By Bergotte
Walt Whitman’s answer to the human condition is the most audacious in all of literature: yes. Not the qualified yes of the philosopher who has weighed the evidence, not the fragile yes of the survivor who has come through suffering and found something on the other side, but the absolute, prior, unconditional yes of a man who decided, somewhere in his thirties, to open himself to existence so completely that nothing — not death, not pain, not the suffering of others, not his own contradictions — could be excluded from the embrace. This is not naivety. It is the most demanding spiritual position imaginable, and Whitman spent forty years revising a single book in its service, expanding it from twelve poems to nearly four hundred, adding and rearranging and deepening until the book was not a collection but a life — the record of a consciousness trying to be equal to everything it contained and everything it witnessed. He is the most American of writers and the most universal, the most egotistical and the most selfless, the most bodily and the most transcendent. He contains multitudes. He said so himself, and he was right.
The Wound Dresser
Walter Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island, the second of nine children of a carpenter and farmer of English Quaker descent and a Dutch mother whose warmth and practicality he adored and absorbed. His formal education ended at eleven. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, a teacher, a journalist, an editor, a carpenter, a government clerk — the range of occupations reflecting both financial necessity and a genuine hunger for the breadth of American experience, the conviction that a writer who had only sat at a desk had not yet earned the right to speak. He read voraciously and unsystematically: the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Scott, the Hindu scriptures, the newspapers, the political oratory of the age. He walked the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan for years before he wrote a line of the poetry that would make him famous, absorbing the city, the ferries, the crowds, the opera — which he loved with the intensity of a man who has discovered the form of expression most adequate to what he feels.
The first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, when Whitman was thirty-six, at his own expense, in a print run of around eight hundred copies. It contained twelve untitled poems, including the one that would later be called Song of Myself. He sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who replied with a letter of such generous excitement — I greet you at the beginning of a great career — that Whitman promptly had it printed on the spine of the second edition without asking permission, which Emerson found presumptuous and which gives you, in a single anecdote, the full picture of Whitman’s relationship to the conventions of literary society.
The book was revised and expanded in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881, and finally in the deathbed edition of 1891-92, each version adding poems, rearranging sequences, deepening the argument. This continuous revision is itself a statement about the human condition: the book was not finished because the life was not finished, because the project of containing everything required as long as everything took. The final Leaves of Grass is four times the length of the first and in some ways a different book, but the seed of it — the extraordinary opening claim that what I assume you shall assume, that every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you — was there from the beginning and never changed.
The Civil War transformed him. He went to Washington in 1862 to find his brother George, who had been wounded at Fredericksburg, and stayed for three years, working as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals, dressing wounds, sitting with the dying, writing letters for men too damaged to write their own. The Drum-Taps poems, published in 1865 and later incorporated into Leaves of Grass, are the record of this experience, and they are the place where Whitman’s yes was most severely tested and most honestly earned. He saw what industrial war did to young bodies. He sat with enough dying men to know death not as an abstraction but as a specific, physical, attended fact. And he did not retract the yes. He deepened it.
Song of Myself
Song of Myself is the central poem of the American literary tradition and one of the central poems of world literature — a fifty-two section, thirteen hundred line aria for a single consciousness that attempts nothing less than the complete identification of the self with the universe. It begins with the most direct and most disarming opening in poetry: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. The self being celebrated is simultaneously the most particular self — Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos — and the most universal, the self as the point at which the universe becomes conscious of itself.
The poem moves by accumulation and juxtaposition rather than by argument — lists of trades and types and landscapes and animals and activities piled against each other with a democratic insistence that nothing is more important than anything else, that the President and the slave, the prostitute and the deacon, the grass and the stars are all equally real and equally deserving of attention. This is not a rhetorical device. It is a philosophical position: the claim that the universe is not a hierarchy but a democracy, that significance is distributed equally across everything that exists, and that the poet’s job is to be the instrument through which this equality is registered and expressed.
The grass is the poem’s central image and its deepest meditation. What is the grass? Whitman asks, and gives multiple answers: it is the flag of his disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven; it is the handkerchief of the Lord; it is a uniform hieroglyphic; it is the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Each answer is true. The grass is the same whether it grows from the mouths of young men or old men or women or children. It grows from the decomposed bodies of the dead and will grow from ours. It is the universe’s most patient and most democratic statement: that everything returns, that nothing is lost, that the atoms of the dead are the substance of the living, that the transformation is continuous and the continuity is consolation.
