Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

First published: 1855

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

“America” is the first word of Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, but this most American of poetic achievements is also the most universal. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Whitman says, a belief that informs Leaves of Grass and led Whitman to redefine “poem” in such a way as to change forever the face of poetry.

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass and even set some of the type himself. It is a slim volume, containing a preface and twelve poems, each several pages in length, sprawling across the pages, and looking quite unlike the neatly rhymed and metered poems then popular with readers. Whitman revised and expanded the book six times and reprinted it twice more. The final and most complete version of Leaves of Grass, published while Whitman was near death (1891–1892), includes hundreds of pages and dozens of poems. Through its various versions, Leaves of Grass always remained a unified whole, and several themes and stylistic innovations remain constant.

Whitman believed that his lyrical epic poem about a new land required a new voice. Leaves of Grass represents a major innovation in poetic form. It is the first major nineteenth-century work in English in what has come to be called free verse—poetry without obvious rhyme or meter. Whitman draws on other poets’ experiments with unrhymed, nonmetrical poetry and on the sonorous rhythms of the King James version of the Bible. Free verse—often characterized by long lines and loose rhythmic structure—became the perfect vehicle for poems with themes of identity, nationality, and transcendence.

At best, the poems of Leaves of Grass are brilliantly rhythmic, with an eloquent use of the American dialect to describe ordinary experience. In “The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles,” for example, colloquial diction and onomatopoeia recreate the sights and sounds of the streets. Whitman takes risks by presenting himself as a typical American working man, “one of the roughs” and a democratic Everyman, but also as a poet of frank sexuality. In the 1855 edition, Whitman’s name does not appear on the title page but it appears in the poem "Song of Myself": “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding.”

The “myself” in the poem is and is not Whitman, for the poem is at once personal and an elevation of the individual to the mythic. A central idea of “Song of Myself” is that the cycle of life constantly renews itself and so triumphs over death: “The smallest sprout shows there really is no death.”

Whitman is preeminently a poet of joy and of the intersection of body and soul: “I and this mystery here we stand.” Individual identity therefore becomes at once fragile and transcendent. The individual dies and “life” goes on. By recognizing and absorbing this knowledge, Whitman says, all may feel unity with life and so triumph over death.

Early in “Song of Myself,” Whitman introduces leaves as a metaphor, likening the grass to a flag, handkerchief, child, and hieroglyphic, “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” and “so many uttering tongues.” Like the speaker, who is an ordinary man, grass represents an ordinary creation so plentiful it is likely to go unnoticed. However, just as in a democracy every voice is important, in Leaves of Grass every leaf is a reminder of the beauty and transcendence of life.

Like Leaves of Grass as a whole, “Song of Myself” progresses toward its climax by dilating and contracting on a number of themes and images. Section by section, this poem includes many subtle and not-so-subtle modulations in tone. Sometimes these shifts occur from one section to the next, from, for example, “twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore” (section 11) to “the butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes” (section 12). Over the larger structure of the poem, Whitman’s expression ranges from passages of personal emotion such as “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand” (section 27) to descriptive passages that, while also intensely emotional, find their focus outside the speaker’s consciousness, as in “The spotted hawk swoops by” (section 89).

The sections of the poem shuttle constantly between general and specific, between description and emotion, and between the body and the soul. These shifts are appropriate to the theme of endless renewal, but “Song of Myself” also moves toward a conclusion in which the poet disappears into the cycle of life, and readers are left to find their own way.

The roughness and sensuality of Leaves of Grass offended and even frightened many of Whitman’s early readers. “Song of Myself” in particular still has the power to surprise and even shock, as when Whitman says in section 24, “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,” words that still offend some readers. Sexuality is the common denominator of human beings, and Whitman wanted to strip away pretense (represented by clothing) to reveal the naked body, which is also the naked soul, for soul and body are one: “Behold,” he says in “Starting from Paumanok,” “the body includes and is . . . the soul.”

