Leaves of Grass First and Death-Bed Editions Read Online Free PDF Page A

Grimes,” by Albert G. Greene. “Young Grimes” is as conventional as “Old Grimes” in its rhyme, meter, religious expression, and sentimentality; there seems to be no signs of America’s great outlaw poet in its didactic lines. Even as he progressed through the decade, Whitman did not make substantial improvements to the formulaic poetry he contributed to the penny dailies. For example, “The Mississippi at Midnight,” originally published in the New Orleans Daily Crescent on March 6, 1848, bears much more similarity to Whitman’s earliest verse than to the twelve poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass : Its forced rhyme, predictable meter, and hyper-dramatic tone suggest that Whitman had not yet found his poetic voice.
    Whitman himself supplied a visual corollary for different stages of his literary career. His interest in physical representations and images, encouraged by his printing apprenticeships, led to a life- long fascination with the developing art of photography. No American writer (with the possible exception of Mark Twain) was more photographed than Whitman. More than a hundred images of the poet are now in public domain and available online on the Walt Whitman Archive ( www.whitmanarchive.org ). An image of Whitman circa 1848 depicts a haughty young dandy; his high collar and necktie lend him a traditional air, and his pose (he is strangely uncomfortable-looking as he leans on a cane) seems affected and self-conscious. His hooded and supercilious expression contrasts with the eye-to-eye contact of the poet of Leaves of Grass , who confronts the reader directly from the frontispiece of the 1855 Edition. This image, an engraving made from an 1854 daguerreotype taken by Gabriel Harrison, shows Whitman with loosened collar, exposed undershirt, and wrinkled chinos. Hands in pockets, hat cocked, physically forward, the 1855 Walt resembles one of the masses but looks radically different from other poets; he strikes one as straightforward and up-front, yet at the same time less predictable and conventional. Between 1846 and 1855, then, Whitman’s image ironically grew younger and more edgy. He exchanged a Brooks Brothers “stuffed shirt” look for the suggestive appeal of a sexy Gap ad, and his radically altered literary style reflected this new look.
     
    “Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1923. “No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators. The same in America. Ahead of Whitman, nothing” (Woodress, ed., Critical Essays on Walt Whitman, p. 211). The sentiments were echoed by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Langston Hughes named Whitman the “greatest of American poets”; Henry Miller described him as “the bard of the future” (quoted in Perlman et al., eds., Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, pp. 185, 205). Even his more cynical readers recognized Whitman’s position of near-mythical status and supreme influence in American letters. “His crudity is an exceeding great stench but it is America,” Ezra Pound admitted in a 1909 article; he continued: “To be frank, Whitman is to my father-land what Dante is to Italy” (Perlman, pp. 112-113). “We continue to live in a Whitmanesque age,” said Pablo Neruda in a speech to PEN in 1972. “Walt Whitman was the protagonist of a truly geographical personality: The first man in history to speak with a truly continental American voice, to bear a truly American name” (Perlman, p. 232). Alicia Ostriker, in a 1002 essay, claimed that “if women poets in America have written more boldly and experimentally in the last thirty years than our British equivalents, we have Whitman to thank” (Perlman, p. 463).
    How did a former typesetter and penny-daily editor come to write the poems that would define and shape American literature and culture?
    Whitman’s metamorphosis in the decade before the first