Galileo’s Mistake

WELL BEFORE THE WORLD WIDE WEB came into existence, books had begun to migrate from paper to digital form. Today, many of the classic works of literature — works whose copyright protection has expired, such as Crime and Punishment and Alice in Wonderland — are freely available for downloading and printing. No one, however, is yet sure whether people will want to read online, how the online reading experience will differ from earlier, paper-based practices, or whether we should ultimately care. It may be too early for definitive answers to such questions, but it isn’t too early to reflect on our own experience of particular works. So in just this spirit of concrete exploration, I want to have a look at one particular work, which began its life as a printed book and now can also be found on the Web.

The book I have in mind is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, undoubtedly one of the great works of American literature. It is a work that was guaranteed to shock its first readers, in 1855, who encountered these opening lines:

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

With this bold announcement, the author had clearly broken with poetic tradition. The lines were written in free verse, and their subject matter — the poet himself, his body, his sensual desires — violated the social and literary norms of the day. And who was he, anyway? To the extent that he had a presence in the public arena, it was as a hack journalist, the author of mediocre and often inflammatory prose. What’s more, the man who published these lines at the age of thirty-five was still living at home and sleeping in the same bed with his feebleminded brother, George.

Ever since Whitman made this extraordinary appearance, scholars and critics have been at pains to explain how this third-rate writer could become a literary genius, capable of producing a poem that, for one commentator at least, ranks as “the greatest poem ever written by an American.”¹ For some, the explanation is quite mundane. In Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, Paul Zweig traces Whitman’s early experiments in form and content that prepared the ground for his surprising emergence.²

But for others, there is an air of the mystical about this emergence, which is in keeping with the prophetic tone and content of some of Whitman’s poems. Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to a reprint of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, argues that Whitman had had a powerful religious experience, a mystical insight into cosmic unity, in 1853 or 1854, just a year or two before he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. “Such ecstasies,” says Cowley, “consist in a rapt feeling of union or identity with God (or the Soul, or Mankind, or the Cosmos), a sense of ineffable joy leading to the conviction that the seer has been released from the limitations of space and time and has been granted a direct vision of truths impossible to express.”³ It was such an experience, according to Cowley, that laid the ground and supplied the energy for Leaves of Grass. Whitman is describing just such an experience in “Song of Myself,” Cowley believes, when he says:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and
knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . and the women my sisters and lovers.⁴

In the end, no one can say with certainty whether these poems emerged as the result of mundane experimentation or mystical insight — or perhaps through a combination of the two. But it is clear that the subject matter of these poems is at once both mundane and mystical, and that the two are inseparable for Whitman. It is his gift to see the transcendent in the ordinary and to speak to us in ways that can invoke this awareness in us as well. The poet looks at the smallest and most ordinary of things — a blade of grass, refuse in the street — with an eye tuned to its fullness and mystery

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;

I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.

Unlike the earlier cash register receipt, there is nothing arbitrary about my decision to write about this particular book. Of the books that have shaped my life, none has been more important than Leaves of Grass. I have been reading Walt Whitman’s great nineteenth-century work of poetry for close to forty years. But I should probably say I have been reading in it: I have never actually traversed it cover-to-cover; instead I have dipped into it over the years, finding poems appropriate to my age and interests. In the first years, poems like “O Captain! My Captain!” — with its conventional rhyme and meter, and relatively straightforward subject matter — were most accessible to me. Early on, though, I was also drawn, however unconsciously, to the poet’s exuberant voice, his wild declarations and untamed lists. When he turned his gaze on New York City, where I grew up, he assured me that the magical qualities I found there were known to others as well, and in other eras than my own. It was only in later years, as I matured, that his meditations on death, inseparable from his celebrations of life, began to speak to me.

