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.