The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Walt Whitman · poems in clusters, with two annexes and a prose afterword · the deathbed edition, David McKay, Philadelphia, 1891 to 1892 · scored on Whitman’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Lyric and epic in one long-lined free verse; a book of poems rewritten over a lifetime as a single growing work
Mythos
The American Adam and a universal body; a passion, resurrection and dispersal into the grass; the sea as mother whispering the word death; the slain king of the spring rites in flower, star and bird
Phase
From the twelve untitled poems of 1855 through seven editions to the issue of 1891 to 1892, the war of 1861 to 1865 and Lincoln’s death at its centre
Presentation
Poems in named clusters, from “Inscriptions” and “Children of Adam” to “Songs of Parting”, then the annexes “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy” and the prose “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”
Register
From the language of the soul and the cadence of the English Bible and of oratory to the slang of the city, the trades and the street, with borrowed words of his own (“camerado”, “allons”, “Libertad”)
Scale
One “I” that is everyone: a man, the city of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the republic and its war, the grass, the sea and the stars
Governing Proposition
A poet in Brooklyn publishes twelve untitled poems without his name on the title page, and for thirty-seven years keeps the one title over a book that grows with every edition, through the love of men and women, the war hospitals and the death of a President, to the arrangement he fixed before he died. The wager of the book is that the self is not a private enclosure but a common ground, every person and thing of equal standing in it and the body one with the soul, and that a line which gives each life its own place and subordinates none can make that equality felt.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;” (§6). The poem’s answer is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”: the grass grows out of the dead, and the living walk on it. The book took its title from that image in 1855 and kept it for the rest of Whitman’s life. The first Leaves of Grass was twelve poems, untitled, with a prose preface, self-published in Brooklyn, and the author’s name was not on the title page. The first of the twelve would become “Song of Myself”.
Then the book grew. A second edition came in 1856, in Brooklyn, with Emerson’s private letter of 21 July 1855 printed in it without his leave; a third in 1860, from Thayer and Eldridge in Boston; then 1867, 1871 to 1872, and the edition of 1881 to 1882, published by Osgood in Boston, withdrawn there in 1882 under threat of prosecution, and reissued in Philadelphia by Rees Welsh and then David McKay. The last, from McKay, bears a title page dated 1891-2. Counts of six to nine editions vary with how the issues are reckoned. The first poem changed its name with them: untitled in 1855, “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in 1856, “Walt Whitman” in 1860, and “Song of Myself” from 1881, in fifty-two sections.
The work scored here is the last of these, the deathbed edition, read as the body readers read. It keeps the arrangement Whitman fixed in 1881, in clusters that run from “Inscriptions”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus” through “Sea-Drift”, “By the Roadside”, “Drum-Taps” and “Memories of President Lincoln” to “Autumn Rivulets”, “Whispers of Heavenly Death”, “From Noon to Starry Night” and “Songs of Parting”, and adds the annexes “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy” and the prose “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”. Whitman died on 26 March 1892. The poems his executors added in 1897 are not part of the work. The book of 1855 is its first state, the greater departure page for page; but only the grown book holds “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, “Calamus”, “Drum-Taps” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”.
Movement II
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” (§1). The first lines of “Song of Myself” state the book’s law and its method at once: a self that is sung only because it is shared. The line is unrhymed and unmetred, long, end-stopped as a rule, and built by anaphora, parallelism and the catalogue. In §5 the self and its soul are joined, and from there the poem goes out into the country, the city and the trades, giving each life a line of its own and setting none beneath another: “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft” (§15), and beside her every other worker in the list.
The grass returns in §6, and with it a claim the poem asserts more than it shows, that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”. In §10 a runaway slave is taken in. In §11 twenty-eight young men bathe, and a woman watches them from behind the blinds. In §21 the poet turns to the night: “Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” In §24 he names himself, “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son”, a single man made into a universal body. In §31 the scale opens to the stars: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars”.
Then the poem suffers. “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” (§33). The murdered men at Goliad (§34) and the sea-fight (§35) are told as if lived, and through the sections to §38 the speaker passes through suffering and recovers. He sees God “in the faces of men and women” (§48). He meets the charge of inconsistency by taking it in: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (§51). And he ends by going into the ground: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”, then “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” The last line is “I stop somewhere waiting for you” (§52).
