Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass (1855)

American Transcendentalist poet

A. Unlike other writers involved in the transcendentalist movement, Whitman was not a
New Englander. He lived mostly in New York, a city that greatly affected his writing
and view of humanity.

Whitman did not begin as a transcendentalist, or with the spirited free verse with which he is
always associated with. His style developed along with his political sense and as the country
became more and more divided with the approaching Civil War. Walt used his poetry to
extol democracy and American populism.

Critics said that he had become capable of writing all-encompassing poetry as a gesture of
healing and togetherness to a nation he felt was on the verge of collapse. He had a messianic
vision of his poems, as though by reading them, America would be magically healed.

He also managed to cast off the conventions of Victorian literature and society. His friend
Emerson even asked him to tone down the sexuality in his poetry but Whitman believed that
it was part of the human essence therefore a part of the soul.

Though Walt was opposed to slavery, he was not strong in the abolitionist movement. He
did, however, love and admire A. Lincoln – “O, Captain! My captain!”. At times, Walt was
on the periphery of transcendentalism, and at other times he was very closely associated with
it.

B. When Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was published in 1855, it was unlike any
collection of poems ever published by an American in the history of the nation.

Characterized by long, twisted sentences combined in a free, liberated poetic form, the poems
included here are bold statements about love, desire, nature and poetics, making it the perfect
candidate for its literary movement: romanticism.

In these poems, Walt Whitman offers a celebration of nature and of the soul and the soul’s
innate connection to God through nature.

The title reveals the central metaphor of the collection: that something as a small as a single
blade of grass contains the divinity of God and at the same time is a small part of the world at
large. The title also refers to the pages of the book itself, making the grass blades equivalent to
the poems collected in it.

The language is openly sexual in places. For example, in poems such as “Song of myself” and “I
sing the body electric”, Walt Whitman takes transcendentalism to an extreme in his discussion of
the body and sexuality; in “Song of myself” he proclaims:” I am the poet of the body/ I am the
poet of the soul”.

Walt’s language is physical, earthy, explicit, expressing heterosexual and homosexual desire.
His audacity in exploring metaphors and other tropes earned him the contempt of many
reviewers in his own time but also made him a hero among less conventional contemporaries and
among later critics.

Emerson and Thoreau were fans of Whitman with whom he involved himself. A poetic pioneer,
Walt inspired many modern poets, especially in the 1960s.