Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions by Walt Whitman Read Free Book Online Page B

regarding a lack of adherence. “He most honors my style,” explains the poet in “[Song of Myself],” “who learns under it to destroy the teacher” (p. 86). Throughout the poem, Whitman encourages the reader’s active participation and independent thinking with unpredictable breaks as well as provocative questions without “right” answers (many of them bear a resemblance to Buddhist koans). At the end of the poem one is left with a sense of the poet’s spirit not shining over but running under the bootsoles of his protégés.
    Equality between writer and reader was not the only difficult balance Whitman attempted to achieve in the poems of Leaves of Grass. As part of his plan for a new democratic art, he questioned and disrupted many other long-standing cultural boundaries: between rich and poor, men and women, the races and religions of the world. His most direct way of doing so was by observation and aggressive questioning, as in his discussion of a slave at auction in “I Sing the Body Electric”:
    This is not only one man .... he is the father of those who
shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless
embodiments and enjoyments.
     
    How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his
offspring through the centuries?
Who might you find you have come from yourself if you
could trace back through the centuries?
(“[I Sing the Body Electric],” 1855, p. 125).
    Such passages were obviously meant to shock and provoke the American conscience, especially considering that slavery was still a legal and accepted activity. Whitman, who was close friends with Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Price, and several other reformers, also attacked the common acceptance that women were the “weaker sex.” Eight years after the first women’s rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, he set out to liberate a population still falsely confined by their society’s written and unwritten rules, their own fears—even their clothing:
    They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right—they are calm, clear,
well-possess’d of themselves
(“A Woman Waits for Me,” pp. 263-264).
    A less confrontational method for “democratizing” his image of America was the “catalogue,” a list of people, places, items, events that sometimes went on for pages. Whitman might have been inspired by the new art of photography in creating these lists; reading through them has an effect that’s similar to looking through a photograph album, though a closer comparison may be to watching a video montage. By verbally connecting the marginalized and the mainstream, Whitman puts them “on the same page”—in the book, and hopefully in the mind of the reader.
    The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the
nominee that is chosen and the nominee that has failed,
The great already known, and the great anytime after to day,
The stammerer, the sick, the perfectformed, the homely,
The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and
sentenced him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,
The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow,
the red squaw ...
I swear they are averaged now .... one is no better than the
other (“[The Sleepers],” 1855, pp. 116-117).
    Whitman’s idea of a “passionate democracy” encouraged an awareness and appreciation of others as well as one’s own self. The strong sensual and erotic passages in Leaves must have been especially shocking in the mid-nineteenth century, when underwear was called “unmentionables” and piano legs were covered with pantaloons because of their suggestive shape; but even in the twenty-first century Whitman’s