Movement III
Around “Song of Myself” the book sets the body. “Children of Adam” names sex and the procreant body in verse, and “I Sing the Body Electric” makes the claim plainly: “If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred”. “Calamus” gives the love of men for men, a love the age would not name; what its poems say, and what Whitman’s revisions hid, are still argued. “The Sleepers” enters the world of dreams, and “There Was a Child Went Forth” gives the family, the mother and the father.
“Song of the Open Road” takes the same self out onto the road. Its method is the method of the whole book: the “I” passes into “you” and back, so that the speaker and the reader stand on the same ground, and the comradeship the poems keep naming, with its borrowed words (“camerado”, “allons”), is the reader’s as much as the poet’s.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, added in 1856, carries that pronoun across time. The poet rides the ferry among the crowds and the ferry hands, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and turns to readers who will cross after he is dead: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,”. The poem does not imagine the future reader; it addresses him, face to face, long after. The pronoun that in “Song of Myself” makes one ground of self and reader here makes one ground of the living and the dead.
Movement IV
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, written in 1859 and in the book from 1860, is a myth of the poet’s origin. A boy on the Paumanok shore watches a bird that has lost its mate, and the sea, as mother, whispers to him the one word: “Death, death, death, death, death.” With “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” it stands in “Sea-Drift”, and death, which “Song of Myself” called lucky, becomes the source of the poet’s song.
The war came into the poems in 1865 with “Drum-Taps”. “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” is given with a painter’s exact economy; “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” keeps watch over a dead soldier; “The Wound-Dresser” goes through the hospital wards; and “Reconciliation” stands with them. The war darkens the book’s optimism without breaking its law: the dead are still taken into the common ground.
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” mourns Lincoln without naming him: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, / And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, / I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” Three figures carry it, the lilac, the star and the hermit thrush, and between them the coffin goes by train across the country, through the mourning nation. The thrush’s song is a carol to death, “Come lovely and soothing death”. In the same cluster stands “O Captain! My Captain!”, one of the book’s rare poems in rhyme and stanza, an elegy of another and more conventional law.
Movement V
The later book widens to the world. “Passage to India” sets the Suez canal and the ocean cable in verse. In “A Noiseless Patient Spider” the spider launches filament into vacancy. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” runs its long lines and turns on a short one at the close: “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars”.
The book also grew where it did not deepen. “Song of the Exposition” and “Song of the Redwood-Tree” are public poems fixed to their occasions; “Autumn Rivulets” and “By the Roadside” hold much that could go; and the two annexes, “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy”, are an old man’s verse, often slack, set after the arrangement of 1881 with the prose of “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”. A book rewritten for a lifetime carries the costs of the life with its gains, and the deathbed edition carries both.
In “So Long!” Whitman steps out of the book to the reader: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man,”. The claim of 1855 is kept to the last: that the book is a body, the self of the first page offered to whoever holds it. Whitman died on 26 March 1892, and this is the last issue of the book in his lifetime. The grass of the title, grown out of the dead and walked on by the living, is the book’s last figure for itself as it was its first, and the voice at the close of “Song of Myself” stops where it said it would, somewhere waiting.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test divides the book. The great poems resist it: in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” each of the three figures, lilac, star and bird, is required, and the poem cannot lose the coffin’s procession without losing the nation that mourns. In “Song of Myself” the catalogues are the argument, not its ornament; equality is enacted by enumeration, and a shorter list would assert a smaller democracy. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the book as a life’s accretion: the late annexes, much of “Autumn Rivulets” and “By the Roadside”, the exposition and redwood poems and “O Captain! My Captain!” could go with the knowledge unchanged, perhaps a third of the poems by count and far less by weight; and some catalogues run past their proof. The core is compelled; the book is permitted.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the self is a common ground, every person and thing of equal standing in it, and the body is not the soul’s prison but the soul. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (§1); “If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred” (“I Sing the Body Electric”). The book tests it against hard cases: the runaway slave sheltered (§10), the murdered men at Goliad (§34), the hospital of “The Wound-Dresser”, the love of men for men in “Calamus”. “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there” (§33) names the method. Held below the top because much of the claim is asserted in transport rather than shown, death’s luckiness above all, and because the book sees the republic’s wounds more readily than their causes.