William Roebuck
SCALING MOUNT WHITMAN: LEAVES OF GRASS AND AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT ‘AWOKENING’
Cards on the table. I’m not a Whitman scholar. Put me down, I guess, as a plain old reader who likes literature. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself constructing in my head a short list of books that loom in the readerly distance, their commanding heights something of a beckoning taunt. Some need to scale Mount Everest or float down the Mississippi. My “Kilimanjaro before I die” obsessions have more often than I’d care to admit focused on books. Perhaps a function of my small-town upbringing in the South long decades ago, reading provided an escape from a culturally and racially stultified setting and a spur to shove off for eventually fairer, freer shores. Reading also allowed me in those days to enact my little dramas of cultural self-improvement and dream of one day writing like Nabokov or Baldwin. In tribute to – or as a residue from – those early days of aspiration and alienation, I have since found myself composing a revisable list of great works of literature that need to be tackled. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time still summon with the disdainful nonchalance of the master work, confident they represent a forbidding climb, even with the oxygen of an annotated edition, or a critical essay or two acting as sherpas for the expedition.
Still driven, decades and careers later, by those teen South reading obsessions of my youth, I recently took on a master work of literature, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I believe the specific inspiration to read Leaves of Grass sprang from the literary backwash churned up with the 200th anniversary of his birth a few years back. Like most American high schoolers, I had read small selections of “Song of Myself” and a few recognized diadems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But this was different. I meant to – and indeed scaled – all 293 poems.
There is a special experience that becomes available upon tackling a great writer’s long master work. There is the sense of not merely dawdling among well-known bits and pieces but experiencing the fresh, raw encounters as one shoves off and discovers, for example, barely out of the reader’s harbor, a gem like “Starting from Paumanok:” Reading it felt like a trip across the country, a walk in the factory, a descent into the mine, a drink from a cold mountain stream, a chanting of all states, States, and sexualities. As Whitman put it in the poem: “O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild! . . . haste on with me.” I was off, on my long, rollicking voyage with Leaves of Grass.
Whitman’s Intense Empathy and Radical Inclusiveness
As I eased into Leaves of Grass, I noted Whitman’s radical inclusiveness: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,” he observes in one of his famous “Inscriptions” poems that kick off his great work. In his relatively early work “Salut au Monde,” he opens with an emphasis on geographic diversity that widens out to include cultural and religious diversity:
I hear the Coptic refrain toward sundown. . .
I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque, I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches. . .
I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms. . .” (Section 3)
Whitman includes in his celebration of inclusiveness his own radical identification with the diverse, including “convicts and prostitutes” and other examples that in his day stood for the outcast or marginalized. “I feel I am of them,” the poet notes in “You Felons on Trial in Courts.” At one point in “Song of Myself” he declares he is the “witch burnt with dry wood” and “the hounded slave. . .” (Section 33).
Reading the entire work also provided glimpses of the sources – for Whitman – of this radical inclusiveness, among them, compassion and intense empathy, a robust embrace of his own boundary-crossing, expansive sense of identity, and a need to break free of stale convention, which he describes variously as “limits and imaginary / lines” (“Song of the Open Road,” Section 5) and “a puny and pious life”, in “A Song of Joys.” He calls instead for a spirit of adventure, openness, and exploration, and for “all deeds, promiscuously done / at all times” (“Our Old Feuillage”). Whitman’s inclusiveness is illustrated, formally, by his repeated cataloguing of objects, vocations, places, religions, and dozens more taxonomies.
Embracing Polarization and Divisions of His Day
Whitman also makes clear that, poetically, at least, he accepts all that life throws his way:
I have the idea of all, and am all, and believe in all. . .
I assert that all past days were what they must have been. . .
And that to-day is what it must be. . . (“With Antecedents,” Section 2)
With Whitman, there is no attempt to deny or cancel the presence of evil, traces of bad action or words, or divisions among people. Earlier in the poem, he observes that “. . . we stand amid / evil and good, / All swings around us. . . “ and makes clear his effort, not to deny or try to efface but to absorb and reflect, the disputes and rancor of the “vehement days” he lived through, prior to, during and after the Civil War. In “To Him That Was Crucified” the poet elaborates on this need to confront and embrace the controversies and divisions of the polarized times one lives in:
We walk silent among the disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers nor anything that is asserted,
We hear the bawling and din, we are reach’d at by divisions, jealousies, recriminations on every side. . .
Yet we walk unheld, free. . .
I was reminded of our own vehement times and found reassuring Whitman’s confident embrace of a brawling, roiling marketplace of ideas, where the good ones get traction and long-term purchase and the crummy, threadbare conspiracy theories and hate mongering falter and are swept into the early morning sewers before another day in the market.
