Walt Whitman

by Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Moore (Editor)

Edited with an Introduction by Geoffrey Moore.

Walt Whitman's first book of poems, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1855 when he was only thiry-four, but it very soon established himas a major American poet. Yet there is something more: in D.H. Lawernce's words, Whitman's is "the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present", and it is this disturbing element which lifts his work into the realms of the truly great.

This selection of his poems is accompanied by the work of well-known American painters of the nineteenth century,

Genres: Poetry, Classics

61 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 1955

About the author

Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.
During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C., and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln. After suffering a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.
Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."

Reviews

[Lobstergirl]

This is a wonderful way to present poetry, with paintings. It's a small, brief book, with only five whole poems and an excerpt from Song of Myself. The paintings reproduced are either landscapes or genre, with the exception of Eakins' portrait of Maud Cook, and are chosen to correspond to something in the neighboring poem. Eakins' "The Swimming Hole" faces this stanza from "Song of Myself:"

The young men float on their backs, their white
bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who
seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with
pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

Poems:
There Was a Child Went Forth
Song of Myself
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
I Sit and Look Out
Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Paintings:
Pat Lyon at the Forge, John Neagle
On a Lee Shore, Winslow Homer
In Nature's Wonderland, Thomas Doughty
Dancing on the Barn Floor, William Sidney Mount
Madonna of the Moors, Fritz Mackensen
The Verdict of the People, George Caleb Bingham
The Swimming Hole, Thomas Eakins
Farmers Nooning, William Sidney Mount
Portrait of Maud Cook, Thomas Eakins
In the Woods, Asher B. Durand
The Timber Wagon, Atkinson Grimshaw
Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church

[Andy Hickman]

Walt Whitman, The Illustrated Poets, intro by Geoffrey Moore, Aurum Press)
Neat little collection. ****

Poems:
There Was a Child Went Forth
Song of Myself
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
I Sit and Look Out
Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Paintings:
Pat Lyon at the Forge, John Neagle
On a Lee Shore, Winslow Homer
In Nature's Wonderland, Thomas Doughty
Dancing on the Barn Floor, William Sidney Mount
Madonna of the Moors, Fritz Mackensen
The Verdict of the People, George Caleb Bingham
The Swimming Hole, Thomas Eakins
Farmers Nooning, William Sidney Mount
Portrait of Maud Cook, Thomas Eakins
In the Woods, Asher B. Durand
The Timber Wagon, Atkinson Grimshaw
Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church
...

There Was a Child Went Forth, by Walt Whitman
Observation of rhythms and motion. ***
"These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day."
..

Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman
A flowing autobiographically observant epic of a poem. Profound. ****
I loved, "A child said 'What is the grass?'" ..
"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside..."
…

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing, by Walt Whitman
He has an eye for gazing at things and personifying them by wondering what it might be like to 'be' that thing. ***
"...uttering joyous leaves of dark green..” How cool!
…

I Sit and Look Out, Walt Whitman
Words from the soul of a weeping prophet. ***

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these — all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
…

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, by Walt Whitman
He is a dreamer and a lover. ***
How about this gem?...
(Part 8)
O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,
As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

[Henry Sturcke]

This anthology collects poems from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, including a few poems Whitman excised from later editions. The selection was performed by Leslie A. Fiedler, who discusses the reasons for his choices in the introduction. Among them are blatant editorializing and what Fiedler calls the “bardic American strain.” In at least one case, he restored a phrase that an older, coyer Whitman had bowdlerized: An enthusiastic opera-goer, Whitman wrote of “the trained soprano—she convulses me to the climax of my love-grip,” then censored it to the incomprehensible “the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?).”

Among the poems Fiedler omits is the much-anthologized  “O Captain! My Captain!”, which he calls “infamous.” This poem, he writes, “is not only banal but banal in a way utterly untrue to Whitman.”

Nor does Fiedler present the poems in the final order of Leaves, “the poet’s last version of himself.”

Out of curiosity, I read Emory Holloway’s introduction to the 1947 Everyman’s Library edition immediately after finishing Fiedler’s. Holloway was the undisputed expert on Whitman in the first half of the twentieth century, but his text seemed much more old-fashioned than Fiedler’s. I checked publication dates: 1947 and 1959; twelve years is not a big difference. The two were born 32 years apart (1885/1917), so perhaps it was generational. I was struck by the tortured syntax of some of Holloway’s sentences, then realized the fog index was high whenever Holloway danced around what Fiedler calls “secrets long since out.” Holloway shies away from mentioning the graphic homoerotic nature of some of the poems.

How times change. Whitman is now a gay icon. Unfortunately, the focus seems biographical rather than literary (did he or didn’t he?).

But what about the poetry? I liked Whitman’s use of free verse and the way he combines the mystical and the concrete. His tone is intimate: He speaks directly to the reader, as “I” to “You.” More than once, he pictures the reader holding his book as if he were holding the poet. Once in a while, I found myself reading his characteristic catalogs superficially, as simply words on the page; whenever I did, the lists seemed tedious and long-winded. But when I slowed down and let each item evoke an image in my mind, they were surprisingly effective, even though he limits himself to naming without saying anything about what he names.

This book may be all the Whitman I need, although I won’t discard my complete edition, even if it does contain what Fiedler calls “too much bulk, too much of it soggy even for the indiscriminating appetite of the neophyte.” But this edition, from Dell’s Laurel Poetry Series (a boon to impoverished poetry lovers in the Sixties), smaller than a Kindle, is the one I slip into a pocket occasionally as I step out the door.

[Sebas JP]

Wow. Rediscovering Whitman. Blew me away; the humanity, the compassion, the rhythm of every verse, the feeling that comes through the text of man enamoured with life, with nature, with being. Extraordinary

[Erik Graff]

This may have been the collection which introduced me to Walt Whitman. Purchased at the Maine Township H.S. South bookstore, it was used as a text in American Literature class. Appreciating Whitman and seeing that he was held in some high regard by English teachers helped me appreciate Alan Ginsberg.

[Monica]

I really like the idea of putting artwork with the poetry.