotesque” book, as Whitman described Sartor Resartus, Carlyle had written his spiritual autobiography and a secular gospel on the pattern of Rousseau, Goethe and Nietzsche, but it was impossible to tell where the skylarking left off and the seriousness began—the romantic irony of the Europeans had been carried over wholesale into English. Like “Song of Myself,” Sartor Resartus was a reflexive work that told the story of how it came to exist. The resemblance did not end here. “Song of Myself”—described (by Richard Chase) as an “extraordinary collection of small imagist poems, versified short stories, realistic urban and rural genre paintings, inventories, homilies, philosophizings, farcical episodes, confessions and lyric musings”—was a comparable mélange or what-not. The astonished or perplexed reader discovered in it, along with ecstasy, pain and surreal journeyings, a strange admixture of wit, humor, clowning, comic boasting, Western brag, Yankee laconism, conscious absurdity and colossal egotism:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious . . .
I think I could turn and live with animals . . .
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat . . .
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Still, for all such parallels, resemblances, echoes, borrowings, or influences, whether direct or reflections of the spirit of the age, it is useless to look outside Whitman himself for the matrix or occasion for Leaves of Grass. Eventually he rejected Carlyle, the most obstreperous Victorian critic of democracy, for his sheer “cussedness”, for his “ever-lurking pessimism and world-decadence,” and for lacking “a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hand of the hunter.” In the long run neither Emerson nor Carlyle was the “master” of Whitman, any more than George Sand or Sir Walter Scott. Brought toward a pitch of aroused readiness by art and history, radical politics and magical pseudo sciences, Whitman was soon to acknowledge an emerging purpose to be “a master after my own kind.”
II
At antislavery meetings in the New York Tabernacle on Broadway near Pearl Street, Whitman drank in the hot eloquence of Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky and Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, both of them natural orators, as he recalled, and also “tough, tough”—they had to hold their ground against bands of hecklers and thugs sent in by Isaiah Rynders, Sixth Ward Tammany boss and an instigator of the bloody Astor Place riot. On August 14, 1852, writing out of the blue as “a stranger, a young man, and a true Democrat, I hope,” Whitman called on Hale, the unanimous but reluctant presidential nominee of the Free Soilers, to lay his candidacy before the people “in the old heroic Roman fashion.” He offered Hale a creed rather than a platform, a litany of hopes rather than a reasoned assessment of the forthcoming campaign. He believed that his “close phalanx” of artists, “young,” “ardent,” and “generous,” had a mighty counterpart in “the young men of our land,” as he told Hale, in their “ardent and generous hearts.”
“You are at Washington, and have for years moved among the great men,” Whitman wrote from his house on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn.
I have never been at Washington, and know none of the great men. But I know the people. I know well, (for I am practically in New York,) the real heart of this mighty city—the tens of thousands of young men, the mechanics, the writers, &c &c. In all these, and behind the bosh of the regular politicians, there burns, almost with fierceness, the divine fire which more or less, during all ages, has only awaited a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of tyrants, hunkers, and all their tribe. At this moment New York is the most radical city in America. It would be the most anti-slavery city, if that cause hadn’t been made ridiculous by the freaks of the local leaders here.
Despite his displays of Roman heroism at public meetings and in the Senate—a colleague once promised that Hale would not go ten miles into Mississippi before gracing “one of the tallest trees of the forest, with a rope around his neck”—Hale was no Coriolanus or Caesar. He was the justifiably despairing candidate of a third party that had been bleeding to death since the Compromise of 1850. In a dull November election even the Whig runner-up, General Winfield Scott, managed to win less than a tenth the electoral votes of the colorless and inoffensive Democratic victor, Franklin Pierce, plain evidence that in 1852 “the great mass of the common people”—including the people of New York, for all the radicalism that Whitman credited them with—valued sectional tranquillity and the middle road. But the future poet-prophet of Leaves of Grass continued to hold it as a certainty that “the souls of the people ever leap and swell to any thing like a great liberal thought or principle” and that the world would again see, as in the age of Jefferson half a century back, “an American Democracy with thews and sinews worthy this sublime age.” “Look to the young men,” he told Hale.
