Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Whitman 1 Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 2 Section headings and information Poems 6 “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea” 7 “We Two, How Long We Were Foole’d” 8 “These I Singing in Spring” 9 “France, the 18th Year of These States” 10 “Year of Meteors (1859-1860)” 11 “Song for All Seas, All Ships” 12 “Gods” 13 “Beat! Beat! Drums!” 14 “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night” 15 “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” 16 “O Captain! My Captain!” 17 “Unnamed Lands” 18 “Warble for Lilac-Time” 19 “Vocalism” 20 “Miracles” 21 “An Old Man’s Thought of School” 22 “Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling” 23 “To a Locomotive in Winter” 24 “O Magnet-South” 25 “Years of the Modern” Source: Leaves of Grass. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, ed. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973. Print. Note: For the IOC, copies of the poems will contain no information other than the title, the poem’s text, and line numbers. Whitman 2 Leaves of Grass, 1881, section headings for those poems within this packet WW: Walt Whitman LG: Leaves of Grass MS: manuscript “Inscriptions” First became a group title for the opening nine poems of LG 1871. In LG 1881 the group was increased to the present twenty-four poems, of which one was new. “Children of Adam” In two of his notes toward poems WW set forth his ideas for this group. One reads: “A strong of Poems (short, etc.), embodying the amative love of woman—the same as Live Oak Leaves do the passion of friendship for man.” (MS unlocated, N and F, 169, No. 63), The other, evidently written after the “Live Oak Leaves” had been replaced by “Calamus” as a symbol, is more explicit: “Theory of a Cluster of Poems the same to the passion of Woman-Love as the ‘Calamus Leaves’ are to adhesiveness, manly love. Full of animal-fire, tender, burning,--the tremulous ache, delicious, yet such a torment. The swelling elate and vehement, that will not be denied. Adam, as a central figure and type. One piece presenting a vivid picture (in connection with the spirit) of a fully complete, well-developed man, eld, bearded, swart, fiery, --as a more than rival of the youthful type-hero of novels and love poems (Trent; N and F, 124, No. 142). Under the title “Enfans d’Adam” the group first appeared in LG 1860 as fifteen poems, twelve of which were new. In the 1867 edition the title was changed to “Children of Adam,” and one of the poems, “In the New Garden, in all the Parts” was dropped. In 1871 the fourteen poems of the preceding edition were retained, together with two transfers from Drum-Taps poems, to make a total of sixteen; thereafter the group remained unchanged, although the present order is slightly different from that of the original. WW was formally to defend this group in his “A Memorandum at a Venture,” North American Review (June 1882) CXXXIV, 456-450 [sic], as a few months earlier he had defended it in talk with Emerson on the Boston Common. He is reported by Traubel as remarking, “ ‘Children of Adam’ stumps the worst and the best; I have even tried hard to see if it might not as I grow older or experience new moods stump me; I have even almost deliberately tried to retreat. But it would not do. When I tried to take those pieces out of the scheme the whole scheme came down about my ears” (Traubel 1, 3). “Calamus” Of all the groups in LG, the “Calamus” poems, first appearing in the test in 1860, possess the closest autonomy, held together by a sentiment of manly attachment (“adhesiveness” was WW’s term) which some readers find more intimate and compelling than that of “Children of Adam.” Their beginning may be surmised in an MS cluster of twelve poems (out of sequence in their present position) which appear originally to have been intended for a commemorative notebook, of like pen and ink and marked by Roman numerals. These poems reveal a story of attachment and renunciation whose symbol at first was not “Calamus” but “Live Oak with Moss.” For the benefit of his English editor, W.M. Rossetti, WW defined his symbol as follows: Whitman 3 “‘Calamus’ is a common word here. It is the very large and aromatic grass, or rush, growing about water-ponds in the valleys—spears about three feet high—often called ‘sweet flag’—grows all over the Northern and Middle States…The recherché or ethereal sense of the term, as used in my book, arises probably from the actual Calamus presenting the biggest