Frank Hecker

This is my fourth and final “Sunday night poetry” post about Walt Whitman. In the post-war period Whitman, always an aggressive self-promoter, spent a lot of time revising and rearranging Leaves of Grass and putting out multiple editions of it, in an effort to make it more popular. He also added several more poems to the book, most of which are relatively minor and not considered among his best.

Here are the first two stanzas of “Passage to India,” the last major poem Whitman wrote. It celebrates the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 (hence the poem’s title), the completion of the US transcontinental railroad in September 1869, and the earlier completion of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in July 1866:

This Sunday night I once more feature Walt Whitman, as Whitman evolved from “one of the roughs” of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass to the “good gray poet” he eventually became.

A major influence on that evolution was Whitman’s experience in the US Civil War as a hospital volunteer attending to wounded soldiers (a duty which included writing letters to families for those unable to do so themselves). In 1865 he published a book Drum-Taps of poems he wrote based on that experience and his general impressions of the war from its beginning to end, along with a selection of other poems. (These include “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” quoted in the TV series Breaking Bad.) Whitman then added Sequel to Drum-Taps with more poems, in a subsequent combined edition.

Here are the first three stanzas of the most famous poem from Sequel to Drum-Taps, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, inspired by the funeral train that took Lincoln’s body from Washington, DC, through several states to its final resting place in Springfield, Illinois:

This Sunday night I again feature Walt Whitman, this time the Whitman who eventually became a queer icon, based both on his poems about the “love of comrades” (including the “Calamus” sequence) and on his relationships with several younger working-class men, including Peter Doyle, pictured left above.

But to talk of “queerness” in this context is both anachronistic and reductive: Anachronistic because gender and orientation being in large part socially constructed means that we can’t simply apply 21st terms and concepts to 19th century lives. Peter Doyle’s sister may have called her brother a “homosexual,” but in private correspondence Whitman himself denied that his relations with men were of a character that others might see as improper.

And reductive because the “Calamus” poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass are about more than the love of one man for another: in the last years before the US Civil War, Whitman had a wild vision of the ills of America healed, and the nation brought together, by bonds of manly affections and “adhesiveness” between “comrades.”

Here’s the first poem in the “Calamus” sequence:

This Sunday night, a classic American story, perhaps the American story: Thirty-something Walter Whitman, a 19th-century Brooklyn hipster and itinerant journalist, reads an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson calling for a poet worthy of America: “the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.” He takes up the challenge, and turns himself into “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” self-publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855.

And what better poem of Whitman’s to feature than the first poem in that book, at that time untitled, but later to be named “Song of Myself”? It is endlessly quotable, but except for the beginning and the end I’ve avoided the most well-known passages in favor of others, focusing on those that display the poet’s self-identification with the varied people of America: