Leaves of Grass (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

-from a letter to Walt Whitman (July 21, 1855)

CHARLES A. DANA

[Whitman‘s] Leaves of Grass are doubtless intended as an illustration of the natural poet. They are certainly original in their external form, have been shaped on no pre-existent model out of the author’s own brain. Indeed, his independence often becomes coarse and defiant. His language is too frequently reckless and indecent though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind. His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society, and will justly prevent his volume from free circulation in scrupulous circles. With these glaring faults, the Leaves of Grass are not destitute of peculiar poetic merits, which will awaken an interest in the lovers of literary curiosities. They are full of bold, stirring thoughts—with occasional passages of effective description, betraying a genuine intimacy with Nature and a keen appreciation of beauty—often presenting a rare felicity of diction, but so disfigured with eccentric fancies as to prevent a consecutive perusal without offense, though no impartial reader can fail to be impressed with the vigor and quaint beauty of isolated portions.

—from an unsigned article in the

New York Daily Tribune (July 23, 1855)

WALT WHITMAN

An American bard at last! One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded, his posture strong and erect, his voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old. We shall cease shamming and be what we really are. We shall start an athletic and defiant literature. We realize now how it is, and what was most lacking. The interior American republic shall also be declared free and independent....

Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer. Every move of him has the free play of the muscle of one who never knew what it was to feel that he stood in the presence of a superior. Every word that falls from his mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of the old theories and forms. Every phrase announces new laws; not once do his lips unclose except in conformity with them. With light and rapid touch he first indicates in prose the principles of the foundation of a race of poets so deeply to spring from the American people, and become ingrained through them, that their Presidents shall not be the common referees so much as that great race of poets shall.

—from an unsigned review of

Leaves of Grass in United States Review (September 1855)

FANNY FERN

Well baptized: fresh, hardy, and grown for the masses. Not more welcome is their natural type to the winter-bound, bed-ridden, and spring-emancipated invalid. Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious, after the forced, stiff, Parnassian exotics for which our admiration has been vainly challenged.

-from the New York Ledger (May 10,1856)

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

We are to suppose that Mr. Whitman first adopted his method as something that came to him of its own motion. This is the best possible reason, and only possible excuse, for it. In its way, it is quite as artificial as that of any other poet, while it is unspeakably inartistic. On this account it is a failure. The method of talking to one’s self in rhythmic and ecstatic prose is one that surprises at first, but, in the end, the talker can only have the devil for a listener, as happens in other cases when people address their own individualities; not, however, the devil of the proverb, but the devil of reasonless, hopeless, all-defying egotism. An ingenious French critic said very acutely of Mr. Whitman that he made you partner of the poetical enterprise, which is perfectly true; but no one wants to share the enterprise. We want its effect, its success; we do not want to plant corn, to hoe it, to drive the crows away, to gather it, husk it, grind it, sift it, bake it, and butter it, before eating it, and then take the risk of its being at last moldy in our mouths. And this is what you have to do in reading Mr. Whitman’s rhythm.

—from Round Table (November 11, 1865)

HENRY JAMES

The most that can be said of Mr. Whitman’s vaticinations is, that, cast in a fluent and familiar manner, the average substance of them might escape unchallenged. But we have seen that Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance—the life—of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy—such we take to be the author’s argument—but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people. He tells us, in the lines quoted, that the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are everything, and very little at that. A great deal of verse that is nothing but words has, during the war, been sympathetically sighed over and cut out of newspaper corners, because it has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. Whitman’s verse, we are confident, would have failed even of this triumph, for the simple reason that no triumph, however small, is won but through the exercise of art, and that this volume is an offense against art. It is not enough to be grim and rough and careless; common sense is also necessary, for it is by common sense that we are judged. There exists in even the commonest minds, in literary matters, a certain precise instinct of conservatism, which is very shrewd in detecting wanton eccentricities. To this instinct Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste. The point is that it does this on theory, wilfully, consciously, arrogantly. It is the little nursery game of “open your mouth and shut your eyes.” Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense, but never in direct violation of it. Mr. Whitman sits down at the outset and counts out the intelligence.

—from an unsigned review of

Drum-Taps in The Nation (November 16, 1865)

WILLIAM DOUGLAS O‘CONNOR

Walt Whitman’s [Leaves of Grass] is a poem which Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen of naïve literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said.

—from The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (1866)

JOHN BURROUGHS

When Leaves of Grass was written and published, the author was engaged in putting up small frame houses in the suburbs of Brooklyn, partly with his own hands and partly with hired help. The book was still-born. To a small job printing office in that city belongs the honor, if such, of bringing it to light. Some three score copies were deposited in a neighboring book store, and as many more in another book store in New York. Weeks elapsed and not one was sold. Presently there issued requests from both the stores that the thin quarto, for such it was, should be forthwith removed. The copies found refuge in a well-known phrenological publishing house in Broadway, whose proprietors advertised it and sent specimen copies to the journals and to some distinguished persons. The journals remained silent, and several of the volumes sent to the distinguished persons were returned with ironical and insulting notes. The only attention the book received was, for instance, the use of it by the collected attaches of a leading daily paper of New York, when at leisure, as a butt and burlesque—its perusal aloud by one of the party being equivalent to peals of ironical laughter from the rest.

