Leaves of Grass

From Karen Karbiener's Introduction toLeaves of Grass: First and "Death-Bed" Editions "Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman," wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1923. "No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman, nothing" (Woodress, ed.,Critical Essays on Walt Whitman, p. 211). The sentiments were echoed by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Langston Hughes named Whitman the "greatest of American poets"; Henry Miller described him as "the bard of the future" (quoted in Perlman et al., eds.,Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, pp. 185, 205). Even his more cynical readers recognized Whitman's position of near-mythical status and supreme influence in American letters. "His crudity is an exceeding great stench but it is America," Ezra Pound admitted in a 1909 article; he continued: "To be frank, Whitman is to my fatherland what Dante is to Italy" (Perlman, pp. 112113). "We continue to live in a Whitmanesque age," said Pablo Neruda in a speech to PEN in 1972. "Walt Whitman was the protagonist of a truly geographical personality: The first man in history to speak with a truly continental American voice, to bear a truly American name" (Perlman, p. 232). Alicia Ostriker, in a 1992 essay, claimed that "if women poets in America have written more boldly and experimentally in the last thirty years than our British equivalents, we have Whitman to thank" (Perlman, p. 463). How did a former typesetter and penny-daily editor come to write the poems that would define and shape American literature and culture? Whitman's metamorphosis in the decade before the first publication ofLeaves of Grassin 1855 remains an intriguing mystery. Biographers concede that details about Whitman's life and literary activities from the late 1840s to the early 1850s are extremely hard to come by. "Little is known of Whitman's activities in these years," writes Joann Krieg in the 18511854 section of herWhitman Chronology(most other years have month-to-month commentaries). Whitman was fired from his job at the New OrleansDaily Cresentin the summer of 1848, then resigned from his editorship of theBrooklyn Freemanin 1849. Though he continued to write for several newspapers during the next five years, his work as a freelancer was irregular and his whereabouts difficult to follow. He seems also to have tried his hand at several other jobs, including house building and selling stationery. One wonders if Walt's break from the daily work routine had something to do with his poetic awakening. Keeping to a regulated schedule in the newspaper offices had been a struggle for him, and he had been fired several times for laziness or "sloth." Charting his own days and ways--in particular, working as a self-employed carpenter, as had his idiosyncratic father--may well have enabled him to think "outside the box" and toward the organic, freeform qualities ofLeaves. Purposefully dropping out of workaday life and common sight suggests that Whitman may have intended to obscure the details of his pre-Leavesyears, and there is further evidence to support the idea that Whitman consciously created a "myth of origins." In his biography of Whitman, Justin Kaplan quotes the poet on the mysterious "perturbations" ofLeaves of Grass: It had been written under "great pressure, pressure from within," and he had "felt that he must do it" (p. 185). To obscure the roots ofLeavesand build the case for his original thinking, Whitman destroyed significant amounts of manuscripts and letters upon at least two occasions; as Grier notes in his introduction toNotebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, "one is contiWhitman, Walt is the author of 'Leaves of Grass', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593080839 and ISBN 1593080832.