2019 marks the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman, America’s literary radical and great poet of democracy. His slim, self-published (and largely self-designed, typeset, and distributed) 12 poem Leaves of Grass was printed in Brooklyn on July 4th 1855 out of a small shop owned by the Rome brothers on Fulton and Cranberry streets. The first edition of Leaves of Grass listed no author name on its title page. Instead, on its frontispiece was included a portrait of its swarthy creator - hat cocked to one side, one hand in a pocket, the other on his hip, slouchy, bearded, dressed in a working man’s clothes with shirt collar widely unbuttoned and eyes staring straight ahead as if daring the reader to engage.
And though it still vibrates with a revolutionary energy well over a century and a half after its inaugural edition, the few first readers of Leaves of Grass largely dismissed it as the product of a disturbed mind. The handful of reviews it received declared it vulgar, disjointed, sinful, and pretentious. The Saturday Review recommended burning the book. Calvin Beach, after admitting to having scanned just a few lines, was so personally offended by what he read that he suggested in The New York Saturday Press that Whitman should commit suicide by throwing himself off a cliff into the ocean. A slightly softer, if no less damning take, from the Dublin Review cast the unusual collection of poems as “a farrago of rubbish,—lucubrations more like the ravings of a drunkard, or one half crazy, than anything which a man in his senses could think it fit to offer to the consideration of his fellow men.” One can readily imagine a frustrated mid-19th century reviewer paging back to Whitman’s frontispiece portrait after reading lines like “Loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous” to look into the confident, daring eyes of the 37 year-old poet to wonder, What on earth were you thinking?
Whitman’s poetic universe contained everything and everyone, he plucked subjects from his own time and, more ambitiously, from all times before and after. He wrote about the opera and ship building, freckles and beards, benevolent societies and the soul, farmers and the odor of hair, Brooklyn and Mannahatta, suicide and the heat and electricity of city crowds, the “Goods of guttapercha or papiermache” and sex. Quite a bit of sex. Whitman collapsed the distance between high culture and the unsung daily rituals of the masses; declared equally beautiful the ancient mystery of the limitless soul and the ineluctable fact of our corporeal yearnings, expulsions, and decay. To Whitman, all of it was magnificent. Contained in all things, at all times, are the faint murmurings of whatever ancient spirit nudged this world into being - and the poet’s job is to be curious, to listen, and to write it all down.
In the year of his 200th birthday, I wonder how Walt Whitman would use our libraries if he were alive today. He’d no doubt be one of our most frequent, and vocal members. He’d know the names of every librarian, custodian, literacy instructor, and volunteer in this place. And I’d likely get a few calls and emails regarding this curious Brooklynite.
He’d stroll through our stacks – checking out armloads of books, hanging around the reference desk peppering our librarians with oddball questions, asking for book recommendations (and no doubt offering some of his own), sharing with strangers sudden musings on phrenology or mycology or swim bladders or metempsychosis, launching unprovoked into recitation of Shakespeare soliloquies, volunteering to lead a conversation group for new Americans, getting lost in our Brooklyn Daily Eagle Archive, recording a podcast in our studio, donating books to our jail libraries, soap boxing and arguing into the small hours of the morning at our annual Night of Philosophy, taking a social media class to learn how to Tweet at Oscar Wilde, spending hours with our musical score collection, being one of the first people at the door waiting for us to open in the morning, and one of the last to leave at night. Walt would be one of our favorites. He’d urge us to be better. He’d demonstrate empathy, curiosity, unflagging commitment to intellectual freedom, and he would demand that we do the same. This place of debate and critical thinking, of research and culture, of inclusive community and radical empathy - our public libraries were made for Walt Whitman.
The truth is Walt is already strolling through our stacks. I see Walt in so many of our library patrons. I see him in our omnivorous readers and his spirit is in the curious strangeness of some of our reference questions. He emerges in the research of the autodidacts and shares a seat among adults learning to read. A few Whitmans have joined our 1984 book club, and Whitman surely volunteers in our Books by Mail service for homebound seniors. I encounter the curiosity, empathy, love and wisdom of Whitman in our library staff. And for the poet who spent a great deal of his adult life caring for others (particularly wounded soldiers during and after the American Civil War), he would have found great affinity of spirit in an institution and profession whose currency is empathy, and one of its guiding principles, inclusion.
The poems collected in this commemorative Walt Whitman e-book were specially chosen by Brooklyn librarians and archivists. The accompanying photographs were similarly curated and sourced from our Brooklyn Collection archive. These are some of our favorite Whitman poems, and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do. We envision these poems being pulled up on one’s phone or other device while traveling across the city, or sitting in the park, or waiting in line for a bagel. We hope this makes it easier to handily carry the universe in your coat pocket and, as Walt recommends, “to read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life.”
Nick Higgins
Chief Librarian, Brooklyn Public Library