Today marks the 155th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass. The 36-year-old Whitman had hoped to write a “new American Bible,” a work that you, the reader, might pore through “in the open air every season of every year of your life.” Reviewing a later edition, the New York Tribune attacked “the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman,” concluding that “the gross materialism of his verses represents art in its last degradation.” Ezra Pound, in a piece originally titled “What I Feel About Walt Whitman,” wrote, “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the the crucial stage’ and he is the ‘voice triumphant.’ He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.”
In a wonderfully strange episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, Bob Dylan recited Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing”:
(To read Langston Hughes’ response to Whitman, click here. The history of poetry is the history of an extended conversation.)
But why not listen to some actual Whitman? Alas, there isn’t much: the poet who described himself as “garrulous to the very last” left us only 36 seconds of his voice, recorded on a wax cylinder. Here are the first four lines of his six-line poem, “America”:
(Does the poem make you want to run out and buy a pair of jeans? Then click here — and insert an “art in its last degradation” joke at your Levi’s-sporting leisure.)
But to imagine Whitman as a jeans-wearing, flag-waving, Pop-Tarts-eating patriot is to get him wrong in ways that extend beyond the anachronism. In Democratic Vistas, an 1871 prose work, he writes,
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? . . . . It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
The poetry conversation extends from Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, who asks, a century after the first publication of Leaves of Grass, “America when will you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes? / When will you look at yourself through the grave?”
From Ginsberg’s questions about angels, about America, we might move to Tony Kushner, poet of the stage. The entire clip that follows is worth watching (especially if you’re a student of Dutch), but the most pertinent part runs from 6:43-7:40:
But that’s a heavy way to close this post. Instead, how about some Mellencamp?
Or some Hugh Laurie?
Or some Springsteen?
Or some Homer Simpson?
Happy birthday, America. As John Berryman writes, in Dream Song 22, “It is the Fourth of July. / Collect.”
