Leaves of Grass (imaginary edited edition)

All of which creates a real headache for those who want to discuss the first poem in the first volume of Leaves of Grass. Technically that original poem is not entitled “Song of Myself.” Pity the poor person wanting to discuss this poem.

Let’s just embrace our inner Whitman. “What I assume you shall assume.” Let’s call the poem “Leaves of Grass.”

“Leaves of Grass” is a sprawling mess of a poem. If you think that is a harsh statement, you have never read the poem. It is deliberately and cheerfully a sprawling mess. I doubt a single person has ever read through the poem, all 60 pages of it in the Library of America volume, and maintained focus throughout. It’s that type of poem. Endless freely flowing lines with no discernable pattern, flittering all over the place.

Whitman is responsible for a ton of horrible contemporary poetry. Whitman has a lot of good lines, so he is better than the contemporary formless dreck. But he definitely made the idea of writing a formless poem seem possible to people who have no ear for a beautiful line.

Thoreau published Walden in 1854. A fun parlor game would be to pick random bits from Thoreau and random lines in Whitman and see if it is obvious which is which. (OK, it would not really be a fun parlor game.) As far as content and catchy images, they are the same. Thoreau uses complete sentences though. So, one way to think about “Leaves of Grass” is “Walden written with poor grammar.”

Take an example from fairly late in the poem:

I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

The bit above has some rather nice lines, memorable and evocative. Tramping a perpetual journey, the signs (and the theological implication of the idea of signs), no settled abode, the knoll, the left hand hooked around a waist and the right hand pointing onward (you can imagine the painting). Then the final charge in the two line stanza. There is something really beautiful here.

As a standalone poem, those 10 lines would be rather good. But, this isn’t a standalone poem. Those lines come after over 55 pages of other unrelated things. That is bad enough. The real crime, however, is the next five lines. Whitman doesn’t leave this image after those ten lines. The poem continues:

It is not far . . . . it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

Ugh. Those five lines completely destroy the beauty of the previous ten lines. Suddenly, immediately after being told you must travel alone, Whitman and you are traveling together with shouldered duds, seeking something which is everywhere, in fact maybe you are on it right now. Instead of the marvel of that hooked left hand and the right hand pointing out to the horizon, we get…what exactly? Just some general mush.

The whole of “Leaves of Grass” is like that. Nice images surrounded by lumpy porridge. It is hard to even notice the good bits because you must be lucky to have your mind alert at the moment when they show up.

All of this leads to a couple of thought experiments which would be fantastic real experiments for anyone who wanted to spend a lot of time conducting them.

1. Imagine taking “Leaves of Grass” and chopping it down to 10 percent of its current length. You can pick which parts to keep. The result is a six page poem, presented not as an excerpt from “Leaves of Grass” but as an original poem. There are then two questions to ask about that new shorter poem:

a) Is it good? Is it better than the full version? Does it convey the same impression but in a fashion that makes you more likely to want to reread it? Would a poem that is 20% of the original be better or worse than the poem that is 10% of the original?

b) If you got a bunch of people to do this experiment at the same time, how similar are the shorter poems? Which parts are in all of them? (The opening stanza for sure. The barbaric yawp for sure.) What percentage of the lines of this poem are in the essential 10% for everyone who does this experiment?

2. Imagine scouring all the places where people mark their favorite passages. Then add in all the evaluative reviews of the poem. What percentage of “Leaves of Grass” has ever been chosen to be highlighted? Or putting it the other way, how much of “Leaves of Grass” has never been pulled out as something admirable?

Is “Leaves of Grass” a Great Poem? I think the answer has to be “Yes” because parts of it are Great Poetry. But, the fact that this is actually a debatable question again points to the massive problem with this poem. I have read it several times in my life. I am not eager to read it again. But, I know, once the memory of the tortuous slog has faded, I will once again think, “It can’t be all that bad, can it?”

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