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4. An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos
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Chapter Four An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos Five years ago a new poet appeared, styling himself the representative of America, the mouthpiece of free institutions, the personification of all that men had waited for. . . . He regards himself as the fertilizing agent of American Poetry; perhaps all the better for fertilizing purposes that the rains and snows of a rough life have caused it to fester in a premature and unwholesome decay. —“The New Poets,” New York Times, 19 May 1860 In the early fall of 1855, Walt Whitman wrote and published three anonymous reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a bold and audacious move intended not only to generate publicity for his book but also to instruct critics and potential readers on how they were to receive it. By far the boldest and most audacious moment in all three of these reviews occurs when Whitman refers to himself as “the true American poet,” proclaiming that he is “an American bard at last!”1 For years scholars have commented on how Whitman used this review to introduce himself as the poet that antebellum literary nationalists had anxiously been awaiting: the poet who spoke to and for the nation as its representative bard. Curiously absent from this scholarly commentary , however, is a consideration of how, precisely, Whitman fulfilled the duties of the American bard in the years immediately following his self-appointment to that role.The prevailing assumption has been that, prior to the Civil War, Whitman viewed the office of national bard rather narrowly, believing that his sole responsibility was towrite lyric poems about the distinctive features of the United States. It would take the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln, scholars have held, forWhitman to expand his bardic duties to include commemorative poems about events of national importance in addition to lyric poems about national traits and characteristics. As such, it has been widely assumed that not until the crisis of the Union did Whitman step up towrite the kind of commemorativeverses that have Walt Whitman 156 Walt Whitman historically been the duty of poets laureate and national bards to compose. But there is more to the story of Whitman’s career as an American bard than has been acknowledged by this narrative of a ten-year gap between the moment in 1855 when Whitman christened himself the representative poet of the United States and the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, his volume of poems about the Civil War. The missing chapter in the story of Whitman’s antebellum claim to the title of national bard centers around the publication of “A Broadway Pageant,” a poem Whitman wrote in the summer of 1860 to commemorate the visit of a delegation of Japanese ambassadors who had come to the United States to ratify Townsend Harris’s 1854 treaty granting America exclusive trading rights with Japan. Published less than a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, “A Broadway Pageant” has been lost in the shuffle between the release of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in May 1860 and Whitman’s decision to dedicate both his poetry and his personal life to mending the wounds of the war. The visit of the Japanese ambassadors itself has been overshadowed by the Civil War as a major moment in nineteenth-century U.S. history, even though most newspapers at the time agreed with the assessment of the NewYork Illustrated News that the U.S. diplomatic coup over Europe in securing trade rights with the isolationist government of Japan was a “great national event,” and that the Japanese ambassadors were themselves, as Whitman later put it, “celebrities of the time.”2 Despite this conspicuous neglect, both the text of “A Broadway Pageant” and the context surrounding its publication tell a rich and involved storyabout howWhitman defined the office of American bard at a crucial moment of his career. While Donald Pease has commented that “Whitman’s poetry seems to take place against the backdrop of a national celebration,” “A Broadway Pageant” is the only poem Whitman wrote after publishing the 1855 Leaves of Grass and before adopting the post–Civil War persona of America’s “Good Gray Poet” that literally takes place amid a national celebration—the only antebellum poem, that is, in which Whitman takes upon himself the duty of the bard to publicly commemorate an event of national importance.3 The first section of this chapter...