Reviewing the Reviewer

I have chosen three essays from three different countries: the United States, Canada, and Ireland. I do wish I knew more about the journals and papers where these reviews appeared, because it would seem that their respective audiences would be the real determining factor for either severly condemning these “raving of a drunkard” or celebrating them.

What I find particularly interesting about each of the reviews, especially the more unfavorable ones, is how hypocrtical they are. They lambaste Whitman, this “nameless bard” according to The New York Daily Tribune, for what they describe as “ravings” “full of egotism,” but the reviews themselves are malicious, egotistical rants. The supioriety that each of the writers conveys, their self-righteousness, is absurd. Moreoever, one can gather just how undemocratic and oppresive the cultures are that these writers come from (as though loafing in the grass were a crime, as though a lack of meter suggested a lack of morality).  Whitman wasn’t merely attacking the opression that prevailed in conventional poetry, but the oppresive culture that created such poetry. Leaves of Grass acts almost like a manifesto in this respect, one that is calling for real American democracy and the end to the tyranny wielded by religious groups, the upper classes, high culture, pseduo-moralists, and others.  

Something else that’s interesting is the reasons these reviews give for detesting Leaves of Grass, are the very reasons why the book is brilliant: “His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society” (New York Daily Tribune). What? Who wouldn’t be dying to know the words passed between Adam and Even in Paradise before the “fig-leaves,” or what the nature of those words were? I think it’s a true and lovely description of Leaves of Grass, only the metaphor is invoked here to suggest something abhorrent. But he’s more or less saying that Whitman has brought to life that moment in Paradise before shame, and that simply wonderful. “Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex. Without shame the woman I like knows and avows her” (Children of Adam).

What speaks to how radical Whitman was for the time is the great difficulty that the reviewers actually have as they try to write about Leaves of Grass. They aren’t really sure what passages to quote, they cannot find representative passages (probably because they do not know what it represents, but also because it’s impossible to sum up the immensity of the book with a few lines). The reviewers, especially D.W. for the Canadian Journal, ultimately ends up placing the decision on the reader, more or less undecided himself: “And so we leave the reader to his own judgment, between the old-world stickler for authority, precedent, and poetical respectability, and the new-world contemner of all authorities, laws, and respectabilities whatsoever.” D.W.’s review similarly demonstrates that Leaves of Grass was pushing people to reconsider their ideas about poetry, and about culture.

A-well-a, everybody's heard about the bird

In his entry entitled “Bird and Birds and Birds,” Whitman writes about the numberless species of birds that he’s been seeing all April. “Such oceans, such successions of them,” he writes. He goes on to catalog them all—Black Birds, Woodpeckers, Quails, Turkey-Buzzards, Cuckoos, Owls, Cat-Birds. The list is extensive. It's really intriguing since we see so many catalogs in  “Song of Myself” and elsewhere in Leaves of Grass. It seems to have been something that he did quite naturally; a kind of pastime. He undoubtedly would have been able to refer back to such catalogs as well in the event that a poem needed a list.

Frances Wright & Whitman

Born in Dundee, Scotland, Frances Wright became a prominent feminist, abolitionist, and liberal crusader of the 19^th Century. After traveling to the United States in 1818, Wright published Views of Society and Manners in America, a critique and celebration of American society that garnered praise from people like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, much like Alexis de Tocqueville’s later Democracy in America. After becoming an American citizen, Wright formed a utopian community, called Nashoba, where slaves Wright had purchased and liberated worked alongside white volunteers. The community turned out to be a failure. Wright became a public speaker, arguing for free love, birth control, equal rights for women, and separation of church and state. Among her critics, she was known as “The Great Red Harlot.”

Wright enchanted Whitman. Even as a small boy, he would have been familiar with Wright’s periodical The Free Inquirer, which his liberal father subscribed to. Perhaps as early as the age of ten, he saw her speak in New York. He later described her as “a woman of the noblest make-up” and “a most maligned, lied-about character—one of the best in history though also the least understood.” Whitman was a big fan of her A Few Days in Athens, a factually inaccurate book about the philosopher Epicurus. John W. McDonald states that, in her book, Wright made Epicurus into a determinist, and that this possibly led to Whitman’s interest in determinist philosophy and “the inevibility of all things.”

