Published Works Manuscripts Biography & Correspondence Criticism Resources Pictures & Sound About the Archive

Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1.	Growing Up in the Age of Accelerating Print: Whitman as Printer, Journalist, Teacher, and Fiction Writer
Chapter 2.	"Many Manuscript Doings and Undoings": The Road toward Leaves of Grass
Chapter 3.	"I Was Chilled with the Cold Types and Cylinder and Wet Paper Between Us": The First and Second Editions of Leaves of Grass
Chapter 4.	Intimate Script and the New American Bible: "Calamus" and the Making of the 1860 Leaves of Grass
Chapter 5.	Blood-Stained Memoranda
Chapter 6.	Reconstructing Leaves of Grass, Restructuring a Life
Chapter 7.	Dying into Leaves
Appendix	What Whitman Left Us
References

Acknowledgments

Our collaboration on this book began in 1996 when we worked together on a searchable electronic scholarly resource called Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman (Primary Source Media, 1997). At that time, we began tracking and writing about the evolution of Leaves of Grass from manuscript to print and from edition to edition. Later, we co-authored the Whitman biography for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Antebellum Writers in New York (Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale Group, 2002) and adapted it for the online biography on the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). That work stands behind and informs this work.

Part of chapter 2 appeared in another form as Ed Folsom, "'Many MS. Doings and Undoings': Walt Whitman's Writing of the 1855 Leaves of Grass," in Anthony Mortimer, ed., From Wordsworth to Stevens (Peter Lang, 2005), and part of chapter 6 appeared in another form as Ed Folsom, "Trying to Do Fair: Walt Whitman and the Good Life," Speakeasy (March/April 2004).

The authors want to thank the ever-growing staff of the Whitman Archive for their dedication, good work, and friendship. So much of what we have learned about Whitman and his work derives from the extraordinary work our colleagues and graduate students are doing every day on the Archive.

List of Abbreviations of Whitman's Works

AP	An American Primer, ed. Horace Traubel (Stevens Point, WI: Holy Cow! Press, 1987).
Corr.	The Correspondence, 6 vols., ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961-77); vol. 7, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
DBN	Daybooks and Notebooks, 3 vols., ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978).
D-T	Drum-Taps (New York: 1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (Washington: 1865-6). Available in facsimile as Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-6), ed. F. DeWolfe Miller (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1959).
EPF	Early Poems and Fiction, ed. Thomas Brasher (New York: New York University Press, 1963).
Journ.	The Journalism, 2 vols., ed. Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and Edward J. Recchia (New York: Peter Lang, 1998-2003).
LG	Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold W. Boldgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965).
LG 1855	Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: 1855). Available in facsimile as Leaves of Grass: A Facsimile of the First Edition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968).
LG 1860	Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-1). Available in facsimile as Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961).
LG Var.	Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 3 vols., ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White (New York: New York University Press, 1980).
NUPM	Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, 6 vols., ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
PW	Prose Works 1892, 2 vols., ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963-4).
WWC	With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel, 9 vols. (various publishers, 1906-96).

Introduction

No American writer has been more influential, nationally and internationally, than Walt Whitman. Poets from his time to our own, in the United States and around the world, have talked back to Whitman, carrying on the conversation that he initiated over 150 years ago—a dialogue about democracy, poetry, love, death, and the endless permutations of life that he believed would define America and eventually produce a republic equal to its ideals.

It is difficult to become a poet in the United States without at some point coming to grips with Whitman, answering the challenge that he issued to future generations, to the "Poets to come": "I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future," he said, "Expecting the main things from you" (LG, 14). This continual deferral of the ideal was Whitman's style; he set in process a history and a literature that would struggle toward democracy, even if they would never fully attain it. His poetry was written to initiate response, revision, process, and his own compositional techniques emphasized his refusal to reach conclusion. Whitman was the ultimate reviser, continually reopening his poems and books to endless shuffling, retitling, editing, and reconceptualizing. Leaves of Grass was Whitman's title for a process more than a product: every change in his life and in his nation made him reopen his book to revision.

Whitman's desire was for a democracy that celebrated the self yet sang the ensemble, a democracy that worshipped the individual and the communal, that indeed defined democratic individuality as the ability to imagine and empathize with the vast variety of other individualities that composed the nation: "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse" (LG, 1). Whitman's continual wrestling with the problems and challenges of the emerging American democracy and the developing American democratic art has had a surprisingly widespread impact on other countries as well, where his democratic ideas and radical poetics have taken root and emerged in new hybrids as his work mixes with other national literatures. There are now many different Walt Whitmans at work in various poetic traditions, influencing writers in distinctive ways—in some countries he is the poet of socialism, in others the poet of spiritualism, in others still the poet of radical sexuality. His work has been translated into all the major languages of the world, and in several languages there are multiple and competing translations of Leaves of Grass. Even in the United States, the variety of reactions to Whitman's poetry is staggering; American poets have as often rejected him as they have embraced him. The remarkable fact is that everyone, at some point, has to confront Whitman, wrestle with his structuring of poetry, the nation, democracy, and the self: "I am large," he said, "I contain multitudes" (LG, 88).

From Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg; from Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer to June Jordan and Michael Harper; from Meridel LeSueur and Muriel Rukeyser to Patricia Hampl and Sharon Olds; from D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Charles Tomlinson and Anthony Burgess; from José Martí to Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges; from Rubén Darío, Fernando Pessoa, and Federico García Lorca to Rudolfo Anaya, Garrett Hongo, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Yusef Komunyakaa—the intense urge on the part of writers to talk back to Whitman has cut across boundaries of race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.

This monograph has a direct relationship to our editorial work with the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). That project has convinced us that a new kind of introductory book on Whitman now needs to be written. In our ongoing efforts to re-edit Whitman's work on the web, we are motivated not so much by a desire to reproduce in electronic form the many things brilliantly accomplished by the monumental Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (22 volumes, New York University Press, 1961-84) as by a desire to address the dated scholarship, and the gaps, peculiar orderings, errors, incoherencies, and other inadequacies, that characterize that edition. Perhaps the oddest choice made by the New York University Press editors was never to present, anywhere in the 22 volumes, a straightforward printing of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a document of primary importance in literary history. In fact, with the exception of the final "deathbed" edition of Leaves (so called because copies were brought to Whitman during his final illness), one can only imaginatively construct the different editions from the textual notes and lists of variants in the Variorum Edition (LG Var.).

Another curiosity is the omission of Whitman's poetry manuscripts, an especially strange choice because the New York University Press edition includes a hefty amount of material of minor importance, meticulously edited and annotated. The three-volume Variorum Edition of Leaves of Grass was originally slated to present all the manuscripts, periodical publications, and book publications of Whitman's poems, but it ended up dealing only with the book publications, leaving the important manuscript origins and early periodical versions all but inaccessible. A projected second Variorum Edition, dealing with materials not accounted for in the first Variorum, has never materialized. Our electronic archive is steadily making available an increasing number of poetry manuscripts, a development that is revealing a previously unknown side of Whitman's creative process.

We therefore call our book Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Every book about Whitman, of course, rewrites the script of Whitman's life and work, altering the meaning of his work and emphasizing certain events in his life. Our book certainly re-scripts Whitman in that sense, but our title is further meant to suggest a recurring emphasis in the following pages: we are rethinking Whitman's life in terms of his script, those thousands of manuscript pages that he left behind and which, to this day, have not been adequately studied. Whitman has always been thought of as the "poet of print," the newspaperman who learned to set type and who often took his poetry manuscripts to print shops to have them set in type so that he could see immediately what they would look like on the printed page. Because of this, we often have viewed Whitman as a poet who begins and ends in print, when in fact he labored hard in script. From his early notebooks, where we can trace the first seeds of Leaves of Grass, through his final years, where he struggled against failing health to scribble out his last poems, Whitman's most intense struggles were in script, in that tough, originating workshop where words first meet paper. That's where the process began that resulted in Whitman's eventual identification of himself with his book.

Our book pursues the metonymic relation that Whitman famously employed between himself and his work ("this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man" [LG, 505]). We weave together an account of Whitman's life and an account of his works, especially his evolving masterpiece Leaves of Grass. In a sense, we follow Justin Kaplan's notion that "the irreducible reality of literary lives" is not the "naked self" but the "sum of a writer's public verbal acts and ecstasies with language" (Kaplan 1979, 55). Once we begin to think about Whitman through the lens provided by digital resources, new questions become accessible and new problems emerge. Certainly some of the inadequacy of older models of criticism becomes clear. Many of us still talk about "Song of Myself" as if it were a single, stable entity. Yet this poem took various forms and had various titles in the six different editions of Leaves of Grass from 1855 to 1881, and it had a complex pre-history in manuscripts and early notebooks. Our discussion highlights Whitman's evolving work—including the material production of the books themselves—in the context of his life. Many aspects of books that Whitman typically controlled—including typeface, margins, ornamentation, and the like—communicate in subtle but powerful ways to readers, and in ways that have been for the most part ignored.

We are looking, in other words, at Whitman's life as a writer—his writing life. In doing so, we emphasize his "scripted life," the manuscript origins of his work that tell us some remarkable things about his motivations, ideas, and thinking processes. We also investigate his "life in press," the ways that his training and experience as a printer and typesetter affected his evolving belief that he could literally transfer his identity to the printed page, embody himself in books. Our narrative attempts to illuminate both Whitman's life and his work by focusing on those places where they most thoroughly meld.

