Edward Whitley
Toward the end of “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman looks out over the panorama of humanity that he has catalogued for over a thousand lines and comments, as if to identify the vantage point from which he has observed so many different types of people, “This is the city and I am one of the citizens” (Whitman 2002: 67). Earlier in the poem, he identifies the city in question as New York and himself as a cosmic presence in its midst, declaring that he is “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (Whitman 2002: 45). Readers have always been drawn to Whitman’s engagement with his urban surroundings, from William James’s comment that Whitman “felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains” (quoted in Brand 1991: 156), to William Pannapacker’s claim that, “alone among well‐known American Romantic writers of his era, Whitman chronicled and celebrated urban life” (Pannapacker 2007: 42). Indeed, the city remained a central element in Whitman’s evolving book of poems, Leaves of Grass, from the first edition in 1855 through numerous later versions to the final, “Deathbed Edition” of 1891–1892.
In this chapter, I consider two of the major trends in American literary scholarship regarding Whitman and New York City. The first we could call a “sights‐and‐sounds” approach to Whitman’s urbanism, wherein scholars demonstrate how the vibrant cultural life of the city was integral not only to the content of Whitman’s poetry but also to its rhythms and forms. Whitman himself invited such interpretations, noting that the groundbreaking verses in Leaves of Grass “arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equaled” (quoted in Reynolds 1995: 48). Such an approach to Whitman’s poetry directs our attention to the street life, social types, omnibuses, and ferries that fill out the visual spectacle of Leaves of Grass, as well as to the broadsides and newspapers that influenced the look and feel of his poems.
During the same 15‐ to 20‐year period when Whitman was “absorbing” the sights and sounds of the city, however, he also experienced New York as a set of institutions. He wrote in “Song of Myself” that “Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, / The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate” (Whitman 2002: 67). As such, another major trend in the scholarship on Whitman’s New York has focused on how the poet navigated the world of literary publishing – the “markets, newspapers […] stocks, stores” – in an era when the business of literature was undergoing a major transition. This transition in the literary marketplace had both economic and geographic components: economically, publishing evolved from a “gentlemanly” trade guided by an unwritten code of ethical conduct into the contract‐based system of market capitalism that defines the industry today, while geographically the center of literary publishing moved from Boston to New York. These two factors are not unrelated. Michael J. Everton has noted that Boston‐based publishers such as Ticknor and Fields were “Gentlemen Publishers, literary tradesmen whose self‐styled belief in friendship over profit elevated them above competitors like New York’s Harper and Brothers, [who were said to be] ‘governed […] by their anticipation of profit or loss’” (Everton 2011: 3). That the once‐mighty firm of Ticknor and Fields has faded from memory while Harper’s celebrated its bicentennial in 2017 would suggest that the publishing industry’s economic journey from social compact to capitalist enterprise and its geographic transition from Boston to New York have long been settled facts.
Nevertheless, during the years leading up to the Civil War when Whitman came into his own as a poet – the period that Leon Jackson identifies as “the epicenter of this transformation” – the transition to market capitalism “was a complex and often incomplete process” wherein the business of letters was “transacted through a multitude of distinct economies” as authors “bought, sold, begged, borrowed, bartered, and gave away what they wrote” (Jackson 2007: 2–4). Whitman’s efforts to establish his career bear the traces of these economic and geographic shifts: he was deeply connected to New York both culturally and professionally, but he also worked strategically with Boston publishers and members of the elite Boston–Concord literary scene, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson; and, while he kept an eye toward a level of professional authorship that would have allowed him to be supported by mass readers in a market economy, he also participated in a “multitude of distinct economies” that included self‐publishing his own books and supplementing his income as an author by working as a journalist and newspaper editor. This chapter will trace Whitman’s relationship to the New York literary world, beginning with his early career writing for the penny press in Brooklyn and Manhattan, continuing with his efforts to publish the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, and ending on his first market success with the professional publication of the 1860 Leaves of Grass by the Boston firm of Thayer and Eldridge. Whitman left New York in 1862 and never lived full‐time in the city again. At a number of pivotal moments in his post‐Civil War career, however, Whitman returned to the New York literary world that had initially defined him as a poet.