Full Credit for Scaling Mount Whitman
As I started my own catalogue charting my responses to reading Whitman and began as well to sense Whitman’s themes of inclusiveness and diversity, it was not all sunshine and reading progress. In my notes – and memories – of my months-long reading journey with Whitman, there were some dead spots. In more than one instance, I lost patience with his poetry – for example, its occasional dollops of half-digested, Emersonian-infused hocus pocus. I also sensed as I read his great work, as others have, a certain unevenness in his voluminous output. The latter third of LG seemed to sag a bit and the autumnal work of the two annexes that round it out did not seem as vital or fresh as the earlier master works and great supporting pieces.
Near the end of LG I found myself making tough decisions about whether I would include the secondary peaks of Poems Excluded from Leaves of Grass and Uncollected Poems, along with other excursions the editor offered. I said yes to the two annexes “Sands at Seventy” and “Goodbye My Fancy” as well as the retrospective essay “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, the sections that round out the final 1891-92 edition, recognizing that full credit for scaling Mount Whitman required getting to the top of that “death-bed edition.” I left the secondary peaks of excluded works and fragments to the Whitman scholars. I did go back and read Whitman’s 1855 Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and then called it, well, a climb. I planted my flag of notes and musings and began the descent to the base camp of early 21st century suburbia, family, and media caterwauling.
There were times, as I imagine there usually are for others in tackling a long, master work of literature, when I felt I was reading somewhat rotely, perhaps overly focused on trying to hit some imaginary quota of pages to keep up the forward momentum in the great read. Sometimes when the sheer volume of the enterprise was overwhelming, I wondered if I would be better off just selecting (or relying on critical consensus to select) a limited number of Whitman’s best poems in LG, to helicopter to the crest of the Whitman experience rather than hiking through the entire volume.
Maybe. But I’m doing something different, I told myself. This was a marathon and it had its own pleasures. I had the pleasure of a cross- country journey that enabled the discovery of little nuggets of Whitman verse – samplings that almost certainly would not have been included in any curated selections I might have read. In addition, reading a master work, in its entirety, allows you to get a good sense – the best sense you the reader are able to get – of a great artist like Whitman developing, sensing his poetic mission, his gathering power, and, for Whitman at least, registering the neglect by readers and critics of his day that so weighed on him.
Cataloguing – and Carefully Weighing – Whitman’s Notions of Equality
As I continued my journey with Whitman, I developed an urge, matching his, to catalogue some of the related themes I found coalescing around his notions of inclusiveness and identity. I found Whitman regularly celebrating a radical equality, whether male-female or black- white, standing in for broader notions of equality. As the poet put it, regarding gender equality: “And I will show you of male and female that either is but the equal of the other.” (“Starting From Paumanok,” Section 12). He also took issue with any notion of zero summing efforts regarding equality: “. . . as if it harm’d me, giving others the same / chances and rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own rights. . .” (“Thought” Of Equality).
Whitman’s embrace of equality between blacks and whites informs and is informed by his longstanding abolitionist opposition to slavery. The two notions edge together in “Salut Au Monde” where he celebrates “[You] black, divine-soul’d African, large, fine-headed, nobly form’d, superbly destin’d, on equal terms with me!” (Section 11). He makes clear in “Song of the Broad-Axe” that a great civilization is not where the tall buildings stand but “where the slave ceases, and the master of the slave ceases . . . There the great city stands.” (Section 5). His most powerful, recurring symbol in the work, leaves of grass, he sees as
. . . a universal hieroglyphic
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones
Growing among black folks as among white. . .
I give them the same,
I receive them the same. (“Song of Myself,” Section 6)
Whitman also illuminates – and feels – the deforming role that a powerful nation like the United States, or a powerful race or section of the country at a pivotal moment, can have in entrenching injustice and on efforts for equality between people:
I see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the opprest of the whole earth,
I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes all mine. . . “ (“The Mystic Trumpeter,” Section 7).
This view serves as a useful corrective to some of the poet’s over-the- top poetic celebrations of America that, in places in the early work, occasionally slide into a type of jingoistic embrace of America. It is also important to note Whitman the man was no plaster saint. A tiny sampling I made of articles related to Whitman’s racial attitudes turned up some examples of casual racism, in his broader writings and statements, showing, as with Lincoln and great abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, racial attitudes of the day had their impact. One recent critic, Lavelle Porter, noting some of the problematic references, even posed the question, “Should Whitman Be #Cancelled?” Scholar Ed Folsom noted, in the same article, “the temptation to talk back to Walt Whitman has always been great. . .” while placing the emphasis, like Porter, on continued engagement with the writer.
Giving Voice to Diversity and Difference
At moments in Leaves of Grass, the poet cites and gently celebrates John Brown, the great but violent abolitionist eventually executed for the raid he led on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry: “I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted / the scaffold in Virginia. (“Year of Meteors”). Also merging with Whitman’s celebration of equality and proud advocacy of the abolitionist cause is his embrace in “Song of Myself ” of the voiceless and dispossessed:
Through me many long, dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing. . . (Section 24)
Whitman not only celebrated diversity, but the importance of rejecting unexamined tradition, as well as old “creeds” and “others’ formulas” (“Song of the Redwood Tree”). The poet emphasizes his comfort with “paths untrodden, / In the growth by the margins. . . [Away] From all the standards hitherto publish’d. . .” (“In Paths Untrodden”).