We begin with a consideration of what it meant to grow up in the age of accelerating print. Whitman's childhood took place in and around New York City, which at the time was experiencing an explosion in print technology and printed products. From his schooling through his newspaper apprenticeships, Whitman was formed in key ways by the technological developments that made cheap paper and cheap printing accessible to the quickly expanding population of the US. As a young teenager, Whitman was already publishing professional written work. He was surrounded by a vibrant and chaotic newspaper- and book-publishing world, where the very nature of a genre like "poetry" was morphing before his eyes. He was an aspiring fiction writer, journalist, and poet. As a schoolteacher, he was fascinated by the new development of school textbooks, and he had much to say about the kinds of books America should be having its young people read. There are ways, in fact, to see the first edition of Leaves of Grass (which begins with a poem about a child asking a deceptively simple question—"What is the grass?"—and features a poem about the education of a child who went forth into the world) as a kind of poetic textbook.

Our second chapter, "'Many Manuscript Doings and Undoings,'" looks at the mystery years leading up to the first edition of Leaves of Grass and explores the little-known manuscript sources of that book. We examine in detail some of his notebooks and manuscript jottings in which Leaves was born, and we explore how those manuscripts teach us a great deal about Whitman's poetry—its forms, its compositional process, its meanings.

Our third chapter treats Whitman's first two editions of Leaves (1855, 1856). These were possibly Whitman's most radical editions, at once challenging publishing conventions and creating new conventions. Examining these editions in their material, aesthetic, and ideological aspects opens a window into Whitman's thinking as a thirty-something newspaper man who was groping for a new genre to express his radical notions of democracy, reading, writing, and absorptive American identity.

"Intimate Script and the New American Bible," our fourth chapter, examines the years from 1856 to the publication of Whitman's 1860 edition of Leaves. These years, too, are still something of a mystery, involving the haunting and intimate manuscript cycle of male-male love poems that he never published but instead reworked into a much more public statement of camaraderie that became a centerpiece of the edition of Leaves that he construed to be an "American Bible." The wild swings between private and public, personal love and public love, script and print, that mark this era of his life are indicative of a fermenting imagination that was seeking a way to fuse the personal and public, to make the act of reading at once the most public act in America (everyone reading the same thing) and the most intimate (each reader penetrated by the words of the author whose book was held in hand).

The Civil War changed everything for Whitman, including the nature and purpose of writing, as we attempt to show in chapter 5, "Blood-Stained Memoranda." His never-published manuscript notebooks written during the war are some of the most astonishing Civil War documents extant. Whitman did not think of himself primarily as a poet, but rather as a writer, and his work always probes the borders between prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, realism and romanticism. His work is at its most radical when he finds the conduits and seepages that allow him to explore ideas and events in genre-breaking ways. The Civil War notebooks, out of which grow his poems Drum-Taps and his prose Memoranda During the War, are the workshop where we can see the poems when they were still prose, can trace the prose becoming poems, and can experience his life among the wounded soldiers in hospitals becoming words, occasionally literally stained by the blood of the young men he was nursing.

In the American Reconstruction period, Whitman engaged in his own process of "Reconstructing Leaves of Grass," the subject of our sixth chapter. As the nation was reconstructing itself politically and healing from the war, Whitman undertook the complete reordering and rebuilding of Leaves of Grass. The 1867 edition literally sewed in his Civil War poems, and by 1870 he had made Leaves almost unrecognizably different from its pre-war state. His prose work during this time, notably Democratic Vistas, serves as a companion to this rebuilding project.

"Dying into Leaves" treats the last decade of Whitman's life, a period often ignored by critics and biographers. This is in fact an illuminating and active period for Whitman, as he once again enters into a series of experiments in merging prose and poetry. He publishes two books that run the genres together, and he oversees the production of a single volume that gathers his prose and poetry. He incorporates Memoranda During the War into a wildly suggestive new kind of autobiographical prose that he names Specimen Days, capturing his sense of identity as a series of indicative and often contradictory moments instead of a clear unity.

Whitman's life created a chaos of words, printed and unprinted, finished and barely begun. In an appendix, called "What Whitman Left Us," we examine the history of how his work has been categorized and printed and taught, and we look at how that history suggests the various purposes to which Whitman has been put over the last century. From the 1902 Camden edition of his Complete Writings to the New York University Press 22-volume scholarly edition of his Collected Writings to the new Whitman Archive on the Internet, the story of how we gather and sort and label and categorize this massive life-in-words tells us a great deal about how we have read Whitman's significance, and it indicates the new ways we may read him in the future.

Chapter 1

Growing Up in the Age of Accelerating Print: Whitman as Printer, Journalist, Teacher, and Fiction Writer

Walt Whitman, arguably America's most influential and innovative poet, was born into a working-class family in West Hills, New York, a village near Hempstead, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just 30 years after George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States. When Whitman was born, the new country was still very much in formation. Only five years before the poet's birth, the United States Capitol Building, the White House, the Library of Congress, and other key governmental buildings in Washington had been burned by the British in the War of 1812, a war that most Americans did not want to fight, and the purposes of which seemed as amorphous to many citizens then as they do to students of American history today. Andrew Jackson, however, emerged as a wildly popular figure after he led American troops to victory in the battle of New Orleans that ended the war. Jackson would soon turn his attention to conquering Spanish Florida—and the Seminole Indians and escaped black slaves who fought with Spain—and claiming it for the US.

As Whitman entered the world, the US Congress was just beginning to meet again in the reconstructed Capitol Building. But Congress, like the nation, was already torn in fierce debate over the issue of slavery, and within the first year of Whitman's life, the Missouri Compromise was enacted, part of the tormented balancing act between slave and free states that would define so much of the nation's history while Whitman was growing up, a tension that would culminate in the Civil War. Virtually all of the political issues that would occupy Whitman during his lifetime, and that would inspire and inform his poetry, were gestating at the time of his birth.

Walt Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old when Whitman was born. Walter Sr had been born just after the end of the American Revolution; always a liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas Paine. Trained as a carpenter but struggling to find work, Walter Sr had taken up farming by the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just about to turn four, Walter Sr moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across from New York City, or "Mannahatta" as Whitman would come to call it in his celebratory writings about the city that was just then emerging as the nation's major urban center. One of Walt's favorite stories about his childhood concerned the time General Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the 6-year-old Walt from a crowd in Brooklyn, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman later came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands, the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants, where the new nation was being invented day by day.

Walt Whitman is thus of the first generation of Americans who were born in the newly formed United States and grew up assuming the existence of a unified new country. Despite the nation's many problems, pride in the United States was rampant, and Walter Sr—after giving his first son Jesse (1818-70) his own father's name, his second son his own name, his daughter Mary (1822-99) the name of Walt's maternal great-grandmother, and his daughter Hannah (1823-1908) the name of his own mother—turned to the heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of his other three sons: Andrew Jackson Whitman (1827-63), George Washington Whitman (1829-1901), and Thomas Jefferson Whitman (1833-90). Only the youngest son, Edward (1835-1902), who was mentally and physically handicapped, carried a name that tied him to neither the family's nor the country's history.

Walter Whitman Sr was of English stock, and his marriage in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and Welsh stock, led to what Walt always considered a fertile tension in the Whitman children between a more smoldering, brooding Puritanical temperament and a sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition. Whitman's father was a stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, maybe an alcoholic, whom Whitman respected but for whom he never felt a great deal of affection. His mother, on the other hand, served throughout his life as his emotional touchstone. There was a special affectional bond between Whitman and his mother, and the long correspondence between them records a kind of partnership in attempting to deal with the family crises that mounted over the years, as Jesse became mentally unstable and violent and eventually had to be institutionalized, as Hannah entered a disastrous marriage with an abusive husband, as Andrew became an alcoholic and married a prostitute before dying of ill health in his thirties, and as Edward required increasingly dedicated care.

During Walt's childhood, the Whitman family moved around Brooklyn a great deal as Walter Sr tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to cash in on the city's quick growth by speculating in real estate—buying an empty lot, building a house, moving his family in, then trying to sell it at a profit to start the whole process over again. Walt loved living close to the East River, where as a child he rode the ferries back and forth to New York City, imbibing an experience that would remain significant for him his whole life: he loved ferries and the people who worked on them, and his 1856 poem eventually entitled "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" explored the full resonance of the experience. The act of crossing became, for Whitman, one of the most evocative events in his life—at once practical, enjoyable, and mystical. The daily commute suggested the passage from life to death to life again and suggested too the passage from poet to reader to poet via the vehicle of the poem. By crossing Brooklyn ferry, Whitman first discovered the magical commutations that he would eventually accomplish in his poetry.

While in Brooklyn, Whitman attended the newly founded Brooklyn public schools for six years, sharing his classes with students of a variety of ages and backgrounds, though most were poor, since children from wealthier families generally attended private schools. In Whitman's school, all the students were in the same room, except African Americans, who had to attend a separate class on the top floor. Whitman had little to say about his rudimentary formal schooling, except that he hated corporal punishment, a common practice in schools and one that he would attack in later years in both his journalism and his fiction. But most of Whitman's meaningful education came outside of school, when he visited museums, went to libraries, and attended lectures. He always recalled the first great lecture he heard, when he was 10 years old, given by the radical Quaker leader Elias Hicks, an acquaintance of Whitman's father and a close friend of Whitman's grandfather Jesse. While Whitman's parents were not members of any religious denomination, Quaker thought always played a major role in Whitman's life, in part because of the early influence of Hicks, and in part because his mother Louisa's family had a Quaker background. Whitman's grandmother Amy Williams Van Velsor was especially committed to her Quaker beliefs, and her death—the same year Whitman first heard Hicks—hit young Walt hard, since he had spent many happy days at the farm of his grandmother and colorful grandfather, Major Cornelius Van Velsor.

