by Walt Whitman
“Leaves of Grass” indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on “Leaves of Grass” distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism.
I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective.
In the free evening of my day I give to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences,
As idly drifting down the ebb,
Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore.
Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises—First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish’d and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.
As a dandy—29 years old, 1848, photo taken in New Orleans, Louisiana,
by an unidentified photographer. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman House,
Camden, New Jersey, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association,
Huntington, New York. Not officially in Saunders, but sometimes
referred to as Saunders #1.1.
ADDITIONAL POEMS
Poems Written before 1855
Poems Excluded from the “Death-bed” Edition
(1891-1892)
Old Age Echoes
(1897)
INTRODUCTION TO ADDITIONAL POEMS
Whitman published the poems in this section outside of the First Edition (1855) or culminating edition (1891-1892) of Leaves of Grass. “Poems Written before 1855” includes all the poems Whitman published during the so-called “seed-time of the Leaves”; these twenty-three poems date from 1838 to the early 1850s. “Poems Excluded from the ‘Death-bed’ Edition” gathers the works published in other editions of Whitman’s poetry but dropped from the “Death-bed” Edition of Leaves of Grass (often cited as the “definitive” and “complete” edition, though it by no means includes all of Whitman’s poetry). The “Old Age Echoes” section contains a collection of thirteen poems that first appeared in the 1897 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s literary executor, Horace Traubel, claimed to have received Whitman’s consent to publish this collection.
The reader is thus presented with all the poems that Whitman approved of publishing—allegedly approved of, in the case of Old Age Echoes—at some time during his life. Spanning almost sixty years and ranging widely in quality, the poems are interesting not only in their own right, but also for Whitman’s reasons for excluding them from the definitive canon of the “Death-bed” Edition.
POEMS WRITTEN BEFORE 1855
Musing about “long foreground” of Leaves of Grass in his 1855 congratulatory letter to Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first readers to express curiosity about Whitman’s beginnings as a poet. What had Whitman written before 1855 that hinted of such great things to come? Determined to create a myth of his origins, Whitman did what he could to “cover his tracks”: He destroyed significant amounts of manuscripts and letters upon at least two occasions and frequently reminded himself to “make no quotations, and no reference to any other writers.—Lumber the writing with nothing.”
Sensitive to the public’s curiosity concerning his development as a poet, but aware that much of his juvenilia was readily available in old newspapers, Whitman decided to publish some of his early pieces in an appendix to Collect (1882) entitled “Pieces in Early Youth, 1834-‘42.” “My serious wish were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion—but to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue, (as lately announced, from outsiders), I have, with some qualms, tack’d them on here,” he writes in Collect’s prefatory note. And yet the four poems, nine short stories, and a “Talk to an Art-Union” represented only a fraction of his early efforts; additionally, the works were often heavily revised to hide flaws of his early style.
Twenty-three poems written by Whitman were published before 1855. The awkwardness of Whitman’s language and the conventional rhyme schemes and imagery will surprise anyone familiar with the energy and independence of his mature verse. Some of these pieces (like “The Death and Burial of McDonald Clarke” and “Young Grimes”) are directly imitative of popular poems of the time; others (“The Mississippi at Midnight”) are sensationalistic; still others (“Our Future Lot,” “The Punishment of Pride”) are didactic or overtly pious. One senses the insecurities of Whitman as man and artist: Trying so hard to please the average reader of New York’s penny-daily newspapers, he has forgotten himself and his own voice.
Yet there are signs of the great poetry to be written in the next decade. “Resurgemus” and “The House of Friends” indicate that Whitman’s political awareness was growing in the early 1850s; his interest in diverse peoples and cultures is exhibited in “The Spanish Lady” and “The Inca’s Daughter.” “Our Future Lot” and “The Love That Is Hereafter” are written on the themes of death and rebirth, key issues for his finest poems, including “The Sleepers” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
For more examples of Whitman’s pre-1855 writings, see Thomas L. Brasher’s edition of Early Poems and the Fiction (see “For Further Reading”), Emory Holloway’s edition of Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, and the two-volume edition of The Journalism. Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842), is also available (New York: Random House, 1929).
