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2. “I Think I Will Do Nothing … But Listen”: Forming a New Urban Ear
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chapter two “I Think I Will Do Nothing . . . But Listen” Forming a New Urban Ear jJ What Do You Hear, Walt Whitman? In the mid-1840s, around the time that Ossian Dodge first began hustling for renown in Boston, another young man on-the-make was working furiously as an editor, writer, and printer for a variety of newspapers in New York City. Walt Whitman was an aspiring novelist and poet from Brooklyn, New York, who had lived in and around Long Island, Brooklyn, and New York City since his youth. Working for the Aurora, the Statesman, the Democratic Review, the Brooklyn Evening Star, the Brooklyn Eagle, and other papers , he wrote hundreds of sketches commenting on the day’s politics, as well as the changing and chaotic life of New York’s streets. He would linger on corners, observing and listening to firemen, fruit peddlers, omnibus drivers, and sailors. He covered political rallies and parades , the arrival of goods at the wharves, and what it was like to bunk for a night at the police station. On any given day, he might visit a gymnasium or a fortune teller, catch the latest exhibit at a dime museum, and then attend an evening lecture on phrenology or wander the gardens at Niblo’s. He often played roles: he was as thrilled to join in a drinking song with the boisterous “mechanics” in the Bowery, as he was promenading up and down Park Avenue in his dandyish clothes and mingling with the fashionable .1 In all, Whitman saw it as his job to absorb as much as he could. As he later said about his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, “the book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people , for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”2 New York was the epicenter of commercial amusements in America, and Forming a New Urban Ear / 41 Whitman was an especially active participant in the city’s rapidly growing number of theaters, lectures, exhibitions, and concerts in the 1840s. He was a regular at the Bowery Theater, for instance, savoring the intense emotionalism of actors like Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest. He was an enthusiastic follower of oratory, attending lectures by Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher or temperance speaker John Gough. In his early years, he even considered becoming a lecturer himself, and he attended political rallies and abolitionist meetings at Broadway Tabernacle to study the fiery rhetoric of reformers. Perhaps most of all, Whitman discovered music. At first, he was ambivalent about the virtuosos starting to trickle into America, like Ole Bull and Leopold de Meyer; he outright resisted the Italian opera as unsuited for common Americans with whom he identified. His nativist politics in his editorials in the early 1840s fed these initial impressions, and the music he preferred was that of homegrown singing families, Dodworth ’s Brass Band, or the comic songs of blackface minstrels. However, by 1847, with the opening of the Astor Place Opera House, Whitman was converted . With his status as a journalist on the “free-list” for concerts in the city, he heard most of the major virtuosos that passed through in the late 1840s and early 1850s, including favorites like the Italian baritone Cesare Badiali and contralto Marietta Alboni.3 Many have talked about Whitman’s appreciation for music, locating the influences of opera and its various singers on his own singing. Indeed, Whitman is popularly called “the bard of democracy,” someone whose voice was emblematic of the nation and its people.4 David Reynolds has gone so far as to juxtapose Whitman’s “participatory, dialogic spirit” to a current United States shaped by “passive spectatorship and the mass media.”5 Few, however, have given attention to Whitman’s formative role not as a singer but as an extraordinary listener. Whitman was constantly practicing and re- fining his skills as a listener as he walked the streets, attended lectures, and reviewed concerts. His journalistic attention to the vibrant cultural world of New York was not so much through detached observation, as one might expect of a journalist today, nor of the “passive spectatorship” Reynolds points to, but rather through more immediate, transformative hearing. There was both a physical and spiritual intimacy inherent in his “taking-in” of sounds. As he wrote, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop/They seize every object...