Visiting his grandparents on Long Island was one of Whitman's favorite boyhood activities, and during those visits he developed his lifelong love of the Long Island shore, sensing the mystery of that territory where water meets land, fluid melds with solid. One of Whitman's greatest poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," is on one level a reminiscence of his boyhood on the Long Island shore and of how his desire to be a poet arose in that landscape. The idyllic Long Island countryside formed a sharp contrast to the crowded energy of the quickly growing Brooklyn-New York City urban center. Whitman's experiences as a young man alternated between the city and the Long Island countryside, and he was attracted to both ways of life. This dual allegiance can be traced in his poetry, which is often marked by shifts between rural and urban settings.

By the age of 11, Whitman was done with his formal education (by this time he had far more schooling than either of his parents had received), and he began his life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library, where his self-education began. Always an autodidact, Whitman absorbed an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his visits to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant for engaging everyone he met in conversation and debate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed highly structured, classical educations at private institutions, Whitman forged his own rough and informal curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, music, and archeology out of the developing public resources of America's fastest-growing city.

In 1831, Whitman became an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot, a liberal, working-class newspaper, where he learned the printing trade and was first exposed to the excitement of putting words into print, observing how thought and event could be quickly transformed into language and immediately communicated to thousands of readers. At the age of 12, young Walt was already contributing to the newspaper and experiencing the exhilaration of getting his own words published. Whitman's first signed article, in the fashionable New York Mirror in 1834, expressed his amazement at how there were still people alive who could remember "the present great metropolitan city as a little dorp or village; all fresh and green as it was, from its beginning," and he wrote of a slave, "Negro Harry," who had died in 1758 at age 120 and who could remember New York "when there were but three houses in it" (Journ., 1:3). Here, at age 15, Whitman was already exploring subjects—his city's and his nation's remarkable growth and heterogeneous population—that would continue to fascinate him throughout his career as a writer. Even late in his life, he could still recall the excitement of seeing this first article in print: "How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper, in nice type" (PW, 1:287). For his entire life, he would maintain this fascination with the materiality of printed objects, with the way his voice and identity could be embodied in type and paper.

Living away from home—the rest of his family moved back to the West Hills area in 1833, leaving 14-year-old Walt alone in the city—and learning how to set type under the Patriot's foreman printer William Hartshorne, Whitman was gaining skills and experiencing an independence that would mark his whole career: he would always retain a typesetter's concern for how his words looked on a page, what typeface they were dressed in, what effects various spatial arrangements had, and he would always retain his stubborn independence, remaining a bachelor and living alone for most of his life. These early years on his own in Brooklyn and New York remained a formative influence on his writing, for it was during this time that he developed the habit of close observation of the ever-shifting panorama of the city, and a great deal of his future poetry and prose came to focus on catalogs of urban life and the history of New York City, Brooklyn, and Long Island.

Walt's brother Thomas Jefferson, known to everyone in the family as "Jeff," was born during the summer of 1833, soon after his family had resettled on a farm and only weeks after Walt had joined the crowds in Brooklyn that warmly welcomed the newly re-elected president, Andrew Jackson. Brother Jeff, 14 years younger than Walt, would become the sibling he felt closest to, their bond formed when they traveled together to New Orleans in 1848, when Jeff was about the same age as Walt was when Jeff was born. But while Jeff was a young child, Whitman spent little time with him. Walt remained separated from his family and furthered his education by absorbing the power of language from a variety of sources: various circulating libraries (where he read Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other romance novelists), theaters (where he fell in love with Shakespeare's plays and saw Junius Booth, John Wilkes Booth's father, play the title role in Richard III, always Whitman's favorite play), and lectures (where he heard, among others, Frances Wright, the Scottish radical emancipationist and women's rights advocate). By the time he was 16, Walt was a journeyman printer and compositor in New York City. His future career seemed set in the newspaper and printing trades, but then two of New York's worst fires wiped out the major printing and business centers of the city, and, in the midst of a dismal financial climate, Whitman retreated to rural Long Island, joining his family at Hempstead in 1836. He was only 17, but this five-year veteran of the printing trade was already on the verge of a career change.

His unlikely next career was that of a teacher. Although his own formal education was, by today's standards, minimal, his work as a newspaper apprentice had helped him develop the skills of reading and writing, more than enough for the kind of teaching he would find himself doing over the next few years. He knew he did not want to become a farmer, and he rebelled at his father's attempts to get him to work on the new family farm. Teaching was therefore an escape but was also clearly a job he was forced to take in bad economic times, and some of the unhappiest times of his life were these five years when he taught school in at least 10 different Long Island towns, rooming in the homes of his students, teaching three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes (some with over 80 students, ranging in age from 5 to 15, for up to nine hours a day), getting very little pay, and having to put up with some very unenlightened people. After the excitement of Brooklyn and New York, these often isolated Long Island towns depressed Whitman, and he recorded his disdain for country people in a series of letters (not discovered until the 1980s) that he wrote to a friend named Abraham Leech: "Never before have I entertained so low an idea of the beauty and perfection of man's nature, never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here," he wrote from Woodbury in 1840: "Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dulness are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair" (Corr., 7:3).

The little evidence we have of his teaching (mostly from short re-collections by a few former students) suggests that Whitman employed what were then progressive techniques—encouraging students to think aloud rather than simply recite, refusing to use corporal punishment, involving his students in educational games, and joining his students in baseball and card games. He did not hesitate to use his own poems—which he was by this time writing with some frequency, though they were rhymed, conventional verses that indicated nothing of the innovative poetry to come—as texts in his classroom. While he would continue to write frequently about educational issues and would always retain a keen interest in how knowledge is acquired, he was clearly not suited to life as a country teacher. One of the poems in his first edition of Leaves of Grass, eventually called "There Was a Child Went Forth," can be read as a statement of Whitman's educational philosophy, celebrating unrestricted extracurricular learning and an openness to experience and ideas that would allow for endless absorption of variety and difference: this was the kind of education Whitman had given himself and the kind he valued. He would always be suspicious of classrooms, and his great poem "Song of Myself" is generated by a child's wondering question, "What is the grass?," a question that Whitman spends the rest of the poem ruminating about as he discovers the complex in the seemingly simple, the cosmos in himself—an attitude that is possible, he says, only when we put "creeds and schools in abeyance." He kept himself alive intellectually by taking an active part in debating societies and in political campaigns: inspired by the Scottish reformist Frances Wright, who came to the United States to support Martin Van Buren in the presidential election of 1836, Whitman became an industrious worker for the Democratic party, campaigning hard for Van Buren's successful candidacy.

By 1841, Whitman's second career was at an end. He had interrupted his teaching in 1838 to try his luck at starting his own newspaper, the Long Islander, devoted to covering the towns around Huntington. He bought a press and type and hired his younger brother George as an assistant, but, despite his energetic efforts to edit, publish, write for, and deliver the new paper, it struggled financially, and he reluctantly returned to the classroom. Newspaper work made him happy, but teaching did not, and two years later, he abruptly quit his job as an itinerant schoolteacher and never returned to the classroom. The reasons for his decision continue to interest biographers. One persistent but unsubstantiated rumor has it that Whitman committed sodomy with one of his students while teaching in Southold, though it is not possible to prove that Whitman actually even taught there. The rumor suggests he was run out of town in disgrace, never to return and soon to abandon teaching altogether. But in fact Whitman did travel again to Southold, writing some remarkably unperturbed journalistic pieces about the place in the late 1840s and early 1860s. It seems far more likely that Whitman gave up schoolteaching because he found himself temperamentally unsuited for it. And, besides, he now had a new career opening up: he decided to become a fiction writer. Best of all, to nurture that career, he would need to return to New York City and re-establish himself in the world of journalism, since most fiction at the time was published in magazines and newspapers.

How ambitious was Whitman as a writer of short fiction? The evidence suggests that he was definitely more than a casual dabbler and that he threw himself energetically into composing stories. Still, he did not give himself over to fiction with the kind of life-changing commitment he would later give to experimental poetry. He was adding to his accomplishments, moving beyond being a respectable journalist and developing literary talents and aspirations. About twenty different newspapers and magazines printed Whitman's fiction and early poetry. His best years for fiction were between 1840 and 1845, when he placed his stories in a range of magazines, including the American Review (later called the American Whig Review) and the Democratic Review, one of the nation's most prestigious literary magazines. As a writer of fiction, he lacked the impulse toward innovation and the commitment to self-training that later moved him toward experimental verse, even though we can trace in his fiction some of the themes that would later flourish in Leaves of Grass.

His early stories are captivating in large part because they address obliquely (not to say crudely) important professional and psychological matters. His first published story, "Death in the School-Room," grew out of his teaching experience and interjected direct editorializing commentary: the narrator hopes that the "many ingenious methods of child-torture, will [soon] be gazed upon as a scorn'd memento of an ignorant, cruel, and exploded doctrine." This tale had a surprise ending: the teacher flogs a student he thinks is sleeping only to make the macabre discovery that he has been beating a corpse. Another story, "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul," offered a barely fictionalized account of Whitman's own circumstances and attitudes: the hero, Archibald Dean, left New York because of the great fire to take charge of a small district school, a move that made him feel "as though the last float-plank which buoyed him up on hope and happiness, was sinking, and he with it." Other stories concern themselves with friendships between older and younger men (especially younger men who are weak or in need of defense since they are misunderstood and at odds with figures of authority).

Whitman's steady stream of stories in the Democratic Review in 1842—he published five between January and September—must have made Park Benjamin, editor of the New World newspaper, conclude that Whitman was the perfect candidate to write a novel that would speak to the booming temperance movement. Whitman had earlier worked for Benjamin as a printer, and the two had quarreled, leading Whitman to write "Bamboozle and Benjamin," an article attacking this irascible editor, whose practice of rapidly printing advance copies of novels, typically by English writers, threatened both the development of native writers and the viability of US publishing houses. But now both men were willing to overlook past differences in order to seize a good financial opportunity.