Death is everywhere in Song of Myself and it is not the enemy. It is part of the yes. To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. The claim is not trivial. Whitman is not promising heaven or reincarnation in the conventional sense. He is making a more difficult and more interesting argument: that death is the condition of the kind of continuous transformation that the poem celebrates, that the individual self dissolving back into the universe is not a tragedy but a participation in something larger than itself has any right to claim. The grass grows from the graves. The atoms continue. Nothing is finally lost.
The Body Electric
One of the most radical things about Whitman — radical in his time and still, in some quarters, uncomfortable in ours — is his insistence on the body as sacred. I Sing the Body Electric is the poem in which this insistence is most directly expressed, and it proceeds from a premise that the entire Western tradition of mind-body dualism had worked systematically to deny: that the body is not the prison of the soul but its expression, that the soul is not diminished by its physical embodiment but realised through it, that to love the body — any body, every body — is not a distraction from spiritual seriousness but its fullest form.
The poem catalogues the human body with the same democratic thoroughness that Song of Myself catalogues the landscape and the occupations: every part named, every function honoured, the whole treated with a reverence that the religious tradition had reserved for the soul and that Whitman insists belongs equally to the flesh. This is not merely a celebration of physical pleasure, though it is that too. It is a theological claim: that the divine is not elsewhere, not in a realm beyond the physical, but here, in this body, in these bodies, in the specific and irreplaceable physical existence of each person.
The sexuality in Whitman — the Calamus poems celebrating male comradeship and physical love, the Children of Adam poems celebrating heterosexual desire — is inseparable from the philosophical argument. He was writing at a time when the body was officially a source of shame and the soul was officially the locus of value, and he reversed the hierarchy without abolishing either term. The body and the soul are not opposites in Whitman. They are aspects of the same continuous, sacred, democratic reality. To exclude the body from the celebration of existence is to celebrate only half of what exists, which is to lie.
Drum-Taps and the Test of Yes
The Civil War poems are where Whitman earns the right to his yes. Anyone can say yes to existence in a time of peace and personal comfort. Whitman said it in the hospitals of Washington, surrounded by the wreckage of young men, and the saying required everything he had.
The Wound-Dresser is the poem in which the experience of the hospitals is most directly rendered, and it is unlike anything else in Leaves of Grass — quieter, slower, the cataloguing impulse subdued by the weight of specific suffering. He moves from bed to bed, dressing wounds, offering water, sitting with the dying. He does not look away. He does not offer false consolation. He is simply present, fully present, with the full attention that his poetry had been training him to bring to experience — and he extends that attention to the bodies destroyed by the war with the same openness he had extended to the grass and the city and the sea.
O Captain! My Captain!, the elegy for Lincoln, is the most formally conventional poem Whitman ever wrote — rhymed, metered, structured in the way his other poems refuse to be — and he came to dislike it, resenting the popularity it achieved at the expense of the less accessible When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, which is the greater poem. Lilacs is the elegy in which the full depth of Whitman’s engagement with death is expressed: the lilac and the star and the thrush’s song woven together into a meditation on grief and acceptance that arrives, finally, not at consolation exactly but at reconciliation — the willingness to hold death as part of the fabric of existence rather than as its contradiction.
The war did not break the yes. It changed its quality. The yes that comes out of Drum-Taps is harder and more costly than the yes of the 1855 Leaves of Grass — less expansive, less effortless, earned rather than assumed. It is, for that reason, more trustworthy. A vision of human existence that has not been tested against its worst possibilities is not a vision but a wish. Whitman’s had been tested, and it held.
Democratic Vistas
Democratic Vistas, published in 1871, is the prose work in which Whitman most directly addresses the political dimension of his vision, and it is a more complicated and more honest document than his reputation as the bard of American democracy sometimes suggests. He is not simply celebrating America. He is demanding it — demanding that the democratic promise be made real, that the equality proclaimed in the founding documents be extended to the actual conditions of actual lives, and he is doing this in the immediate aftermath of a war that had been fought over exactly that question and had not resolved it.