Song for Occupations: Revising Revisions

I. Initial Reaction to “Song for Occupations” (1855)

In “Song for Occupations,” Whitman immediately takes up where he left off in “Song of Myself.” Once again there’s that call for physical and spiritual union, and Whitman continues to make the case that his poems are essentially each and every one of us--that he is not “the head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman.” He's talking again about the uniformity of experience, the democratic nature of his identity. It does seems to differ from “Song of Myself” in that Whitman addresses the reader far more directly. He broaches us with question after question:

“Why what have you thought of yourself?

Is it you then that thought yourself less?

Is it you that thought the President greater than you? or the rich better off than          you? or the educated wiser than you?

The urgency and sheer number of these questions show that Whitman is crushing the barriers set up between poet and reader to an even greater extent than he did in “Song of Myself.” It’s almost as if he  expects us to answer. It’s rather galvanizing in that way. The other effect it has is didactic, for he’s laying it all out for us without abstractions or innuendo. He’s taking a very no-nonsense approach in the poem to tell us what he has to tell us.

Interesting lines abound in the poem. The following passage for instance:

The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are;

The President is up there in the White House for you . . . . it is not you who are          here for him,

The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you . . . . not you here for them,

The Congress convenes every December for you,

Laws, courts, the forming of states, the charters of cities, the going and coming of          commerce and mails are all for you.

Here Whitman likens American institutions (Congress, the White House, etc) to his poetry, reiterating the importance of the individual, the worker, and we the readers. Like American institutions, the ultimate purpose of Leaves of Grass is to benefit us. Without us the poetry is useless, as useless as a government without a people to serve.

II. Alterations Made to “Song for the Occupations” in Later Editions.

In 1856, the poem became “Poem of the Daily Work of The Workmen and Workwomen of These States.” We see that the same stylistic changes have been made  that were made to “Song of Myself.” In the 1860 edition, the poem becomes part of the “Chants Democratic” sequence, and so, clearly, has been given less indiviual significance. (However, it does keep its place toward the beginning of Leaves of Grass.) Here, the poem been altered in such a way as to sound more like a chant. Exclamations such as “American Masses!” and “Workmen and Workwomen!” have been added to make it sound like Whitman is directing a rally.

In the 1871-72 edition, the poem becomes “Carol of Occupations” and appears in the middle of Leaves of Grass. The poem has been drastically revamped in this version. Lines have been reorganized or removed completely, and certainly some of the oomph has been lost in the process of these alterations. Most significantly, perhaps, the ending that appeared in the 1855 edition has been cut:

When the psalm sings instead of the singer,

When the script preaches instead of the preacher,

When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved the supporting          desk,

When the sacred vessels or the bits of the eucharist, or the lath and plast, procreate          as effectually as the young silversmiths or bakers, or the masons in their          overalls,

When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child convince,

When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the nightwatchman's daughter,

When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions,

I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and          women.

 However, in the 1881 edition, many of these changes were scraped. The poem, now back to “A Song for Occupations,” looks more like the original  that first appeared in 1855. The stylistic changes have been revised, so that the lines are long again. Also, the original ending has been revived, and the sections have become longer. By the time we get to the 1881-92 edition, Whitman seems to have more or less satisfied himself with this version. 

It's worth noting how the poem changed from a "song" to a "chant" to a "carol" and then back to a "song." Each of those has its own associations. We typically associate a chant to a rallying crowd, and a carol of course has its religious connotations. There's something about a song that, I think, is useful to Whitman--it suggests music, something universal and something that's valuable in itself. Chanting and caroling have  specific functions for specific people. There's also something about a song that has more appeal to the masses. And  songs themselves are diverse--there's drinking songs, working songs and so forth.

