Walt Whitman: The Good Gray Poet for a New Generation

If published today, the radical and controversial content of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass would hardly raise an eyebrow; in 1855, however, reviewers called it “indecent, bold, curious, lawless, obscene” (Baym 2146). The Long Island native certainly pushed the envelope through his revolutionary writing, such as the overtly homosexual narrative in “Live Oak, with Moss” and a multitude of themes – including faith, death and immortality – in his epic poem “Song of Myself.” Although Whitman is mostly remembered for his sprawling works that celebrate nature and American life, it is easy to forget that he tackled the majesty and horrors of war in “Drum-Taps” as well as the complexities of politics and American democracy in “Democratic Vistas.” Even more remarkably, Whitman drew parallels between all of these seemingly distinct parts of life and molded them into unified themes. For example, as America expanded during the nineteenth century and created greater geographical distance between people, Whitman placed an even more profound literary emphasis on emotional and sexual human bonding in “A Woman Waits for Me” and his “Calamus” poems. Like life itself, Whitman was daring and complex.

Right from the opening words “I celebrate myself,” Whitman’s “Song of Myself” establishes itself as a work like no other published up until that time. Whitman was audacious in that he repeatedly refers to “I” throughout this lengthy work – making the poem very personal by drawing the reader in and seemingly personifying himself as a mythic and almost godlike entity with intimate connections to nature, spirituality and the universe around him. Sex, politics, religion and other controversial subjects aside, “Song of Myself” and other works contained in Leaves of Grass redefined the genre of poetry simply by breaking literary form and telling stories in ways that hadn’t been experienced before. Traditional patterns of rhyming and verse were all but eliminated by Whitman, who shocked readers of the time with his unorthodox ways. As pointed out in an extensive biography written by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price for the Whitman Archive website: “The mystery about Whitman in the late 1840s is the speed of his transformation from an unoriginal and conventional poet into one who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery, finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way.”

It is in “Song of Myself” (especially the revised 1881 version) and other Whitman writings that we see his deep interest in expressing love, sexuality and human bonding. These are recurrent themes throughout Whitman’s life and, as with much of what Whitman did during his prolific career, they stunned readers of the nineteenth century with bold and frank discussions of previously taboo subjects. It is hardly surprising to learn that Whitman had reservations about publishing some of his works when he first wrote them, and even if he had overcome that hesitation, it was unlikely that any mainstream publisher would’ve touched them. In the case of “Live Oak, with Moss,” a poem that seems to imply his love for another man, “âÂ?¦Whitman explicitly renounces his old role of public poet seeking knowledge and celebrating the American land and its heroes; instead, he chooses to be happy in private with his lover. If he had printed it, the sequence would have constituted a new and highly public sexual program, nothing short of an open homosexual manifesto” (Baym 2129).

“Live Oak, with Moss,” a series of twelve poems that were slightly altered and reordered when they became part of Whitman’s “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass, is perhaps his most daring and direct reference to the love of one man for another or, as Whitman called it, “adhesiveness” (2129). In it, Whitman alludes to the emotional and physical comfort of a friend or male lover:

I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering to congratulate me, – For the friend I love lay sleeping by my side,
In the stillness his face was inclined towards me, while the moon’s clear
beams shone,
And his arm lay slightly over my breast – And that night I was happy. (25-27)

Although sexually daring by the standards of the time, “Live Oak, with Moss” is also surprisingly poignant and angst-ridden in its treatment of the emotional component many believe Whitman longed for in male friends and lovers:

Hours of torment – I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the
like feelings?
Is there even one other like me – distracted – his friend, his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him?
And at night, awaking, think who is lost?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless? Harbor his anguish and passion? (68-72)

Whitman’s affinity for “adhesiveness” doesn’t end with “Live Oak, with Moss” – it’s a topic he tackles again in works such as “In Paths Untrodden” as well as “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.”

Meanwhile, the love a man has for a woman wasn’t ignored by Whitman; in fact, his cluster of poems originally titled “Enfans d’Adam” (“Children of Adam” in later editions of Leaves of Grass) was very covert in expressing male-female sexuality in ways that were still bold for his time, but very likely more palatable than the homoerotic elements detailed in some of Whitman’s other poetry. In “A Woman Waits for Me,” Whitman spares no explicitness in describing the passionate relationship between the sexes: “Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex / Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers” (10-11). Additionally, there is little left to the imagination in the poem suggestively titled “O Hymen! O Hymenee!,” a dual reference to parts of the female genitalia and the Greek god of marriage. In “Spontaneous Me,” Whitman talks about “love-juice,” “phallic thumb of love,” and “bellies press’d and glued together with love” in a homage to everything sexual. In fact, James E. Miller, Jr., writing for the Whitman Archive website, deciphers references such as “the pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers” and “âÂ?¦this bunch pluck’d at random from myself” as relating to masturbation and ejaculation.