The young Walter Whitman, Jr. began his decades‐long career in journalism as a 12‐year‐old apprentice printer for the Long Island Patriot in 1831; he continued to work as either contributor or editor for a number of newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan throughout the antebellum period. For years, scholars of American literature puzzled over how Whitman’s revolutionary free‐verse poetry could have come from the same writer who had produced a rather conventional body of work as a city journalist. It struck many readers as odd that the poet who wrote the nineteenth century’s most innovative volume of poems could have spent so much time and energy attending to the mundane interests of readers of the penny press (Bergmann 1995: 71; Fishkin 1985: 11–15). It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who first wondered not only how Whitman could have learned to write the poetry that he did but also where he had learned how to do it: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson wrote in July of 1855, adding that Whitman’s career as a poet “must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start” (quoted in Whitman 2002: 637). In recent years, scholars have come to appreciate that city journalism provided an integral component to the “long foreground” of Whitman’s poetry.
Specifically, in a number of articles that Whitman wrote for outlets such as the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he adopted the style and mannerisms of the flâneur, a Parisian social type known for sauntering through city streets with a purposeless gait and a penetrating gaze. A regular presence in US newspapers by the 1840s, the flâneur provided American journalists with a template for how to write about the everyday occurrences of city life beyond the murders, fires, and political scandals that dominated headlines. Whitman took to flânerie with great aplomb (Brand 1991: 156–163). For example, in an 1842 piece that he wrote for the Aurora titled “Life in a New York Market,” Whitman describes “a stroll of observation through a market” that filled him with the same sense of wonder that we have come to associate with his poetry:
How the crowd rolls along! There comes the journeyman mason (we know him by his limy dress) and his wife – she bearing a little white basket on her arm. […] Notice that prim, red‐cheeked damsel, for whom is being weighed a small pork steak. She is maid of all work to an elderly couple, who have sent her to purvey for their morrow’s dinner. […] With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man. He is dressed in a shabby suit, and no doubt will look long and watchfully before he spends the two cent pieces to which his outlay is limited.
(Quoted in in Fishkin 1985: 16)
Characteristic of the flâneur, Whitman takes the ordinary sight of a city market and asks us to consider a series of unremarkable figures – an overworked maid, a limestone‐smeared mason, a shabbily dressed middle‐aged man – with the same care and attention that we would give to a work of art. A number of immediate parallels emerge with the Whitman of “Song of Myself” who similarly invites us to experience the city as a site of beauty and awe. As the speaker in “Song of Myself” passes through the city streets, for example, Whitman equates the music of the opera with the sounds he hears emanating from a carpenter’s shop, writing, “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, / The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp” (Whitman 2002: 36). He continues in this way for over 60 lines of poetry, noting in wonder the presence of people from across the social spectrum: laborers (“jour printer,” “machinist,” “paving man”); social outcasts (“lunatic,” “prostitute,” “opium‐eater”); slaves (“quadroon girl […] sold at the auction‐stand”); and patrons of the arts (“connoisseur [in] the exhibition‐gallery”) (Whitman 2002: 36–39). The poet who hears music in “The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot‐soles, talk of the promenaders” finds a similar beauty in his fellow citizens regardless of their wealth or status (Whitman 2002: 32).
In addition to everything that Whitman learned from journalists and flâneurs about how to capture the enduring beauty of an otherwise mundane city, he also took from his time with the newspapers several important lessons about the unforgiving nature of the publishing industry – lessons that would prove immensely valuable as he attempted to navigate a changing literary marketplace. Hans Bergmann argues that Whitman’s experience with the antebellum newspaper industry taught him that writing was a commodity to be bought and sold, and that writers themselves were an expendable source of labor. He writes, “in the boom and bust of market‐society newspapers Whitman did not succeed in attaching himself to a particular paper for long. […] New York newspapers rarely provided steady work, and journalists were part of the shifting workforce that served all the new entrepreneurial businesses” (Bergmann 1995: 70). Walter Benjamin similarly linked the work of the nineteenth‐century flâneur to the appetites of consumers in a market society, writing, “As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the marketplace. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer” (Benjamin 1969: 170–171). The same Whitman who learned from years of journalistic flânerie how to render the sensuous life of the city as art was also forced to acknowledge that publishing a book of poetry in the most capitalistic city on earth would require him to confront the demands of the literary marketplace.
