Preface to Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Notebook with trial lines for Leaves of Grass, ca. 1847-1854

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, 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 its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Preface to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

From "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman

Earth, Jupiter, and Venus, seen from Mars.

I do not know what is untried and afterward;

But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
Each who passes is consider'd--each who stops is consider'd--
          not a single one can it fail
Nor anything in the myriads of spheres--nor one of the myriads
          of myriads that inhabit them...

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinked systems,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim
          of the farther systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward, and forever outward.
My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners, a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage;
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
          were at this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not
          avail in the long run;
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And as surely go as much farther--and then farther and farther.
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not
          hazard the span, or make it impatient;
They are but parts--anything is but a part.
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that;
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look'd at the crowded
          heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those
          orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them,
          shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that lift, to pass and continue
          beyond.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and
          composed before a million universes.

From "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855.

Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman

Time to remember Walt Whitman again.

In this post from 2011 I talked about the impact his poetry had on me when I first discovered Leaves of Grass as a young man. This is the particular section of that work that was transformative for me then, and that has deepened in meaning with each successive stage of my life. I love this.


Song of Myself, Part 52, from LEAVES OF GRASS

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
     and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.


What a way to live; what a way to go. Thanks, Walt.

Here's more on his life from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Walt Whitman (books by this author), born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father's trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The Poet," which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later said. "Emerson brought me to a boil."

Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, "I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.

Many of Whitman's poems were criticized for being openly erotic. One of Whitman's earliest reviews had called the book "a mass of stupid filth," accusing Whitman of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians." But rather than censoring himself, Whitman added 146 poems to his third edition.

He began to grow a literary reputation that swung from genius to moral reprobate, depending on the reader. Thoreau wrote, "It is as if the beasts spoke." Willa Cather referred to Whitman as "that dirty old man." Emerson praised Whitman's collection as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed," and the critic William Michael Rossetti proclaimed that Whitman was a talent on par with Shakespeare.

Whitman left New York when his brother was wounded in the Civil War, traveling to Virginia and then to Washington, D.C., to serve as a volunteer Army hospital nurse. He had a reputation for unconventional clothing and manners. He wrote, "I cock my hat as I please, indoors and out." With the help of well-placed friends, Whitman eventually found work as a low-level clerk in the Department of the Interior. But when former Iowa Senator James Harlan discovered Whitman worked in his department, he had him dismissed, proclaiming Leaves of Grass was "full of indecent passages," and that Whitman himself was a "very bad man" and a "free lover."

Whitman's friend William Douglas O'Connor immediately came to his defense. He arranged for Whitman to be transferred to the attorney general's office, and he published a pamphlet refuting Harlan's charges. Titled The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, the small book praised Whitman's "nobleness of character" and went on to quote from positive reviews — and to ridicule Harlan as an under-read philistine.

The pamphlet became more than a vindication: it helped to radically alter the average reader's perception of Whitman as both a writer and as a man: Out with the image of the bawdy nonconformist and in with the "good gray poet," the nickname for Whitman that is still popular to this day.

Whitman spent the last 20 years of his life revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, issuing the eighth and final edition in 1891, saying it was "at last complete — after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old."

Today, most scholars agree that Whitman was likely gay. When he was asked directly, toward the end of his life, Whitman declined to answer. But he did say, shortly before he died, that sex was "the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood — that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world."

Happy Birthday, Walt

Walt Whitman has been a great influence on me, as someone who celebrated life, the joy of simple things, and the value of all living creatures, unflinchingly spoke the truth as he perceived it, and called out the hypocrisy and oppression of societal dogmas. I remember discovering him when I was a young college student in the turbulent late Sixties, and it was like a rope to a drowning man. I have fond memories of reading Leaves of Grass one beautiful Spring, out loud, savoring every word.

Happy birthday, Walt. May there be many more like you.

This text is from the The Writer's Almanac:


It's the birthday of Walt Whitman (books by this author), born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, in 1819. He worked as a printer, and then a journalist. During the 1860s, Whitman worked as a clerk for the government, although he was fired from his job at the Indian Bureau when the director found out he'd written a collection of "indecent" poetry; Leaves of Grasswas published in several editions beginning in 1855, and was controversial for its frank treatment of sex and sexuality.

Whitman loved transportation and transportation workers; he would ride the ferry endlessly, going back and forth for the sheer pleasure of it. In his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," he wrote:
"Now I am curious what site can ever be more stately and admirable to me than my mast-
hemm'd Manhattan,
My river and sun-set, and my scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide,
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter."

He enjoyed great camaraderie with the omnibus drivers and conductors, and he'd ride the whole length of their route just for the company. He got in the habit of visiting the Brooklyn Hospital to look in on these friends when they were injured. As the Civil War got under way, he began to see more and more wounded soldiers filling the hospital beds, and he would listen to their stories, write letters for them, and give them gifts and whatever measure of comfort he could offer, "to help cheer and change a little the monotony of their sickness and confinement," he wrote. He became friends with the doctors and even assisted them in surgery from time to time.

In December 1862, his brother George's name appeared in the list of war wounded, and Whitman left New York to journey to Virginia. After a search of 40 hospitals and a trip to Fredericksburg, he found his brother, who had suffered only a mild facial wound. But Whitman couldn't turn away from the horribly maimed soldiers, "a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart," he wrote in his journal, "human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening." He stayed in Washington to help the wounded and dying soldiers, Union and Confederate alike; he wanted to be their arms and legs, often staying late into the night, moving between the rows of cots to offer a comforting touch. "What an attachment grows up between us, started from hospital cots, where pale young faces lie & wounded or sick bodies," he wrote; "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield." Whitman visited tens of thousands of soldiers through the course of the war, and he developed close friendships with several of the men, particularly a young Confederate soldier from Mississippi. He took a job in the Army paymaster's office, and used whatever little money he could spare to buy gifts for the soldiers. He also wrote poetry about the war, but about the after-effects of battles, not the battles themselves. His collection Drum-Taps was published in 1865 and was eventually incorporated into a later edition of Leaves of Grass.

He was in New York, recuperating from exhaustion, when the Confederate Army invaded the capital, and he was there again, visiting his furloughed brother George, when the war ended and Lincoln was assassinated. At his mother's house, he wrote, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" for the fallen president:
"Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin."