In Our Time - Walt Whitman

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the highly influential American poet Walt Whitman. In 1855 Whitman was working as a printer, journalist and property developer when he published his first collection of poetry. It began:I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. The book was called Leaves of Grass. In it, Whitman set out to break away from European literary forms and traditions. Using long lines written in free verse, he developed a poetry meant to express a distinctively American outlook. Leaves of Grass is full of verse that celebrates both the sovereign individual, and the deep fellowship between individuals. Its optimism about the American experience was challenged by the Civil War and its aftermath, but Whitman emerged as a celebrity and a key figure in the development of American culture. With Sarah Churchwell Professor of American Literature and the Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of LondonPeter Riley Lecturer in 19th Century American Literature at the University of Exeter and Mark Ford Professor of English and American Literature at University College LondonProducer Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, in July 1855, a Brooklyn printer, journalist and property developer called Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry. It began, I celebrate myself, and would I assume, you shall assume,

for every atom belonged to me as good belongs to you. The book was called Leaves of Grass. In it, Whitman set out to break away from European literary forms and traditions. Using long lines written in free verse, he developed a poetry meant to express a distinctive American outlook. Leaves of grass is full of verse that celebrates both the sovereign individual and the deep fellowship between individuals. Its optimism about the American experience was challenged by the Civil War in its aftermath,

but Whitman emerged as a celebrity and a key figure in the development of American culture. We need to discuss Walt Whitman, are Sarah Churchill, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of Humanities at the University of London, Peter Riley, lecturer in 19th century American literature at the University of Exeter, and Mark Ford, Professor of English and American Literature at University College London. Mark Ford, can you tell us about Whitman's family in early life? Yes, he had a, what might seem to us, a rather kind of rackety-up. his first sort of 20 years of very, very diverse range of experiences.

He was born in the middle of Long Island, somewhere called West Hills, and his father, Walter Whitman, Sr, was a farmer and then a property speculator and then a carpenter and was basically a failure at everything he tried, while his mother, Louisa Van Velsaw, she was a Dutch stock. And Whitman liked to think that he came from this mixture of English stock and Dutch stock, that was quite important to his sense of himself. she had eight children and four of them you could say went pretty wild and pretty weird four of them were fine so Whitman had this agrarian upbringing for the first four years living in

the country then they moved to Brooklyn and he went to school in Brooklyn and he left school at the age of 11 which wasn't so untypical for those days and he started working first in a kind of legal office then he worked in journalism and he was kind of publishing pieces by the age of 13 His first piece under his own name came out when he was 15, which is pretty good going. And that began a kind of lifelong obsession with journalism and print. And with the print industry, he was, by the time I was 15, he was an accomplished compositor and so on.

Yeah, I mean, that's the way papers worked in those days, that you didn't just write them, you set them as well. And he would deliver them sometimes as well. So he had kind of a one-man banned some of these cheap papers that he worked for. And that obsession that he had with designing his own books and that all of his copies of leaves of grass, he was oversaw how they were produced. That really goes back to those early years

when he was involved in the paper industry and journalism and writing and setting and then distributing. So it was a kind of, in some ways, like a home industry. But that all came to an abrupt halt with the fire which destroyed the kind of print section of Manhattan. And he was living on his own in Manhattan

at the age of 14 and 15, which seems, again, quite odd to us. His parents had moved back to the country. Thank you very much. So we had the fire, and then Peter Riley, what happened next? Well, you know, I suppose he's spending the next few years working out exactly what he wants to be. He's very much a jack-of-all-trades figure, and maybe a newspaper journeyman is a way to understand him, taking editorial gigs, just writing continually, sometimes writing short poems in conventional verse forms, actually, short stories. There's one article that he writes in the early 1840s called Tear Down and Build Over Again,

where he complains about New York City and Brooklyn's habit of destroying all historic buildings and just planting new neighbourhoods in the middle of a particular area, which is ironic because it's exactly that kind of activity that he engages in just prior to the publication of leaves of grass in 1855. So he actually funds his first book of poems through property speculation. And probably the most major bit of writing that he undertakes in the 1840s is a temperance novel, would you believe. So 1842 he serialises a book called Franklin Evans or the inebriate and I think he wants to make a quick buck from the temperance movement at that particular time and it was I think by most estimates the best-selling piece of writing of his entire writing career.

So he was immersed in print words, setting them, juggling them about, putting them in different ways and so on and so forth. Absolutely, a sense of being immersed in ink and bodily fluid. There's this amazing line in 1855 where he says, this is unfinished business with me, how is it with you? I pass so poorly with paper and types. I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls. And he talks about wet paper between us. So, you know, he's almost imagining a sense of intimacy

in terms of sweating with other workers in a print shop. And that's, I don't know, building out a kind of an erotic vision. out of that almost. Yeah, covered in ink and the sweat of labour was one of his fantasies anyway. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an important influence on Whitman's development. Who was he, and why was there such an influence?

