If optimism is the American creed, Walt Whitman stands as its most exuberant exponent. He was steadfast in his embrace of America. In “Song of Myself,” published in Whitman's first volume of Leaves of Grass, in 1855 (and appearing in all subsequent editions), he presents himself as the flesh-and-blood representative of a sprawling and rising nation:
Of every hue and cast am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker . . .
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
The essential Whitman qualities can be appreciated anew with the publication of Walt Whitman Speaks, a slim volume presenting, as its subtitle tells us, “His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America.” Throughout his life, Whitman had many such thoughts—in his last years alone, enough to fill nine volumes, transcribed by his young friend and amanuensis, the writer and social reformer Horace Traubel. In 1888, Traubel began nearly daily visits to Whitman at his Mickle Street row house in Camden, New Jersey, writing down, in shorthand, almost every utterance. The mostly one-way conversations halted only with Whitman's death, at 72, in 1892. Walt Whitman Speaks is a “best of” from his bulky and repetitious material, ruthlessly pared and elegantly sorted by the editor, Brenda Wineapple, an historian and biographer, into categories like “Nature,” “Egotism,” “Sex,” “Friendship,” and “Democracy.” Whitman, I think, would be pleased.
It's tempting to think of Whitman merely as a reflection of his times—an age of boundless confidence, as a young nation sprouted into a global titan. But that would be a double mistake. First, America did not enjoy an untroubled passage through these years—the Civil War, for one thing, intervened midway in Whitman's life—and second, Whitman's literary contemporaries did not all share his buoyant and expansive temperament. Consider Herman Melville. Both were natives of New York, born a few months apart in 1819 (Whitman in West Hills, Long Island, Melville in southern Manhattan). Like many Yankees, they opposed slavery and its spread. But their contrasting dispositions came to the fore when fighting began between the North and the South. In his poem “The Swamp Angel,” Melville offers an ode to the Union gun—the angel—that rained death and destruction on Charleston, South Carolina, in the siege of the city that Northerners blamed, rightly, for giving birth to the Southern rebellion. The poem seems to suggest Charleston's deserved comeuppance, in a tone of cold anger: “Is this the proud City? the scorner/Which never would yield the ground?”
That was not a tone found in Whitman, a war volunteer who nursed the wounded. “Some of my best friends in the hospitals were probably Southern boys,” he tells Traubel, decades later. “I remember one in particular, right off—a Kentucky youngster . . . I found myself loving him like a son: he used to kiss me good night—kiss me . . . Oh! I could tell you a hundred such tales.” This recollection is mirrored in Whitman's poem, “Reconciliation,” written at war's end:
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin."
The Union victory strengthened Whitman's bright spirits. As the Gilded Age dawned, his contrast with contemporaries remained striking. For Mark Twain, younger than Whitman by 16 years, the endemic corruption that defined this chapter of American life was a wellspring for sardonic sayings along the lines of, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Ambrose Bierce, born 23 years after Whitman, began work on The Devil's Dictionary, where he defined a cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” Brooks Adams, great-grandson of John Adams and 29 years Whitman's junior, plunged into despair. He wrote a mawkish treatise that he considered calling “The Path to Hell,” but ultimately titled The Law of Civilization and Decay.