Whitman’s “musical passion,” he recalled in Specimen Days, “follow’d my theatrical one” by several years. During the middle 1840s he listened appreciatively enough to Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul and to the pyrotechnics of foreign virtuosos like the Frenchman Henri Vieuxtemps and the Norwegian Ole Bull, who could play on all four strings of his violin at the same time. But his passion fixed itself for a while at the homelier level of simple music sung by family trios and quartettes: the Hutchinsons from New Hampshire, who often appeared at antislavery rallies; the Cheneys, children of a Vermont preacher; the Alleghanians, the Amphions, the Harmoneons, and Father Kemp’s Old Folks. These popular touring ensembles exemplified “heart-singing” as opposed to “art-singing”—so Whitman wrote in an article for Poe’s Broadway Journal in November 1845. He was moved by their sentimental and topical ballads—“The Soldier’s Farewell,” “My Mother’s Bible,” “Lament of the Irish Emigrant,” “The Mariner Loves O’er the Water to Roam,” “The Old Granite State.” The unadorned style, easy unison, and simple harmonies of the Cheneys, the fresh faces of the girls, the stout shoulders of their brothers, all reminded him of “health and fresh air in the country, at sunrise,” and took him back to his childhood on the Hempstead plains.
“Our gratification was inexpressible,” he wrote after hearing the Cheneys at Niblo’s Garden in November 1845. “This, said we in our heart, is the true method which must become popular in the United States—which must supplant the stale, second-hand, foreign method, with its flourishes, its ridiculous sentimentality, its anti-republican spirit, and its sycophantic influences, tainting the young taste of the Republic.” He was still a narrow cultural nativist—he ignored the fact that the vogue of family singing troupes had begun in 1839 with the Rainers, yodelers from the Austrian Tirol, and the Alpine flavor had persisted. He spontaneously favored “the true method” of the Cheneys over “the agonized squalls, the lackadaisical drawlings, the sharp ear-piercing shrieks, the gurgling death-rattles” that had been his first impressions of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi. He was slow, and as a partisan of native and earthy culture, even reluctant to give in to grand opera, the rage of New York from the middle forties on. Opera companies, lead singers, conductors, and orchestras from Paris, Milan, London, Havana, and New Orleans performed at one or more of some eight theaters, including the elegant 1,800-seat Astor Place Opera House.
After a year of operagoing on Eagle passes, Whitman conceded that foreign music was exercising an elevating influence on American taste. Soon his reviews moved from tolerance to sophisticated pleasure and finally to “passion.” “Art-singing” and “heart-singing” were no longer opposed but one and the same; grand opera began to reshape his sensibility:
Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.
On August 5, 1847, after hearing the English diva Anna Bishop in Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix, he wrote with a new degree of assurance:
Her voice is the purest soprano—and of as silvery clearness as ever came from the human throat—rich but not massive—and of such flexibility that one is almost appalled by the way the most difficult passages are not only gone over with ease, but actually dallied with, and their difficulty redoubled. They put one in mind of the gyrations of a bird in the air.*
By 1850 Whitman belonged to the stubborn minority in New York who kept their heads during the visit of the Swedish coloratura Jenny Lind. Barnum had whipped up such a frenzy of expectation and worship that on September 1 twenty thousand people massed in Broadway in front of the entrance to the Irving House to witness her arrival. A week later, George Templeton Strong noted that “Jenny Lind mania continues violent and uncontrolled. Auction of seats for her first concert Saturday; Genin the hatter took seat number 1 at $225.”
Whitman attended her last Castle Garden concert on the twenty-fourth. “She was dressed in pink satin, with black lace flounces and cape—great, green cockades in her hair—white kid gloves, fan, handkerchief, and the ordinary fashionable et ceteras. Her cheeks were well rouged, and her walk bad. The expression of her face is a sort of moral milk and honey.” He found her performance “showy,” remote from “true music”—“She simply has a clear, shrill voice, of wonderful fluency, which will perhaps make you think of rich plate glass.” The Swedish Nightingale sang like a sweet bird, he acknowledged, “but there is something in song that goes deeper—isn’t there?” He left believing that Barnum and a bought press had humbugged the public with this renowned “cantatrice,” a word he apparently borrowed from the English translation of George Sand’s Consuelo. Its emancipated heroine, an operatic contralto of miraculous gift, was proof, as the novelist wrote, that the secret of “the grand, the true, the beautiful in art” was simplicity. “Be simple and clear,” Whitman instructed himself in his notebook. His line in “Song of Myself”—
—recalled Consuelo singing Pergolesi’s “Salve Regina” in the organ loft of Saint Mark’s in Venice.