In an extra number in November 1842, Benjamin's New World published Whitman's Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. The novel centers on a country boy who, after falling prey to drink in the big city, eventually causes the deaths of three women. The plot, which ends in a conventional moralistic way, was typical of temperance literature in allowing sensationalism into literature under a moral guise. Whitman's treatment of romance and passion here, however, is unpersuasive and seems to confirm a remark he had made two years earlier that he knew nothing about women from either "experience or observation." The novel stands nonetheless as one of the earliest explorations in American literature of the theme of miscegenation, and its treatment of the enslaved (white) body, captive to drink, has resonance, as does the novel's fascination with "fatal pleasure," Evans's name for the strong attraction many feel for sinful experience, be it drink or sex.

Interestingly, Franklin Evans sold more copies (approximately 20,000) than anything else Whitman published in his lifetime. The work succeeded despite being a patched-together concoction of hastily composed new writing and previously composed stories. Whitman claimed he completed Franklin Evans in three days and that he composed parts of the novel in the reading room of Tammany Hall, inspired by gin cocktails (another time he claimed he was buoyed by a bottle of port). He eventually described Franklin Evans as "damned rot—rot of the worst sort." Despite these old-age remarks, Whitman's original purpose was serious, for he supported temperance consistently in the 1840s, including in two tales—"Wild Frank's Return" and "The Child's Champion"—that turn on the consequences of excessive drinking. Moreover, Whitman began another temperance novel (The Madman) within months of finishing Franklin Evans, though he soon abandoned the project. His concern with the temperance issue may have derived from his father's drinking habits or even from Whitman's own drinking tendencies when he was an unhappy schoolteacher. Whatever the source, his concern with the issue remained throughout his career, and his poetry records, again and again, the waste of alcoholic abuse, the awful "law of drunkards" that produces "the livid faces of drunkards," "those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations," the "drunkard's breath," the "drunkard's stagger," "the old drunkard staggering home."

During the time he was writing temperance fiction, Whitman remained a generally successful journalist. He cultivated a fashionable appearance: William Cauldwell, an apprentice who knew him as lead editor at the New York Aurora, said that Whitman "usually wore a frock coat and high hat, carried a small cane, and the lapel of his coat was almost invariably ornamented with a boutonniere." In 1842 and 1843 he moved easily in and out of positions (as was then common among journalists) on an array of newspapers, including, in addition to the Aurora, the New York Evening Tattler, the New York Statesman, and the New York Sunday Times. And he wrote on topics ranging from criticizing how the police rounded up prostitutes to denouncing Bishop John Hughes for his effort to use public funds to support parochial schools.

Whitman left New York in 1845, perhaps because of financial uncertainty resulting from his fluctuating income. He returned to Brooklyn and to steadier work in a somewhat less competitive journalistic environment. Often regarded as a New York City writer, his residence and professional career in the city actually ended, then, a full decade before the first appearance of Leaves of Grass. However, even after his move to Brooklyn, he remained connected to New York: he shuttled back and forth via the Fulton ferry, and he drew imaginatively on the city's rich and varied splendor for his subject matter.

Opera was one of the many attractions that encouraged Whitman's frequent returns to New York. In 1846 Whitman began attending performances, often with his brother Jeff, a practice that was disrupted only by the onset of the Civil War (and even during the war, he managed to attend operas whenever he got back to New York). Whitman loved the thought of the human body as its own musical instrument, and his fascination with voice would later manifest itself in his desire to be an orator and in his frequent inclusion of oratorical elements in his poetry. For Whitman, listening to opera had the intensity of a "love-grip." In particular, the great coloratura soprano Marietta Alboni sent him into raptures: throughout his life she would remain his standard for great operatic performance, and his poem "To a Certain Cantatrice" addresses her as the equal of any hero. Whitman once said, after attending an opera, that the experience was powerful enough to initiate a new era in a person's development. When he later composed a poem describing his dawning sense of vocation ("Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"), opera provided both structure and contextual clues to meaning.

By the mid-1840s, Whitman had a keen awareness of the cultural resources of New York City and probably had more inside knowledge of New York journalism than anyone else in Brooklyn. The Long Island Star recognized his value as a journalist and, once he resettled in Brooklyn, quickly arranged to have him compose a series of editorials, two or three a week, from September 1845 to March 1846. With the death of William Marsh, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman became chief editor of that paper (he served from March 5, 1846, to January 18, 1848). He dedicated himself to journalism in these years and published little of his own poetry and fiction. However, he introduced literary reviewing to the Eagle, and he commented, if often superficially, on writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in the next decade would both have a significant impact on Leaves of Grass. The editor's role gave Whitman a platform from which to comment on various issues, from street lighting to politics, from banking to poetry. But Whitman claimed that what he most valued was not the ability to promote his opinions, but rather something more intimate, the "curious kind of sympathy . . . that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. He gets to love them."

For Whitman, to serve the public was to frame issues in accordance with working-class interests—and for him this usually meant white working-class interests. He sometimes dreaded slave labor as a "black tide" that could overwhelm white working men. He was adamant that slavery should not be allowed into the new western territories because he feared whites would not migrate to an area where their own labor was devalued unfairly by the institution of black slavery. Periodically, Whitman expressed outrage at practices that furthered slavery itself: for example, he was incensed at laws that made possible the importation of slaves by way of Brazil. Like Lincoln, he consistently opposed slavery and its further extension, even while he knew (again like Lincoln) that the more extreme abolitionists threatened the Union itself. In a famous incident, Whitman lost his position as editor of the Eagle because the publisher, Isaac Van Anden, as an "Old Hunker" (a member of a political faction within the New York Democratic party that opposed anti-slavery agitation), sided with conservative proslavery Democrats. He could no longer abide Whitman's support of free soil and the Wilmot Proviso (a legislative proposal designed to stop the expansion of slavery into the western territories).

Fortunately, on February 9, 1848, Whitman met, between acts of a performance at the Broadway Theatre in New York, J. E. McClure, who intended to launch a New Orleans paper, the Crescent, with an associate, A. H. Hayes. In a stunningly short time—reportedly in 15 minutes—McClure struck a deal with Whitman to become editor and provided him with an advance to cover his travel expenses to New Orleans. Whitman's younger brother Jeff, then only 15 years old, decided to travel with Walt and work as an office boy on the paper. The journey—by train, steamboat, and stagecoach—widened Walt's sense of the country's scope and diversity, as he left the New York City and Long Island area for the first time. Once in New Orleans, Walt did not have the famous New Orleans romance with a beautiful Creole woman, a relationship first imagined by the biographer Henry Bryan Binns and further elaborated by others who were charmed by the city's exoticism and eager to identify heterosexual desires in the poet. The published versions of his New Orleans poem called "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City" seem to recount a romance with a woman, though the original manuscript reveals that he initially wrote with a male lover in mind. Here, as is so often the case, Whitman's manuscripts provide an insight into the original motivations and tonalities of his poems, often revealing aspects of his thoughts that his published versions erased or disguised.

Whatever the nature of his personal attachments in New Orleans, he certainly encountered a city full of color and excitement. He wandered the French quarter and the old French market, attracted by "the Indian and negro hucksters with their wares" and the "great Creole mulatto woman" who sold him the best coffee he ever tasted. He enjoyed the "splendid and roomy bars" (with "exquisite wines, and the perfect and mild French brandy") that were packed with soldiers who had recently returned from the war with Mexico, and it was in New Orleans that his first encounters with young men who had seen battle, many of them recovering from war wounds, occurred, a precursor of his Civil War experiences. He was entranced by the intoxicating mix of languages—French and Spanish and English—in that cosmopolitan city and began to see the possibilities of a distinctive American culture emerging from the melding of races and backgrounds (his own fondness for using French terms may well have derived from his New Orleans stay). But the exotic nature of the Southern city was not without its horrors: slaves were auctioned within an easy walk of where the Whitman brothers were lodging at the Tremont House, around the corner from Lafayette Square. Whitman never forgot the experience of seeing humans on the selling block, and he kept a notice of a slave auction hanging in his room for many years as a reminder that such dehumanizing events occurred regularly in the United States. The slave auction was an experience that he would later incorporate in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric."

Walt felt wonderfully healthy in New Orleans, concluding that it agreed with him better than New York, but Jeff was often sick with dysentery, and his illness and homesickness contributed to their growing desire to return home. The final decision, though, was taken out of the hands of the brothers, as the Crescent owners exhibited what Whitman called a "singular sort of coldness" toward their new editor. They probably feared that this Northern editor would embarrass them because of his unorthodox ideas, especially about slavery. Whitman's sojourn in New Orleans lasted only three months.

His trip South produced a few lively sketches of New Orleans life and at least one poem, "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," in which the steamboat journey becomes a symbolic journey of life:

Vast and starless, the pall of heaven

      Laps on the trailing pall below;

And forward, forward, in solemn darkness,

      As if to the sea of the lost we go. (EPF, 42)

Throughout much of the 1840s Whitman wrote conventional poems like this one, often echoing the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant, and, at times, Shelley and Keats. Bryant—and the eighteenth-century graveyard school of English poetry—probably had the most important impact on his sensibility, as can be seen in his pre-Leaves of Grass poems "Our Future Lot," "Ambition," "The Winding-Up," "The Love that is Hereafter," and "Death of the Nature-Lover." The poetry of these years is artificial in diction and didactic in purpose; Whitman rarely seems inspired or innovative. Instead, tired language, conventional forms, and predictable thoughts usually render the poems inert:

O, beauteous is the earth! and fair

The splendors of Creation are:

Nature's green robe, the shining sky,

The winds that through the tree-tops sigh,

      All speak a bounteous God. (EPF, 8)

By the end of the decade, however, Whitman had undertaken serious self-education in the art of poetry, conducted in a typically unorthodox way—he clipped essays and reviews about leading British and American writers, and as he studied them he began to be a more aggressive reader and a more resistant respondent. His marginalia on these articles demonstrate that he was now committed to write not in the manner of his predecessors but against them.