POEMS EXCLUDED FROM THE “DEATH-BED” EDITION (1891-1892)
Readying the final edition of Leaves of Grass to be published in his lifetime, Whitman wrote in the “Author’s Note”:
As there are now several editions of L. of G., different texts and dates, I wish to say that I prefer and recommend this present one, complete, for future printing, if there should be any.
As a result of this announcement, the 1891-1892 edition has been considered the “definitive” or “complete” edition of his oeuvre.
There are several problems with the idea of considering the “Death-bed” Edition as “definitive.” For one, though the 1891-1892 edition contains Whitman’s greatest works, the style and sometimes the language of these poems reflects Whitman’s more controlled and conservative “late style” rather than the original energy and rawness of his message in the 1850s and 1860s. A quick comparison between the 1855 and 1891-1892 versions of “Song of Myself” is a case in point. In time, Whitman substituted the ellipses and irregular line lengths with more conventional punctuation and more even-tempered flow of language; he also removed blatantly provocative lines—“I hear the trained soprano.... she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip” on p. 57—with more demure observations—“I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)” on p. 218. The “good gray poet” idea of Whitman is a lifetime away from the young rebel of 1855, and readers should be aware that the poetry reflects those changes in Whitman the man and poet. Knowing where he began and ended is a good way to gain a knowledge of the poet, but a stronger understanding comes from looking into his “stops” along th
e way—including the sexually charged 1860 edition, the strong patriotism of Drum-Taps (1865), the melancholy dreaminess of so many of the 1871 poems.
The 1891-1892 Edition of Leaves of Grass is also not a “complete” edition, simply because Whitman dropped earlier poems and pieces of poems along the way. Why did he do so? The most obvious answer is that Whitman recognized the poorer quality of certain pieces; at other times, however, the older poet seems to have had second thoughts about an earlier opinion or feeling. In the interest of providing a more nuanced view of the poet’s work, this selection includes the poems that appeared in one or more editions of Whitman’s poems but were omitted by Whitman from the culminating edition of Leaves of Grass. In other words, these are poems that might “fall through the cracks” for readers acquainted only with Whitman’s two best-known collections.
OLD AGE ECHOES (1897)
I said to W.W. today: “Though you have put the finishing touches on the Leaves, closed them with your good-by, you will go on living a year or two longer and writing more poems. The question is, what will you do with these poems when the time comes to fix their place in the volume?” “Do with them? I am not unprepared—I have even contemplated that emergency—1 I have a title in reserve: Old Age Echoes—applying not so much to things as to echoes of things, re verberant, an aftermath.”
Whitman’s friend and literary executor Horace Traubel records this 1891 conversation in the preface to Old Age Echoes, a collection of thirteen poems added to the 1897 Edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, who died in 1892, did not see or approve of this collection; in fact, Traubel seems to have changed some of the titles himself. But Traubel does claim that it was one of Whitman’s final wishes to “collect a lot of prose and poetry pieces—small or smallish mostly, but a few larger—appealing to the good will, the heart—sorrowful ones not rejected—but no morbid ones given.”
The thirteen works date from 1855 to Whitman’s actual death bed (Traubel noted that “A Thought of Columbus” was Whitman’s “last deliberate composition”) and range in quality from sketches for longer projects (“Then Shall Perceive”) to carefully revised works (“Supplement Hours”) and even a few previously published poems (such as “A Kiss to the Bride” and “Death’s Valley”).
—Karen Karbiener
POEMS WRITTEN BEFORE 1855
OUR FUTURE LOT
This breast which now alternate burns
With flashing hope, and gloomy fear,
Where beats a heart that knows the hue
Which aching bosoms wear;
This curious frame of human mould,
Where craving wants unceasing play
The troubled heart and wondrous form
Must both alike decay,
Then cold wet earth will close around
Dull, senseless limbs, and ashy face,
But where, O Nature! where will be
My mind’s abiding place?
Will it ev’n live? For though its light
Must shine till from the body torn;
Then, when the oil of life is spent,
Still shall the taper burn?
O, powerless is this struggling brain
To pierce the mighty mystery;
In dark, uncertain awe it waits
The common doom—to die!
Mortal! and can thy swelling soul
Live with the thought that all its life
Is centred in this earthly cage
Of care, and tears, and strife?
