In
his long, defiantly unconventional life, Walt
Whitman blew to smithereens all of the polite conventions of poetry as a genteel pastime and repository for lofty sentiment. He blew it up in form, content, and
subject. The first self-proclaimed poet of the people, gloried unselfconsciously
in himself, but also in the throbbing, vibrant world aboil around him. He absorbed it all and celebrated it in
torrents of words that seemed to flow from his pen faster than his hand could
move across the paper.
An
in the process he invented a new poetics. Although there is none like him and never
will be, he is the God father to all
of us, as Emily Dickinson’s very
different voice makes here the God
mother.
Whitman
spent his whole life on one book Leaves of Grass. The first edition of only 12 poems was
published in 1855 with a cover blurb purloined from a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was none too
happy to find himself so used. At the end
of his life and several editions later the book had ballooned to over 400 poems
and many individual poems had been revised and refreshed through several
editions.
Despite
it’s essential, classic status, Leaves of
Grass, like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, is a seminal work very
few have ever read in its entirety. Here
are some samples of poems from it you may have never read.
To a Locomotive
in Winter
Thee for my
recitative!
Thee in the
driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy
panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
Thy black
cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous
side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical,
now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great
protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale,
floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and
murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted
frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,
Thy train of
cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or
calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the
modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,
For once come
serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and
buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy
warning ringing bell to sound its notes, By
night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Fierce-throated
beauty!
Roll through my
chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,
Thy
madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,
Law of thyself
complete, thine own track firmly holding,
(No sweetness
debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of
shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er
the prairies wide, across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and
strong.
—Walt Whitman
When I Heard the Learned Astronomer
When I heard the
learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs,
the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown
the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting
heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon
unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and
gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical
moist night-air, and from time to time,
Lookdd up in
perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman
Mannahatta
I was asking for
something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon
lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what
there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane,
unruly,
musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the
word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see
that word nested in nests of water-bays,
superb,
Rich, hemm'd
thick all around with sailships and
steamships,
an
island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless
crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender,
strong,
light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,
Tides swift and
ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
The flowing
sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining
islands,
the heights, the villas,
The countless
masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters,
the
ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d,
The down-town
streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the
houses
of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers,
the
river-streets,
Immigrants
arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
The carts
hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses,
the
brown-faced sailors,
The summer air,
the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds
aloft,
The winter
snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the
river,
passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of
the city, the masters, well-form’d,
beautiful-faced,
looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs throng’d,
vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops
and shows,
A million people—manners
free and superb—open voices—
hospitality—the
most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried
and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays!
my city!
—Walt Whitman
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