I have a theory about Walt Whitman. Tell me if this rings true for you.
I suspect that more people are enchanted by the idea of Whitman — the democratic, unbuttoned, man-loving poet loafing in the grass — than are actually enchanted by his poems. Right now, self-check: how many Whitman cadences or images do you carry around in your blood? Do you light up sometimes in the middle of a day with a Whitman phrase that expresses the moment perfectly?1
There is a good chance that the answer would be an easy yes if I asked about Emily Dickinson. She wrote so many unforgettable lines that slide into a person’s body and stay there, flaring up from time to time:
The Soul selects her own society —
My Life had stood, a loaded gun —
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant —
After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
I felt a funeral in my brain —
There’s a good chance you’ll have your own favorites from Dickinson.
But Walt?
“I sing the body electric!” Maybe you heard this somewhere. Does it actually light you up like the local electric utility office in December? Or is there a lecture behind the words, running like this: “Walt Whitman wrote more explicitly about the body than anyone of his time. Here he is in the frontispiece to his 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass — shockingly casual and unbuttoned! Next slide, please:”
Now I’m going to add another plank to the platform of my theory before I walk out on it. Give a Yawp if you think the platform is flimsy and I should stay off. Here’s the two-by-four:
Whitman wrote as many blood-stirring one-liners as Dickinson, but he piled them under drifts of language so deep that few people find them. She gave us memorable lines four to sixteen at a time. People can print whole poems of hers on bookmarks and leave them in coffee shops. He gave us needles in verbal haystacks. We remember mostly the first and last lines of Whitman’s poems, rarely the long middles.
Whitman loved verbal haystacks. They are great places to lean and loaf. They do not lend themselves as well to the radiant enchantment of singular, potent lines.
If my theories have any merit, there is a lesson here: Keep it brief. One good idea at a time. This isn’t just true for PowerPoint decks; it’s true even in creative, expressive work like poetry.
But maybe I’m wrong! You’ve got Whitman memorized. That’s good! He’s an ebullient spirit who spun wonderful lines worth remembering. I’m happy to be wrong. If this romance with brevity is a modern sickness, and you think more people would do well to soak slowly in the imaginary lakes of the poets, by all means, I’ll be the first to add rose petals to your bath. I have no quarrel with long immersions in literature.
On the other hand, if you’re nodding with a teeny bit of affirmation, here is a little archival secret that may help to explain why Whitman’s best words sometimes get lost behind the couch cushions of his puffy stanzas.
Inside the blank front pages of a personal copy of Leaves of Grass that Whitman annotated after 1860, the poet betrayed more than a loafer’s ambition. He estimated the word count in a handful of competitors or models of classic and popular literature, then estimated the number of words in his own book. He updated his stats in pencil as he wrote more poems.
Yes, Walt Whitman compared his metrics with those of writers in the rank he aspired to join. What rank was this? The one with the Bible, the New Testament, the Iliad and Aeneid, all of Virgil’s works (in English translation), Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the complete works of the popular English poet William Cowper. In his early forties, Whitman had bypassed (by his chosen metric) almost all of his peer institutions, was closing in fast on Cowper, and had only the New Testament still in the distance ahead of him.2
Let’s just sit with that for a second.
Whitman meant to write his way into the immortal ranks of the English literary canon by word count!
Okay, I suspect he knew he had a world-class, important message: something about universal love, the ecstasy of mortal bodies joined to immortal and all-pervading soul, the joyous instruction to love thy neighbor as thyself. Oh sure, that! But he was practical enough to know that a writer needed more than a good theme. He needed to get people talking about him. Racy frontispieces and big books were strategic.
Even so, knowing that Whitman saw long poems as weighty, canonical, and aspirational, we still have the question: Do Whitman’s words and cadences enchant? I’ll pull just a few out of his haystacks, and you can decide.
I. Of Abraham Lincoln’s coffin passing through American cities on the way to burial, Whitman lamented in diminishing line lengths:
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac. (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” lines 43-45)
II. Riding the ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn over the neck of the East River where the Brooklyn Bridge would later be built, Whitman had reveries about his love of place and his solidarity with future pedestrians and with readers not yet born. In the second passage below from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” notice how the details help Whitman to connect concretely with readers of the future, and also how they draw out this passing moment, as if to say, “Hold up time. Let me just finish this 97-line sentence. Then I’ll come with you”:
Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan? (section 8)
and
I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water . . . . (section 3)
III. Whitman treasured the soul, but like many people, he understood the difficulty of explaining what a soul was. In this uncommonly short, two-stanza poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” he uses the metaphor of a spider to describe the isolation of a soul and its artful effort to make contact with others. If the grammar feels odd, it’s not you; this is a sentence fragment. Now they’re all the rage, but Whitman was ahead of his time:
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. (stanza 2)
One more.
IV. Sadly, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is often assigned to students in great gulps, though it resonates one line or phrase or sentence at a time, like this one:
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.3
You can see from examples II and III above that sometimes drawing out the words is a necessary part of Whitman’s aesthetic. He’s not just fattening up for a weigh-in with the New Testament. He’s halting time by filling it with the sights and imaginings of a single moment. He’s reaching out with tireless repetition to “anchor” his slender threads of thought to the surface of any reader’s soul.
Even though his words are carefully chosen and evocative of the feeling he wants to convey, still, do you remember his words? Do they enchant you? Have you read enough of them to fall under their spell?
Oh golly! Look at the time. I’ve been leaning and loafing and observing the late-summer grass and completely missed what the professor was saying!4 Did anybody catch it? Could I borrow your notes?
Was there a takeaway? 🙈 😉
The fact that English professors and poets read this newsletter may skew our actual results! I’m willing to be amused by whatever answer comes up.
From Walt Whitman’s Blue Book, a facsimile edition of a copy of Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860-61) held by the New York Public Library. Commentary by Arthur Golden. Published in two volumes in 1968.
From stanza three of the five in numbered section 14 in the 1891-92 edition of “Song of Myself.” I am looking at the poem in Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson’s Bedford Anthology of American Literature, volume one, Beginnings to 1865, 1st edition, page 1249.
The 1891-92 revision of “Song of Myself” - the one most people meet in anthologies - begins:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. (section 1)
"What was your takeaway?" asked the loafer in the last paragraph. Good question! :-)
A good metric is there are a lot of Emily Dickinson elementary schools in America, not a lot of Walt Whitmans haha.