Well, Ralph Waldo Emerson kind of figurehead of what became known as American Transcendentalism, so other names that are associated with this Henry David Thoreau who wrote Walden. And really, I think what he put forward was

a version of a romanticism really that relied heavily on European British precedents and maybe two key texts to bring into this discussion essays, a selection of essays that he published in 1844. One of the essays was called The Poet and another one was called Nature. And in The Poet, he made the following argument. He said that America thus far has excelled militarily, politically, but where is the great American poet? So far, everything that America's contributed is derivative in conventional verse form. We're still looking across the Atlantic for guidance.

We need a new man to step forward. England has Shakespeare, Germany has Gertr, where is the American poet? And in order to kind of give a blueprint of how this new American poet might develop this voice, I think he writes, he writes nature. And he thinks, that, well, one of the things that America does have is space and a natural landscape. And although this is, you know, very heavily, colonially inflected, I think, he makes the argument that if you walk into the woods, let's say, you can forget historical precedent, you can forget about past forms, you can forget about the increasingly genocidal American state, and you can cultivate, quote, an original relationship to the universe,

cultivate a kind of ultimate presentism whereby in the momentary communion with your natural surroundings you get born again almost. Thank you, Sarah. Can we develop his relationship with Emerson? We've been set on the right road, but what more was the two?

Absolutely. So, as Peter said, not only was this essay, the poet and many of the other essays that Emerson was writing at the time incredibly important and influential, they were specifically influential, and he delivered them as lectures, several of them,

the first that really made his name, They were public lectures. And the first that made his name was in 1837 called the American Scholar. And that was where he called for this indigenous kind of American literature and intellectual activity that Peter was just referring to. And then he developed that argument more specifically around poetry in his lecture, the poet. And Walt Whitman attended that lecture. It was a call to arms for him. It was incredibly inspiring. He famously said that up until he heard that lecture, he said, I was simmering, simmering, simmering, and Emerson set me to boil, right? And that sense that he was just waiting for somebody to bring it to flame. And when we hear, if we can just take a couple of lines of what Emerson said in that speech, for people who know Whitman's poetry, it's almost as if Emerson calls Whitman's poetry forth. He said, America is a poem in our eyes. It's ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters. And he says in this, in this lecture, that we don't really need meters, that what we need is something that was somewhat wild that would speak to America's ample geography. And he said that the poet needed to be representative. And we see all of those things, and hear all of those things in Whitman's great breakthrough when his poetry doesn't wait for meters. He bursts forward into something that's wild and untrammeled and inclusive and amplifying and wide-ranging and deeply American in the way that Emerson was demanding.

And it's been called Freeverse. What would you tell the listeners was free verse? Well, free verse is a bit difficult to define because it tends to be defined negatively, but basically it's a non-traditional verse that doesn't follow, kind of traditional forms. It doesn't rhyme. It doesn't have traditional meter form. It doesn't have traditional stanza form. But it does have certain kinds of forms, and that's partly what makes it poetry, is that it's not just prose chopped into bits, but that it's interested in music.

It finds rhythm. It finds other kinds of structures. Absolutely. Some of the most familiar and famous examples are actually from the opening of his great poem, Leaves of Grass. I celebrate myself and what I assume you shall assume for every Adam belonging to me as good belongs to you. And it's a good example of the ways in which free verse can find rhythms and half rhymes and connections within the language. So none of those are hard rhymes, but you can hear the musicality in it and the way that words are echoing with

each other and the ways that he's creating continuity and associating ideas and lines through the poem. And so the most important part of Whitman's free verse, I think, certainly in terms of thinking about its Americanness, is the way that he wanted to open up the line to bring in vernacular rhythms, to bring in all of his background as a journalist that we've been talking about, to bring in these kinds of catalogs and these exhaustive encyclopedic lines and ranges of ideas and names and people and places, and to try to contain a America within something that the kind of finer forms of traditional verse would just be too, from his point of view, would just be too narrow to do. It had to burst out. So the line bursts

out, the word bursts out, and all of kind of America burst through the line. And sometimes it's very simple, actually. I mean, two lines, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked. I am mad for it to be in contact with me. That says a mass in a very small, but that's a new thought in the verse you're talking about. And to make poetry conversational. In fact, it's a dialogue through much of his poem