Jenny Lind “never touched my heart in the least,” but the tenor Alessandro Bettini, who sang in Donizetti’s La Favorita at Castle Garden the following summer, made him realize, for the first time, he said, “what an indescribable volume of delight the recesses of the soul can bear from the sound of the honied perfection of the human voice. . . . all words are mean before the language of true music.” His conversion became complete during the 1852–53 season when the Italian prima donna Marietta Alboni sang the principal roles in ten different operas and also gave a dozen concerts and a performance in Rossini’s Stabat Mater. “I heard Alboni every time she sang in New York and vicinity,” Whitman said. He remembered her as the “greatest of them all”—“I wonder if the lady will ever know that her singing, her method, gave the foundation, the start, thirty years ago, to all my poetic literary efforts since.” “But for the opera,” he was to say, “I could never have written Leaves of Grass.” Rich, supple, expressive, overleaping the stars, Alboni and her music liberated him from the metrical, rhymed “ballad-style” of poetry. The arching, cantabile lines, the stabbing arias, sobbing recitatives, and antiphonal design of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” followed “the method of the Italian opera,” he said in 1860. The boy in that poem, an “outsetting bard,” responds to the song of the mocking bird as Whitman at thirty-three responded to Marietta Alboni:
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die. . . .
My own songs awaked from that hour.
Music had become the great “combiner, nothing more spiritual, nothing more sensuous, a god, yet completely human,” and the human voice was its godlike instrument.
“Talents of gold, and endowments of silver, are possessed by every human being, if he did but know it,” Whitman wrote in November 1850, arguing that “music, in the legitimate sense of that term, exists independently of technical music . . . just as poetry exists independently of rhyme.” “I advise each and every young person early to commence the study of music, and persevere in its practice and enjoyment all their days.” Following his own advice he traded ten daguerreotypes and some artist’s supplies from his Myrtle Street store for Charley Heyde’s guitar, valued at twelve dollars. During 1852 he traded a lot in Cypress Hills plus $54 for a melodeon and, a gift for Jeff, paid $180 for a seven-octave rosewood-case piano with a two-year warranty. On the Fulton Street ferry late at night, with only a few sleepy passengers aboard, he sang operatic scraps and airs. He sang when he rode the Broadway omnibus, and he sang when he walked on the beach at Coney Island. In love with his own voice—“somehow it’s always magnetic”—he sent it out into a relational void where his unrequited single self attempted to merge with the “not Me.”
III
One redeeming feature of the brutally hot summer of 1853—Whitman noted “400 deaths in three or four days in N. Y.”—was the World’s Fair, America’s first, that filled the Crystal Palace, a gorgeous octagonal building of glass and iron on the site of present-day Bryant Park. The exterior of this architectural wonder was viewed to best advantage from the Latting Observatory on the north side of 42nd Street, a 280-foot-high tower served by a steam elevator that hoisted visitors from an ice-cream parlor at ground level to banks of telescopes on the upper landings. Sam Clemens, a seventeen-year-old journeyman printer, was entranced by the view from the tower, a great city surrounded by water and farmland, the broad promenades of the reservoir, and adjoining them “a perfect fairy palace—beautiful beyond description.” Bold in construction and materials, the Crystal Palace outstripped its counterpart in London’s Hyde Park and promised to inaugurate an entire order of architecture in iron, from train sheds to mile-high buildings.* It had the largest dome in the Western world—123 feet high, 100 feet in diameter, and supported by twenty-four columns—and it enclosed nearly five acres of display space for steam and electric engines; bridge elements; printing presses; guns; gold bars from California; lighthouse lenses; lifeboats; grain separators; apple parers; furniture, carved and inlaid; works in precious metals; and paintings and sculptures, including Hiram Powers’ celebrated nude, the “Greek Slave” (“so undressed,” Henry James said, “yet so refined”).
The centerpiece of the Crystal Palace, a colossal equestrian statue of George Washington by Baron Carlo Marochetti, an Italian residing in London, loomed beneath the apex of the great dome. It had earned this place of honor more by its size and subject than by its excellence. The horse belonged in the knacker’s yard, while the plaster Father of his Country, sitting braced in his saddle eye to eye with spectators in the gallery, reminded some of them of a raw recruit anxious to please his drillmaster. “In short,” said the authors of the exhibition catalogue, “it is not a statue of Washington, but a huge man on a huge horse.”
“Undoubtedly the great artistic feature of the Exhibition,” the same authors said, was the equally looming but more universally admired sculpture group, Christ and His Apostles, by the Dane Bertel Thorwaldsen—“Christian art has reached . . . its noblest expression.” Thirteen gigantic figures, intended for the cavernous apse of a church in Copenhagen, were crowded together against a lunette of maroon wall, as if the Last Supper were being served in a railway buffet. Still, one visitor who had dragged through the Crystal Palace’s endless courts of edification was to recall that his tiredness and hunger as a boy of eleven had faded before the “sugary or confectionary sweetness” of Thorwaldsen’s “shining marble company.” “I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been ‘brought over,’” Henry James wrote. “The Crystal Palace was vast and various and dense, which was what Europe was going to be.” (The young Mark Twain thought instead of home. “The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily,” he told his sister, “—double the population of Hannibal.”)