On July 16, 1849, the publisher, health guru, and social reformer Lorenzo Fowler confirmed Whitman's growing sense of personal capacity when his phrenological analysis of the poet's head led to a flattering—and in some ways quite accurate—description of his character. Whitman at this time believed strongly in phrenology, the reading of the "bumps" on the skull to determine which emotions and qualities were well developed and which needed further work. Fowler was a well-known manipulator of skulls, and often gave examinations and wrote out his "charts of bumps" in his New York office. On this particular day, he registered his new client as "W. Whitman (Age 29 Occupation Printer)" (Stern 1971, 102). As Fowler felt around the bumps and indentations of Whitman's head, he expressed some amazement at this printer's "large sized brain" and noted how "few men have all the social feelings as strong as you have." While Fowler's emphasis on how much Whitman loved home life and how much he wanted to become a husband and father and how he might make a good accountant seems wide of the mark, his other perceptions are keen: You choose to fight with tongue and pen rather than with your fist . . . You are in fact most too open at times and have not alway[s] enough restraint in speech . . . Your sense of justice, of right and wrong is strong and you can see much that is unjust and inhuman in the present condition of society. You are but little inclined to the spiritual or devotional and have but little regard for creeds or ceremonies . . . You have a good command of language especially if excited. (Stern 1971, 103-4)

It's as if Fowler's phrenological reading gave Whitman certification as a kind of ideal person, large in appetites and yet balanced in temperament, someone with what Fowler called a "grand physical constitution" (Stern 1971, 105) and therefore fit to become America's poet. In addition to bolstering Whitman's confidence, the positive reading of the "bumps" on his skull gave him some key vocabulary for Leaves of Grass. "Amativeness" and "adhesiveness," phrenological terms delineating affections between and among the sexes, were particularly important for him, and "adhesiveness"—the bonding of people of the same sex—provided Whitman with an early word for male-male affection at a time when such terms were not easy to find.

Whitman's association with Lorenzo Fowler and his brother Orson would prove to be of continuing importance well into the 1850s. The Fowler brothers, along with their brother-in-law Samuel R. Wells, ran the firm of Fowler and Wells, which would distribute the first edition of Leaves of Grass, publish the second anonymously, and provide a venue in their firm's magazine for one of Whitman's first self-reviews of his book. Whitman would later work for Fowler and Wells as a bookseller and as a writer for their Life Illustrated magazine. While he eventually drifted apart from them, the impact of phrenology always stayed with him: late in his life, Whitman admitted that "I probably have not got by the phrenology stage yet" (WWC, 1:385). When he later wrote in "Song of Myself" that "my palms cover continents" (LG, 61), he was still imagining himself as a kind of cosmic phrenologist, reading the mountains and valleys of continents to determine their telltale characteristics just as Fowler read the nooks and crannies of skulls. Whitman entered Fowler's studio as a "printer," but he left dreaming of larger ambitions.

Along with Fowler's 1849 description of Whitman as a "printer," we have other evidence about just how Whitman's career was perceived in 1850. James J. Brenton, owner of the Long Island Democrat, a newspaper on which Whitman had worked, put together a book in 1850 that collected what he called "sketches, essays, and poems by practical printers." The idea was to demonstrate that printers—"they who have so often assisted in ushering into the world the productions of others"—could also be writers, could "now in turn venture to originate ideas of their own, and appear before the public in the ambitious character of Authors" (Brenton, iii). The result, Voices from the Press, contained Whitman's short story "The Tomb Blossoms," the first appearance by Whitman in a book. He is presented as one of the printers who could also write, and in the contributors' notes we find a short biography of Whitman that describes him as a printer, former schoolteacher, and writer of popular sketches; he is now, we are told, "connected to the press" and is "an ardent politician of the radical democratic school." He is seen, in short, as anything but a poet: even his numerous early poems, many of which had appeared in Brenton's newspaper, are not mentioned. In 1850, only five years before publishing Leaves of Grass, a book that would forever change American literature, Whitman was still very much seen as just a "practical printer," but a huge transformation was just around the corner.

Chapter 2

"Many Manuscript Doings and Undoings": The Road toward Leaves of Grass

There has always been a mystery about Whitman at the end of the 1840s and through the early 1850s. Many critics and biographers have tried, but no one has fully explained the speed of his transformation from a newspaperman and "practical printer," and an unoriginal, conventional, and occasional poet, into the author of Leaves of Grass, a radical writer who abruptly abandoned conventional rhyme and meter and, in jottings begun at this time, exploited the odd loveliness of homely imagery, finding beauty in the commonplace but expressing it in an uncommon way, and, once he started, expressing it prolifically. One of the best places to search for the answer to that mystery is in Whitman's manuscript writings from this period. What is known as Whitman's earliest notebook (called "albot Wilson" in the Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts) was long thought to date from 1847 but is now understood to be from about 1854. This extraordinary document contains early articulations of some of Whitman's most compelling ideas. Famous passages on "Dilation," on "True noble expanding American character," and on the "soul enfolding orbs" are memorable prose statements that express the newly expansive sense of self that Whitman was discovering, and we find him here creating the conditions—setting the tone and articulating the ideas—that would allow for the writing of Leaves of Grass. Late in his life, Whitman looked at this notebook and called it the "ABC" of Leaves, the very primer for the whole book.

A pivotal and empowering change came over Whitman at this time of poetic transformation. His politics—and especially his racial attitudes—underwent a profound alteration. As we have noted, Whitman the journalist spoke to the interests of the day and from a particular class perspective when he advanced the interests of white working men while seeming, at times, unconcerned about the plight of blacks. Perhaps the New Orleans experience had prompted a change in attitude, a change that was intensified by an increasing number of friendships with radical thinkers and writers who led Whitman to rethink his attitudes toward the issue of race. Whatever the cause, in Whitman's future-oriented poetry blacks become central to his new literary project and central to his understanding of democracy. Notebook passages assert that the poet has the "divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President in the midst of his cabinet, and Good day my brother, to Sambo, among the hoes of the sugar field" (NUPM, 1:61).

It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with the Democratic party's compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking. In any event, his first notebook lines in the manner of Leaves of Grass focus directly on the fundamental issue dividing the United States. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black and white, to join master and slave:

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves

. . .

I am the poet of the body

And I am the poet of the soul

I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,

Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike. (NUPM, 1:67)

The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were lining up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space—sometimes violent, sometimes sexual, always volatile—between master and slave. His extreme political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of corrupt American politics in the 1850s with his own persona—a shaman, a culture-healer, an all-encompassing "I."

The new all-encompassing "I" that emerged in Whitman's early notebook became the main character of Leaves of Grass, the explosive book of 12 poems that he wrote in the early years of the 1850s, and for which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an age quite advanced for a poet. Keats had died ten years younger; Byron had died at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads while both were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his best-known poem, at age 16; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman admired had done their most memorable work early in their adult lives. Whitman, in contrast, by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he were to achieve fame in any field, to do so as a journalist or perhaps as a writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that this middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would suddenly begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as America's greatest and most revolutionary poet.

One source of Whitman's influence was his radical reconception of the art of poetry. What we now think of as his "poetry" is actually a new kind of writing, a hybrid form that draws not only on the tones and diction of the Bible and on the traditions of British, European, and American literature, but equally on such things as American newspapers, booming mid-nineteenth-century political oratory, and the lingoes of the emerging urban working classes (of which he was a product and a member). Whitman immersed himself in American culture, and his work resonates through the multiple levels of that culture. It is a writing that reaches deep into the numerous corners of the roiling nineteenth-century society, absorbing the nation's stormy politics, its motley musical and theatrical stages, its athletic contests, and its new technologies (including the chemical art of photography and the rapidly developing printing trade). It is writing remarkably open to the century's scientific discoveries (evolutionary, geological, astronomical, archeological, and phrenological), to new discourses about the body (medical and sexual), and to advances in understandings about language (lexicographical, etymological, and theoretical).

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Figure 1.

Daguerrotype portrait of Whitman (1854), called by Whitman's disciple R.M. Bucke "the Christ likeness." Ed Folsom collection.

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"Births have brought us richness and variety," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself," "And other births will bring us richness and variety" (LG, 80). Whitman's own family taught him that lesson, but it was a lesson he sought to learn again and again in all aspects of his life. He celebrated the self, but not a self that was narrowly and securely defined—rather a self that took the risks of imaginative absorption and creative dispersion. The opening words of the first poem in Leaves of Grass, the poem that would become "Song of Myself," set the tone for the book—pride in a nondiscriminating self mixed with a demand that the reader agree to give up, at least for the duration of the poem, biases and tenets and, instead, join the "I" on a dizzying journey of discovery: "I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (LG 1855, 13). "We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves," he wrote, but the power came in one's ability to open the self to its latent pluralities: "we are sufficient in the variety of ourselves" (LG, 341). Whitman's goal was the multitudinous self, a self capacious enough to identify with the vast variety of human types that American democracy was producing: he loved America's "loose drift of character, the inkling through random types" (LG, 186), and Whitman's pun on "ink" and "type" here would become his great metonymic invention—to turn human types into printed type, to ink character on a page, to turn a book into a man. "Camerado, this is no book," he writes, "Who touches this touches a man" (LG, 505), and throughout Leaves, we can feel an identity straining to make human contact through the print and paper: "I pass so poorly with paper and types . . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls" (LG 1855, 57).

