Leaves of Grass
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Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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WilliamCollinsBooks.com
This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2015
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral right as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
Cover by e-Digital Design
Cover image: Mary Evans / Everett Collection
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008110604
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008110611
Version: 2015-07-21
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
History of Collins
Life & Times
Song of Myself
A Song for Occupations
To Think of Time
The Sleepers
I Sing the Body Electric
Faces
Song of the Answerer
Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States
A Boston Ballad [1854]
There Was a Child Went Forth
Who Learns My Lesson Complete?
Great Are the Myths
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
A Child Went Forth
Walt Whitman was born in New York in 1819, the second child of a family that eventually grew to nine. Despite the best efforts of Walter Whitman Sr., a carpenter who turned his hand unsuccessfully to real-estate speculation, the family was forced by economic hardship to move house often. As a result, Whitman had a disjointed education and left school at the age of eleven in order to seek employment.
But though formal schooling did not serve him well, Whitman, left to his own devices, quickly learned to love self-improvement. His first employer, a Brooklyn law firm, gave him access to library books and he became an avid reader and visitor of museums. Aged twelve he went to work for a liberal newspaper, the Long Island Patriot, where he was apprenticed in printing and typesetting and even made contributions to articles. He spent the next five years honing his reputation as a printer, and above all making the most of being on his own in New York City. It was a period of rapid and dazzling development, and Whitman never tired of walking the streets and observing the teeming beauty of life around him. It was an experience that surely influenced his poem ‘There Was a Child Went Forth’, which appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855:
There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became …
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows …
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud …
But it was not to last: a combination of financial instability and a devastating fire in New York’s printing district sent him back to his family in Long Island, where he took up a largely miserable career as a teacher. The only advantage of this move was that he was able to use some poems he had written as teaching aids. By 1841, thoroughly disillusioned with teaching, he returned to New York City to become a full-time journalist and fiction writer.
The Voice of America
Whitman’s earliest published work shows signs of the political and philosophical engagement that would later run through Leaves of Grass. By the 1840s he had become an ardent supporter of the temperance movement, and in 1842 published Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, a novel in which alcohol provides the catalyst for a great deal of death and despair. Whitman was never afraid to side with controversial political viewpoints: he was a vocal Democrat and opposed slavery, even losing his job as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848 because his views on the subject were at odds with those of the paper’s publisher.
Whitman above all wanted America, still in its early decades of independence, to be the very best it could be – to fulfil the ambitions of its revolutionary heroes – and he was frustrated whenever he saw the country letting itself down. He was later appalled by the needless bloodshed of the Civil War, doing what he could to heal the country’s wounds – quite literally – by visiting, comforting and rehabilitating injured soldiers in the makeshift hospitals of Washington, DC. He did not return to New York after the war, instead taking up another new career as a government clerk.
Whitman’s arguably idealised view of America, as well as his liberal politics, were the legacy left to him by his father, a great admirer of Thomas Paine, Founding Father and author of Common Sense and Rights of Man. Walt was brought up to be a true American: a self-made man, and proud of his country.
In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman paid tribute to that heritage: ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem … Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.’ As this ode unfolds, Whitman looks beyond the traditional signs of a country’s civilisation – ‘its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches’ – and instead declares that ‘the genius of the United States’ lies ‘in the common people’ and ‘their deathless attachment to freedom’; ‘these too are unrhymed poetry’.
Sacred Bodies
Herein lies the heart of much of Whitman’s poetic inspiration: time and again he writes from the viewpoint of an American Everyman, a figure not defined by the increasingly polarised capitalist spectrum that was America on the cusp of its Gilded Age. ‘Neither a servant nor a master I,’ he declares in ‘A Song for Occupations’. ‘I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.’ In the same poem, written at a time when slavery was tearing his beloved country apart, Whitman made a series of bold claims for equality, for the body as an extraordinary form, part of the soul, rather than a commodity:
The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred …
These limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve.
This is a theme picked up in ‘The Sleepers’, in which the narrator is able to observe mankind under the equalising cover of darkness: ‘The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced him … I swear they are averaged now – one is no better than the other.’
Whitman was fascinated by the diversity of mankind and at the same time saw that diversity as a great unifier. In ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, the narrator wanders among the common people, much as Whitman did as a young man in New York – ‘I loosen myself, pass freely … and pause, listen, count’ – observing and auditing the variety of the human form in all its sensual, toiling, beauty:
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle …
The female soothing a child.
It was not just Whitman’s liberal politics that made him alive to the pain of social inequality. It is widely assumed now – and was scandalously rumoured during his lifetime – that he was homosexual. He never married and instead had a series of intense friendships with men, the most prominent being Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor and former Confederate soldier. When Leaves of Grass first appeared, with its appreciative descriptions of the male form – ‘The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty … the embrace of love and resistance’ – it was denounced for being immoral and obscene. Fellow equality campaigner Thomas Wentworth Higginson went so far as to say, ‘It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.’
Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass is remarkable not just for its content but also for its form: the poems are almost entirely devoid of rhyme or formal structure, and as such Whitman has been hailed as the father of free verse. The Beat poets of the mid-twentieth century certainly drew great inspiration from him; Allen Ginsberg specifically invokes Whitman in ‘A Supermarket in California’ (1955), in which he wanders the sidestreets ‘shopping for images’.
The collection was the work of a lifetime. The first edition of 1855 contained just twelve poems, all untitled, and was funded and typeset by Whitman himself. Not quite content with the collection, he revised and expanded it in 1856, and continued to revise and expand it at least once every decade, even after a debilitating stroke in 1873 forced him to move to New Jersey, near his family. The final ‘deathbed edition’ of 1892 contained almost 400 poems. Whitman put a notice in the New York Herald informing the public that Leaves of Grass was now finally ‘completed’, and died two months later. The poems that appear in this Collins Classics edition are the twelve poems that comprised the original 1855 edition; however, they are reproduced here as they were in the final 1892 edition. ‘Great Are the Myths’ was dropped from the last two editions, however, so appears here as in the 1871 edition – the last in which it featured.
There is no doubt that in his poetic celebration Whitman had given America the ‘gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it’ that he had wished for in the preface to the first edition. He had become America’s Everyman but he was also in everything. ‘I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe … and am not contained between my hat and boots,’ he wrote in ‘Song of Myself’, the most famous poem from the collection. ‘Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’
Song of Myself
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?
Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,