Leaves of Grass or, The Epic of the Everyman
"Trough me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating" - Scented Herbage of My Breast, Walt Whitman
That you are here – that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse
— O Me! O Life!
No book has ever been so capable of altering my mood, even against my will. Walt Whitman has created a great sensory experiment with this volume that transcends the literary sphere, as it contains much about philosophy, religion, politics and beyond. Imagine my surprise to discover that this book is neither about leaves nor grass. I mean, Whitman does invoke nature, but these poems are a pure and powerful affirmation of life, a celebration of humanity, of the senses, of the connection between individuals, through an audacious poetic language for its time.
Whitman had a very ambitious project in mind because he wanted to create a kind of new literature that would fit in with the ‘new’ America post-revolution. It wasn't just the desire to exalt democracy, but to inaugurate a way of thinking that suited the idealistic yearnings for freedom, and for that, the poet couldn't restrict himself, he couldn't be bound by trivialities such as ‘decency’ and ‘propriety’. Whitman's America really is the marvellous land of opportunity, but I can't forget that this is the same America portrayed by Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian. It seems like two completely opposite universes, but as the author himself would say, it's a country that contains multitudes.
He was part of Transcendentalism, a philosophical-literary movement that preached a ‘self-sufficient’ individualism (Emerson's ‘self-reliance’), the inherent goodness of nature and physical experience over pure abstract knowledge. Nevertheless, it wasn't this element that made Whitman a great innovator in literature, but rather a bold general detachment from the rules of conventional poetry. In the preface to the 1855 edition, he wrote:
The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good percepts, but is the life of these and much else and is the soul… The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent…Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals… devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward other people… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in words but in the silent lines of its lips and face…
I've read two essays on Whitman by Jorge Luis Borges and Harold Bloom. Despite being entirely different critics, they have an interpretative overlap in observing that there are multiple Whitmans (both in the poem itself and in the popular imagination), confirming once again that he is, indeed, a multitudinous man.
I must admit that, for the first time in my literary life, I disagreed with almost everything Bloom said. He and I have practically antagonistic views of Leaves of Grass (even if we both come from a place of admiration). For example, he ‘doesn't believe’ in Whitman's sexuality, reducing all the poems with this theme to masturbatory fantasies, arguing that the poet never had any real sexual encounters other than with himself. I don't know how anyone can read A Woman Waits for Me or even Song of Myself and think that.
Besides, even though I'm used to the ghost of Freud lurking in everything Bloom writes, in this essay I found the Freudian interpretations of Whitman's ‘oceanic’ poems to be quite a stretch, sometimes overstated. As he himself said, a Freudian reading of Shakespeare is reductionist, but a Shakespearean reading of Freud can be very interesting – the same I would say about Whitman's work. Still, Bloom's observations weren't completely absurd, and I appreciated some things, particularly this comparison to Paradise Lost: ‘Sometimes the Walt of Song of Myself plays Adam in the morning, but quite often he is as deliberately old as Chaos and Night’.
Borges' essay, on the other hand, is incredibly insightful – it's all anyone needs to read to understand Whitman, and this excerpt sums up the poet's intention perfectly, it's a bit long but well worth reading:
Whitman thought of the past as being feudal. He thought of all previous poetry as mere feudalism. I suppose the past is more complex than Whitman thought, but that simplification was good enough for his purposes. And then he discovered, as he could not fail to discover, that in epic poetry (and he was essentially an epic poet-he says this in the very first poem of his Leaves of Grass, in his descriptions), he discovered that in all epic poetry there was a hero, a man standing out from the rest, a king and a conqueror. He thought of Achilles, of Hector, of Aeneas, of Beowulf, of Siegurd, of Roland, of the Cid and so on, and he felt that was the poetry of feudalism. He thought, “I will have to write a poem, a poem of democracy, that is to say, a poem where there shall be no central hero, or rather the central hero shall be everybody, Everyman", to use the old name. As Everyman, as everybody, had to be somebody, Whitman began, strangely enough, with himself.
What surprised and captivated me most about this book was the fact that Whitman displays an extremely seductive and compelling persona in his poems, whether it's real or not we'll never know. I believe he devised a kind of autofiction, exaggerating the splendour of his individual self. This is also Borges' theory, because when we come across Whitman's biography we see a very different man: solitary, self-conscious, ambitious about his literary project. In Leaves of Grass, the lyrical speaker is the prophet of freedom, who is surrounded by the most divine company and exemplary humans, who discard the world of the man of letters in favour of natural experience, as Borges points out:
the picture of Walt Whitman that we get in Leaves of Grass is a picture of a divine vagabond, a man of a large hospitality, a man who feels that he's not able to judge other men. He has to take other men as they come. He has to accept them, as he accepts the universe. And also a man beyond good and evil, not in the sense of being a mean man or a doer of wicked things, but rather in the sense of repairing from morality, except perhaps in his own case. We think of Walt Whitman as essentially a friend; we think of him as essentially good, though not worried by any ethical scruples about right or wrong.