This extraordinary conflation of book and identity grew out of Whitman's experience as a printer and a newspaper editor. He was always conscious of the way that different types and different page sizes and different titles altered otherwise identical words: for him, paper and type were more than a vehicle to present poems, they were indeed bodies themselves. He conceived of the "body of his work" as something more than a dead metaphor. Thus he was always engaged in the act of bookmaking as well as poetry writing. He knew how to set type, and he knew how books were printed and bound. He wanted to have an actual physical involvement in the creation of the physical object of the book, and so he set a few pages of type for the first (1855) edition of Leaves and chose the large-paper format to give his long lines room to stretch across the page. Late in his life, Whitman noted how "I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing . . . the way books are made—that always excites my curiosity: the way books are written—that only attracts me once in a great while" (WWC, 4:233). He never stopped being a printer, and his various editions of Leaves all show the marks of his idiosyncratic printer's eye.

The mystery that has intrigued biographers and critics over the years has been about what prompted the transformation: did Whitman undergo some sort of spiritual illumination that opened the floodgates of a radical new kind of poetry, or was this poetry the result of an original and carefully calculated strategy to blend journalism, oratory, popular music, and other cultural forces into an innovative American voice like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his essay "The Poet"? "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung," wrote Emerson; "Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres" (Emerson 1983, 465). Whitman began writing poetry that seemed, wildly yet systematically, to record every single thing that Emerson called for, and he began his preface to the 1855 Leaves by paraphrasing Emerson: "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." The romantic view of Whitman is that he was suddenly inspired to impulsively write the poems that transformed American poetry; the more pragmatic view holds that he devoted himself in the five years before the first publication of Leaves to a disciplined series of experiments that led to the gradual and intricate structuring of his singular style. Was he truly the intoxicated poet Emerson imagined or was he the architect of a poetic persona that cleverly constructed itself according to Emerson's formula?

There is evidence to support both theories. We know very little about the details of Whitman's life in the early 1850s; it is as if he retreated from the public world to receive inspiration, and there are relatively few remaining manuscripts of the poems in the first edition of Leaves, leading many to believe that they emerged in a fury of inspiration. On the other hand, the manuscripts that do remain indicate that Whitman meticulously worked and reworked passages of his poems, heavily revising entire drafts of the poems, and that he issued detailed instructions to the Rome brothers, the printers who were setting his book in type, carefully overseeing every aspect of the production of his book.

The 1855 Leaves of Grass, as we have come to know it, consists of 12 poems, all either untitled or headed with the identical title "Leaves of Grass." But a manuscript now held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas indicates that Whitman referred to his 1855 poems by name, even though he would withhold the titles in print. In the manuscript, he gives most of the 12 poems first-line titles, a practice he would frequently employ during the rest of his career. Further, his listing of poems in the Texas manuscript appear in an order significantly different from the arrangement he finally settled on: "I celebrate myself" ("Song of Myself") came first (as it would in the printed edition), followed by "A young man came to me" (the poem that would develop into "Song of the Answerer"), "A child went forth" ("There Was a Child Went Forth"), "sauntering the pavement" ("Faces"), "great are the myths" ("Great Are the Myths"), "I wander all night" ("The Sleepers"), "Come closer to me" ("A Song for Occupations"), "Who learns my lesson complete" ("Who Learns My Lesson Complete"), "Clear the way there Jonathan" ("A Boston Ballad"), "Resurgemus" ("Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States"), "To think through the retrospections" ("To Think of Time"), and "Blacks" ("I Sing the Body Electric").

Whitman's use of these shorthand names allowed him to work out an arrangement of poems. Only one of the 12 poems had previously been published, and Whitman continued to call it by the same title under which it had originally appeared in the New York Tribune—"Resurgemus." Perhaps the most interesting working title is "Blacks" (the word is smudged almost beyond recognition on the manuscript), which underscores the fact that a slave auction is the setting of the poem that would become "I Sing the Body Electric." At the time he wrote these notes, "Blacks" was to be the concluding piece, a position that, had he published the poems in this order, would have intensified the importance of the slavery issue in the book. In two cases, Whitman groups pairs of poems: "A young man came to me" is bracketed with "A child went forth," and "Who learns my lesson complete" is bracketed with and joined by an ampersand to "Clear the way there Jonathan." These subgroups suggest that Whitman had a hitherto unrecognized organizational plan for the book, one that involved small "clusters" of poems, a plan he would soon abandon in favor of what became the final arrangement.

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Figure 2.

Whitman's alternative plan for structuring the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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Whitman seems, then, to have been both inspired poet and skilled craftsman, at once under the spell of his newly discovered and intoxicating free verse style while also remaining very much in control of it, adjusting and altering and rearranging. For the rest of his life, he would add, delete, fuse, separate, and rearrange poems as he issued six very distinct editions of Leaves of Grass. Emerson once described Whitman's poetry as "a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York Herald" (Sanborn 2000, 144), and that odd joining of the scriptural and the vernacular, the transcendent and the mundane, effectively captures the quality of Whitman's work, work that most readers experience as simultaneously magical and commonplace, sublime and prosaic. It was work produced by a poet who was both sage and huckster, who touched the gods with ink-smudged fingers, and who was concerned as much with the sales and reviews of his book as with the state of the human soul.

It is striking that, 150 years after the appearance in 1855 of Leaves of Grass, we still know almost nothing for certain about its genesis. Long after published versions have appeared of all of Whitman's juvenilia, all of his late daybooks with listings of his supper guests and gas bills, all of his postcards and much of his marginalia, his poetry manuscripts have not been collected and edited, and few of them are readily accessible to students and scholars. When the variorum edition of Leaves of Grass was announced in 1955, the poetry manuscripts were promised as a central feature, but when the Textual Variorum (LG Var.) actually appeared in 1980, it contained only the published versions of each poem (in fact, only the published book versions—even the periodical variations have not yet been gathered and edited). There was speculation that a companion set of volumes dealing with the manuscripts would soon be following, but that has not happened, and Whitman's poetry manuscripts remain largely a mystery. Because so little is known about the manuscript origins of Leaves, we need to take some time to review just what we do know about the book's early composition and then examine a particularly revealing manuscript draft of a section of the long opening poem (eventually called "Song of Myself") of the 1855 edition. This will help us understand the intricate complexity of Whitman's process of revision.

Whitman kept a number of small notebooks in which some rough ideas and trial lines of some of the poems in the original Leaves can be found, and versions of those notebooks were included in Edward F. Grier's 1984 edition of Whitman's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. But some of the early notebooks, including the one that contained the most important pre-Leaves notes, were lost when the Library of Congress packed them up and shipped them to a college in the midwestern United States for safekeeping during World War II; some are still missing, but several turned up unexpectedly in 1995. The so-called "earliest notebook," containing what are thought to be Whitman's first notes leading to Leaves of Grass, was one of the recovered items, and, while most of it had already been transcribed in NUPM, the physical notebook itself offers evidence of dating unavailable to Grier (who made his transcriptions from microfilm and photostats, which had been the only surviving evidence). These early notebooks—a number of which contain what could be considered preliminary versions of Leaves poems—have still not been fully examined and evaluated in relation to what they reveal about Whitman's writing process and what they tell us about the development of the 1855 Leaves.

Because of this lack of knowledge about Whitman's notebooks, critics and biographers have usually portrayed Leaves as an artistic immaculate conception, apparently emerging from nowhere. Most biographers, from John Burroughs and Richard Maurice Bucke in the nineteenth century on up to the most recent, have been remarkably vague about Whitman's actual writing of the original Leaves. Since Whitman directly contributed to both Burroughs's and Bucke's books, it is useful to recall just how they present the composition of the first Leaves. Burroughs, writing in 1867 and repeating phrases Whitman had given him, tells us the writing process was relatively brief and intense: It is at this period (1853 and the season immediately following,) that I come on the first inkling of Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman is now thirty-four years old, and in the full fruition of health and physique . . . In 1855, then, after many manuscript doings and undoings, and much matter destroyed, and two or three complete re-writings, the essential foundation of Leaves of Grass was laid and the superstructure raised. (Burroughs 1867, 83) Burroughs's words echo Whitman's own description that he included in a chronology of his life (he claims to have written this in 1856 or 1857, though he did not publish it until much later): '55 . . . Commenced putting Leaves of Grass to press for good, at the job printing office of my friends, the brothers Rome, in Brooklyn, after many MS. doings and undoings—(I had great trouble in leaving out the stock "poetical" touches, but succeeded at last.) (PW, 1:22; Traubel 1889, 4) Bucke, in his biography, adds some specificity to this outline; Whitman tells us, or so Bucke says, that he had more or less consciously the plan of the poems in his mind for eight years before, and that during those eight years they took many shapes; that in the course of those years he wrote and destroyed a great deal; that, at the last, the work assumed a form very different from any at first expected; but that from first to last (from the first definite conception of the work in say 1853-'54, until its completion in 1881) his underlying purpose was religious . . . By the spring of 1855, Walt Whitman had found or made a style in which he could express himself, and in that style he had (after, as he has told me, elaborately building up the structure, and then utterly demolishing it, five different times) written twelve poems, and a long prose preface which was simply another poem. (Bucke 1883, 135, 137)

All subsequent descriptions of Whitman's compositional process derive from Bucke's and Burroughs's early descriptions, both of which were endorsed by (and largely written by) Whitman himself. The problem has been that those "MS. doings and undoings" and those "five different" versions of the book apparently disappeared, and scholars have been left guessing at whether what we have here is another of Whitman's infamous exaggerations or an actual description of invaluable but lost manuscript materials. If there were indeed five complete, different manuscript versions of Leaves, the evidence has never been found.