is it's a constant move between I and you as if it's a literal dialogue and this imaginary conversation that he's having with the reader that's spoken. And so you're thrust into the midst of a conversation with Whitman who's already thinking

about who you are and what are you doing and what does it mean to be part of this project together. Okay, thank you very much. Mark Ford. Can you talk a bit about the themes that he develops in leaves of grass? Yes, the primary theme is to present this persona, the Whitman persona. There's Walter Whitman Jr., who is Whitman in real life, and there's Walt, an American, one of the ruffs, cosmos. And most important to the poem is the creation of this ideal democratic persona who is like, D.H. Lawrence,

called him like a pipe open at both ends. that the whole of kind of American life can flood through him. And for Whitman, that was a way of dramatizing his ideals of democracy, the idea that the new American democratic political system begets this new kind of poetry that is very egalitarian and allows all different kinds of people to exist within it. So his rejection of European conventions is a rejection of the kind of class system. Why did he adopt that?

I mean, did he conscious to say, I do not want to be European, and I do not want to be lives of great men all remind us, we will make our lives supply. I don't have been that sort of American. I want to do something completely different. Yes, I mean, it's interesting that when he reviews his own poetry, which he does quite often, one of the reviews, a very positive review, he gives of it anonymously,

compares his own work to that of Tennyson. And he says Tennyson's poetry embodies the aristocratic ideals of shooting and fishing and hunting and so on. But this is a different kind of poetry in the country house. that his poetry rejects all that. And the free verse which Sarah was talking about, the new verse, which is kind of also, it's very slangy, but it's also pretty biblical as well.

He's also assuming the role of the prophet, the seer. And it's by a kind of sort of divine fiat, he says, I celebrate myself. And then he immediately engages us in it. So the reader has an awful lot of work to do in Whitman. And he's also celebrating his bodily experience. It's about America, but it's also about him, naked on the shore of this.

Yeah, that's one of the really interesting and crucial things about him is his rejection of the Puritan inheritance of America, that Whitman's song of myself and the whole of leaves of grass in the various forms, completely rejects Puritan sense of sinfulness, that the flesh is evil, and for both women and men, he celebrates sexuality and enjoyment of one's body, sensuality, all sorts of things which look forward to modernity, and you can again see why that appeal to someone like D.H. Lawrence so much. Thank you very much. Peter Raleigh, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.

How was it printed and how did that affect the literary form of the book? The thing to emphasise is that this was a self-funded and self-published book. He's working as a barely known real estate dealer in the early 1850s. He's got these ideas and these lines that he's beginning to shape. into a kind of whitmanic form, but he's unsure of how to put this into material form. So what he does, he approaches some friends of his, the Rome Brothers printing firm in Brooklyn,

just around the corner from where he's living, and he says, I'd like to publish 800 copies of a book of poems. And they say, yeah, that's fine. The only problem is we've only got contractual legal paper in stock at the moment, because that's our usual commission. We print legal documents. So if you don't mind printing on that, then that's fine.

And I think Whitman saw these oversized pages and then saw his lines being able to spill across the page and kind of went with that. And I love the idea that the free verse is also kind of dependent on a Brooklyn paper shortage. And I think the thing, just drawing on something that Mark was saying earlier about the body, Whitman is fascinated with the idea that he can convert his,

own physical and intellectual labour into book form. He has this fantasy that when you read him, you are reading a version of his own corpus, as it were. And there's a line, for example, where he imagines actually in book form in the lap of his reader, shouting up at the reader, listener up there, hear you, what have you to confide in me? Right. So a fantasy of being in a reader's lap as a book. Yes. He had 800 printed. How many did it do it do? Tell? Very few. What's very few? Lucky if he shifted

300, 300 copies. He gifted a number of books, most famously probably to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He got a very positive response. That was important for him, because he used it mercilessly, didn't he? Emerson's response, he used on the spine of his book, he used it, and self-promotion, he used it

everywhere. Good for him. Good for him. You know, he was very much clued in to the literary marketplace, and also a variety of the marketplaces as well. When he saw an opportunity to self-promote, he went for it. That's the first book blurb, apparently, in American history, by the way, I greet you at the beginning of a great career. Can we develop that, Mark? Yeah, the self-promotion is astonishing when you look at Whitman's

career. It does come out of the newspaper industry, and it was all, it was the age of P.T. Barnum. It was the age of kind of, uh, of hucksters and snake oil salesman. And Whitman was sneered at by some of the Boston Brahmin, such as Emerson and Thorough, for his vulgarity, and Henry James as well, who has a character called Sailor Tarrant in the Bostonians, who's loosely based on Whitman, and he was always looking at newspaper offices and wants to go into the press himself somehow. In the reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, people saw it as a strange mixture of these Bowery boys, as they were known, the kind of loutish street thugs of downtown Manhattan, and New England transcends.

dentalism. It's this weird fusion. But he actually fused all sorts of different languages, the languages of mesmerism, which he was interested in, phrenology. He was a huge believer in phrenology and had his head read several times and there's a kind of, you can see what scores he got. He even bumped up his own scores apparently a couple of times when he felt they hadn't done justice to some aspect of his phrenological. The Bowery boy, one of the rough's working man persona, he actually included an image of himself at the beginning of the book. and instead of just being a standard mugshot of a poet, this is the work of the intellect, he includes his entire body.