A small but important occurrence seems to have turned the tide. This was the appearance of a letter from the most illustrious literary man in America, brief, but containing a magnificent eulogium of the book. A demand arose, and before many months all the copies of the thin quarto were sold. At the present date, a curious person, poring over the shelves of second-hand book stalls in side places of the city, may light upon a copy of this quarto, for which the stall-keeper will ask him treble its first price. Leaves of Grass, considerably added to, and printed in the new shape of a handy 16mo. of about 350 pages, again appeared in 1857. This edition also sold. The newspaper notices of it both here and in Great Britain were numerous, and nearly all of them scoffing, bitter and con demnatory. The most general charge made was that it had passages of serious indelicacy....

The full history of the book, if it could ever be written, would be a very curious one. No American work has ever before excited at once such diametrically opposite judgments, some seeing in it only matter for ridicule and contempt; others, eminent in the walks of literature, regarding it as a great American poem. Its most enthusiastic champions are young men, and students and lovers of nature; though the most pertinent and suggestive criticism of it we have ever seen, and one that accepted it as a whole, was by a lady—one whose name stands high on the list of our poets. Some of the poet’s warmest personal friends, also, are women of this mould. On the other hand, the most bitter and vindictive critic of him of whom we have heard was a Catholic priest, who evoked no very mild degree of damnation upon his soul; if, indeed, we except the priestly official at the seat of government who, in administering the affairs of his department, on what he had the complacency to call Christian principles, took occasion, for reason of the poet’s literary heresies alone, to expel him from a position in his office. Of much more weight than the opinion of either of these Christian gentlemen is the admiration of that Union soldier we chanced to hear of, who by accident came into possession of the book, and without any previous knowledge of it or its author, and by the aid of his mother wit alone, came to regard it with feelings akin to those which personal friendship and intercourse alone awaken; carrying it in his knapsack through three years of campaigning on the Potomac, and guarding it with a sort of jealous affection from the hands of his comrades.

-from Galaxy (December 1, 1866)

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Whitman‘s] book, he tells us, should be read “among the cooling influences of external nature”; and this recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, “the huge and thoughtful night.” And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders.

-from Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)

WILLIAM JAMES

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn; hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

-from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

EZRA POUND

His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ’voice triumphant.‘ He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.

-from “What I Feel About Walt Whitman” (1909), in

Selected Prose: 1909—1965 (1973)

D. H. LAWRENCE

Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception, that the soul of man is something “superior” and “above” the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome “superiority” of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.

-from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

LANGSTON HUGHES

Walt Whitman wrote without the frills, furbelows, and decorations of conventional poetry, usually without rhyme or measured pretti ness. Perhaps because of his simplicity, timid poetry lovers over the years have been frightened away from his Leaves of Grass, poems as firmly rooted and as brightly growing as the grass itself. Perhaps, too, because his all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs and freemen, beaming democracy to all, many academic-minded intellectual isolationists in America have little use for Whitman, and so have impeded his handclasp with today by keeping him imprisoned in silence on library shelves. Still his words leap from their pages and their spirit grows steadily stronger everywhere.

—“The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman,” in

I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman (1946)

ALLEN GINSBERG

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.

Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the

supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade

to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past

blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,

what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry

and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching

the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

from “A Supermarket in California” (1955)

PABLO NERUDA

There are many kinds of greatness, but let me say (though I be a poet of the Spanish tongue) that Walt Whitman has taught me more than Spain’s Cervantes: in Walt Whitman’s work one never finds the ignorant being humbled, nor is the human condition ever found offended.

-from “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age” in

the New York Times (April 14, 1972)

ALICIA OSTRIKER

But what moves me, and I suspect other American women poets, is less the agreeable programmatic utterances than the gestures whereby Whitman enacts the crossing of gender categories in his own person. It is not his claim to be “of the woman” that speeds us on our way but his capacity to be shamelessly receptive as well as active, to be expansive on an epic scale without a shred of nostalgia for narratives of conquest, to invent a rhetoric of power without authority, without hierarchy, and without violence. The omnivorous empathy of his imagination wants to incorporate All and therefore refuses to represent anything as unavailably Other. So long as femaleness in our culture signifies Otherness, Whitman’s greed is our gain.

—from “Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America,” in

The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman (1992)

QUESTIONS

2. In 1882 the district attorney of Boston, Oliver Stevens, sent publisher James R. Osgood an order to stop publication of Leaves of Grass on the grounds that it violated “the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature.” Do you see any lines in Leaves as obscene or, in any case, as an outrage to public decency? You may want to examine closely the poems Osgood wanted Whitman to remove or change, such as “A Woman Waits for Me,” “Spontaneous Me,” and “The Dalliance of the Eagles.”