Whitman himself, late in his life, talked occasionally with his young friend Horace Traubel about the missing manuscripts of the first Leaves of Grass. In 1891 (in a conversation not published until 1996), Whitman reminisced about the early versions in a suggestive way: Bucke probably does not know that long long ago, before the 'Leaves' had ever been to the printer, I had them in half a dozen forms —larger, smaller, recast, outcast, taken apart, put together—viewing them from every point I knew - even at the last not putting them together and out with any idea that they must eternally remain unchanged. (WWC, 8:351) Here Whitman seems to suggest that he has been withholding evidence even from his good friend and loyal disciple Bucke (perhaps he has forgotten that Bucke already included in his biography the comment about five versions of the book), but here the form of those "MS. doings and undoings" seems even more fluid and fragmentary: "recast, outcast, taken apart, put together." Three versions, five versions, six versions: the actual number will never be known, and the nature of the "versions" can never be fully determined. All we finally can know, as Roger Asselineau observed in the 1950s, is that the evolution of the first Leaves "was a slow growth with many complex exchanges which we can guess at, but which it is impossible for lack of documentation to follow in detail or completely reconstruct. Only the result of this evolution has reached us" (Asselineau 1960, 1962, 1:45).

Most biographies and critical studies finesse the issue of Whitman's process of writing the original Leaves of Grass by referring vaguely to the now-missing "manuscript" for the book. "The manuscript" comes to be for biographers a convenient term for an assumed final handwritten "printer's copy" of Leaves, and the term has some basis in Whitman's own descriptions. On a couple of occasions late in his life, he mentioned "the manuscript" to Traubel: "You have asked me questions about the manuscript of the first edition. It was burned. Rome [the printer] kept it several years, but one day, by accident, it got away from us entirely—was used to kindle the fire or to feed the rag man" (WWC, 1:92). Another time, Whitman recalled that "[t]he first manuscript copy of the Leaves—1855—the first edition—is gone—irretrievably lost—went to the ragman: . . . But I make nothing of that—of the money value of the manuscripts—attach no importance to curios" (WWC, 2:56). By the time he made those statements, however, he was struck by how copies of the first edition of Leaves had become collectors' items and were selling for high prices, and he had begun to realize how valuable the 1855 manuscript would have been had he kept it: "The collectors are inflamed with the curio desire but to me the appetite is unwholesome," he said, even as he went on to think of how the money he might earn from such "curios" would help him take care of his mentally incapacitated brother Eddy: "And yet, . . . for Eddy's sake it might be wise for me to husband such stuff" (WWC, 2:56).

It is difficult, on the basis of any biographical images of Whitman, to imagine him actually writing five or six complete drafts of Leaves. If we want to picture him in the act of writing and revising, in fact, we have very little evidence to go on. His brother George gives us one of the few contemporary reports of his early writing habits, and his recollection of Walt is hardly of the disciplined wordsmith: "He would lie abed late, and after getting up would write a few hours if he took the notion—perhaps would go off the rest of the day. We were all at work—all except Walt" (Traubel 1893, 35). Bucke, again aided by Whitman, offers a more active portrayal of the poet at work: "Early in 1855 he was writing Leaves of Grass from time to time, getting it in shape. Wrote at the opera, in the street, on the ferry-boat, at the sea-side, in the fields, sometimes stopped work to write. Certainly no book was ever more directly written from living impulses and impromptu sights, and less in the abstract" (Bucke 1883, 25-6).

Whitman, throughout his whole life, would try to keep alive this active, experimental image of his younger self, combining it—sometimes uneasily—with his claim of meticulous revision. An anonymous London, Ontario, interviewer in 1880, for example, reported that Whitman said he "gave this work [Leaves] a great deal of revision, experiencing a difficulty in eliminating the stock poetical touches, if the idea may be conveyed in that way" (Myerson 1991, 20). To the end of his life, Whitman would continue to extol the virtues of ceaseless revision: I know an author's temptation always to [revise]—I myself, for one—I am always tempted to put in, take out, change. Though, having been a printer myself, I have what may be called an anticipatory eye—know pretty well as I write how a thing will turn up in the type—appear—take form. But in spite of that, I remember how, years ago, I used to wish for the privilege for myself—the privilege to alter—even extensively. (WWC, 5:390) It was important, in other words, for Whitman to portray himself both as the casual outdoor writer, jotting things down spontaneously while crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and as the careful craftsman, continually worrying over insertions and deletions, searching always for the precise word. His manuscripts demonstrate that he was in fact both kinds of writer; there are signs of speed and spontaneity in his notebooks and brief jottings, but also, in his more extended manuscripts, signs of careful, nearly obsessive, revising.

There is, however, more evidence of the process than we have up to this point assumed. All the extant manuscripts of the poems in the first edition of Leaves are now being gathered for inclusion in the online Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). This process of gathering has revealed some fascinating traces of Whitman's manuscript doings and undoings. In addition to the notebooks that have been known for nearly a century, there also exist a large number of manuscript fragments on various single sheets and scraps of paper, containing lines and passages very close to those that appear in the 1855 Leaves. These fragments do indicate different stages of composition and revision, and most clearly date from later than the notebooks, which contain much rougher notes toward the book.

We mentioned earlier the manuscript preserved in the University of Texas Humanities Research Center, the one on which Whitman listed and named the poems for the 1855 edition of Leaves. This manuscript provides the first actual evidence of the extent of his active involvement in the design and structuring of the 1855 Leaves and allows us finally to confirm some previously unsubstantiated claims about the first edition—including his recollection that his prose preface to the first Leaves was added at the last minute ("It was written hastily while the first edition was being printed in 1855" [Corr., 2:100]). The Texas manuscript—worn and soiled, after obviously spending some time on the Rome brothers' printing-shop floor—consists of, on one side (see figure 3 below), a heavily revised section of a proto-version of the poem that would eventually become "Song of Myself" (key images of the eventual poem here appear in surprising juxtapositions); on the other side (see figure 2 above) are Whitman's scribbled notes for the arrangement, size, and decoration of the 1855 Leaves. We have already talked about the side of the manuscript on which Whitman made his list of poems; let's focus now on the other side—the weird proto-version of a section of "Song of Myself."

Whitman often wrote notes and drafts on the backs of various documents, including the backs of abandoned drafts of poems, and that is the case with this manuscript. But what is striking here is that the abandoned poetry on the verso appears to be a section of an entirely different version of "Song of Myself" from the one Whitman published. It may be the only remaining evidence that there once actually was an entirely different version of the 1855 Leaves. Let's take a close look at this draft fragment. Here is a transcription of the poetry side of the manuscript:

25

^*tr (And to me each minute of the night and day is chock with something ^{vital and visible} as

      vital live as flesh is

trs in here page 34—And I say the stars are not echoes

And I perceive that the salt marsh ^{sedgy weed} has delicious ^refreshing

      odors;

And potatoes and milk afford a fit breakfast ^{dinner of state,}

And I dare not say ^{guess the} the bay mare is less than I ^{chipping bird}

      mocking bird sings as well as I,

      because ^although she reads no newspaper; ^{never learned the gamut;}

And to shake my friendly right hand governors

      and millionaires shall stand all day,

      waiting their turns.

And on ^{to me} each acre of the earth ^land and sea, I behold ^{exhibits to me}

      perpetual ^unending _^ ^marvellous pictures;

They fill the worm-fence, and lie on the heaped stones

      and are hooked to the elder and poke-weed

And to me each _every minute of the night and day is filled with a

      [illegible] joy.

And _^ ^{to me} the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses ^{is an a}

      every statue _^ ^{perfect and plumb};

[illegible line, cut off]

This manuscript passage, it turns out, is made up of versions of lines from numerous places widely scattered in the first published version of the poem (and of the 1855 preface). From this one passage, in fact, lines scatter throughout what would become the printed version of "Song of Myself," and pieces reappear in what eventually would be sections 5, 13, 16, 31, 36, and 43, while other pieces appear in the poem eventually entitled "To Think of Time" and the pre-1855 manuscript poem "Pictures."

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Figure 3.

Draft lines from "Song of Myself." Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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Virtually every line of this early version of a section of "Song of Myself," then, gets used somewhere in the poem or elsewhere in Leaves. But the section itself is entirely dismantled and scattered; it ceases to exist as a unit. We recall Whitman's comment that his early drafts of Leaves were "recast, outcast, taken apart, put together." It's as if he mined early drafts for lines much like some sort of proto-word-processing system, lifting and moving lines and juxtaposing them with others, dissolving entire sections into other newly forming sections. This evidence strongly suggests that for Whitman the line was the basic unit of his poetry, since he seems always to move entire lines. This habit of composition may well have derived from Whitman's experience as a typesetter, where lines of text were separate, moveable units assembled into galleys. For Whitman, then, passages emerge from the juxtaposition and accretion of lines, and those lines can be recast and put together in different combinations to form different but equally coherent larger units.

These notes were written quite close to the publication of Leaves, and so this manuscript reveals that Whitman was actively making substantive last-minute changes—reorganizing, adding, and deleting, even while Andrew Rome was typesetting the poetry. These manuscripts suggest that the poems of the 1855 Leaves of Grass were extremely unstable right up to their being set in type (and even after that, since we now know that Whitman stopped the press at least once to rewrite a line and another time to correct a typographical error in the preface).

