Walt Whitman--Song of Myself
by Leah Brown
Walt Whitman~~Song Of Myself from Leaves of Grass
Born on Long Island in 1819, Walt Whitman was one of many children. His father, Walter Whitman, Sr. later moved his family to Brooklyn for a better, richer lifestyle. Here Whitman attended grammar school and took his first job as a ‘printer’s devil’ (an apprentice to a publicist) for the Long Island Patriot. But in 1835 a severe economic depression forced him to quit that job and move back to Long Island to teach and farm. While teaching, he went on with the newspaper interest, and in 1836 he founded a weekly newspaper titled The Long Islander. Only a year later, he sold the paper and moved back to New York City. Finding New York still in a depression, he moved back to Long Island within that year and started teaching again and working for the Long Island Democrat. Between 1841 and 1859, Whitman held editorial positions on seven different newspapers in New York, Long Island, and New Orleans. During these years he was a renaissance man: attending the opera, dabbling in politics and participating in street life. These experiences influenced him as a student, printer, reporter, writer, carpenter, farmer, seashore observer, teacher, and editor. All this provided fuel for his future poetic vision of an idealized society based on the realization of self. From this came his inspiration for Leaves of Grass (Ryan).
During the Civil War, Whitman’s writings took a reflected form of what was going on to his country. During 1862, Whitman left Brooklyn to search for his missing-in-action brother. In this adventure, Whitman became a Civil Service Post and made nearly 600 hospital trips. Whitman described this time in his life as "the greatest privilege and satisfaction…and the most profound lesson of my life" (Ryan). These experiences affected his work greatly. After his search for his brother, he returned to Washington, D.C. and volunteered with the Christian Commission (a wartime part of the YMCA). During this time he published a small volume of wartime verses called Drum Taps (Ryan).
In his later years, specifically 1873, Whitman was dismissed from his current job as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, when his boss found out that he was the author of a "vulgar" book: Leaves of Grass. Later the same year, Whitman suffered a stroke caused by the stresses of the Civil War. He then turned his withering life to the wonders of Camden, New Jersey. He filled his time with travel, revising (several times) Leaves of Grass, overseeing new editions with the help of friends like Horace Traubel and his last publisher, David McKay. Visitors such as Alfred Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde came to talk literature with him. The final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1892, the year of his death (Ryan).
Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855 with only 12 long untitled free verse poems. The first was later titled Song of Myself. A year later the work was republished with twenty new additions. By the 1860’s the publication had tripled in size. The 1881 edition sold the best, between the first publication in 1855 and the last publication in 1892 there were nine editions in all (Mallis).
Song of Myself was inspired by a joyous vision of life. The idea: Whitman and everyone else were eternally connected to the rest of life; in fact he and everyone else were in fact life itself, and so everywhere, in everything, in everyone—seeing, hearing, feeling, and understanding everything. This vision is very grand and abstract, but the poem itself isn’t difficult. This is because Song of Myself isn’t so much an explanation of Whitman’s ideas as it is a celebration of life—like a celebration on the Fourth of July, which is believed to be the day which Whitman started writing Leaves of Grass. He praises all the parts of life in great detail—and all for just existing. Song excites other poets for many reasons: its length (1,346 lines), its confident proud tone, and its long loose lines written in plain language full of seemingly unpoetic things (crocodiles, city streets, fireman, and people in hospitals). The subject was so large that anything, it seemed, could be included as part of it. "[S]everal aspects to Whitman and his work can be interpreted on many levels: democrat, egalitarian, patriot, metaphysicist, nature poet, lover, free spirit and exponent of the spiritual values of self-realization through the recognition of life’s real priorities" (Mallis).
Whitman sings a ‘song’ in Song of Myself, but really speaks for the human race and universal harmony through his own experiences. "In the poem, we are told that all that is real is sacred" (Mallis). We also possess something of the "divine within ourselves" (Mallis). The holiest thing we can do for ourselves and our fellow man-- listen to all and learn from all, regardless of how humble the source of the knowledge may be:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his
Own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod
Confounds the leaning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman,
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street,and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever(Whitman, 1855, lines 1260-1277)
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We can also see in recovered manuscripts that are housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Whitman’s earliest articulation of ideas that would become central to Leaves of Grass. These manuscripts suggest that these notes were written in the few years before Whitman’s first publication of Leaves in 1855. In this page to the left, we can see first drafts of lines, images, and phrases that would become part of the poem he eventually named Song of Myself. These manuscripts are interesting because they are parts of what was apparently a complete draft of Song. This version is very different from the first version Whitman published in 1855. This is the first evidence we have of a kind of proto-version of Song with many lines and images identical to the final version. Appearing in this draft are ideas that are a wildly different order and juxtapositions than the final version. The way that Whitman wrote down certain ideas to begin with was not the order in which it was published. Some sections were in the beginning of the poem in the published edition but a very last idea when he wrote it down in this notebook. |
I am the poet of women as well as men. The woman is not But she is I remember I stood one Sunday forenoon. (the Peacemaker)
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In the 1855 version the lines read as follows: "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing great than the mother of men." (426-429) Which is completely different than the lines in the manuscript. So we can see that, with the many versions of Leaves and Song, Whitman’s reasoning for revisions was just to make his piece better and more in depth. This is closer to how life really is, a daily revisal of what happened the day before that (Folsom).
Whitman’s role in American poetry and literature is one of the unique kind. Without his influences we would have never had poets like Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, and Frank O’Hara. These poets were greatly inspired by Whitman’s writings and his style. Whitman wouldn’t be who he was without the help of a good friend--whom first praised his Leaves of Grass and made him popular--Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman’s other influences maybe such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, and he always said he admired Abraham Lincoln. I imagine that--for time period in which Whitman was writing--Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Fuller, and Thoreau helped inspire him as well.
Today, more than a century after the publication of the final draft of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s place in American literary history often seems as indefinable and mysterious as the ideas upon which America was founded. Numerous poets since Whitman have either placed themselves in the traditional wake of his work or reacted violently against him. His subject matter remains controversial to this day. For that Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself are still read and applied to today’s controversies.
Pictures:
Walt Whitman: George Mallis,
www.liglobal.com/walt/poetry.shtml.Beginning Manuscript of Song of Myself: Ed Folsom, University of Iowa.
<bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/index.html>.
"I am the poet" Manuscript: Ed Folsom, University of Iowa. <bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/index.html>.
Works Cited
Barrett, Ken. Class Notes. Creative Writing. Martinsville High School. Spring 1999.
Folsom, Ed. Whitman’s Manuscript Drafts of "Song of Myself" Leaves of Grass, 1855 16 Nov 02 <bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/Whitman/index.html>.
Mallis, George. "About the Poetry." Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. 16 Nov 02
www.libglobal.com/walt.poetry.shtml.Ryan, Richard. "Walt Whitman-His Life and Times." Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. 16 Nov 02
www.libglobal.com/walt/waltbio.shtml.