What Borges argues, which I agree, is that Whitman stood out in the poetic canon precisely because he didn't try to be that different. As stated above, he tried to write on behalf of everyone and for everyone, repeating to us that his feeling, his experience, his being, was not divided from the whole of humanity, but rather that we are all connected by a single greater will or consciousness. And this is intensified when Whitman speaks directly to us, to the reader. Numerous times Whitman uses ‘you and me’ ‘you, reader’ ‘for the reader’ etc. creating a close relationship in line with the level of intimacy of the poems – the poet shares his desires, memories and passions as if we were in fact his friends, sometimes even lovers.
You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me
(Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition)
Most of the poems are very sensual, in the literal sense, because they constantly evoke the human touch, the rhythm of breathing, walking, the sound of voices, the shapes of the body, etc. In the mid-1800s this was quite controversial, and to complicate even more, there are several homoerotic poems in the Children of Adam section. But Whitman didn’t do it for the sake of shock, on the contrary. It's not a question of shamelessness but of pure honesty in recognising sex as a part of life that deserves to be celebrated as well, even with a kind of innocence that seems to precede shame, as we see in Adam and Eve's dignified nudity in Paradise. For Whitman, Paradise is not lost, it is right here in the present, in America, in the reader's arms.
In this respect, literary critic Jerome Loving says that the narrator of Leaves of Grass is
half body, half soul; but it is the body that animates the soul, not vice versa. Before Whitman, American poetry had cherised too much the soul... the body was the “unregenerate" part, at best the child of Mother Nature and not of God the Father. It was more than a Transcendentalist emblem for Whitman, whose poetry transcends the metaphysical, as it were, to come full circle in the fashion of the life cycle it celebrates... Whitman intended Leaves of Grass as a gift to the reader, something physical (and sensual) as well as thoughtful.
It's interesting to observe a contraction movement in the poem, as if it expands and tightens, given that Whitman switches from moments of profound, direct intimacy with omniscient observations, like a spirit travelling through America. Bloom calls him a ‘passerby’ and often that's exactly what he is. A great example is in The Sleepers, in which in a dream vision he lists scenes of sleeping people and describes their lives, blending them with memories. This poem is curious because it escapes the confident and expansive persona, expressing a lyrical speaker in a moment of doubt and reflection, as Bloom explains: ‘Midnight is Whitman's point of epiphany, when revelation is undisturbed by the distractions of day’.
I really enjoyed Whitman's straightforward, sensorial and sometimes romantic language. Even when he talks about morbid subjects, he does so in a sublime yet simple way, and inspires a courage and a dignity as if we were about to face some mortal ordeal head-on. This, I believe, is the epic quality mentioned by Borges.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity
(Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition)
Whitman created an epic poem in which the author and the reader are equally heroes, and there's nothing more democratic than that. In these poems, he remade reality in his poetic aspirations and convinced me to believe in it; in his world, misery is not equivalent to an accurate portrait of reality – this is one of the sins of the devotees of realism.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
— Song of Myself, 51
Thus we can see the multiple faces of Walt Whitman – his multitudes in Song of Myself – alluded by Bloom and Borges and observed by me: an epic bard, a passerby, a confident man, a self-conscious man, a divine vagabond, a lover, a loner, a friend, a romantic, a patriot, a prophet, an everyman. Being so many, no wonder he can resonate with different people across ages and make them feel understood, or seen, or just cause a strong reaction — for I believe there’s no book out there like Leaves of Grass; and isn’t that the canonical/classic test? Didn’t he pass? I think so, and he deserves it.
Perhaps I have failed to express the elation I felt reading some of his poems, since this is one of the rare examples in which art truly needs to be experienced first-hand, and there's no point in me trying to translate my experience, regardless of how eloquent I am. Let's just say that reading Leaves of Grass is the complete opposite of reading Notes from the Underground (one of my favourite books, don't get me wrong). Perhaps Whitman found some kind of metaphysical answer in his poetry, but it's so noble and gloriously impossible that even he couldn't live up to his own lyrical speaker. However, I think the best examples are those impossible to achieve – from Jesus to Alyosha Karamazov – because then they keep us eternally trying.
And so Whitman ends the poem in the most beautiful way, metalinguistically acknowledging that this is a book and that the reader may have found it centuries after the poet's death. He bids us farewell with a greeting from beyond the grave, and I hope he knows how much his poems resonate around the world, somewhat in the transcendentalist union he idealised. Still in the Preface of 1855, he says ‘A great poem is for ages and ages in common and for all degrees and complexions... A great poem is no finish to a man or a woman but rather a beginning’.
Of course, I couldn't fail to include here my favourite poems from Leaves of Grass. I hope you'll read it.
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What a wonderful post! Loved so much.