Many biographers have assumed—since the "earliest" notebook to contain lines that sound like precursors to the 1855 Leaves had been mistakenly dated 1847—that Whitman must have been working for nearly ten years on drafts and trials of the poems that would appear in Leaves. But Esther Shephard argued in the 1950s that the evidence for the 1847 dating was faulty. Now that the notebook has been recovered by the Library of Congress and is available for examination on the World Wide Web, it is clear that Whitman, in characteristic fashion, cut out already used pages from an earlier notebook and used the blank pages and almost-blank pages as a new notebook sometime around 1854. All of this is to say that he moved from first jottings to final product in a much briefer period than is usually thought. If he in fact composed three or four or five or six separate drafts of the 1855 Leaves, he did so with astonishing speed. The available evidence would seem to indicate that the first edition of Leaves was no more than two years, and perhaps significantly less, in the making—from notebook jottings to printed book.

The Texas manuscript, with the proto-version on one side and the printer's instructions on the other, gives us a snapshot of how quickly the poem was coming together, since, as we noted earlier, the apparently abandoned version of the poem on the verso of the sheet contains a number 25 on it, indicating that it is part of a longer manuscript. (It also contains the intriguing note "tr[an]s[fer] in here page 34," indicating that Whitman was in fact doing a lot of "taking apart and putting together," pre-computer cutting and pasting that, if this one example is an accurate indication of his general process, was breathtaking in the complexity and scope of rearrangement.) It is a process that invites us to play the dangerous but instructive game of shuffling Whitman's lines all through "Song of Myself" (or, indeed, all through the 1855 Leaves) and discovering how easily new poems emerge that sound perfectly plausible: Whitman's lines, all concerned with absorption and the celebration of the democratic scatter of the world, are often interchangeable, and, when shuffled in myriad ways, keep forming different poems that say the same things.

Let's look closely now at the last line from this manuscript proto-version of the poem that would become "Song of Myself": "And ^to me the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses is an a every statue ^perfect and plumb." It is one of the stranger lines in Whitman's poetry, but it offers a key to one of the central meanings of his work. On one hand, it is a simple and typical Whitmanian statement that common natural life outshines art. But the oddness of the word "crunching" and the surprising juxtaposition of a grazing cow and a statue captures something we recognize as Whitman's idiosyncratic genius. In the context of the manuscript passage, the image is the culminating emblem of an emphasis on the artistic importance of the diurnal, the small, the neglected, the commonplace. The first line, insisting on how each minute is "vital and visible," evokes sight, and then Whitman systematically engages each of the senses: the second line (with the "echoes") suggests hearing, the third line (with the "refreshing odors") smell, the fourth (with "potatoes and milk") taste, the fifth (with the singing bird) sound again, and the sixth (with the shaking hands) touch. Then the passage turns the world into an infinite art gallery, where every sensation becomes a work of art worthy of display: "And on to me each acre of the earth land and sea, I behold exhibits to me perpetual ^unending marvellous pictures." Whitman then populates every remote crevice of the world with these exhibits—the worm-fence (a kind of zigzag fence), the heaped stones, and the weeds (in an image that would later appear in section 5 of "Song," where it would be the extreme border of "love," "the kelson of creation")—and, by offering us the image of the crunching cow as a perfect statue, he clinches his argument about the teeming art gallery that is available to us every minute of the day through every sensation.

When the line appears in the published version of the poem, it comes near the end of a slightly different kind of catalog, one that begins with "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars" and goes on to juxtapose small and large, the tiny and the vast, the commonplace and the exalted: we get pismires, grains of sand, wren-eggs, tree-toads, and blackberries offered as "a chef-d'ouvre for the highest," fit to "adorn the parlors of heaven," before the culminating series:

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,

And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer's girl

      boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake. (LG 1855, 34)

In this new context, the image is more incongruous. The cow seems too large in this catalog of the small (blackberries, wrens' eggs, knuckle joints, mice, and a cow?), and its comparison to a statue is not parallel to the other comparisons, which are all based on differentials in size and number and complexity (journeywork of stars, parlors of heaven, all machinery, sextillions of infidels, and any statue?). While, in the catalog of Whitman's poem, the image may be harmlessly absorbed into the cascade of his images, once we have seen the manuscript where the line is more precisely situated among analogous images, we begin to realize that the line in its new context is somewhat out of place, as if Whitman had moved it randomly.

So why would Whitman have made this decision? Surely the final version of the first Leaves did not result from a random shuffling of lines. To begin to answer why it finally appears where it does, we need to track the line back through even earlier layers of Whitman's manuscript "doings and undoings." In Whitman's recovered "earliest" notebook (Library of Congress Notebook #80), the notebook we mentioned earlier and the one generally thought to contain the first stirrings of "Song of Myself," there is a two-page passage in which the "cow crunching" line reappears, this time in the context of a catalog demonstrating that Whitman is "the poet of little things." But if this notebook version is in fact the earliest of Whitman's manuscript drafts, the lines here are surprisingly much closer to the arrangement Whitman ended up with in the first edition of Leaves.

Is this notebook draft, then, actually a later revision of the apparently extensive draft of the proto-"Song" evidenced in the Texas manuscript passage we have been examining, or did Whitman distribute the images in this notebook into an extensive draft of the poem that he later abandoned, after which he returned to his early notes to write his final draft? The more we investigate the evidence, the more confusing Whitman's process of revision seems. Here is the relevant passage from the notebook:

I am the poet of little things and of babes

Of each gnat in the air, and of beetles rolling balls of dung,

Afar in the sky was a nest

And my soul flew thither, and squat, and looked out,

And saw the journeywork of suns and systems of suns,

And that a leaf of grass is not less than they

And that the pismire is equally perfect, and all grains of sand, and every

      egg of the wren.

And the tree-toad is a chef' d ouvre for the highest.

And the running-blackberry would adorn the parlors of Heaven

And the cow crunching with depressed neck surpasses every statue,

And pictures great and small crowd the rail-fence, and hang on its

      heaped stones and elder and poke-weed.

I am the poet of Equality

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger trillions of infidels.

And I cannot put my toe anywhere to the ground

But it must touch numberless and curious books

Each one scorning all that schools and science can do fully to translate

      them

And the salt marsh and creek have delicious odors,

And potato and ears of maize make a fat breakfast,

And huckleberrys from the woods distill joyous deliriums. (NUPM, 1:70-2)

This notebook passage has elements of both the proto-"Song" passage and the published passage. Here the lines up through the crunching cow image are a near-draft of the published passage, and the lines following the crunching cow image are versions of lines that appear in the Texas draft fragment—from the fence, stones, and pokeweed through the odors of the salt marsh and on through the potatoes (here combined with maize for a "fat breakfast" instead of combined with milk for a "dinner of state"). The mouse-infidels image becomes part of the published passage, but some of the images just drop away, not to be used anywhere (like the huckleberry-induced "joyous deliriums"). In this notebook passage, the sequence of images seems to produce a key declaration—"I am the poet of Equality"—and all the lines support this claim in some way, with the poet equating the significance of little things to large things and discovering the power of the commonplace (from those powerful huckleberries to the statue-surpassing cows).

So, if we assume the notebook passage is the earliest one, then Whitman clearly broke up the passage and recombined the images in one of the drafts of Leaves, then moved the crunching-cow line back to the grouping it had originally been in. Even though, as we have noted, the line does not fit quite as well in the large/small grouping as it did in the nature-better-than-art grouping, there are good formal and thematic reasons Whitman may have chosen to move it there. First, the sequence of lines in the 1855 Leaves begins with the central assertion of Whitman's book, its title trope: "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars." Nearly twenty pages after the unnamed child had asked "What is the grass?" (LG 1855, 16), the question that in many ways precipitates the rest of the long poem, the poet is still answering it, and the "cow crunching with depressed head" carries on the answer, for the cow of course is eating grass.

Let us consider for a moment some of the wider implications of the crunching cow image. As George Hutchinson argues, the "riddle of the grass" is the central mystery that Whitman deals with in the first edition of Leaves: The riddle of the grass and the riddle of death are fully entwined in Whitman's conception, binding all the other riddles of "Song of Myself" together . . . To get to the bottom of the riddle of the grass is to get to the bottom of death and democracy, and to be renewed with supreme power. The dead are absorbed into the earth, their bodies broken apart to feed the grass, which in turn feeds us - as Whitman would feed us after he departs at the open end of his poem, "and filter and fibre [our] blood." Thus "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life." The way in which Whitman leads us toward a solution of the riddle of the grass by enacting its germination (and, metaphorically, his own) is the process of the poem. (Hutchinson 1986, 75) Thus, suggests Hutchinson, the image of the cow eating grass is at the center of the riddle-structure of the poem: "'How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?' (answer: because the cattle eat grass, which grows from soil well-manured by death. Notice that this hidden 'answer' only implies an endless succession of further insoluble questions unfolding from the symbolism of grass)" (Hutchinson 1986, 80). The cow is one intermediary between the grass and us and the stars: in Whitman's composting faith, all the atoms of the universe cycle through various forms, and humans and the grass are literally stardust. The cow crunching the grass is an emblem and manifestation of the transformative and democratic energy of the universe, as all forms become all other forms.

Whitman always remained fascinated with this image of the cow crunching the grass, and throughout his life he invoked it, in a variety of contexts, from reveries about rural life to harangues about American politics. In Memoranda During the War, his book of Civil War memories, he uses the image to emphasize the ways that all profundities are devoured and digested by time: Let us not be deceiv'd by flatulent fleeting notorieties, political, official, literary and other. In any profound, philosophical consideration of our politics, literature &c., the best-known leaders—even the Presidents, Congresses, Governors, &c.—are only so many passing spears or patches of grass on which the cow feeds. (PW, 1:327) In Specimen Days, when Whitman portrays himself sitting