Original Hipsters

The Bowery B’hoy, a phrase coined in the 1840s, referred to the young men who belonged to New York City’s most delirious, drunk, and carnivalesque quarter, dubbed the Bowery. The neighborhood was infamous as the poor man’s section of the city—or the working-class quarter—and was known for its notorious bar scene, lurid lights, eclectic street vendors, and street performers (among them, apparently, an Englishman who could slip swords down his throat). Bowery B’hoys dressed sharply—oiled hair, silk hat, upturned collar, boots—and had a peculiar “swing” in their gate. They disdained everything bourgeois (they never dressed too sharply), possessed a sense of adventure, and took great pride in their independence. They embodied the neighborhood, and it became part of their identity. 

It comes as no surprise that Walt Whitman was infatuated with the Bowery—its bustling energy, night life and diversity would have been a constant source of fascination to him. He said that the neighborhood had “the most heterogeneous melange of any street in the city: stores of all kinds and people of all kinds are to be met with every forty rods.” Much like Whitman’s interest in the American Museum, Whitman found in the Bowery oddness, a misfit character, and a medley of social classes coalescing in the streets and bars. And like how we can think of Leaves of Grass as like the American Museum, so we can think it as like the Bowery. Indeed Whitman has been referred to as the “Bowery B’hoy of literature.” 

The New Leaves

The picture above that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass replaced the casual, working-class mannered Whitman that opened the first edition. That simple change in portrayal tells us everything about how the 1860 edition differed from the 1855 edition. In this portrait, Whitman has the appearance of a "proper" poet--a rather cerebral curiosity marks his face, and he's dressed in some type of formal smoking jacket (or something). He's certainly not altogether "proper," but it's a significant change in appearance. And indeed, the alterations Whitman made to Leaves of Grass--added poems and refined style alterations--similarly helped transform his image into a more orthodox poet.

Comparing the original “Song of Myself” (as it would come to be known) with the version that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, one is immediately stuck by how much the poem has been groomed, for better or for worse. The relaxed prose element in the first version has yielded to a traditional verse structure. The long lines have been tucked and trimmed; the dazed, roaming nature of the poem has a more fixed direction; the unchecked free-spiritedness has been dressed so as to become more conventional, more “respectable.” The result reads smoothly; one can better grasp the language because the lines conform to our expectations as readers—the way we tend to normally read poetry, that is. Whitman really placed this emphasis on clarity in the second version, it seems, for its apparent not only in his line breaks, but in his denoting sections with numbers. Whitman wanted to be read—his poetry, more than the majority of others that preceded him, depended on it actually being read—so it would make sense for these alterations to have been made on behalf of the reader.

With regards to content, however, the alterations Whitman made are actually toward the abstract. For instance, in “Song of Myself,” “As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the / peep of the day / And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their / plently...” becomes in the 1860 version “As the hugging  and loving Bed-fellow sleeps at my / side through the night and withdraws at the / peep of day / And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels / swelling the house with their plenty...” It’s an interesting change—it turns from somewhat devotional to vaguely homoerotic. We also see in the blue book that Whitman made changes to this second version as well, so that it reads “with stealthy tread / leaving me baskets...” in the 1867 version. This too underscores the homoerotic element of the poem, but still resists telling us anything outright.

What else do we see Whitman doing in the blue book? For one, he eliminates “ed” from past tense words and replaces them with simply “d.” One of my favorite images in the poem, that of the suicide sprawled on the floor, started rather badly with “It is so—I witnessed the corpse—there the pistol had fallen,” but was immeasurably improved when it became “I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol/has fallen.” Another section that has a lot of work being done to is on page 44 (page number within book). What’s interesting to me on this page is the elimination of the line “Not merely of the New World, but of Africa, Europe, / Asia—a wandering savage.” It seems that by eliminating this line in the 1867 edition, Whitman was making a conscious decision to indeed only be of the New World; to firmly ground his poem in America.

In All People

Filmed at the Chinese New Year Parade with iMovie dramatic stuff