In addition to long poems such as “Song of Myself,” the smaller poems in Leaves of Grass also contribute to the book’s unity. Many readers have found homoerotic imagery in Whitman’s celebration of “adhesiveness” and “manly love,” though Whitman himself denied that connection. In “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” which first appears in Leaves of Grass in 1860, Whitman uses the live oak tree as an image of solitary strength; unlike the tree, the speaker says he could not live “without a friend or lover near.” In another major poem that appears in every version of Leaves of Grass, “The Sleepers,” Whitman provides counterpoint to the joyous optimism of “Song of Myself” when he describes the narrator going from bedside to bedside like an angel overseeing suffering humanity. The imagery of “The Sleepers” takes on a special poignancy from the fact that, after he wrote this poem, Whitman cared for hospitalized soldiers during the American Civil War. When his brother, George, was listed among those wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he headed south to look for him; George’s wound was slight, but Whitman stayed on in Washington, DC, to visit the sick and wounded soldiers in the military hospitals.

Whitman’s charitable work in the hospitals allowed him to participate in the war without fighting and to express his complex amorous and charitable feelings toward men. These feelings surface in Leaves of Grass:

I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and most restless,

I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,

The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.

“The Sleepers” is a difficult, visionary poem, full of troubled and troubling imagery, as in the line “The wretched features of the ennuyés, the white features of corpses.” The poem has the quality of a nightmare but might more accurately be characterized—as it was by Whitman’s friend and first biographer, Richard M. Bucke—as “a representation of the mind during sleep” moving rapidly over loosely connected images. The central metaphors are darkness and sleep, which stand for confusion and death. In the end, however, just as night disappears into sunrise, death must disappear into life and the poem returns to the affirmative voice of “Song of Myself.”

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” added to Leaves of Grass in 1856, describes the immortality of the individual across the sweep of time. As the speaker rides a ferryboat across the East River, he contemplates the crowd on the boat, the flow of the water, and the motion of the boat, finding in them a transcendent continuity: “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, / I am with you, you men and women of a generation, of ever so many generations hence.” When he is gone, other people will look at the crowd and think the same thoughts he is thinking. These others will, in that sense, become him. By accepting one’s own identity, by trusting life and the soul’s natural impulses, one can be happy and recognize the interrelationship with all of life, past, present, and future.

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” published first in 1871 in a separate volume of poems entitled Passage to India, and later incorporated into the expanded 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, is a poem of reminiscence. The speaker looks back on his boyhood to a time when, near the ocean, he is awakened from innocence to an empathetic experience of a male mockingbird’s loss of his mate. This empathy leads him directly to an enlightened state that gives him a sense of his identity and leads him to his vocation as a poet. By revising “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman brings the italicized sections representing the mockingbird’s song to an increasingly subtle onomatopoeia, which unites the bird’s song and the poet’s words just as the poet’s empathy for the bird’s loss has united them through the bird’s song. “My own songs awaked from that hour,” the speaker says.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, also first appears in Passage to India, before it become part of Leaves of Grass in 1881. Just as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” weaves together a bird’s song, ocean, beach, and memory, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” uses three key symbols—the blooming lilac, the “western fallen star,” and the warbling of a thrush in a swamp—to mourn the death of Lincoln: “Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul.” Whitman adored Lincoln as the preserver of the Union, and in this poem he pays homage to Lincoln’s greatness and comes to terms with his tragic death.

In “A Passage to India,” the title poem of the 1871 collection of that name, Whitman celebrates the great breakthroughs in communication during his lifetime: the Suez Canal, which opened access to the East; the transcontinental railroad, which made travel across the United States easier; and the laying of telegraph cables across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which made virtually instantaneous international communication possible. Whitman himself describes that the poem concerns the way evolution unfolds “cosmic purposes.”

Leaves of Grass is a work of integration and wholeness. Through its dozens of poems and many revisions, the central themes of the work—the transcendence of the individual through knowledge of the unity and continuity of life, the naturalness of death, and the beauty of the living world—serve to describe the joy Whitman took in his own life and time.

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