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height and frequency are both high. The warm sublime: the grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” (§6); the night earth, “Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” (§21); the twenty-eight young men bathing and the woman behind the blinds (§11). The cosmic: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” (§31), and the close, “I stop somewhere waiting for you” (§52). The mourning sublime, sustained across whole poems: the boy on the Paumanok shore given the word death, the hermit thrush’s carol in “Lilacs”, the ferry crossing in which a reader long after is addressed face to face. The dreadful: the sea-fight (§35) and the vigil over a dead soldier. Held off the top because elevation flattens in the long public poems and the annexes, and the weakest catalogues accumulate without lifting.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built. “Song of Myself” makes a single man, “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (§24), into the American Adam and a universal body, and its structure is load-bearing archetype: the soul’s union with the self in §5, a passion and resurrection in the sections of suffering and recovery (§§33 to 38), and a last dispersal into the earth, “look for me under your boot-soles” (§52), as a dying god returns into the grass of the book’s title. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is a myth of the poet’s origin: a bird’s lost mate, and the sea as mother whispering the one word. “Lilacs” builds a trinity of flower, star and bird and never names the dead President, who becomes the slain king of the spring rites while remaining a coffin on a train. Held a step down because elsewhere the myth is asserted, and the late book repeats the figure without deepening it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance was the metred, rhymed, stanzaic English lyric and the American poetry of Longfellow and Bryant. The turn was total: an unrhymed long line on the cadence of the English Bible and of oratory; the catalogue as structure; a lyric “I” that is everyone; the body and sex named in verse; the slang of the city and the trades beside the language of the soul. “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” (§52) states the departure. The stake was paid: a first edition self-published without the author’s name on its title page, reviews that called it obscene and formless, the edition of 1881 withdrawn in Boston under threat of prosecution. Whitman kept the poems. Held a hair below the top because the long line had precedents in the Psalms, Macpherson’s Ossian and Blake’s prophecies, and the expansive self had Emerson’s essays behind it.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Put “Song of Myself” into stanzas and its equality goes: the end-stopped, paratactic line gives each item of the catalogue a line of its own and none subordinate to another, which is the democracy the poem knows. The shifting pronoun, the “I” passing into “you” and back, is the instrument of the claim that self and reader are one ground, and it lets “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” speak across time: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt”. The book’s own form, one title kept for a lifetime and rewritten in each edition, is a growing body, the grass of its name, and in “Lilacs” the weaving of three motifs is the work of mourning. Held off the top because the clustering of the later book is in part arbitrary, and in the occasional and late poems the line is a container.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a hundred and seventy years of reading, not exhausted, with the questions still open and argued. Who is the “I”: a man, a nation, a voice offered to every reader? Is the self of “Song of Myself” democratic or imperial, an embrace or an annexation? What do the “Calamus” poems say, and what did the revisions hide? The scholarship of sexuality has reread the book more than once. Race and the republic: the runaway slave of §10 beside the silences of the later book. And the editions themselves: whether 1855 or 1892 is the work, a question the book’s form forces on every reader. The prosody of the line and the division of “Song of Myself” still divide readers, and the Variorum and the Whitman Archive show a text that rewards return. Held a step down because the public poems give everything on first reading.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is poetry in English in the nineteenth century, and, with American poetry beginning there, the poetry of the Americas. The force is a reorganisation of possibility: the book made free verse a major form in English and the democratic self a subject of poetry. With Dickinson it is one of the two sources of American poetry. Its American reception was slow, a delay credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the long line and the catalogue carried through Sandburg, Hart Crane, Williams and Ginsberg; works that answer the book by name, Pound’s “A Pact”, Darío’s sonnet, Pessoa’s salutation as Campos, Lorca’s ode; Martí’s writing on him, Neruda’s answer and Borges’s translation; in Russia, Chukovsky’s translations and the futurists; and settings by Delius, Vaughan Williams and Hindemith.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in Whitman’s own final arrangement; nothing is lost, and the many editions are a surplus of text, not a loss of it. Presence: continuous since 1855 and wide, in print without a break, taught wherever American literature is taught, translated into most written languages, quoted in public life, set to music and read beyond the academy. A hundred and seventy-one years is less than two centuries, and the widest presence such a span can show earns the top of what it can show, and no more: it does not stand level with the texts that have lasted millennia. The surface fixed to its moment, the exposition poems, the Suez and the cable of “Passage to India”, the nationalist boosting, is the smaller part and does not carry the book.