But when I say this book is special, I mean not only the work of literature in some generic sense but one particular copy, which is before me now. For this is my childhood copy, a hardcover book given to me by my Uncle Jack when I was perhaps ten or twelve years old. There have of course been many editions of Leaves of Grass, and many more are sure to follow. A number are currently in print and easily available: the Modern Library edition in hardcover; and the Bantam Classic, the Penguin Classics, and the Wordsworth Poetry Library editions in paperback. I have copies of all of these, as well as copies of several older, out-of-print editions. While these are all useful to me in various ways — they help satisfy my interest in comparative study and lay scholarship — it is always my childhood copy to which I return for nourishment. It is this copy that I read.

But it is surely a sign of the times that Leaves of Grass is now available in yet another format, not just in another edition: it is on the Web. As I write, the opening lines of “Song of Myself” are visible in a Web browser running on my laptop. Placing both my childhood copy and this new online version side by side on my desk gives me a chance to reflect on them in relation to one another. What strikes me first is how vastly different they are in gestalt. They are both ostensibly doing the same piece of work, making Whitman’s poems available to me, and they do this through essentially the same communicative mechanism, placing typographic letterforms on a flat surface. Yet they are markedly different in form and, what may come as more of a surprise, in content. Although each has its source, ultimately, in Whitman’s creative spark, they are products of different choices made not only by Whitman but by any number of interme- diaries who have had a hand in shaping what is before me now. It should hardly be surprising, then, if my experience of them is different as well.

My childhood copy comes from an illustrated edition produced by the Peter Pauper Press. The Peter Pauper Press was started by Peter Beilenson in the late 1920s in Mount Vernon, New York, and was taken over by his wife, Edna, after his death in 1962. It was known for books like mine, lovingly yet inexpensively prepared. They typically sold for one or two dollars. Peter Beilenson credited his wife with bringing an integrated sense of color and design to the books they produced, and this is evident enough in my copy of Leaves of Grass. The covers are bound in dark green paper as a background for repeating images of white and light green blades of grass. The top edges of the pages are tinted green, and the headbands — decorative stitching at the head and tail of the spine, which also provide structural support — have an alternating pattern of green and white thread.

The book’s ten or so drawings — pastels printed in green ink — are by the Kansas artist John Steuart Curry, and were presumably commissioned for it. They are straightforward and, to my mind at least, unimaginative. The illustration for “Song of Myself” shows a barefoot man, in workers clothes, leaning up against a tree while reading a book. All the drawings have a dreamy quality, suggesting that this is the product of an idle and harmless dreamer. Looking at them, you would never suspect that it might instead be the work of a prophet, or of a radical poet breaking with traditional forms, or of a sensualist living outside the bounds of normative sexuality. There is nothing here to offend — or, for that matter, to excite — anyone.

As for the text printed in this edition, it is based on Whitman’s 1891 edition, the so-called deathbed edition. When reading Whitman, I’ve discovered, it helps to know something about the edition you have in hand. There can be substantial textual differences among editions, a good deal of which are due to the changes Whitman made over the years. During his lifetime, he published seven separate editions of Leaves of Grass: in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1872, 1876, and 1891. The text of each edition differed in significant ways from its predecessors. The editions grew in size as Whitman added new poems. The first edition of 1855 had a mere twelve poems, while the final edition of 1891 had 383. But Whitman also deleted poems, reordered them, grouped them in different ways, gave them titles when first they had none, and sometimes changed them. He even tinkered with the words.

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

The opening lines of “Song of Myself” appear in the first edition as I’ve rendered them on the first page of this chapter. But in my childhood copy (see facing page), based on the 1891 edition, a new phrase, “and sing myself,” has been added to the first line:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

In the first edition, “Song of Myself” appears first in the collection, but it is as yet untitled. In the next edition, a year later, it acquires a title, “A Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.” This changes to “Walt Whitman” in the 1860 edition and ends up, in the 1891 edition, with the title “Song of Myself,” which has since become its standard name.⁵ The poem also changes its location, losing its position as our introduction to the poet. By the deathbed edition (and also in my childhood copy), it appears a good twenty poems into the work.