“New York, Great Exposition open’d in 1853,” Whitman wrote much later. “I went for a long time (nearly a year)—days and nights.” He remembered Thorwaldsen’s “colossal” figures along with inexhaustible displays of the products of art, commerce, science and industry. With characteristic emphasis he described the Crystal Palace as “an original, esthetic, perfectly proportioned American edifice—one of the few that put modern times not beneath old times, but on an equality with the best of them.”
High rising tier on tier with glass and iron facade,
Gladdening the sun and sky, enhued in cheerfulest hues,
Bronze, lilac, robin’s egg, marine and crimson . . .
Not very good Whitman, to be sure, but a suggestion at least that the Crystal Palace continued to have vital meaning for him after his own vitality as a poet had waned. In delights of the mind, eye and soul, as well as in material comforts and conveniences, no feudal lord had ever been so abundantly blessed as the American common man of the mid-nineteenth century: this was one lesson of the Crystal Palace, a temple of the useful and uplifting that also suggested that the mission of an American poet was
To exalt the present and the real,
To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade.
He dressed like men who worked on ferryboats, drove stages, fire engines and express wagons, and worked with their hands, and he shared with them a quality of something “rankly common,” John Burroughs said, “like freckles and sweat.” A tall rough-looking man who weighed 179 pounds on the scale at the Crystal Palace on November 18, 1853, he wore a slouch hat over his grizzled hair and weathered red forehead, clean, cheap knockabout clothes, checked shirt open at the neck, and baggy trousers with the bottoms tucked into his boots. Crossing the river he stood in the wheelhouse with the pilots. He rode the Broadway stages by the hour and sat up on the box with the drivers, “a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race”:
They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances. Not only for comradeship and sometimes affection—great studies I found them also. (I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly entered into the gestation of “Leaves of Grass.”)
He enjoyed their yarns, their mimicry, and their virtuoso memories—they could cite passenger tallies for a particular time of day from trips a month back. Most had got their muscles and their skill with horses from years on the farm. They had to be quick, strong and brave to thread their lumbering stages through anarchic thoroughfares, and often they fetched up in the accident ward where Whitman, unconsciously rehearsing his wartime occupation as wound-dresser, came to comfort and minister to them. Sometimes he followed their bodies to the cemetery:
He was a goodfellow,
Freemouthed, quicktempered, not badlooking, able to take his own part,
Witty, sensitive to a slight, ready with life or death for a friend,
Fond of women . . . played some . . . eat hearty and drank hearty,
Had known what it was like to be flush . . . grew lowspirited toward the last . . . sickened . . . was helped by a contribution,
Died aged forty-one years . . . and that was his funeral.
He felt easy and loved with these men, loving and alive. Drivers are archangels in “Song of Myself”:
The young fellow drives the express wagon, (I love him, although I do not know him;) . . .
The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon . . .
The force he felt was as strong as gravity, and yet for all his sensitivity and candor he did not fully understand it. He believed he was doing neither more nor less than claiming for men the emotional freedom and physical expressiveness—holding hands, touching, hugging, kissing—that society allowed women to enjoy with each other. Why should the sexes be so manacled by custom and decree, by an irrational terror of gender confusion, that aggressiveness was reserved to the male and tenderness to the female? Androgyny, the beautiful integrating principle that had stirred poets and philosophers from Plato to Coleridge, seemed only natural and right to Whitman standing “all alone,” “myself,” “solitary,” a self-contained classless society of one.
On the other side of a sheet of manuscript containing draft lines of “Song of Myself”—
I claim for one of those framers over the way framing a house,
The young man there with rolled-up sleeves and sweat on his superb face,
More than your craft three thousand years ago, Kronos, or Zeus his son, or Hercules his grandson
—Whitman described some of his companions at the Crystal Palace:
20 March ’54.
Bill Guess—aged 22. A thoughtless, strong, generous animal nature, fond of direct pleasures, eating, drinking, women, fun etc. Taken sick with the small-pox, had the bad disorder and was furious with the delirium tremens. Was with me in the Crystal Palace, a large, broad fellow, weighed over 200. Was a thoughtless good fellow.
Peter________ ________, large, strong-boned young fellow, driver. Should weigh 180. Free and candid to me the very first time he saw me. Man of strong self-will, powerful coarse feelings and appetites. Had a quarrel, borrowed $300, left his father somewhere in the interior of the State, fell in with a couple of gamblers, hadn’t been home or written there in seven years . . .
George Fitch—Yankee boy, driver. Fine nature, amiable, sensitive feelings, a natural gentleman, of quite a reflective turn. Left his home because his father was perpetually “down on him.” When he told me of his mother his eyes watered . . .