To begin with, when he was unable to find a publisher for the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman paid out of his own pocket to have 800 copies of the book printed and bound. The small, family‐run print shop in Brooklyn that Whitman hired to produce Leaves of Grass was, according to Ed Folsom, “hardly set up to publish books at all,” given that the majority of their business came from printing legal forms (Folsom 2007: 13–15). Whitman’s budget was tight. He saved money by printing on the same paper used for legal forms that was already on hand in the print shop, which gave the 1855 Leaves of Grass its distinctive quarto size. He claimed to have hand‐set some of the type himself, and it appears that when he caught a typographical error on a page coming hot off the press (the word “and” misspelled “adn”) he kept and later bound the pages with the error on them rather than pay to reprint corrected pages (Folsom 2007: 13, 19–20). Antebellum publishing was on its way to becoming the compartmentalized industry that we recognize today, with different groups of professionals devoted to writing, editing, proofreading, printing, binding, distributing, promoting, and selling books. Whitman, in contrast, took on all of these roles virtually by himself.
As a result, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is an idiosyncratic little book. It begins with a long, rambling preface that Whitman printed as parallel columns running down the page, harkening back to the look and feel of the city newspapers where he cut his teeth as a writer. The book lacks a byline, table of contents, or titles for any of the poems – or, rather, six of the volume’s twelve poems carry the heading “Leaves of Grass” while the remaining six are left untitled – and throughout the text standard punctuation is replaced by irregular periods of ellipses. As Justin Kaplan says, “For a book so momentous, there was something casual, ad hoc, even accidental, about its first publication” (Kaplan 1980: 198). Despite the vast quantities of cheap print that filled the city at this time, Whitman’s book would still have been something of a sore thumb alongside the published works that were driving the New York economy. As David Dowling writes, “The business of printing and publishing so dominated New York that by 1860 it was the city’s leading industry” (Dowling 2009: 18). Given the financial pressures that Whitman was under as an independent agent in the rapidly growing publishing industry of antebellum New York, it should come as no surprise that a self‐published book of poems would have a peculiar, even amateurish, aspect.
The entire book is just under 100 pages long, with the first 10 pages given over to a sprawling prefatory statement on the nature of art and the duties of the American poet. Nationalistic phrases common to the “Young America” literary movement of antebellum New York appear throughout the preface: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”; “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people”; and “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (Whitman 2002: 616, 618, 636). Young America was a loose confederation of Manhattan‐based writers and publishers who advocated for literature that exemplified the distinctive aspects of US national culture. Writers such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe were, to varying degrees, connected to the movement at different points in their careers (Miller 1956: 161–173). Whitman’s cheering nationalism in the 1855 preface resonates on similar frequencies. Similarly, the 44‐page poem that would later be titled “Song of Myself” moves back and forth between the streets of New York and the cardinal points of US geography common to the nationalism of Young America – southern plantations, western frontiers, northern farmlands – as if to suggest that New York provides the anchor point that tethers a sprawling nation together. In one moment in particular, Whitman imagines that the entire nation has gathered on Broadway to celebrate Independence Day. Using the idiosyncratic punctuation (strings of ellipses rather than commas) that characterizes the 1855 edition, Whitman writes, “Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gathered …. it is the Fourth of July …. what salutes of cannon and small arms!” and in the same section of the poem he mentions a “cleanhaired Yankee girl,” a Missouri farmer, a Michigan trapper, and hunters along the Tennessee and Arkansas rivers (Whitman 2002: 673).
The other poems in the collection similarly route their thematic concerns through urban imagery. In a poem later entitled “There Was a Child Went Forth,” the child ponders “Whether that which appears so is so …. Or is it all flashes and specks?” before this Neoplatonic quandary is projected onto the fleeting spectacle of a crowded city street: “Men and women crowding fast in the streets … if they are not flashes and specks what are they? / The streets themselves, and the facades of houses …. the goods in the windows, / Vehicles … teams … the tiered wharves, and the huge crossing at the ferries” (Whitman 2002: 746). In another poem, later entitled “The Sleepers,” Whitman seems to echo the concerns at the heart of William Blake’s 1794 poem “London.” But whereas Blake’s poet‐prophet wanders through the midnight streets only to witness the pain and suffering of the people, Whitman is able to see past the heartache of the city and into its ultimately redemptive beauty: “I swear they are all beautiful, / Every one that sleeps is beautiful …. every thing in the dim night is beautiful, / The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace” (Whitman 2002: 729). The lessons that Whitman had learned from the flâneur are on display throughout the 1855 Leaves of Grass as he gazes lovingly upon his fellow citizens: “Sauntering the pavement or crossing the ceaseless ferry, there then are faces; / I see them and complain not and am content with all” (Whitman 2002: 737).