Changes of this kind are hardly atypical in works of literature. Indeed, they can be even more dramatic. Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” for example, first published as a poem of thirty lines, later appeared in versions of thirteen, fifteen, and twenty-nine lines, ending up as a poem of only three lines.⁶ Clearly, texts have lives: they change over time, they aren’t fixed forever in stone. We can’t see this if we only stare at one manifestation, one particular application of ink to paper. But if we broaden our gaze to encompass the larger sweep of history, we can see that works on paper exhibit the same “controlled movement” that Bolter wants to attribute to digital works. Of course, we are still within our rights to ask whether or how much such textual changes matter. And in the case of Leaves of Grass specifically, how significant is the addition of a phrase here, the modification of a line there?

For Malcolm Cowley, at least, the changes Whitman made to “Song of Myself” are substantial. He believes they reflect Whitman’s changing relationship to the mystical experience that inspired the poem in the first place. When, in the first version of the opening line, Whitman declares,

the self to which the poet is referring isn’t Walter Whitman, the hack journalist still living at home, but “a dramatized or idealized figure” whose “distinguishing feature is that he has been granted a vision, as a result of which he has realized the potentialities latent in every American and indeed ... in every living person.”⁷ So that when Whitman celebrates “myself,” he is celebrating the divinity within each of us.

But in time, according to Cowley, Whitman was partly misled by his vision. He became inflated with it and began to confuse his small self with the divinity to which he had been given access. In time he also lost the acuity of that original vision. He continued to edit the poem, making seemingly small changes, which together reveal to Cowley a trail of increasing self-involvement and self-aggrandizement. The addition of the phrase “and sing myself” in the first line — which Cowley claims for Whitman would have meant “write a song about myself” — represents a loss of the immediacy of revelation. For now the poet is no longer witnessing and exclaiming, but selfconsciously collecting material for his song. (This one observation would hardly make his case, but Cowley points to a number of other changes to support his thesis.)

Whether or not Cowley is right, surely Whitman’s continuing revisions reflect a changing conception of the poems, an ongoing process of reinterpretation. Cowley is not alone in thinking that Whitman’s changes represent a dimming of the original poetic insight, whatever its origin. “As he grew older,” Stephen Mitchell says in the introduction to his own edited version of “Song of Myself,” “his insight faded, and with it the vivacity of his words. Yet in each successive edition he kept tinkering with ‘Song of Myself and the other early poems — adding, deleting, revising. And while certain of these revisions are excellent, most of them are disastrous.“⁸

My childhood copy is the product of Whitman’s rethinking and reinterpreting, for better or worse. But it is equally the product of the Beilensons’ hands, their design aesthetic, and their recasting of the poems as gentle, harmless reveries. To look at my copy in this way is therefore to see it as the product of many hands, and the embodiment of a number of interpretations, not all completely aligned. It is also to see it less as an isolated, static object than as a constituent in an ongoing process of literary production, revision, and renewal.

The online version of Leaves of Grass is another thread in this same process. That it is on the Web is due to the efforts of a man named Steven van Leeuwen. When van Leeuwen was a librarian at Columbia University, he began making digital copies of various literary works whose copyright protection had expired, calling this collection the Bartleby Library and himself its editor and publisher. It is an eclectic collection, apparently still growing, made up of works by Sherwood Anderson, T S. Eliot, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gertrude Stein. In 1997, van Leeuwen moved the collections off Columbia’s server, creating bartleby.com as an independent Web site.

Van Leeuwen’s online Leaves of Grass is based on a print edition published in 1900 by David McKay To create this digital copy, van Leeuwen scanned and OCRed the text of the poems (performed optical character recognition on digital images of the pages), coding the resulting text in HTML for display on the Web. The print edition includes images of Whitman and facsimiles of notes in #c3s own handwriting. Van Leeuwen scanned these too, and when I first began examining the online version, they were available for viewing as bitmapped images, along with a scanned image of the title page of the 1900 edition.