Actually, he cuts himself off at the feet. My favourite example of self-promotion in Whitman, so he has a dialogue with the engraver Samuel Hollier, and he wants an alteration to the image that eventually ends up in the book, and for about 150 years, no one could tell what alteration he made. and a scholar called Ted Genoese about 10 years ago was comparing the various editions and it turns out that he had asked for the size of his crotch to be altered

which is my favourite example of American exceptionalism Sarah let's not try to follow that but still thank you he was very much saw himself as a man of the people he contributed to the penny papers he wrote as he saw for the people and so on and yet they more I'm using very coarse, generalised, they didn't take to him.

It was the elite who eventually saw him through. Is that right? Well, eventually. I mean, Whitman was, you know, the cliche that he was a poet who was ahead of his time is absolutely true in his case. And he was changing the rules

in front of everybody and no one knew what to make of them. I mean, so Thoreau, for example, writes these kind of extraordinary letters where he's wildly ambivalent within one letter. And he's like, you know, it seems kind of incomprehensible

and it's merely sensual, but it's really great. And you can hear him wrestling with himself. So the sense that people just didn't know what to make of it, certainly for readers of popular magazine fiction in 19th century America, this was not what they were accustomed to. And certainly, it's worth remembering that the most popular poet in mid-19th century America was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a versifier of great rigidity and of aristocratic, archaic, refined diction. So for Whitman to burst through with the language of the working man, with this demotic, vernacular language, it was very, very urban. It was inclusive. It was an immigrant language, a polyglot language. And so people just didn't know what to make of it. So eventually, so the elite didn't take him up particularly quickly either. It all took a long time. And it wasn't actually until very near the end of his life that not just American elite poets, but in particular European poets began to see the importance of what it was that Whitman had been doing all along. But at the beginning, you know, yeah, Emerson was excited by it. Thoreau was a little bit excited by it, but really nobody knew what to make of it at the beginning. In terms of sales, the Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow was also published in 1855 and it shifted 50,000 copies in its first year. Mark, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, sold about 300, something like that. What effect did it have on him? Was he pleased? Was he dejected? Have we any idea

how it affected him? One of the interesting things about Whitman is his conviction throughout his life that he would be absorbed by his country, the way in which he felt he had absorbed the country. That's self-confidence is astonishing, isn't it's wonderful. Yes, and it lasts throughout

all the different editions of leaves of grass. He thinks this is the one that is going to make me a kind of a household name, and everyone will be reading Whitman. And for him, it wasn't wanting particularly to be famous, or that was one aspect of it maybe, but it was about politics that he wanted, he was so convinced that the American Union depended upon a voice like his, that you have to put it in the context of the 1850s. America is falling apart, and the threat of civil war was so

devastating and was really one of the catalysts for his writing of leaves of grass, that he saw his writing as equivalent to that of a great political hero, you might say even an autocrat. who could somehow bring the country together that if all Americans would read Walt Whitman's leaves of grass, there would be no need for the Civil War and America would stay together. So the stakes for him were really high. Thank you. Peter, the American Civil War started 1861.

What was Whitman's response? He is absolutely attuned to the fact that the nation is about to tear itself apart in 1859, 1860. In the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, it almost has this compensating language of togetherness. So the Calamus poems emphasizing male adhesiveness, literally sticking together, bodies sticking together. One of the poems, We Two Boys Together Clinging, One, the Other, Never Leaving, North and South. I think he genuinely thinks that he can come up with a language that will save the union.

