I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
On July 4th, 1855, a skinny green book was born that would change the course of American poetry, and nudge America itself towards self-recognition. It was the first edition of Leaves of Grass, self-published (with some friends) by Walt Whitman, and meant from the beginning to be one long growing poem. He saw his great plan through, and at the end the slim first volume had grown to a hefty tome, perhaps the quintessential poem about our country. At his death, four decades later, he was satisfied and content, though still relatively poor and unknown: He had a publisher and some influential fans, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Toward the end of his life he wrote, “The last two days have been faultless in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two more perfect days, and I have enjoy’d them wonderfully. My health is somewhat better, and my spirit at peace.”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Whitman (1819-1892), and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) are the three pillars of American poetry, and all three of them died little known and unappreciated. The book club editions of their work came long after they were gone. One might think, why would anyone choose to be a poet? Such an impractical choice! Myriad reasons and deficiencies must enter in — but Whitman felt he had actually been chosen.
In 1824 President James Monroe invited General Lafayette, the French hero of our Revolution, to America, thanking him for his services (not to mention his money) that our budding democracy dearly needed. Lafayette, who had a genius for making good decisions, visited all 24 states, and did one more great thing for America. Marching through New York City, the hero lifted randomly out of the cheering crowd little six-years-old Walt Whitman, and carried him for a while. Whitman’s liberal father had brought his son to the parade, and Whitman often looked back to that time as the anointing of the future poet of America. A child of immigrants from a working-class family in the most electrifying city in the country, whose family was so patriotic that Walt, who was named after his father, had three younger brothers named George Washington Whitman, Andrew Jackson Whitman, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman: Lafayette had made the perfect choice.
Born in 1819, the “good gray poet,” as he was called by William Douglas O’Connor in a pamphlet written in 1866, would undoubtedly smile at how widely his 200th birthday is being celebrated this year. How he would look at what our American democracy has become is another matter.
On this 4th of July, while Trump was bloviating in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I reread one of my favorite sections from Leaves of Grass, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” written in memory of Abraham Lincoln. It still takes my breath away.
Walt Whitman, who was gay but loved everybody, and especially immigrants, was the most patriotic of our poets. Dickinson looked deep inside and found her soul (“Hope is thing with feathers—/That perches in the soul—”); Poe also plunged inward, and faced his nightmares (“‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!’). But Whitman looked inside and outside, and discovered America. Everything he saw, thought and felt he recorded in Leaves of Grass. In a way, and on purpose, he felt he was America. At the end of his long book, he wrote:
Camerado! This is no book;
Who touches this, touches a man;
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you;
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.
—both quotes from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
This article appears in Jul 11-18, 2019.