As it happens, van Leeuwen’s choice of this particular print edition has been somewhat controversial. The problem is that Mc Kay based his edition loosely and unsystematically on Whitman’s 1871 edition. In a review of Whitman materials on the Web, Charles Green makes the following points about Mc Kay’s edition, by way of criticizing van Leeuwen’s choice of texts:

The edition published by Mc Kay in 1900 ... is actually based upon an edition published by Whitman in 1871. What makes the text questionable ... is that Mc Kay took liberties with this unauthorized edition, shifting the placement of some poems, and omitting others. The . . . Bartleby Library’s online text of Leaves of Grass, then, presents an arrangement that reflects neither Whitman’s wishes in 1871, nor his final wishes. In fact, it presents a text different in arrangement than anything Whitman ever produced.⁹

Mc Kay had known Whitman personally, and had printed and distributed earlier editions of his works, including the deathbed edition. In the preface to the 1900 edition, Mc Kay refers to himself as Whitman’s “most successful publisher.” (He was evidently as capable of self-promotion as Whitman.) But in attempting to produce this new edition after the poet’s death, he ran afoul of copyright. In the Library of Congress, I inspected a copy of this edition that had been owned by Thomas B. Harned, one of Whitman’s literary executors. On the inside cover Harned has written: “When D. Mc Kay was refused a renewal of his contract, he printed this edition of Leaves of Grass, using all matter where the copyright had expired.” Mc Kay himself acknowledges this, somewhat indirectly, in the preface when he says: “For any errors of commission I accept all responsibility; for those of omission (and there are a few), conditions which I could not control are alone responsible, a fact which time will yet correct.”

Unable to use the text of the 1891 edition, which he himself had published, he resorted to the text of the 1871 edition, which no longer enjoyed copyright protection. To this base text he added other material: footnotes giving variant readings of words and phrases as they appeared in editions earlier than 1871; poems not found in these earlier editions; and personal remembrances of his relationship with Whitman. In printing “Song of Myself” for example, he renders the first verse as:

The atmosphere is not a perfume — it has no taste of the distillation — it is odorless;

My respiration, and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs;

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the bam;

The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loosed to the eddies of the wind;

The opening lines of “Song of Myself” as they appear in the Bartleby Library’s online edition of Leaves of Grass.

I celebrate myself;

And what I assume you shall assume;

For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

These lines reproduce the text of the first edition — with three exceptions: semicolons have been substituted for commas at the end of the first two lines, and a comma has been added in the middle of the third. Mc Kay doesn’t acknowledge these changes; he generally only notes variant words and phrases. It is perhaps more interesting that he fails to acknowledge the later addition of the phrase “and sing myself,” a change he would have known only too well. To do so with a footnote, I’m guessing, would either have constituted a violation of copyright or would have forced him to make explicit his strategy for dodging it.

Mc Kay renders the title of the poem as “Walt Whitman.” He fails to note that the poem was untitled in the first edition, or that it had other titles in earlier and later editions. This is curious, since in the preface Mc Kay says: “As Walt Whitman’s publisher, I was frequently called upon to give information concerning poems whose headings had been changed. These have been noted, and in the alphabetical list at the end of the volume all such titles appear, with reference to the present title.” Not so, in this case.

These are just a few of the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in Mc Kay’s edition. To modern scholars, trained to produce painstakingly precise critical editions, this must be a nightmare, and seen as not just bad scholarship but a moral lapse. As far as I know, this was the first version of Leaves of Grass to appear on the Web, and if one imagines future generations taking this text as gospel, it isn’t hard to understand the reaction of the scholarly community.¹⁰

But, frankly, I am less shocked than interested. What strikes me most about this edition is the strong personal element throughout — the person of Mc Kay as much as of Whitman. This is Mc Kay’s tribute to Whitman, as he makes clear in the preface:

Walt Whitman was an [sic] unique character. As his most successful publisher I saw much of him, and learned to love his sweet and kindly nature. No one could enter the charmed circle of his friendship without feeling the mastery of his personality. This book, the work of my own hands, I give as a token of those never-to-be-forgotten days. To have met Whitman was a privilege, to have been his friend was an honor.