And he puts forward this book. And then when the war begins, he gives. fall silent, as known as the lost years in Whitman's studies, actually. Can you tell listeners what he did in the war? In 1862, he's sitting in his house in Brooklyn, and he's reading a newspaper

looking through the list of the wounded and the dead, and he comes across what he thinks is his brother's name. He strikes his tasks, and he goes to Washington, D.C., and he finds his brother. He's not particularly badly wounded, but

what he does see outside of one, Washington, Hospital is a pile of amputated limbs and the body, you know, the body politic, his great nation manifesting itself in this vision of absolute horror. And at that point, and I think this is where I find Whitman most convincing, actually, at that point he dedicates his, the next few years to service. He turns into the wound dresser. And, you know, this is a character that he explores in the collection of poems called drum taps that he brings out at the end of the Civil War. And by all accounts, he tended to tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, both Union and Confederate. He would move from bed to bed, talking to young men, dressing, redressing bandages,

handing out gifts, making sure that people didn't die alone. And in a sense, I think, you know, Maybe given the confidence of his earlier pronouncements about the State of the Union, the incredibly ebullient lines from 1855, I think most poets would have maybe turned their back on that naive vision, but Whitman decides to lean in and almost become the character from his earlier writing. What do you mean by the line? There are lines in 1855, like, through me, forbidden voices, through me voices of the diseased and despairing,

and he would sit by the side of wounded soldiers' beds, and he would take dictations from them and write letters home. So there are some documents that have come to light in recent years where a family has, I don't know, been going through some papers and have a letter. And right at the bottom, underneath the signature, you find by Walt Whitman a friend. He thinks of himself as the conduit of his wounded nation.

Let's talk about race. It was played a big part obviously in the Civil War. What was his attitude towards this? Yeah. Women's attitude to race is complicated and a little bit difficult, I think, for modern readers, first of all, to get their heads around, if you like, but also to reconcile with some of his great statements about democracy and inclusivity and individualism. He certainly was opposed to slavery.

He said things like slavery was a disgrace and a blot on the character of our republic and our boasted humanity. But the fact is that he was more concerned with slavery in principle than he was in practice, and that much of his work against the expansion of slavery West, which was one of the proximate causes of the Civil War, in a way that some listeners you may or may not be as familiar with as the idea of it being a fight between North and South. It was also a fight over westward expansion. And those debates were very, very real.

And for Whitman, it was really a project, was originally for Lincoln, what was known as the free soil position, which said that the new states needed to come in as free states for white working men. And he was much more concerned with the rights of white working men than he ever was with the rights of slaves or former slaves. And he was also, by the same token, he was much more concerned with the suffering of white soldiers than he ever was with the suffering of enslaved people. And would he be wrong to be blunt and say he was not against slavery. He preferred, he was rather a union survived

than slavery was abolished. Yes, that's correct. He was against abolition, at least in the beginning. His view was that abolition was tearing the country apart and that he would rather, he would rather the country stay together at the cost of abolition,

or at the cost of the maintenance of slavery, than that the union be torn apart by abolition. He saw abolition as itself a kind of hysterical frenzied position. also espoused many times. He was basically a white separatist. He espoused many times a wish that that black people and indigenous people would just sort of go away and that wherever. Like he wasn't specific, but that they should just kind of, if they could just efface themselves, that would make it easier for everybody. And he saw America as a white nation. Did anybody

take exception to these views at the time? Lots of people took exception to the views at the time. Did they therefore take exception to his poetry because of that? that I'm aware of, but I would actually defer to Peter and Mark on that. I've never seen any direct objection to it, but certainly these were common debates, and so people were very aware

of these positions. Most northerners were against the abolitionists, whom they saw is threatening the nation, so that's true. I would say that he was particularly interested in Native American culture, that he does use the name Palmanok for Long Island, and

he often says that the original names are better than the European That's a bit of tokenistic question. You don't really want Native Americans around him, did he? There's also an episode in The Sleepers, when the poem called The Sleepers, when a Native American woman comes to his mother and it's a very sort of touching vignette

and the mother loves the Native American who's visiting her. And certainly in the 1855 and 1856 versions of leaves of grass, there are very moving accounts of him looking after an escaped slave, tending to his wounds, helping him onto the underground railway. There's also a moment when he imagines himself as a slave on the run being attacked by dogs. And again, there's

extraordinary sympathy for the escaped slave. So I think it's fair to say that his views on race hardened after the Civil War, that in the early editions of Leaves of Grass, there is a much greater ability to identify with black experience and the experience of slaves. But he saw the Civil War in some ways as a kind of blood sacrifice, which would create America. And he saw Lincoln as a sort of Jesus figure whose sacrifice was necessary for the creation of an America which he then was uneasy

about the direction taken in the years, decades after the Civil War. He had such a fantastical degree of confidence in those early poems that he genuinely thought he could speak for anyone. So voices of slaves, voices of prostitutes through me, you know, he's channeling everything in his nation

and there are particular and maybe quite disturbing moments where he tries to speak as the African-American subject, and maybe those are the slightly less convincing moments. There's a problem with trying to reconcile his kind of great celebratory, poetical statements about the potential of humankind with the realities of political life during the Civil War and in 19th century America. And some of the time his solution was to see democracy as something that would happen in the future.

