On his return from New Orleans, and until 1855, Whitman edited newspapers, wrote a dreadful temperance novel (the money from which was spent at Pfaff’s Bar just off Broadway), became a believer in phrenology, and then, after clearing his head by working for his father as a carpenter (and the Jesus link was not lost on him) began to write a new kind of poetry that was like no other poetry ever written. It was his own revolution, his own war of independence, he knew, at last, he was the future.

As Van Wyck Brooks wrote:

” This was new verse, stripped as a Quaker meeting-house, into which he had been groping his way for a number of years. Seeking a perfect transparent clearness, he clung to common modes of speech, a language that was always homely and idiomatic, renouncing rhyme and metre too, following, as he thought, the rhythms of nature, which were often those of the prophets of the Bible as well. He was convinced that great poetry would never be expressed again in the arbitrary and rhyming metres of the past, for, conceiving all poetry in the image of his own, as Poe had done before him, he assumed that the rhythms of nature were inevitably free .”

He was to call his finished collection of poems Leaves of Grass and they were the gospel according to Walt Whitman. But they were also much more than that. They were crafted by him in every way. He visualised them, wrote them down again and again, changing a word here a word there; he chose the paper upon which they were to be printed, he set the type himself and printed most of the pages, designed the cover and chose the cloth (green) and watched as a Brooklyn book binder bound each and everyone of the 600 copies ( a further 200 deluxe copies were bound elsewhere) that were then collected by Whitman on that hot July day in 1855.

Whitman advertised them for sale in the New York Tribune on July 6th, 1855, and, of course the book didn’t sell, and was certainly not understood. As Hugh I’Anson wrote in his 1942 biography of the poet:

” His family, hardly to his surprise, found it incomprehensible.’ I didn’t read it at all,’ remarked his brother George later, ‘ didn’t think it worth reading – fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did – did not know what to make of it…said that if Hiawatha was poetry, perhaps Walt’s was.’ In fact his family regarded the whole thing as a sort of malady from which they hoped that he would recover.”

And, as I’Anson reminds us, if being a poet meant staying in bed until lunchtime, missing meals, and staying out late talking with the ferry men, and drinking in Pfaff’s Bar, his family didn’t want anything to do with it. As far as they were concerned Walt was a damned good carpenter, and his father needed more and more help with his building endeavours. But Walt wasn’t interested in carpentry anymore, he knew himself to be a poet, and when not at Pfaff’s he’d take himself off to Long Island to bathe and walk the beaches – watching, listening, and shouting out to the wind his lines of poetry

The reviews of Leaves of Grass were not good. The Boston Intelligencer called it “…this heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense…,” thinking it written by a lunatic; although the North American Review did give it a fair review, but in the end pretty much damned it. The only good reviews were those written (unsigned) by Whitman himself.

Then, with his father’s death, just five days after the publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman decided to write to the leading American scholar, intellectual, and Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, enclosing a copy of his book. It was worth the risk.

Emerson replied:

” Dear Sir – I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as a great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or to much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

” I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find the incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and with large perception only can inspire.

” I greet you at the beginning of a great career…”

Whitman the poet was on his way.

To Be Continued…