He is also, with a prescience that has proved uncomfortable for those who want a simpler Whitman, warning against the specific corruption that democracy is most vulnerable to: the substitution of material prosperity for genuine equality, the production of a nation of consumers rather than citizens, the hollowing out of the democratic self by the very commercial forces that democracy had unleashed. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects. The diagnosis is a hundred and fifty years old and has not been superseded.
What he calls for, against this failure, is literature: a genuinely American literature that will create the democratic self that the political system has proclaimed but not yet produced, that will give Americans the inner life adequate to the outer freedom they have been promised. The poet is not an entertainer or a chronicler but a maker of souls — the person whose job it is to imagine, fully and without flinching, the kind of human being that democracy requires. This is the most ambitious claim ever made for literature’s social function, and it is the claim that Leaves of Grass was written to embody.
I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes
The most quoted line in Whitman — Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes — is usually cited as a celebration of self-acceptance, a permission slip for inconsistency, a democratic shrug in the face of the demand for logical coherence. It is all of these, but it is also something more philosophically serious: the claim that the self is not a fixed entity with a definable essence but a process, a continuous and unresolved negotiation between the multiple, contradictory forces that constitute any actual human life.
This is not the same as Ovid’s vision of transformation, though the two are in conversation. Ovid’s transformations are imposed from outside — the gods, desire, power — and they are often catastrophic, the self dissolving into something unrecognisable. Whitman’s multitudes are internal and embraced: the self is large enough to contain everything without being destroyed by any of it, because the self is not a point but a field, not a single note but the whole instrument. The contradiction is not a problem to be resolved but a richness to be inhabited.
This vision of the self has implications for every human relationship. If I contain multitudes, so do you, and the recognition of your multitudes is the ground of genuine democracy — not the formal equality of the ballot box but the deeper equality of the imagination, the willingness to hold the full complexity of another person’s existence as equal in value and weight to your own. The catalogues in Whitman are not mere lists. They are exercises in this recognition: the prostitute and the President placed side by side not to shock but to insist, with patient, repeated emphasis, that both are equally real and equally deserving of the poet’s full attention.
What Whitman Gives
The human condition according to Whitman is, finally, a condition of participation — in the body, in the crowd, in the grass, in the continuous transformation of matter and energy that the universe conducts without reference to our preferences. We are not observers of existence but expressions of it, not subjects facing an objective world but nodes in a network that includes everything, temporary concentrations of the universe’s ongoing self-exploration. Death is not the end of this participation but its continuation in another form. The self is not a possession to be defended but a gift to be given — to the dying soldier, to the prostitute, to the slave, to the reader in some future century who opens the book and finds, still there, the invitation that has never been withdrawn.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem. This is the most extraordinary thing any writer has ever said to a reader: not that the poem is about you or for you, but that you are the poem, that the act of reading is itself the completion of what the writing began, that the boundary between the self that wrote and the self that reads is as permeable as the boundary between the living and the dead, between the grass and the body it grows from, between the atom that was Whitman and the atom that is you.
He is buried in a tomb he designed himself in Camden, New Jersey — a granite structure of considerable size that struck some contemporaries as grandiose and that seems, on reflection, entirely appropriate: a man who contained multitudes needed room. The Leaves of Grass he revised until the final months of his life, the deathbed edition incorporating everything he had written and everything he had become, is the tomb that matters. It is still open. The invitation still stands. Every atom belonging to him as good belongs to you.
Sources and Further Reading
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1891-92 Edition. Edited by Justin Kaplan. Library of America, 1992.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. Penguin Classics, 1986.
Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas and Other Papers. Walter Scott, 1888.
Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days and Collect. Rees Welsh, 1882.
Whitman, Walt. The Complete Prose Works. Small, Maynard, 1898.
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. Simon and Schuster, 1980.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Knopf, 1995.
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. Basic Books, 1984.
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Letter to Walt Whitman, 21 July 1855. In The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4. Columbia University Press, 1939.
Lawrence, D. H. “Whitman.” In Studies in Classic American Literature. Thomas Seltzer, 1923.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Note on Walt Whitman.” In Other Inquisitions. Translated by Ruth Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964.
Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Various publishers, 1906–1996.
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