And so he just kind of deferred the problem in political terms to a certain extent as well. That's part of his optimism. Someday America will get there. But it also meant that he could kind of, you know, that he could, as I say, defer the problems that he found intractable and race is obviously one of the central ones. Yes, and it's interesting how poetry is the vehicle for that optimism. And prose is where he expresses his negative views of America.

There's a supposed text collected in a book called Democratic Vistas from the late 1860s, 1868 to 1871. And there are a really withering denunciation of the vulgarity. and materialism of America. It's like reading Carlisle on America. It's really ferocious denunciation of America. But into his poetry, he channeled all his ideals and optimism, and he felt that his solution,

which was one, not everyone agreed with, was what America needed was more great poets like him. That if only America had enough poetic seers, then the materialism and the vulgarity would be leavened by these prophetic celebrations of the, the spiritual and the physical and all aspects of existence, and there will be some kind of ways in which life became better for everyone. It's a very complicated vision he puts forward to own democratic vistas.

He's writing against Carlisle's racism in shooting Niagara. And, you know, all of these contradictions. So Emerson once said consistency is the hobgoblin of Little Mines. Whitman rewrites that famously as, do I contradict myself very well? Then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. He writes so many things that speak across purposes

and he presents it to you and you have to deal with it. Other people would have to deal with his attitudes. Now, what did other people of his contemporaries at the time, what did they think his basic attitude was? I mean, he couldn't say to everybody, perhaps he could. When they said, well, he didn't say that yesterday, he didn't say, I am, I contained multitudes. It's a really useful way of winning an argument.

Yes, it is, yeah, but what really happened? I think after the Civil War is when the Whitman myth really starts to take off, when it sort of becomes more widely known that he performed this service for the injured and the dying in those hospital tents. That was the redemption, was it? I think that was a form of redemption. So you've got a publication like William O'Connor's The Good Grey Poet, A Vindication, which presents him as a Christ-like figure. then John Burroughs writes the carpenter

which is a short story very thinly veil portrayal of Whitman and this is where you know this kind of bearded sage image of the poet comes to the fore I think and he there's a photograph that's taken of him with a butterfly

perched on his finger it's a fake butterfly but it looks really good Mark can I come to you switch the subject completely about what was his attitude towards same sex love That's a really interesting question, Melvin, and it's difficult for us to think ourselves into the attitudes towards same-sex love in the 19th century. We could to sound with evidence. What evidence was that?

Well, that he writes a great deal in poems, particularly one called Live Oak with Moss about a relationship. This was written in 1858, 1859, about a relationship which is clearly a relationship with a man. and these poems then become part of a cluster that he calls Callumus, which was published in 1860, and the Calamus poems celebrate what he called adhesiveness, the relationship between camp comrades and this vision of male adhesiveness, as opposed to amativeness, which is heterosexual attraction. This adhesiveness is vitally important to his notion of how America will survive in the modern world that this is a counterbalance

to capitalism and vulgarity, that the spiritual connection and physical connection between men will somehow be a resource. And there's no doubt that he wasn't particularly interested in getting married, which he didn't do. He lived, and his main affections were directed towards men like Fred Vaughn or Peter Doyle. And that they're going...

Who is a fan driver, wasn't he? Say again? Tram driver. Tram driver, yes. And though late in life, in English John Addington Simons, an Englishman called John Addington Simons wrote to him saying, Walt, can't we interpret your poems as somehow suggesting that Greek love is a valid form of love? He was horrified by this, and he claimed then to have fathered six children

with six different women, which, well, these children have never come to light. The defence is almost hysterical. No, I had six children, my six different women. So it's nothing to do with me, Gov. It's a nice idea of Whitman as a Johnny Appleseed character sort of spreading his seed around, but it is certainly not true. So why did he, can we just stay on that for a moment?

Why do you think he felt compelled to give such an overreaction to this? Well, I think it's worth remembering the word homosexual didn't come into the language until 1892, which was the year he died. So the concept of homosexuality didn't exist, and there were ways in which he was able in a way which upset absolutely no one at the time

to channel his very strong feelings about young men into poetry and into loving behaviour with these men, sleeping with them, not necessarily having genital sex with them, but sleeping with them. And that kind of affection was not at all frowned upon that the poems which caused upset were the children of Adam poems or the Enfant Adam poems, which are about heterosexual love. Those are the ones that Emerson said,

you've got to get rid of because they are offensive. And that's the reason that his books were banned and he lost his job in 1865, that was the scandal. Peter, you wanted to come in. I think he found those later categories that came in in the 1890s very aggressive and very restrictive, and I think he comes up with a language of same-sex love, which is so supple and malleable.