Not so; that sorrowing heart of thine
Ere long will find a house of rest;
Thy form, re-purified, shall rise,
In robes of beauty drest.
The flickering taper’s glow shall change
To bright and starlike majesty,
Radiant with pure and piercing light
From the Eternal’s eye!
FAME’S VANITY
O, many a panting, noble heart
Cherishes in its deep recess
Th’ hope to win renown o‘er earth
From Glory’s priz’d caress.
And some will reach that envied goal,
And have their fame known far and wide;
And some will sink unnoted down
In dark Oblivion’s tide.
But I, who many a pleasant scheme
Do sometimes cull from Fancy’s store,
With dreams, such as the youthful dream,
Of grandeur, love, and power—
Shall I build up a lofty name,
And seek to have the nations know
What conscious might dwells in the brain
That throbs aneath this brow?
And have thick countless ranks of men
Fix upon me their reverent gaze,
And listen to the deafening shouts,
To me that thousands raise?
Thou foolish soul! the very place
That pride has made for folly’s rest;
What thoughts with vanity all rife,
Fill up this heaving breast!
Fame, O what happiness is lost
In hot pursuit of thy false glare!
Thou, whose drunk votaries die to gain
A puff of viewless air.
So, never let me more repine,
Though I live on obscure, unknown,
Though after death unsought may be
My markless resting stone.
For mighty one and lowly wretch,
Dull, idiot mind, or teeming sense
Must sleep on the same earthy couch,
A hundred seasons hence.
MY DEPARTURE
Not in a gorgeous hall of pride,
Mid tears of grief and friendship’s sigh,
Would I, when the last hour has come,
Shake off this crumbling flesh and die.
My bed I would not care to have
With rich and costly stuffs hung round;
Nor watched with an officious zeal.
To keep away each jarring sound.
Amidst the thunder crash of war,
Where hovers Death’s ensanguined cloud,
And bright swords flash, and banners fly,
Above the sickening sight of blood.
Not there—not there, would I lay down
To sleep with all the firm and brave;
For death in such a scene of strife,
Is not the death that I do crave.
But when the time for my last look
Upon this glorious earth should come,
I’d wish the season warm and mild,
The sun to shine, and flowers bloom.
Just ere the closing of the day,
My dying couch I then would have
Borne out in the refreshing air,
Where sweet shrubs grow and proud trees wave
The still repose would calm my mind,
And lofty branches overhead,
Would throw around this grassy bank,
A cooling and a lovely shade.
At distance through the opening trees,
A bay by misty vapours curled,
I’d gaze upon, and think the haven
For which to leave this fleeting world.
To the wide winds I’d yield my soul,
And die there in that pleasant place,
Looking on water, sun, and hill,
As on their Maker’s very face.
I’d want no human being near;
But at the setting of the sun,
I’d bid adieu to earth, and step
Down to the Unknown World—alone.
YOUNG GRIMES
When old Grimes died, he left a son—
The graft of worthy stock;
In deed and word he shows himself
A chip of the old block.
In youth, ‘tis said, he liked not school—
Of tasks he was no lover;
He wrote sums in a ciphering book,
Which had a pasteboard cover.
Young Grimes ne‘er
went to see the girls
Before he was fourteen;
Nor smoked, nor swore, for that he knew
Gave Mrs. Grimes much pain.
He never was extravagant
In pleasure, dress, or board;
His Sunday suit was of blue cloth,
At six and eight a yard.
But still there is, to tell the truth,
No stinginess in him;
And in July he wears an old
Straw hat with a broad brim.
No devotee in fashion’s train
Is good old Grimes’s son;
He sports no cane—no whiskers wears,
Nor lounges o‘er the town.
He does not spend more than he earns
In dissipation’s round;
But shuns with care those dangerous rooms
Where sin and vice abound.
It now is eight and twenty years
Since young Grimes saw the light;
And no house in the land can show
A fairer, prouder sight.
For there his wife, prudent and chaste,
His mother’s age made sweet,
His children trained in virtue’s path,
The gazer’s eye will meet.
Upon a hill, just off the road
That winds the village side,
His farm house stands, within whose door
Ne‘er entered Hate or Pride.
But Plenty and Benevolence
And Happiness are there—
And underneath that lowly roof
Content smiles calm and fair.
Reader, go view the cheerful scene—