"This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody but I will tell you."

Jake Slaughter

Blog #1 - Whitman

ENG320 – Dr. Fruhauff

9/5/11

Word Count: 1114

Walt Whitman and the Character of America

            Those who have studied American Literature in any capacity may be familiar with the important place the five-year period between 1850 and 1855 has in the American literary canon.  These five years are often referred to as the American “Renaissance” due to the many significant works published within the timeframe.  The most well known of these works include Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Emerson’s Representative Men, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thoreau’s Walden and finally Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass.  To read the entire body of representative works of the time would be a very lengthy endeavor, but one need not read them all to understand the issues at stake for the majority of these authors.  Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass, though unique in its placement among famous novels and essays, is another such example of an attempt to establish –though Whitman might instead claim to be trying to identify rather than create– an identity as a strictly American thinker and poet.  In his 1855 version of his Leaves of Grass collection Whitman is working with a knowledge of the long ago established conventions of the poetical form while deliberately bending, mocking, or breaking those rules and traditions which did not agree with his idea of the character of America and Americans.

            The American character that Whitman is trying to create always begins with the qualities of the “common people.”  The United States and what it stood for may be the “teeming nation of nations” (3) for Whitman, but he is far more interested in pondering the manner of the average citizen than the actions of those in power.  Indeed, throughout this entire collection Whitman mentions that the president himself is no greater or lesser than everyone else, going as far as to suggest that “the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him [is] unrhymed poetry” (4).  The structures of the poems within the collection are by no means conventional, for Whitman seems to feel that his portrait of America would be ill served by standardized stanzas and rhyming schemes, “The poetic quality [presumably the quality of the country] is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but in the life of these and much else that is in the soul” (8).  We are inclined to think that since the collection often feels like the ramblings of a youth who is just beginning to experience the people and sights of an entire country, Whitman had little sense of control over his work, but that opinion seems to ignore the many editions of the collection and revisions of each poem up until the time of his death in 1892.  Even those who may not care for the work must admit that in this first collection Whitman is not working haphazardly, he is shaping a poem that would correspond to the many layers and dimensions that he saw when he surveyed the paradoxical compilation that formed together to create the American persona.

The first poem of the collection begins with the telling phrase “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (21).  With those opening lines alone one can begin to see elements that will permeate the remainder of the collection.  We are first struck by the subject of his poem: the individual self. Traditionally, an epic poem begins with the poet invoking the power of the muses to help him create a poem worthy of his subject, but in Leaves of Grass this is certainly not the case.  One of the poetical conventions that Whitman specifically mentions in his preface is concerning this lack of epic invocation, “The poetic quality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things” (8, emphasis mine).  It appears as if Whitman assumes that his readers had a working knowledge of older poetry traditions, for in his introduction he mentions that, “The poems distilled from other poem will probably pass away” (20).  While keeping to a tradition of poetical invocation, Whitman turns not to the gods or to previous poetry masterpieces for inspiration, but to himself.

            Notice that immediately after indulging in this seemingly egocentric celebration Whitman speaks of a unity with his reader.  When new ideas are first introduced throughout the poems in this collection they are initially done so in relation to the narrator’s version of self, but Whitman never allows that self to have more significant than everyone else’s unique self.  In other words, anything Whitman says about himself he is quick to say about anybody and everybody.  He writes about the relationship between all persons and how together they form the identity of America.  Whitman is not satisfied with a simplistic understanding of a national identity, rather he seeks a holistic picture of the collage of American life as he sees it, “My words are words of questioning, and to indicate reality; The printed and bound book . . . but the printer and the printing office boy? ... The saints and sages in history . . . but you yourself?” (59). 

There is something of a paradox in his thinking here, for Whitman suggests that while the individual is supreme, he or she is no better or worse than all others.  There is an equality in this empowering that unifies the people of the nation and creates a national identity.  Whitman suggests that there is no one person who can claim to represent America, and yet he also claims that it is the right of every person to claim to be representing America.  Are there conflicting messages in that statement? Whitman seemed to think so, but for him even this conflict is foundational to the character of America as he saw it.  “Do I contradict myself?  Very well then…I contradict myself; I am large…I contain multitudes. [Half a dozen lines later] I too am not a bit tamed…I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of this world” (67).

Whitman’s final poem in this collection (pgs. 110-113) contains some fitting closing words.  In a passage that seems to be perhaps modeled after Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes, Whitman creates a list of what we can refer to as the Greatitudes.  What follows is his last thought on the subject of greatness: “And there is another paradox. Great is life… and real and mystical… wherever and whoever, Great is death…Sure as life holds all part together, death holds all parts together; Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is as great as life” (113).

Works Cited:

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Dover Thrift). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007.