The reviewers of the 1855 Leaves of Grass picked up on the book’s New York origins as well. There were over two dozen reviews published in US and British periodicals, three of which Whitman anonymously authored himself – an act born of equal parts bravura and necessity given that he did not have the support of a formal publishing house to promote or publicize his work. Many of these reviews (including Whitman’s own) highlight the book’s connection to city life. Specifically, reviewers placed Whitman alongside the “roughs” and “loafers” of New York, urban types that often carried a negative connotation among the poetry‐reading public (Reynolds 1995: 106). Whitman identifies himself in the 1855 Leaves of Grass alternately as an urban dandy who loves nothing more than to “loafe at my ease,” and as “of the roughs” – a term used to describe the criminals and lowlifes in New York’s poorest neighborhoods (Whitman 2002: 662, 680). Whitman had learned during his days as a journalist that playing up the more sensationalistic aspects of the story was a surefire way to stand out amid a crowded field of printed texts. When the most popular poet of the day was the eminently respectable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an up‐and‐coming poet who presented himself as an unemployed slacker or a lawless street thug was bound to attract attention.
Whitman’s decision to align himself with these social types caught the eye of more than a few critics. One reviewer, who noted that “Walt Whitman is evidently the ‘representative‐man’ of the ‘roughs’,” went so far as to opine that the author’s portrait included as a frontispiece to the book resembled “the true likeness of half a dozen celebrated criminals” (quoted in Whitley 2010: 159). New York’s “roughs” were held in decidedly low esteem. An 1869 city guidebook said that “A more despicable, dangerous, and detestable character than the New‐York rough does not exist. He is an epitome of all the meannesses and vices of humanity” (Browne 1869: 66). Whitman’s efforts to claim for himself the outlaw swagger of “the rough” was matched by his desire to be seen as a loafing urban dandy, a gentleman of leisure and artistic temperament with all the time in the world “to lean and loafe at my ease …. observing a spear of summer grass” (Whitman 2002: 662). One reviewer agreed, calling him “a perfect loafer” and offering that “The book, perhaps, might be called, American Life, from a Poetical Loafer’s Point of View” (quoted in Reynolds 1995: 346).
Like many other readers, this same reviewer questioned how, precisely, to describe the literary genre in which Whitman was writing. Struggling to find appropriate terms, the reviewer noted: “The body of the volume is filled with ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which are lines of rhythmical prose, or a series of utterances (we know not what else to call them), unconnected, curious, and original” (quoted in Folsom and Price 2005: 59). Despite Whitman’s insistence that he knows what it takes to be “the greatest poet” – a phrase that, along with “the great poets,” he uses over 20 times in the preface – the reviewer prefers to describe his works merely as “utterances” or, at best, as “rhythmical prose.” This same question over what to call Whitman’s literary output was echoed by one of the most enthusiastic, and easily the most famous, of Whitman’s early admirers: Ralph Waldo Emerson. In what must have been a tremendously encouraging moment in his early career, Whitman received a personal letter from the country’s preeminent man of letters congratulating him on having written “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed” (quoted in Whitman 2002: 637). The letter includes passage after passage of seemingly unqualified praise: “I am very happy in reading it”; “I find incomparable things said incomparably well”; “It has the best merits” (quoted in Whitman 2002: 637). The only thing missing from the letter, however, is any indication from Emerson that Whitman’s “wonderful,” “free,” and “brave” book is a book of poetry. Like the reviewer who wondered aloud what type of “utterance” Whitman had offered the world in Leaves of Grass, Emerson stumbles toward his own categorization of the book’s genre before settling on “wit and wisdom” as the best taxonomy for describing its actual content. He never once refers to it as poetry (Grossman 1999: 84–85).
Whitman responded directly to Emerson’s letter – its praise as well as its unspoken criticism – in a variety of ways over the course of the next year. In the fall of 1855 he published the letter (without Emerson’s permission) in the New‐York Tribune in an effort to attract attention and increase flagging sales (Kaplan 1980: 205). The strategy appears to have worked, as the number of reviews increased dramatically after the Emerson letter appeared in the Tribune. Emerson’s approval brought with it the cachet of the entire Boston–Concord literary establishment, which was tremendously important at a moment when New York was still playing second fiddle to the reigning cultural capital of the United States. But Emerson’s praise also threatened to present Whitman as a more conventional writer than he believed himself to be. Without a publishing firm to support him, Whitman worked out a strategy that would allow him to benefit from the considerable cultural capital that Emerson had handed to him without being tied to the particular vision for American poetry espoused by the Boston literati, the Concord Transcendentalists, or Emerson himself.
Whitman’s strategy involved releasing a new and expanded edition of Leaves of Grass the following year. He wrote 20 new poems for the volume and retained, often in modified form, the original 12 as well. He scrapped the 10‐page preface he had written in 1855, and included instead something of an epilogue at the end of the book consisting of Emerson’s letter, a 13‐page open letter reply – beginning, obsequiously, “Here are thirty‐two Poems, which I send you, dear Friend and Master” (Whitman 2002: 638) – and 25 pages of republished reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. The physical format of the book was drastically altered as well, from a slim, oblong volume measuring about 8″ × 11″ to a squat little book at around 3¼″ x 6⅔,″ the spine of which is gold‐stamped with the phrase from Emerson’s letter, “I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R.W. Emerson.” Despite Emerson’s prominent place in the promotional apparatus surrounding the 1856 Leaves of Grass, Whitman works at several levels to distance himself from both Emerson and the Boston sensibilities that he represents. Not only does the open letter advocate for a poetic practice that is “coarse and broad” (Whitman 2002: 641) – something more akin to the language of a New York City rough than a Boston Brahmin – but the title of each poem includes the word “poem” (“Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” “Poem of Women,” “Poem of Procreation,” “Poem of the Proposition of Nakedness”), as if to say to Emerson and anyone else who doubted, “These are poems, not mere ‘wit and wisdom.’ This is what the poetry of the future will look like, and I wrote it first.” As Jay Grossman observes, “The 1856 edition wants to have it both ways (at least): to marshal the full marketing potential of Emerson’s endorsement even while marking its differences from Emerson and ‘traditional’ poetry more generally” (Grossman 1999: 83).
Several of the new poems in the 1856 edition make good on Whitman’s promise to pioneer an innovative brand of poetry that would move beyond nineteenth‐century conventions. One poem in particular did so by celebrating the distinctively New York experience of taking the commuter ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn at the end of the working day. Called “Sun‐Down Poem” in 1856 but later entitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” it has become one of Whitman’s most beloved poems. In it, Whitman returns to the rich urban setting of his earliest pieces of newspaper flânerie: “[W]hat can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast‐hemm’d Manhattan?” he asks, before turning his gaze to the “beautiful hills of Brooklyn” (Whitman 2002: 139). Beyond this joyous celebration of watching the panorama of the city unfold from the vantage point of the East River, Whitman transforms an otherwise mundane evening commute into an opportunity to reflect on the relationships between ferry‐riders as they exchange incidental glances with one another: “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?” he asks, “Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?” (Whitman 2002: 139). This fellow feeling extends across time as well as space, with Whitman imagining New Yorkers decades and even centuries into the future sharing the same experience:
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood‐tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to
the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring‐in of the flood‐ tide, the falling‐back to the sea of the
ebb‐tide.
(Whitman 2002: 136)
Whitman could not foresee that the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge would someday render obsolete the ferry traffic connecting the two boroughs. What he sees instead is a coming together of humanity through a shared experience that breaks down the boundaries between people as effectively as it collapses both time and space. “It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not,” he writes, looking as meaningfully into the eyes of future generations as he does the fellow commuters on the ferry: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” (Whitman 2002: 136). The poem is as powerful a love letter to New York City as anything that Whitman ever wrote. Few people at the time, however, had the opportunity to read it. The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass was both a critical and a commercial failure, with only a half‐dozen or so reviews appearing around the time of its publication and its modest, 1000‐copy print run coming nowhere close to selling out.
Whitman went back to work as a journalist. As early as the spring of 1856 he was editing the Brooklyn Daily Times, which not only gave him a regular paycheck but also, as Karen Karbiener writes, “kept him writing, reading, and in contact with urban culture even as his lack of success as a poet might have taken him off his literary course” (Karbiener 2014: 3). Whitman regularly covered Manhattan cultural events for the Times, which in turn put him into contact with a community of writers, artists, and performers who helped to revitalize his floundering literary career in the months and years leading up to the publication of the third Leaves of Grass in 1860. Sometime during the late 1850s, as Whitman was reviewing theatrical productions and gallery openings for the Times, he discovered a beer cellar a few blocks south of Washington Square Park that had recently become the gathering place for a group of self‐styled bohemian writers and artist. Taking their cue from Henry Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851) – a collection of stories about the bohemian culture of Paris’s Latin Quarter that went on to inspire the opera La Bohème (1896) and much later the Broadway musical Rent (1996) – the United States’ first literary bohemians met at Charles Pfaff’s German beer hall to drink, talk, and plan their takeover of the New York literary world (Levin 2010: 13–69).