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Whitman’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the line and its pacing: anaphora that builds and releases, the catalogue varied in length and rhythm so that it breathes, the short line placed after a run of long ones, “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” (“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”), and endings landed with authority, “I stop somewhere waiting for you”. “Out of the Cradle” and “Lilacs” are as finished as anything in the century’s verse, and the “Drum-Taps” vignettes, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” among them, show an exact, painterly economy. Charged on three counts: the monotony of the long line where the catalogue becomes inventory; an inflated diction and borrowed words that sit uneasily; and the late revisions and annexes, where the old poet’s verse is often slack. “O Captain! My Captain!” shows a hand less sure in metre than out of it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs: the self contains all, each thing is of equal standing in it, body and soul are one, and death is continuance into the common ground. Take the two most distant elements, the procreant ecstasy of “Children of Adam” and the hermit thrush’s death carol in “Lilacs”, or the barbaric yawp and “A noiseless patient spider”, launching filament into vacancy: they obey one law. The war darkens the optimism of 1855 without breaking its physics, and the poet’s contradictions are taken into the law: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (§51). The range is very wide. Charged: the late public poems and the rhymed elegy for Lincoln obey another law, conventional and civic, set beside “Lilacs” in the same cluster; and the annexes add a slackened voice rather than a new range.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Held, and mostly integrated. Consciousness: the self’s dialogue with its soul, the dream-world of “The Sleepers”. The body and sex, fully and for the first time in the language. Labour: the trades of the catalogues, the broad-axe, the ferry hands. The city: Manhattan and Brooklyn, crowds and streets. The family: “There Was a Child Went Forth”, with the mother and the father. The state and history: the republic, Texas and Goliad, the sea-fight, the Civil War, Lincoln’s death, Columbus. The sacred: God seen “in the faces of men and women” (§48). The natural order: grass, sea, stars, the hermit thrush. Death throughout, and one “I” to hold them. Held below the top because the catalogue integrates by inclusion: many orders stand in a list beside each other more than they act on one another, and the axis weighs that as less than held.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5. A departure from the metred, rhymed English lyric so complete that it made the unrhymed long line, the catalogue and a lyric self that is everyone into poetry, at the cost of a first edition published without its author’s name and an edition withdrawn under threat of prosecution; and a reach, with Dickinson’s, to the sources of American poetry and through translation and answer into the poetry of the Americas and of Europe.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7, held by the book as a life’s accretion: the late annexes, much of the middle clusters, the exposition and redwood poems and the rhymed elegy for Lincoln could go with the knowledge unchanged, perhaps a third of the poems by count and far less by weight, and some catalogues of “Song of Myself” run past their proof. Next above it, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.9: the long line slackens where the catalogue becomes inventory and the late verse loosens, and the public poems obey a conventional, civic law beside the book’s own.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths, and the tier rests on it. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the deathbed edition, published by David McKay, Philadelphia, with a title page dated 1891-2. It is scored as one work: the arrangement Whitman fixed in the Osgood edition of 1881, withdrawn in Boston in 1882 and reissued in Philadelphia, with the annexes “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-Bye My Fancy” and the prose afterword “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”. The poems added by the executors in 1897 are not part of it. The edition of 1855, twelve untitled poems and a prose preface published in Brooklyn without the author’s name on the title page, is read as the first state of the same book: its achievement is credited on The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, and the costs of the later revisions and annexes are charged on The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Whitman’s English, with no translation between; his borrowings (“camerado”, “allons”, “en-masse”, “Libertad”) are judged as his. The poems weighed most, “Song of Myself”, “The Sleepers”, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, the “Sea-Drift” poems, “Lilacs” and the chief poems of “Children of Adam”, “Calamus” and “Drum-Taps”, are read closely; the middle clusters less closely, and the late annexes in their character more than in their particular poems. English is quoted only where its words are certain, and lines that carry dashes in Whitman’s text are not quoted. Citations are by section for “Song of Myself” and by title elsewhere. Facts that could not be verified, among them the counts of poems and lines in each edition, the page count and print run of the first edition, the order of poems inside the middle clusters, Whitman’s own instructions for the last issue and several episodes of the book’s reception, are not given.