Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

The Old School Classics group read for May 2024 is Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition by Walt Whitman. This is a spoiler thread.

I'm in for this one.

I have read the 11 shorter pieces in that first edition now. So now ready for Song of Myself. Whitman would have been quite a person to know- I think he was half genius and half crazy. Those folks sometimes do amazing things.

I have been refraining from posting, trying to figure out where to begin... I decided the best thing to do was to drop a series of posts which may explain why we find Whitman important and why the 1855 text of Leaves of Grass is important.

When many of us first read Whitman, we often respond with a shrug of the shoulders and a "What's so special?" comment. I think the best answer to that is a comparison of lines with a respected poet's work from the same year.

Here is the opening sentence from the introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha:

Should you ask me, whence these stories?

Whence these legends and traditions,

With the odors of the forest

With the dew and damp of meadows,

With the curling smoke of wigwams,

With the rushing of great rivers,

With their frequent repetitions,

And their wild reverberations

As of thunder in the mountains?

And here is the opening sentence from Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

AMERICA does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . . accepts the lesson with calmness . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms . . . perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house . . . perceives that it waits a little while in the door . . . that it was fittest for its days . . . that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for his days.

Let's move on to the first sentence of the actual poems, first from Longfellow:

On the Mountains of the Prairie,

On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,

Gitche Manito, the mighty,

He the Master of Life, descending,

On the red crags of the quarry

Stood erect, and called the nations,

Called the tribes of men together.

And then from Whitman:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I think the difference is apparent. Whitman is offering something new in a variety of ways. I don't show this to negate or mock Longfellow. His work is a classic also, but Whitman is a classic bringing something new to the table and I think it is hard to see how new it was in 1855 without comparison.

Note, I first quoted from the preface or introduction to Leaves of Grass. I suggest you read this piece of prose to get a fuller understanding of Leaves of Grass as it was first introduced. Whitman later edited this into more poems but many think the preface is the equal to Wordsworth's from Lyrical Ballads.

Your comparison is so illuminating, Sam! Gave me chills, actually. It's like looking through a new lens. Really shows why Whitman is so impactful, to me anyway.

Does anyone know where I might find the contents of this edition? I have a later edition, and would like to revisit the ones that are in both editions, if possible.

https://whitmanarchive.org/item/ppp.0...

The above has text and facsimile photos of the first edition. I will be adding more notes soon.

Sam wrote: "https://whitmanarchive.org/item/ppp.0..."

So helpful. Thank you, Sam.

Sometimes reading Whitmans work I ask, "he wrote this when?" The 1800s- incredible. He was way "outside of the box" for his time.

In an earlier post I had mentioned that one reason Leaves of Grass is so important is originality. This originality did not come from a vacuum. Most critics I have read link the originality Whitman showed to the demand from the authors and critics of the period for a new American voice, one that would speak to specific American themes in a native tongue. One of those calling for a new American voice was Ralph Waldo Emerson and thankfully his words are available for us to read in the essay, "The Poet." It is included in the 2nd Series of esaays from Gutenberg and worth reading in full because Leaves of Grass seems almost a direct answer to Emerson's call for a new poet.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...

Just as an example of how close Leaves of Grass is to the above, read this paragraph from the essay by Emerson:

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

Sam wrote: "Note, I first quoted from the preface or introduction to Leaves of Grass. I suggest you read this piece of prose to get a fuller understanding of Leaves of Grass as it was first introduced. Whitman later edited this into more poems but many think the preface is the equal to Wordsworth's from Lyrical Ballads..."

This is interesting Sam! I don't think I've ever read Whitman's introduction. I'll have to find my copy. Wordsworth's Preface is indeed a great work on its own.

I am halfway through this audio book, and I am underwhelmed to say the least. The first two poems are clocking in at an hour apiece. They are so long, and so rambling that I can't figure out his point. Can someone help me understand why this is considered a "classic"?

Karen wrote: "I am halfway through this audio book, and I am underwhelmed to say the least. The first two poems are clocking in at an hour apiece. They are so long, and so rambling that I can't figure out his po..."

I am trying to organize my thoughts to best answer you and twice now Goodreads has consigned those thoughts to the trash bin as I was writng and before I could post or save them. For now, instead of answering, I am going to suggest you isolate a small section of the poem you may have liked and reread it, trying to identify themes which you can connect to the whole. Poetry is no longer practiced as it once was but it is a form that genereates appreciation from familiarity and repetition. So like a young child who keeps replaying Frozen over and over till the parents are about to scream, you might pick some part of Leaves of Grass and try the same technique. I am quoting an example below:

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . . . they are so placid and self-
contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied . . . . not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them;
They bring me tokens of myself . . . . they evince them plainly in their possession.
I do not know where they got those tokens,
I must have passed that way untold times ago and negligently dropt them,
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,

Infinite and omnigenous and the like of these among them;
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that shall be my amie,
Choosing to go with him on brotherly terms.
A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead and wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes well apart and full of sparkling wickedness . . . . ears finely cut and flexibly
moving.
His nostrils dilate . . . . my heels embrace him . . . . his well built limbs tremble with
pleasure . . . . we speed around and return.
I but use you a moment and then I resign you stallion . . . . and do not need your
paces, and outgallop them,
And myself as I stand or sit pass faster than you.

As you read the above can you develop an appreciation? Can you see the imagery? Can you relate the content to larger ideas and possible meanings? Can you hear the changes in rhythm as you recite the lines?
Whitman conceived through collage. Can you see where he is cutting and pasting thoughts for both sound and sense?
I will try and answer your question better tomorrow but thought this might help you enjoy the work now. There is a lot to Leaves of Grass and rather than try to assimilate the whole, it is sometimes better to relate by parts as one might approach parts of the bible, perhaps considering a single verse and its meaning instead of expecting to read and understand the whole in one try. I do not mean to imply Leaves of Grass is as substantial but Whitman was definitely using it as one model for form.

I think Sam's advice is very wise. And I have to say to me, audio doesn't seem the best way to experience a long poem for the first time. Seems like it would just float on and on and give you nothing to anchor yourself with.

Here's a few lines from the Whitman website waltwhitman.com that may help us understand why he was important and influential and therefore classic:
The influence of Walt Whitman on modern poetry cannot be overstated. He broke with traditional forms of poetry and created a new style of poetry that was more in tune with the rhythms of ordinary speech. This new style of poetry was a departure from the formal and rigid forms of poetry that were popular at the time, and it represented a major shift in the way poetry was written and understood.

Sam illustrated this different approach in the comparison he shared in message 4 above.

Thank you so much! Actually, the section about the stallion was one of the parts that I did enjoy. I loved the imagery. I thought that since it was poetry, the audio book would help, but it makes it harder to isolate sections, and I end up with an hour of passages that appear to be rambling and disconnected. I am struggling to understand how this fits into a cohesive whole. In my research to understand his poems, other people have likened his style to a "stream of conscious" similar to "Mrs. Dalloway" which I also struggled with. However, I will continue to try.

I should also say that I have always struggled with poetry. It has been my least favorite form or genre. Since this was a Book Club pick, I wanted to try it to read it again. Up until 15 years ago, I always told myself that I didn't like nonfiction. However, I joined a Book Club that read a lot of it, and found an author that I really liked. Now I read at least 15 nonfiction books a year. I am hoping to do the same with poetry - keep reading until I find that "key" to unlock poetry for me.