Bohemia was a good fit for Whitman. The poet who had aligned himself with the lower‐class sensibility of “the roughs” and the flippant attitude toward industrious labor of “the loafer” found in the bohemians’ willingness to embrace poverty in the name of art everything that made those urban types such compelling figures for him. Not only did the Pfaff’s bohemians bring together the rough’s disdain for highbrow cultural authority with the loafer’s rejection of the bourgeois work ethic, but they also provided Whitman with a level of institutional support that he had never previously enjoyed. Specifically, Whitman’s involvement with Henry Clapp, Jr., the universally recognized “King of Bohemia” and the editor of an ambitious literary weekly called The New York Saturday Press, proved to be absolutely transformative for the poet’s career. As Whitman recollected later in his life,
Henry Clapp was always loyal – always very close to me – in that particular period – there in New York. […] Henry Clapp stepped out from the crowd of hooters – was my friend: a much needed ally at that time (having a paper of his own) when almost the whole press of America when it mentioned me at all treated me with derision or worse.
(Quoted in Traubel 1906: 236)
Clapp’s support for Whitman began in December 1859, when the Saturday Press published “A Child’s Reminiscence,” an early version of the great poem later entitled “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” This was then followed by over a year’s worth of attention to Whitman’s poetry in the form of reviews (both positive and negative) and tributes (both sincere homages and vindictive parodies). Whitman ultimately came to agree with Clapp that any publicity was good publicity, commenting that “Henry was right: better to have people stirred against you if they can’t be stirred for you – better than not to stir them at all” (quoted in Traubel 1906: 237). All told, the Press ran close to 50 items by or about Whitman in 1860 (Gailey 2008: 144). Believing that an avant‐garde poet like Whitman could help to sell an up‐and‐coming literary weekly, Clapp’s strategy was to generate publicity for the entire bohemian coterie by linking Whitman with the Saturday Press. The strategy worked.
In February of 1860, shortly after the Saturday Press published “A Child’s Reminiscence,” the Boston‐based firm of Thayer and Eldridge contacted Whitman with an offer to issue a new edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman jumped at the chance to publish Leaves of Grass with a proper firm and traveled to Boston to oversee production on the book. While in Boston, he received several letters from Henry Clapp asking if Thayer and Eldridge could advance the Saturday Press a few hundred dollars toward future advertising of the new edition of Leaves of Grass. Clapp wasted no time in reminding Whitman of the debt that he owed him for having promoted his work (Gaily 2008: 149–151). While Whitman was happy to oblige the request of his friend from New York, he was much less accommodating with Ralph Waldo Emerson when the Transcendentalist philosopher met with him on the Boston Common and attempted to convince him to remove a sexually explicit group of new poems titled “Enfans d’Adam” from the upcoming edition of Leaves of Grass (Loving 1999: 240–241). Whitman was unmoved by Emerson’s argument that frank depictions of human sexuality would put him “‘in danger of being tangled up with the unfortunate heresy’ of free love” (Loving 1999: 241), and instead held fast to his belief “that the sexual passion […] is inherently legitimate, creditable, not necessarily an improper theme for [the] poet” (quoted in Folsom and Price 2005: 71). Whitman’s refusal to defer to the man whom he had referred to reverentially as “Master” only four years earlier is a testament not only to the integrity of his artistic vision, but also to a shift in the center of literary gravity away from Boston and toward New York. Pfaff’s bohemians counted numerous free‐lovers in their ranks, meaning that even if the Boston literary establishment looked askance at the open depictions of human sexuality in Whitman’s poetry, there would always be support waiting in New York.
