Leaves of Grass and "Song of Myself"

The central metaphor in Leaves of Grass is, of course, grass. Here's how to begin: imagine a lawn. It looks green, and it looks like a unified whole. Now look closer, and what you'll see is individual blades of grass--"leaves" of grass. Each one is unique, an individual with its own life, valuable in itself. There are hundreds of thousands of these, and indivdually, they don't seem like much. But each is necessary to create the whole. Without each individual blade of grass, there would be no lawn. So a lawn is (sorry for oversimplifying, Walt!) like a democracy: made up of unique individuals, each of which is first and foremost a life unto itself, yet each of which is vitally necessary to the whole.

Now expand that vision to the world, indeed, to the universe: we are part of a larger unity; each of us tiny leaves of grass is part of a larger whole. The bad and the good, the withered and the flowering, the damaged and the whole: we are each equally necessary and equally valuable.

Whitman wanted to write a poem that would reflect Emerson's idea that America was the poem, and that America itself was only a part of the poem of life and regeneration and procreation. He wanted to create a poem which would reflect the expansive nature of America, with all of its variety and potential. Each man encompasses all men; each person contains eternity. Whitman was influenced by the Transcendentalists, but also believed in the value of immediate experience, in what he could see and feel. The transcendent and the physical cannot be separated, and are both real. Each human is the expression of the divine, filled with the life force. Life is both mystical and realistic; each man's experiences are both subjective and universal.

Grass is life, which, like all nature, humans included, is endlessly procreative, endlessly renewing itself. "Song of Myself" is Whitman's song, and by extension, the song of all of us. Thus, it should be sung (like all poetry, Whitman believed) in ordinary language. Simple was best: eliminate orthodox rhyme and meter. The poems were written to be spoken, and although they have no regular meter, they have a definite rhythm.

Whitman's poems were controversial in his time, and were banned in several places, mainly because of their frank sexuality. A number of people (Emerson among them) tried to persuade him to remove some of the more explicit passages, but he refused: the body is part of the whole of human experience. One can't separate the body from the mind or the spirit.

Whitman never made much money from his poetry, but his work had a greater influence on future generations than any other American poet's. Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsburg and many others achknowledge a debt to Whitman. "He offered himself--and has ultimately been accepted--as the nation's Homer, Vergil and Milton, singing the song of the nation as a song of a particular self" (Ruland and Bradbury 167).