And it reads in such a refreshing way, I think, to revisit a moment when we're not bound by those rigid concepts. Thank you very much. Can we come back to you, Mark? At last he became famous. How famous and what affected it had a harbournima. But at the same time, I'm afraid, he had a heart stuck, didn't he? So the last 20 years of his life was very unhappy.

Physically. He had a stroke, 1873, yes. Undoubtedly, the Europeans did play a part, an addition by William Michael Rossetti, an expigated edition of 1868, was hugely popular, and it got the attention of such as Swinburne, and even Tennyson,

is on record as liking Whitman and the French liked him Jules Lafourg translated him so it's an interesting case as Edgar Allan Poe became famous because Baudelaire liked him so Whitman to some extent became, was repackaged for Americans through European intellectuals

who liked his work but he was also a tireless self-promoter in the 1870s and 1880s writing letters to newspapers and he complained all the time that he was terribly neglected which wasn't the case so he'd built up this whole myth of himself has overlooked and underappreciated by his fellow countrymen.

And in fact, he was becoming a kind of national icon. You could buy a cigar box with what Whitman's face on it, that he was used to sell products. There's a sense in which he became like a sort of P.T. Barnum figure, somebody who incarnated a certain vision of America and embodied Americanness. Camden, New Jersey, where he spends the last years of his life, it does become a center of gravity. the Oscar Wilde visits him in the early 1880s. Wilde describes him the good grey poet as the grandest man he'd ever seen, and there's a story of them sharing a kiss at the end of their meeting.

Maybe that's an apocryphal story. We don't know. But I think, yes, he was famous. Yes, he was hiring himself out and self-aggrandizing and self-mythologizing. But he was attracting to himself an extraordinary number of acolytes, disciples, what have become known as Whitmaniacs. Actually, they're still around. And, you know, they would crowd fund for him.

So after he had his second stroke, a group of followers bought him a horse and cart. They gave him some money to buy a house for himself, which he subsequently spent on a granite tomb for himself in Harley Cemetery. Sarah, what's his influence been on subsequent poets and on which subsequent poets? It's really hard to underestimate Whitman's influence

on almost every poet who came after him and not just in English by any means. I mean, he didn't invent free verse technically, but he invented free verse to all intents and purposes, and he made it possible. And what that meant was that he broke up in the verse form. So modernism broadly is made possible by Whitman's innovations. He also brought sex in the body into poetry in the ways that we've been talking about. So any modern erotic poet is in some way being influenced by Whitman. The idea that the poet is a prophet,

the idea that the poet is a radical, the idea that the poet is not on the side of tradition and conservation, but is on the side of counterculture. The most obvious inheritors of Whitman are, of course, the beat poets. Allen Ginsberg doesn't exist as we know him without Whitman before him. But D.H. Lawrence was hugely influenced by Whitman.

So was Garcia Lorca. So was Andrejid. You could list, you know, and many American poets, of course. And in particular, actually, African-American poets. And we were talking about his own complex and in some ways problematic relationship to race. But many important African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance in particular really saw in Whitman a liberation of their own voice and new possibilities in the way that they were. that he brought in the vernacular. Because until then, the only kind of formal or printed option

had been African-American dialect, which for many writers, writers, I'm thinking particularly of Langston Hughes, found not only restrictive, but patronizing condescending. It limited your own use of the language and suggested that your language was somehow inadequate, that you could only speak in quote-unquote substandard English. But with Whitman's use of vernacular, there's this possibility of your own conversational voice, making it into poetry. And so Langston Hughes enters into direct dialogue with Whitman. So he has a very famous poem called I Too, which begins, I too sing America. I am the darker brother, which is a direct response to the opening of leaves of grass. Well, thank you. Thanks to Sarah Churchill, Peter Riley, and Mark Ford,

and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and how they've transformed our understanding of Judaism during the lifetime of Jesus Christ. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Okay, so what didn't we say you'd like to have said? I mean, maybe the question of capitalism in a sense that he prizes above virtually all things a sense of free exchange. and freedom of movement, freedom of dialogue. And he sees slavery as a threat to that ideal, that promise.