The group of poems that Emerson took issue with was central to both the thematic and structural innovations of the 1860 Leaves of Grass. Thematically, the “Enfans d’Adam” poems were part of a larger trend in the new edition to depict images of love and sex. Structurally, the 15 numbered “Enfans d’Adam” poems are organized into a poetic sequence that Whitman referred to as a “cluster.” Whitman wrote 146 new poems for the 1860 edition, 128 of which were divided into seven separate clusters with titles like “Chants Democratic and Native American,” “Messenger Leaves,” and “Thoughts.” These clusters of poems are nestled together like chapbooks within the overarching structure of the larger work, with each separate cluster containing its own thematic emphasis that in turn reinforces the subject of the book as a whole. Whitman said that the theme of the “Enfans d’Adam” cluster was “the amative love of woman,” with amative being a phrenological term for describing sexual or romantic love between men and women. The poems are quite explicit about the mechanisms of procreative, heterosexual sex. In the third and most famous, or notorious, poem in the cluster – untitled in the 1855 edition, “Poem of the Body” in the 1856 edition, and finally entitled “I Sing the Body Electric” – he writes of his “love‐flesh swelling and deliciously aching”:
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white‐blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom‐night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet‐flesh’d day.
(Whitman 2002: 83)
D.H. Lawrence is one of many critics to note that, despite being sexually explicit, these poems would not best be described as “erotic.” Lawrence comments in particular that the women in such poems exist to serve a “function – no more. […] Muscles and wombs: functional creatures” (quoted in Reynolds 1995: 214).
In contrast, the “Calamus” cluster of poems that Whitman wrote as a companion piece to “Enfans d’Adam” focuses on the love between men – following the phrenological principle of “adhesiveness” or “manly attachment” – and is marked by feelings of tenderness and intimacy. In one of the “Calamus” poems, for example, Whitman describes a quiet night spent with a male companion: “For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, / In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me, / And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy” (Whitman 2002: 105). Many of the “Calamus” poems take these intimate expressions of love between men to the streets of New York, where Whitman presents readers with “a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar‐room” that recall both the “roughs” of the 1855 Leaves of Grass and the bohemians at Pfaff’s (Whitman 2002: 112). The men in “Calamus” exchange kisses that range in expression from tokens of friendship and camaraderie – “Yet comes one a Manhattanese and ever at parting kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love, / And I on the crossing of the street or on the ship’s deck give a kiss in return” (Whitman 2002: 108) – to markers of deep commitment: “two simple men I saw to‐day on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends, / The one to remain hung on the other’s neck and passionately kiss’d him, / While the one to depart, tightly prest the one to remain in his arms” (Whitman 2002: 114). Running throughout the “Calamus” poems is the conviction that “the institution of the dear love of comrades” will prove transformative to the nation as a whole:
There shall from me be a new friendship – It shall be called after my name,
It shall circulate through The States, indifferent of place,
It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each other – Compact shall they be, showing new signs,
Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,
Those who love each other shall be invincible,
They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name.
(Whitman 2002: 531)
One of the other new poems for the 1860 edition, “Mannahatta,” identifies New York as the place where Whitman had learned to love both the men of “Calamus” and the women of “Enfans d’Adam” with such ardor and conviction: “The city of such women, I am mad to be with them! I will return after death to be with them! / The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!” (Whitman 2002: 397).
The 1860 Leaves of Grass was both a critical and a commercial success. The initial print run sold out amid largely positive reviews, and Whitman’s publisher began to prepare a second printing only a few months after its initial release (Genoways 2009: 61; Reynolds 1995: 387). Whitman capitalized on his newfound success by writing a poem to commemorate the parade through the streets of Manhattan in honor of the delegation of Japanese ambassadors who were visiting the United States that summer. With a half‐million New Yorkers attending the event and newspapers up and down the East Coast covering the delegates’ every move, the parade presented Whitman with the opportunity to speak on behalf of the entire nation in the voice of the representative American bard – beginning with an anonymous self‐review identifying himself as “An American bard at last!” he had been claiming the title of national poet for himself without having the popular approval to support it (quoted in Whitley 2010: 155). He had the good fortune to publish the poem in the high‐profile New York Times, and later included it in Leaves of Grass as “A Broadway Pageant.” True to form, the poem focuses as much on the New York City setting as anything else. Whitman is enthralled at the spectacle of the parade, which he describes rapturously as the moment “When Broadway is entirely given up to foot‐passengers and foot‐standers, when the mass is densest, / When the façades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time” (Whitman 2002: 203). Whitman goes so far as to attribute the political import of the event as much to New York as to the rest of the nation: “Superb‐faced Manhattan! / Comrade Americanos! to us, then at last the Orient comes. / To us, my city” (Whitman 2002: 204).
