May 31, 1819
West Hills
Long Island
This is what you shall do: Love the
earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one
that asks, stand up for the stupid and
crazy, devote your income and labor
to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning God, have patience and
indulgence toward the people, take
off your hat to nothing known or
unknown or to any man or number of
men, go freely with powerful
uneducated persons and with the
young and with the mothers of
families, read these leaves in the open
air every season of every year of your
live, re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own
soul, and your very flesh shall be a
great poem…
Leaves of Grass (1855)
Key Techniques
0 Unrhymed / irregular meter (free verse)
0 Chant / rant / spoken rhythms
0 Anaphora
0 Vignettes
0 Lists
Self
Nation
Poetry
I celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease…observing a spear of
summer grass
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves
are crowded with perfumes
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it.
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste of
the distillation….it is odorless,
It is for my mouth….I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?....I do not know what is
is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves
are crowded with perfumes
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it.
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste of
the distillation….it is odorless,
It is for my mouth….I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me
The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him
limpsey and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured
him,
And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and
bruised feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave
him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his
awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and
ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and
passed north,
I had him sit next me at table….my firelock leaned in
the corner
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the
window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? For I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twentyninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from
their long hair,
Little streams passed all over their bodies
An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs
I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
Walt Whitman, an American one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual….eating drinking and
breeding
No sentimentalist….not stander above men and women or
apart from them….no more modest than immodest.
I speak the password primeval….I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.
Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I
touch or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then….I contradict myself;
I am large….I contain multitudes.
I concentrate toward them that are nigh….I wait on
the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already
too late?
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me….he
complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed….I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Transcendentalism
Mesmerism/Spiri
tualism
Fourierism
Carpenter /
Manual Laborer
Volunteer Nurse
Printer / Journalist
Teacher
Swedenborgianism
Free Love
Harmonialism
Phrenology
Pre-Darwinian
evolutionary and
geological
science
Hucksterism and
Celebrity Culture
Pfaff’s
Bohemians
New York Roughs
Slavery
Mid-19th Century
Political Corruption
and Incompetence
Market
Capitalism
Photography
Cultural
Expositions
Western
Expansion
Technological
Change
Urbanization
Performance
Culture
Visual Arts
Landscape
and Genre
Painting
Women’s
Movement
Oratory
Theater
Music
Timeline
0 1848: Mexican Cession/ Seneca
Falls Convention
0 1849: Gold Rush/ Asiatic Cholera
Epidemic
0 1850: Compromise of 1850/
Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter
0 1851: Melville’s Moby Dick
0 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
0 1853: Crystal Palace Art and
Industry Exposition opens in New
York
0 1854: Kansas / Nebraska Act,
Fugitive Slave Anthony Burns
captured in North and returned to
slavery in South / Walden
0 1855 Brooklyn’s population hits
500,000 / Whitman first publishes
0
0
0
0
0
Leaves of Grass
1856: Bloody Kansas / Charles
Sumner beaten by Preston J. Brooks
of South Carolina
1857: Dred Scott – no black
citizenship and Missouri
Compromise unconstitutional
1858: Lincoln Douglass Debates
1859: John Brown takes Harper’s
Ferry and is captured and hanged /
first U.S. oil strike in Pennsylvania
1860-61 Lincoln elected president /
11 states secede and form
confederacy / firing on Fort Sumter
/ Battle of Bull Run
Open Letter to Emerson 1856
Always America will be
agitated and turbulent. This
day it is taking shape, not to
be less so, but to be more so,
stormily, capriciously, on
native principles, with such
vast proportions of parts! As
for me, I love screaming,
wrestling, boiling-hot days.
Beat! Beat! Drums!
Beat! beat! drums! ---blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parely—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie
awaiting the hearses
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles
blow.
The Wound Dresser (Section 3)
On, on I go, (open doors of time! Open hospital doors!)
The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the
bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and
through I examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet
life struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the solder bends with curv’d neck and
side-falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
bloody stump,
And has not yet look’d on it.
The Wound Dresser (Section 3 continued)
I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and
sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.
I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bulletwound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so
sickening, so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray
and pail.
I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in
my breast a fire, a burning flame)
Come Up From the Fields Father
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ‘tis autumn
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the
moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the
trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately
buzzing?)
Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at daughter’s call
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time
be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I
draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice
Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of
freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible,
They shall yet make Columbia victorious.
Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,
You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder
of the earth.
No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,
If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for o
one.
One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian’s comrade,
From Maine, and from hot Carolina, and another an
Oregonese, shall be friends triune,
More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth
Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice (continued)
To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted
beyond death.
It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly
affection,
The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,
The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.
These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,
I ecstatic, O partners! O lands! With the love of lovers tie you.
(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)
Further Exploration
www.whitmanarchive.org
www.whitmans-brooklyn.org
Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman. Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the
Making of Leaves of Grass. University of Nebraska, 2010.