And the way that the language of capitalism structures his lines in so many, you know, he speaks this language. So, you know, yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess. You can even hear it at the beginning of song of myself. What I shall assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, continually a poetics of exchange. That's, you know, if you were going to try and put your finger on what form he's writing in,

it's almost a formalisation of a mercantile capitalism. I always think those lines are ones that a travelling salesman should recite on the doorstep before we ring the bell. I celebrate myself, what I assume you shall assume you shall buy these encyclopedias from them. And it's very interesting how that connects to the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance. Because both Emerson and Whitman developed these kind of concept, of the subjectivity of individuality, which are exhilarating and uplifting and suggest that the untapped potential

that we have in ourselves as being limited by aristocratic conventions or European prejudices. So we've got to unleash our inner imaginations and beings. But at the same time, that can be plotted on, or was used in Nemeson's case, very specifically, as a justification for the most ruthless rob-a-baron capitalism

that develops in the 1880s and 1890s. So in the case of both Emerson and Whitman, what seems like or can seem like a wholly sort of rather holistic, idealistic vision of mankind as liberating itself in relation to some kind of wellness campaign. And he was very much into wellness. He liked outdoor bathing and things like that. And he believed in, well, he was connected with all sorts of rather cranky, culty movements.

So published a fitness guide in 1857, manly health and training that's just come to light. But at the same time, there were ways it could very easily be incorporated into the most ruthless forms of kind of capitalist exploitation. So that kind of,

that ambivalence in the inheritance is quite an interesting one to trace. Well, I feel like one of things I'd like to bring in is just more of Whitman's language and I didn't bring in enough for myself, so I'm very much to blame here. But there is a bit from Democratic vistas that's very apropos that if we're up for a quotation, I think, would be.

And it gives a sense of, for those who know the optimism and the cheer of the poetry, the kind of scathing anger that he could also bring to some of the political writing. So this is from Democratic Vistas in 1871. He says, I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician, diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present. and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.

The underlying principles of the states are not honestly believed in. For all this hectic glow and these melodramatic screamings, nor is humanity itself believed in. The spectacle is appalling. How do you that swear with his earlier optimism then? Well, I think it does.

So his optimism, first of all, was always forward-facing, as I said. So there was always this sense of utopian potential, but he was also very aware that it wasn't being realized. He wasn't naive. And so he was looking around him and seeing the gap between what he thought the United States could be and the reality of American life in 1871. I also think that it's important to remember that right at that moment, the despair that a great many Americans felt at the end of the Civil War, this feeling that you've just gone through all of this horror and the hope had been that it would lead to some

reconciliation and to something that it would be worth it in some way and to some rebuilding instead of which the nation just fell into this kind of frenzy of vulgar buying and spending and building. And that's really, I think, for a lot of writers, the beginning of the end of that kind of first stage of hope in what we now call the American dream, this feeling that it was all just about making a buck and getting rich. So it's a disillusionment rather than that. It's a disillusionment rather than a, not really, it is a loss of faith, but it's a disillusionment, but there's still some hope that maybe America can return itself.

So it's also the anger of the satirist and the teacher who says, you know, get yourself back on track. I like the idea that he reserves his disillusion for the prose, but the poetry remains hopeful, doesn't it? I mean, when I read Song of Myself, just the lack of cynicism, the lack of qualifying language is just so startling. So a word like, because, a word that would want to explain a particular concept with, I don't know, a secondary or, you know, tertiary clause,

there's only one use of the word because in the entire poem, and it's do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else. You know, Randall Jarrell called or described Whitman as celebrating the thereness and suchness of the world, meeting the world for how you find it and engaging on that basis without any presuppositions, without any prejudices. And there's a lot of hope in that. Yeah, maybe I could give a bit of Whitman in full bodily self-projection. Oh, span of youth, ever pushed elasticity. Oh, manhood, balanced, florid and full. My lovers suffocate me, crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,

jostling me through streets and public halls coming naked to me at night crying by day, a hooy from the rocks of the river swinging and chirping over my head calling my name from flower beds vines tangled underbrush lighting on every moment of my life

busing my body with soft balsamic buses noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine one more what do you think happen because you had a sort of rocket-assisted take-off at a certain stage. What happened for that amazing change in his writing?

Well, we don't know. I mean, it is one of the great mysteries of literary history, how Wallace Stevens got good and how Walt Whitman got good. They are just, it's impossible to work out. He can work out what he'd been reading, what he'd been doing, but that he got so great is a miracle. I agree with that. It's baffling. How did Fitzgerald get from the vegetable to the Great Gatsby?

We'd be DA, yeah, or hadn't you? Princeton, I mean, you know, he'd had... I mean, what women was self-autodied at completely? Would everyone like a cup of tea? BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. I hear sobbing, and I absolutely knew that nobody else was in the house. Uncanny is back. The on-duty flight lieutenant came in white as a sheet, and he said it's back.

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