Whitman’s celebrations for the success of the 1860 Leaves of Grass would be short lived, however. The start of the Civil War and the economic turmoil that accompanied it were particularly hard on the publishing industry, and the young firm of Thayer and Eldridge soon went out of business (Genoways 2009: 105). The Saturday Press followed suit, leaving Whitman without the strong network of institutional support that had sustained his career at a tenuous moment. But the financial impact that the Civil War made on Whitman’s career was nothing compared to the emotional toll that it took. The poet who had celebrated New York as a place where diverse groups of people could come together in beauty and unity – a place that he called “City of the world! (for all races are here; All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)” – was now filling the same city streets that once echoed the music of the opera and the rhythms of the carpenter’s labor with the beating of the drums of war: “Beat! beat! drums! Blow! bugles! blow!” he wrote in an 1861 poem. “Over the traffic of cities – over the rumble of wheels in the streets; / […] / Then rattle quicker, heavier drums – and bugles wilder blow” (Whitman 2002: 247, 237). In another poem, he fully embraces the change that has come over the city on the eve of the Civil War: “In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine; / War, red war, is my song through your streets, O city!” (Whitman 2002: 247). The soldiers who paraded through the streets of Manhattan were not anonymous faces. George Whitman, Walt’s younger brother, enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 and by the end of 1862 was wounded in battle. Whitman left New York to find his brother in one of the makeshift hospitals set up in Washington, DC, only to remain in the nation’s capital for more than a decade before retiring to the Philadelphia suburb of Camden, New Jersey.
Whitman never lived in New York City again, but he did return on occasion. During a visit in 1870, he recalled being struck by the spectacle of the city that had captured his attention 30 years earlier as a young flâneur for the city papers. He wrote of “The splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, […] the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night,” but the older Whitman was critical of what postwar New York was becoming, and had harsh words for what he considered the city’s “pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity […] abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms […] with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoy’d,) probably the meanest to be seen in the world” (quoted in Brand 1991: 161–162). All three editions of Leaves of Grass that appeared in the years following the Civil War had connections to the New York literary world. The editions of 1867 and 1871 were released by the New York firms of William E. Chapin and J.S. Redfield, respectively, and the 1881 edition was produced by Boston publisher James Ripley Osgood, whom Whitman had first met around the tables of Pfaff’s bar during his bohemian days (Loving 2006: 118). (The fourth and final Leaves of Grass from the postwar years, the “Deathbed Edition” published in Philadelphia in 1891–1892, was a slightly revised reprinting of the 1881 volume rather than a proper edition in its own right.)
By the late 1880s, an aging Whitman who was eager to stay relevant began writing for the New York Herald – a wonderful irony, or, perhaps, fulfillment of prophecy, given that Emerson had earlier characterized the spiritualized flânerie of Whitman’s poetry as “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Gita and the New York Herald” (quoted in Folsom and Price 2005: 25). At the time, the Herald was the most popular paper in the United States, with a circulation approaching 200 000. Whitman had been invited by Herald editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in the concluding months of 1887, to feature his poetry in the daily paper, and in less than six months he published over 30 poems (Lorang 2008:167). One of the great treasures of Whitman’s time at the Herald is the poem “Broadway,” which picks up on themes from many of the city verses that Whitman had written since 1855:
What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!
What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!
What curious questioning glances – glints of love!
Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!
Thou portal – thou arena – thou of the myriad long‐drawn lines and groups!
(Could but thy flagstones, curbs, façades, tell their inimitable tales;
Thy windows rich, and huge hotels – thy side‐walks wide;)
Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
Thou, like the parti‐colored world itself – like infinite, teeming, mocking life!
Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!
(Whitman 2002: 438)
Noting the “hurrying human tides” moving through the streets that had captured his imagination since the earliest version of “Song of Myself” in 1855, Whitman remarks how the city continues to provide him with the opportunity to reflect on the enigmatic nature of his relationships with other people (the “curious questioning glances”) that began in 1856 with “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or the “glints of love” between men in 1860’s “Calamus.” The poem also takes a somewhat somber turn, as the poet who would pass away only four years later wonders aloud if the city will be able to speak for itself once he is no longer able to memorialize: “Could but thy flagstones, curbs, façades, tell their inimitable tales,” he asks, hoping that the “infinite, teeming, mocking life” of the city will live on indefinitely.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 9 (POPULAR POETRY AND THE RISE OF ANTHOLOGIES); CHAPTER 11 (EMILY DICKINSON AND THE TRADITION OF WOMEN POETS).