and hardiest kind of spears of grass—and their fresh, acquatic, pungeant bouquet.” (Corr. I, 347). That the symbol also possessed a specific sexual significance is apparent from its use five years earlier in “Song of Myself” (see line 535). To John Addington Symonds, who inquired whether the “Calamus” sentiment was homo-erotic, WW gave an emphatic denial, alleging his normal sexuality (Blodgett 61-69, 205-208). Both in Democratic Vistas and in his 1876 Preface to LG, WW was at pains to insist that the meaning of “Calamus” resides mainly in its political significance,—e.g., “It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.” However mistaken such a hope, there is no question that for the poet the “Calamus” sentiment possessed a power both tragic and idealistic, from whose inner turmoil was to emerge compassion, sympathy, and balance. Through the remaining six editions of LG, this group of poems retained its identity with surprisingly little change. The forty-five poems of 1860 were reduced in 1867 to forty-two, with three poems rejected; in 1871 one poem was added and four were transferred to Passage to India to make a total of thirty-nine, which is the number retained for the final arrangement of 1881. “Birds of Passage” This group, new to WW’s final 1881 arrangement, appears under a title which admirably suggests an abiding element in his poetry—the sense of flight and change. Although the seven component poems each appeared in a different group in various earlier editions of LG, they now acquire a casual unity of tone because each details with movement—whether of the evolution of cultural perfection, or westward expansion, or the search for one’s own identity, or the vicissitudes of history. “Sea Drift” This group of eleven poems, compiled in LG1881, included the seven poems of the “Sea-Shore Memories” cluster in the 1871 Passage to India, two new poems, and two poems transferred from the 1876 Two Rivulets. The new group is one of the poet’s most consonant arrangements, held together by the impression, deep in childhood memory, of the sea and the beach, an influence which is at the heart of the acceptance of the tragic in life. “By the Roadside” The two opening poems of this group are from the first edition of 1855, and three were newly written for the final 1881 arrangement. Sixteen are poems from LG 1860, five from the 1865 Drum-Taps, one from LG 1867, and two from the 1871 Passage to India. The title “By the Roadside” suggests no especial assignment of theme whatever, unless the poet meant to evoke the notion of “wayside” topics as they strike the mind during one’s passage through life. What we have here seems at first to be simply poetic miscellany: poems of rebellion, of stern admonition, of the questioning of life’s meaning, of idealistic vision, of announcement, of descriptive intent. The group is truly a mélange held together by the common bond of the poet’s experience as roadside observer—passive, but alert and continually recording. Whitman 4 “Drum-Taps” WW’s earliest reference to Drum-Taps is in a letter of March 31, 1863, in which he asks his mother to look after the MS, but he was at work on some of the poems by 1860 or earlier, when he was considering the printing of a collection, Banner at Day-Break, some of whose titles were later identified as Drum-Taps poems. WW said Drum-Taps was “put together by fits and starts, on the field, in the hospitals, as I worked with the soldier boys…” (Traubel 11, 137); and after much persistence against odds, he sent the book to press in May, 1865. The first issue was a thin book of 72 pages containing 53 poems, one of which was the short twelve-line “Hush’d be the Camps To-day” about the burial of Lincoln. The great Lincoln elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” was the first of 18 more poems published as “Sequel to Drum-Taps (since the Preceding Came from the Press),” and bound into the second issue of Drum-Taps. Five hundred copies were printed, and the reviews were comparatively few and unenthusiastic, notably those by two bright young men of the future, William Dean Howells and Henry James, just turned to twenty-eight and twenty-two years respectively. Such as response saddened the poet, who—as he told O’Connor—felt that Drum-Taps was superior as a work of art to LG. Despite the distinction, WW was profoundly aware that Drum-Taps was a part of LG, that indeed the experience of the war had given identity and homogeneity to the whole.

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