The illustrations make it all the clearer how much this book is Mc Kay’s testament to Whitman, a labor of love and ego that celebrates and advertises the publisher’s relationship with the poet (or, perhaps more to the point, the publisher’s perception of his relationship with the poet). Included are photographs of Whitman at different ages, several of them inscribed to the publisher. One of them shows an elderly, white-haired Whitman sitting in an ornate, straight-backed chair, holding a cane in his right hand, his left hand resting inside his jacket pocket. The inscription reads, “David Mc Kay / from his friend / Walt Whitman.” More than the words, I am struck by the placement of the photograph in the book. It appears on the left-hand page facing the title page, the same position in which, forty-five years earlier, a photograph of the unnamed author appeared in the first edition. Subtly and perhaps unconsciously, Mc Kay seems to be claiming a greater part in the production of Whitman’s work. And when you open the volume to the midpoint, there on facing pages are a note Whitman wrote to Mc Kay and another inscribed photograph of the poet. At the balance point of the book, you find poet and publisher metaphorically embracing.

Van Leeuwen’s digital rendering maintains this character, but in a somewhat diluted form. The poems, the preface, the illustrations are still there, but a transformation has taken place, the result of van Leeuwen’s efforts, as well as of the medium in which he is working. When I first came across this digital Leaves of Grass, I browsed through it, eager to get a feel for it. I quickly found the images, most of them located on a single Web page. Lovely as it was to find them, I was also left vaguely disoriented and discomfited, unable quite to grasp their place, literally and figuratively, in the overall design. They seemed to float oddly unanchored in (cyber)space. It was this discomfort that sent me in search of a print copy in the end I found several: one in the Columbia University Library’s rare-book room, a second in the Library of Congress, and a third in a used-book shop. It was only when I held the physical volume in my hand, when I turned the pages, when I felt as well as saw the location of the images, that I was able to grasp, quite literally, the full impact of Mc Kay’s design.

Without question, van Leeuwen, like David Mc Kay and the Beilensons before him, has left his mark, but it is an indecisive one. In transposing Mc Kay’s design to the Web, he has partly dismantled it. Whereas the Beilensons might be accused of imposing a lukewarm interpretation on the poems, and Mc Kay criticized for egotistical and sloppy work, still their products are coherently personal and intelligible. Van Leeuwen, by contrast, fails to understand that a new edition, digital or otherwise, is inevitably a new interpretation, and has made design decisions without a larger literary plan.

I should mention that van Leeuwen’s Leaves of Grass has undergone a dramatic change since I began looking at it: all the facsimile materials from Mc Kay’s edition have disappeared. When I first noticed this, I sent e-mail to Van Leeuwen, asking him what had happened. He explained that so long as Columbia University was hosting his Bartleby Library for free, he hadn’t needed to worry about the cost of online storage. But having gone independent, he was now forced to pay for it. “We’ve been forced to minimize the graphics for economic consideration,” he said, expressing the hope that the images would return shortly More than a year later, though, they still haven’t reappeared. (It is tempting to see this loss as unique to the digital world, where commitments to sameness and preservation are partial at best. But I would point out that the copy of Mc Kay’s 1900 edition that I found in a secondhand bookstore lacks the photographs at midpoint, presumably also the result of an economic decision — to issue a later, less costly printing.)

Clearly, the two copies of Leaves of Grass before me now are the product of significantly different historical processes. And the more I understand those processes, the better I can account for the differences in form and content, in illustration and interpretation, of the two copies. But no catalog of the relations between them will, in itself, predict or explain how I, or anyone else, for that matter, is likely to read and experience them. It is a question not just of the differences between the two copies, but of which differences really matter. And this can only be determined by real readers in real situations. If each edition and each copy of an edition has its own unique characteristics and its own life history, then surely so does each reader. Each act of reading will be a meeting of one particular reader with one particular copy

So let’s consider one real reader: me. I have a strong preference for the bound volume — and for my childhood copy, in particular — over the online edition. This should hardly be surprising. But why? Is it just a sentimental attachment to books, or is there something more?

In his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde explores the work of art as a participant in a system of gift exchange. The idea of gift exchange comes out of the early anthropological literature. Bronislaw Malinowski, in studying the people occupying a group of South Sea islands, had discovered that they engaged in an elaborate exchange of armshells and necklaces. They never kept or owned these prized objects; instead they were bound by tradition to pass them on, thus forming a circuit of gifts. For the outsiders who first observed such practices, it was evident, says E. E. Evans-Pritchard, a social anthropologist, “how much we [westerners] have lost, whatever we may otherwise gained, by the substitution of a rational economic system for a system in which exchange of goods was not a mechanical but a moral transaction, bringing about and maintaining human, personal relationships between individuals and groups.”¹¹

In his book, Hyde applies this notion to the work of art in the West, seeing the artist as someone who by nature lives in a gift economy but is forced to operate in a market economy (to sell his works) in order to “earn” a living. Hyde points to the different senses of gift involved in the production and circulation of works of art. The artist, having been granted certain talents and insights (one sense of gift), works from within a gifted state. (A gifted state, according to Hyde, is one in which the artist “is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and . . . bring the work to life”)¹² What he then produces, the work of art, is itself a gift, which, when received by others, its audience, has the potential to put them, too, into a gifted state. Sometimes, says Hyde, “if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives.”¹³

As I see it, Whitman’s gift is his vast embrace, his inclusive stance, which Alfred Kazin calls his “boundless affirmation”:

The whole world of existent phenomena is open to Whitman’s general lovingness, which is boundless affirmation. Nothing may be excluded; nothing is higher or lower than anything else. He is the perfect democrat, in religion as in love and politics. There is no hierarchy in his determination to love everything and everyone in one full sweep.”¹⁴

Whitman’s embrace is broad enough to encompass both body and soul, heaven and hell. “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,” he declares in “Song of Myself” (in my childhood copy). “The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me.” He can embrace and celebrate death as much as life. “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” he asks in the same poem. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” And, perhaps even more startling, good and bad are for him on an equal plane. “What is called good is perfect,” he says in “To Think of Time,” “and what is called bad is just as perfect.”

Surely Whitman is speaking from a gifted state. For in reading him, I feel it. I feel raised up, held in his all-encompassing embrace, and reminded that I too am capable of it. His open, celebratory stance toward the world is available to me too. This is more than an intellectual experience, simply in my head: it is an experience of the whole body. My senses are heightened and my mood may shift, becoming lighter and more joyful. Sometimes, to increase this effect, I will read aloud, feeling the sounds vibrate in my body, much like when I listen to music. I liken this mode of reading to contemplation or meditation.

This mode of reading is supported and enhanced, I have found, by reading Leaves of Grass in book form, and even more so by reading my childhood copy. Why is this?

I would start by noting that Whitman designed his collection as a book. This was the main format available to him for distributing his poems, and he was steeped in the book, both as a member of the culture, as a reader, and as someone with particular professional skills and experience. As a young man, he was a printers apprentice, and his primary work as an adult was as a journalist and newspaper editor. He obviously cared a great deal about how his book turned out, overseeing the printing of the seven editions produced during his lifetime, and possibly even setting some of the type for the first edition. He also designed the title embossed on the green leather cover of the first edition: leafy tendrils intertwined in the hand-drawn letters spelling out “Leaves of Grass.” Given Whitman’s embrace of bodies, of the material dimension of the world, it should hardly be surprising that he would care about the material condition of his poems.

And it is through his book, these “leaves of grass,” that life and death, body and soul, his life and our lives are brought together. Indeed, for me at least, the leaves to which Whitman refers in his title are both the pages of the book and the plant matter from which those pages are made. Throughout the poems, grass functions as a symbol of both life and death, and of their relationship. In “Song of Myself” (my childhood copy) he says, “I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,” while later he refers to it as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” His book is not only a celebration of this reality, the cycle of life and death, but a participant in it. The pages of the book, made from trees no longer living, embody the living voice of the invisible poet, made and kept visible through the magic of writing. And much as the poet has passed on, so too will the pages through which he sings crumble and return to the earth, fertilizing future generations of trees and grass — and poets.