There has been much debate over Whitman’s sexual orientation and whether his poems about heterosexual love were heartfelt writings or merely a way to be legitimately published at a time when the literary world wasn’t ready for what he had to say. According to the Whitman Archive website, “âÂ?¦on conceiving the idea for the “Children of Adam” cluster, Whitman jotted in a notebook: ‘Theory of a Cluster of Poems the same to the passion of Woman-Love as the ‘Calamus-Leaves’ are to adhesiveness, manly love.'” In fact, Whitman was known to have changed the gender of subjects in poems like “Once I Pass’d” so that he was writing about women instead of a male lover (Miller “Children”). Critic James E. Miller, Jr. theorizes that “the symbolism basic to the structure of the ‘Children of Adam’ cluster is announced in the title: human beings are all descendants of Adam and Eve, who, after eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, ‘knew that they were naked’ and covered their nakedness with ‘fig leaves’ (Genesis 3:7). For their act of disobedience, they were cast out of the Garden of Eden. In effect, Whitman exhorts a return to the Garden by recovering the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall.”

Miller also points out that during the nineteenth century, Whitman’s sex poems in “Children of Adam” and elsewhere in Leaves of Grass were far less accepted by readers than his “Calamus” poems, which were largely considered innocent writings of comradeship and brotherly love. In the twentieth century, however, the sex poems found acceptance while the “Calamus” poems were accused of depicting “unnatural” sexuality. It wasn’t until the advent of the civil rights movement for gays and lesbians, according to Miller, that “the “Calamus” cluster has come to be celebrated as a homosexual manifesto” (Miller “Calamus”). This development would probably both surprise and please Whitman, who seemed to struggle with writing about his attraction to men. In “Live Oak, with Moss” and other poems with homosexual overtones, Whitman carefully used phrases such as “the friend I love” and “robust friends” to insinuate the existence of male lovers without having to come right out and say it. Regardless of how various sectors of society translate and accept Whitman’s sexually charged works, there is no doubt that he raised the bar at a time when very few others dared.

Just as he confronted the issue of sexuality in his writing, Whitman also took on the complex subjects of religion and spirituality and all of the issues that stem from them. Perhaps “Song of Myself” contains some of the more obvious references to religion, particularly Whitman’s apparent lack of support for any organized religion in his life. Again, when Whitman was at the peak of his creative power, the mere thought of questioning religion and the purpose of God must have been highly controversial for the era. While never putting down the institution entirely, Whitman does question whether religion can only be found in the traditional venues of church and heaven by stating: “And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is” (1271). Whitman goes on to write:

I think I could turn and live with animals,
They are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God� (684-688)

In stanza 43, Whitman lets the reader know that he is supportive of all religions of the world, but later states that he finds spiritual comfort in “what is untried”:

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,
Believing I shall come again up on the earth after five thousand years.
Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun...(1096-1100)

The concept of spiritual awakening being found from within is demonstrated in stanza 24 of “Song of Myself”:

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. (522-526)

Later, Whitman proclaims that he sees God “âÂ?¦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 glassâÂ?¦” (1283-1285). Again, Whitman points to the universe around him as the source for all things spiritual and religious.

On a larger scale, Whitman also addresses birth, death and immortality in his work, most notably in “Song of Myself”: “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug or mortality, it is idle to try to alarm meâÂ?¦And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, / (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before)” (1294-1298). At times, he combines all three themes:

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe,
and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal
and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.) (131-138)

When reading “Song of Myself,” the transcendental nature of the narrator becomes immediately clear with frequent connections between the human body and the soul, as well as references to how true spirituality is found not only in organized religions, temples, or gods, but rather in the grass and trees that bind us all.

Whitman also found parallels to life in the areas of democracy, war, politics and the American experience – all subjects, like sex and religion, in which he pushed the boundaries to express himself in ways considered revolutionary in the nineteenth century right through to the present day. Some of Whitman’s most revered writings are those dealing with his Civil War experience, including “Drum-Taps,” a series of poems that chronicle his view of the war from its fervently patriotic beginnings to its bloody end. In the first poem, Whitman expresses anticipation for a battle that will show America at its finest:

The blood of the city up-arm’d! arm’d! the cry everywhere;
The flags flung out from the steeples of churches, and from all the public buildings and stores;
The tearful parting-the mother kisses her son-the son kisses his mother;
(Loth is the mother to part-yet not a word does she speak to detain him;)
The tumultuous escort-the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the way;
The unpent enthusiasm-the wild cheers of the crowd for their favorites;
The artillery-the silent cannons, bright as gold, drawn along, rumble lightly over the stones;
(Silent cannons-soon to cease your silence!
Soon, unlimber’d, to begin the red business;)
All the mutter of preparation-all the determin’d arming;
The hospital service-the lint, bandages, and medicines;
The women volunteering for nurses-the work begun for, in earnest-no mere parade now;
War! an arm’d race is advancing!-the welcome for battle-no turning away;
War! be it weeks, months, or years-an arm’d race is advancing to welcome it. (34-47)

Reading further into the collection of poems, Whitman’s attitude toward the war has shifted to one of doubt and concern:

Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me!
Your summerwind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me.
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? Said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat? (1-6)

In later years, with “The Wound-Dresser,” Whitman brings the reader right into the center of the hellish wartime experience by describing “the stump of the arm, the amputated hand” and “a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensiveâÂ?¦” In the 1881 version edition of “The Wound-Dresser,” Whitman sums up his views on the war with the epigraph: “Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, / But soon m fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself / To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead” (Baym 2219).

Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” is also a complex, insightful and revolutionary work that takes on the American ideal and all that is good and bad about an expanding democracy. In Whitman’s own words he is wring to anyone “âÂ?¦whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the people’s crudeness, vice, capricesâÂ?¦” He expresses reservations about democracy in the United States and, at times, spares no words in describing life in the states as “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten.” Whitman also sees problems ahead in regards to racism, gender conflicts and political wars: “We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents, vortices – all so dark, untriedâÂ?¦”

It may not come as a big surprise that Whitman sees a new wave of literature as the salvation for Americans – literature that would guide citizens in how to live a proper life and transform their way of thinking. Whitman writes:

That which really balances and conserves the social and political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c. Indeed, this perennial regulation, control, and oversight, by self-suppliance, is sine qua non to democracy; and a highest widest aim of democratic literature may well be to bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen this sense, in individuals and society. A strong mastership of the general inferior self by the superior self, is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for individual or aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and along with which goes a great masterful spirit.

Arthur Wrobel points out in his critical writing for the Whitman Archive website that “Whitman wrote in an anonymous review of “Democratic Vistas” that the essay attempts to demonstrate how freedom and individualism could not only ‘revolutionize & reconstruct politics, but Religion, Sociology, Manners, Literature & Art’ as well. The culture, he envisioned, would hold up a forgotten ideal that might yet recall people to perfection.”

Despite any doubts Whitman had about democracy and politics of the time, he also expressed a great love for his country in works like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Very much a poem about America, it is even more about the common bond all humans share in crowded spaces and wide-open places. In the opening lines of Whitman’s beloved poem, he expresses some mystery about the teeming masses he sees on the ferry:

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, and more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. (3-5)

Throughout the poem, Whitman switches between past and present, nature and man-made structures, and a feeling of distance and closeness with the people crossing the harbor. It’s not until the final stanza that he seems to bring everyone together, including the reader:

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you and more shall be able to foil is, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside – we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not – we love you – there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish you parts toward the soul. (126-132)

In addition to Whitman’s published poetry and prose, his personal letters and notebook jottings also contain detailed views on many of the pressing issues of the day, including sex, religion and politics. In an 1856 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the reader gets insight into the inner workings of Whitman’s mind and some of the reasons why he writes about the subjects that he does. On the subject of sex and how puritan ideals have stifled creativity and the advancement of civilization:

By silence or obedience the pens of savans, poets, historians, biographers and the rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts, are unmentionable and to be ashamed of, to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them. This filthy law has to be repealed – it stands in the way of great reforms (Baym, 2199).

Discussing “adhesiveness,” Whitman tells Emerson: “âÂ?¦as to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print” (2199).

On the subjects of America and democracy, Whitman expressed optimism about his nation’s future and its ability to grow (including a prophetic line about the number of states):

To freedom, to strength, to poems, to personal greatness, it is never permitted to rest, not a generation of part of a generationâÂ?¦America is not finished, perhaps never will be; now America is a divine true sketch. There are Thirty-Two States sketched – the population thirty millions. In a few years there will be Fifty States. Again in a few years there will be A Hundred States, the population hundreds of millions, the freshest and freest of men (2198).

Whitman addressed religion in his preface for Leaves of Grass:

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a while .. perhaps a generation or two .. dropping of by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place �the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women�They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth (2144).

In the end, Whitman believed that literature would be the great salvation of man and the world around him. He wrote about sex, religion, politics, democracy and other heavyweight topics because he proposed that the human experience, in its totality, was the greatest religion of all. Although readers of his era were reluctant to embrace Whitman’s work as either morally acceptable or revolutionary, his writing has stood the test of time and serves as a memorial to a bygone era when America was still trying to find herself. Whitman predicted a bold, new America with a population of creative free thinkers who would shed some of their puritan ways and embrace all that is at their disposal. If Whitman were alive today, it is likely he would applaud the diversity and open-mindedness of modern America and would certain revel in the fact that his work remains a manifesto to so many people. As he points out in the final line of the preface to Leaves of Grass: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1820-1865. 6th ed. Vol. B. New York: W.R. Norton & Company, 2003.

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. “Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Archive. 8 March 2006.
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– -. “Democratic Vistas.” 8 March 2006.
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– -. “Leaves of Grass [Song of Myself].” The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1820-1865. 6th ed. Vol. B. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.R. Norton & Company, 2003. 2147-89.

Wrobel, Arthur. “Democratic Vistas.” Walt Whitman Archive. 8 March 2006.
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