Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: Poetry and the Founding of a ‘New World’ Culture

ROBERT OLSEN Whitman's Leaves of Grass: Poetry and the Founding of a 'New World' Culture If it can be ' generally stated that nineteenth-century European Ihigh' culture valued poetic discourse over the less codified practices of everyday language, then Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is an attempt to give everyday American linguistic usage poetic value. Whitman's poem includes discourse that does not comply with the traditions of European poetics but that is proclaimed nevertheless to be poetry in order to suggest that the liberal-democratic American state has a natural beauty equivalent to the most refined poem. Leaves demonstrates this national beauty by including a wide variety of utterances and observations in its epic project, even though this inclusiveness also implies a critique of the project that the work undertakes. The ambitious extent of this collection threatens the identity and distinctiveness of the literary text itself. Like a state with poorly defined borders and institutions, a work that intends to articulate such an inclusive democratic poetic voice challenges the necessary formal distinctiveness that would recognizably make it a form of literary discourse. The result is that Leaves must solicit the willing participation of its readers in order to realize the project that it undertakes . Whitman's poetry requires that the reader constantly renew its discourse by reinvesting it with new poetic meaning and, as a result, reaffirming it as the poetry of a flourishing, liberal American state.1 The poem's cultural project is· announced in 'Starting from Paumanok,' a piece that was originally titled 'Proto-Leaf' and that serves as a general introduction to the entire Leaves. In it, the poet takes his birthplace as his point of poetic departure and provides a list of the scarcely formed, raw materials from which the poem and nation are to be composed. He associates his personal vision with the growth of America, and this conjunction of individual, natural progress and nation building enables him to 'strike up for a New World': Victory, union, faith, identity, time, The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. This then is life, Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1995 306 ROBERT OLSEN How curious! how real! Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun. See revolving the globe, The ancestor-continents away group'd together, The present and future continents north a.nd south, with the isthmus between. See, vast trackless spaces, As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill, Countless masses debouch upon them, They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known. See projected through time, For me an audience interminable. With finn and regular step they wend, they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, One generation playing its part and passing on, Another generation playing its part and passing on in its -tum, With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to listen, With eyes retrospective towards me. (Leaves, 16-17) This poetic declaration demonstrates the union of poet, nation, and 'kosmos' imported into the American continents as part of the liberal ideology which justified a settler culture. The initial poetic enumeration displaces the 'New World,' the empty, pristine world that Wl1itman imagines the pre-Columbia Americas to have been and that he introduces at the end of the preceding stanza. These displacements are listed as if they were both the products of human actions and the natural generations of the American continents themselves. Whitman's America is the product of Lvictory,' 'union,' Lfaith,' and Lidentity,' human achievements of which the poem constructs a shorthand JNew World' history. However, this past of European conquest is also seen to be in harmony with the natural processes of 'progress' and the 'kosmos.' Like the birth of a child, America is the result of convulsions and throes, events which elicit expressions of amazement ('How curious!-how real! / Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun'). America is '[h]ere,' always present, since it is that which surfaces in this space before us and is, therefore, Hving in Whitman's poetry. The poem celebrates this...