The pages of the book, in other words, exemplify the very concerns of which the poet speaks, in effect amplifying his voice. When I hold the bound volume in my hands, I am aware — through sight, smell, and touch — of the organic process, the slow process of decay, it is undergoing. And this awareness is all the stronger when I read my copy of the Peter Pauper Press edition, which has been my companion all these years. So that when I hold it and read it, I am more in touch — quite literally — with myself, as I am in the moment, but also as I have been in decades past. And, perhaps most important, its signs of aging parallel and reflect my own. To read this poem in this very copy is therefore to be put more fully in contact with my own mortality and the mystery of my own life. This is possible because the book is a tightly integrated physical unity; it is a stable physical object capable of traveling with me through time.

Not so the online edition. If there is a stable, solid, physical object here, it is my laptop, which provides a portal through which I can view not only Leaves of Grass, but airline flight schedules, stock market quotes, movie reviews, and corporate e-mail. The text of the online edition is stable too, in the sense that the server on which the Bartleby Library is located can be expected reliably to deliver up the same text again and again (for some indefinite period of time, at any rate). But whereas text and physical object are inalienably united in the book, they have been pulled apart in the online edition. This has its advantages, to be sure. It means that digital representations of the text can be transported and realized (made visible and real) on any number of surfaces. But it also means that there is no particular and unique object that can be my companion and share my history

I am not suggesting that we pull the plug on the online Whitman, nor am I making an argument for the inherent superiority of books over bytes, or for paper over digital materials. The observations I have offered are quite specific: to one particular work, to two particular copies of this work, to a particular mode of reading, and to one particular person at a particular stage in his life. To vary any of these conditions is likely to result in different preferences. Given a choice, I will choose to read my childhood copy over the online edition, but the online edition has its advantages too. The search capability is certainly superior to what I can do with the book’s index and my limited ability to scan with my eyes. The illustrations in the online edition — sadly no longer available — are to my mind far more interesting and valuable than the tepid drawings in my childhood copy in fact, I feel all the happier for having both the Beilenson and the Mc Kay/van Leeuwen editions available to me. Does one have to win, and the other one lose?

If there is a lesson to be drawn from these observations, it is that in evaluating the relative merits of books and their online counterparts, we must look to their specific material conditions and to ours. We are living through an era in which information — conceived of as abstract, disembodied, and infinitely manipulable — is given pride of place and we are taken to be “information processors.” Under such circumstances, documents — and, most unfortunately, books — come to be treated as information delivery vehicles: useful to the extent that they accurately deliver up their payload. To the extent that digital technologies can perform this particular task better (which typically means faster and cheaper), they are to be preferred.

In the end, I am not so interested in arguing for the superiority of one copy of Leaves of Grass over another, or for one technology over another. Rather, what interests me more is broadening the terms of our collective exploration. If we want to see more fully into the nature of our documents and their enabling technologies, then we may well need to see how form, content, and medium are not-to-be-fully-separated constituents in our lives and in the richness of our experience. And it is perhaps for this reason that I have chosen Whitman’s book as the object of this chapter’s reflection. He is a poet of embodied experience, and his great work is to be experienced through its various bodies and ours. He calls us back to the richness and diversity of our experience, which lies beyond simple generalizations or categorizations.

When I look at Leaves of Grass with the eyes of Whitman, what I see is an ongoing movement, which can be only arbitrarily dated to 1855, and which continues on, today and beyond. It is a movement of inspiration and revelation, realized in various material objects — books and manuscripts — as well as in acts of reading and writing organized around these objects. When I look specifically at these objects — these books and manuscripts — I see both their sameness and also their differences. For each one is an instance of Leaves of Grass, yet all of them are different in endless and ultimately uncategorizable ways. But it isn’t just Leaves of Grass I see this way; it is receipts and handwritten notes and Web pages and videos — all of them, paper and digital forms alike, partaking of the dance of fixity and fluidity, of stasis and change.

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Leases of Grass