In poems like “In Paths Untrodden” (and throughout the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass in which it appears, and elsewhere), Whitman makes clear that his celebration of diversity and difference, and his embrace of transgressive identity revolve to a significant degree around his resolution “to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment”. His is a poetry, a fervent, alternately open, and coded, embrace of homosexuality, of gay and queer yearnings and experiences:
I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
To tell the secrets of my nights and days,
To celebrate the needs of comrades.
In “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” the poet sees “men in other lands yearning / and thoughtful. . . O I know we should be brethren and lovers. ” The speaker in one poem emphasizes that regardless of whatever successes life brought, whether personal or artistic, they did not bring happiness. But “when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his / way coming, O then I was happy.” (“When I Heard at the Close of Day”).
While Whitman on occasion made statements to friends or correspondents denying his homosexuality and any male-homoerotic sentiment in his poetry (his exchange with the poet John Addington Symonds providing one well-known example), the impulse in his poetry is clear, coding and all, and it fits within his broader championing of diversity, equality, and identity, his celebration of “the flesh and the appetites,” and his commingling of the flesh, desire, and identity: “Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity . . . “ He points to his mission to liberate transgressive identity: “Through me forbidden voices,/ Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil. . . .“ (“Song of Myself,” Sections 28, 24).
Awake Among the Sleepwalkers
In this great summons to diversity and difference that is Leaves of Grass, Whitman sees himself as ‘woke,’ perhaps the first great woke writer in America, and summons the reader to identify, as I read him in this early 21st century timeframe, as the opposite of those who sleepwalk their way through life and “go toward false realities” and “pass unwittingly the true realities of life . . . “ In the same poem, trotting out a French term for sleepwalkers, the poet makes clear, by implication, his ‘wokeness’ in describing the unwoke: “And often to me they are sad, hasty unwaked sonnambules / walking in the dusk. . .” (“Thought” of persons arrived at high positions). In “The Sleepers,” a more difficult, complex poem, the poet picks up a version of this sleeping/’woke’ opposition and contrasts his aware, visionary, active state – a consciousness awake to empathy, political concern, and openness to sexual/male-homoerotic experience – to those sleeping, without such awareness or experience:
I wander all night in my vision. . .
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers. . .
I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst suffering. . . The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.
America’s Turbulent Democracy
It is interesting to note that for Whitman, being woke to realities in his day broadened out and embraced an appreciation and a concern for democracy. Whitman in LG sees America as experimental and improvisational, but also representing the culminating ideal of governance, with its rule by common citizens in a land not haunted by “the ghosts of uncrown’d ladies [and] rejected kings.” (“Song of the Broad-Axe”). At the same time Whitman acknowledges that American democracy “will always be agitated and turbulent,” with Americans hostage to “the terrible significance of their elections.” (“Prefatory Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson”; “Preface 1855—Leaves of Grass, First Edition”).
The Great ‘Awokening’: Responsibilities for the Reader
The Whitman summons to wokeness includes responsibilities for the reader: the poet sees his poetry as an invitation to dialogue and a call to action: “The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine,” he observes in his wonderful valedictory essay, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.” He urges readers, later in the same piece ,“to pursue your own flight” and “be lifted into a different light and atmosphere.”
I acknowledge two related truths in embracing the term ‘woke’ to evoke a coherent Whitman vision in his poetry: first, a truism, that of course Whitman’s mid- and late 19th century America is very different from our own and whatever he invoked, prophesied, celebrated, or transgressed were mere seeds, or, put another way, anticipatory soundings, of what these attitudes have come to signify today. But what powerful, shaping messages they were, even with the blemishes some critics have noted. And second, that ‘woke’ is an immensely fertile notion, with a long, proud lineage in the Black community. References to it date back as far as 1938, when blues singer Huddie William Ledbetter (performing as Lead Belly) in a spoken afterword to his song about the Scottsboro Boys, urged Blacks to “stay woke” to the dangers they faced in a racist, Jim Crow America. Fast forward, since the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and subsequent similar incidents, the term has also come to signal the need for vigilance about police brutality and racial discrimination and profiling. On a parallel track, notions of woke in the 1980s (and earlier in some instances) broke out of the black community and began service in the broader culture, while also prompting, more recently, an eventual conservative backlash. That a powerful, reactionary political faction in our time would seek to subvert and weaponize this useful, storied construct – in order to call into question explorations and celebrations of diversity, equality, inclusion, and transgressive identity – would not have surprised Whitman.
As I concluded my extended journey with Whitman, including a sustained return-to-base camp review of my sprawling notes, a sense of what I had taken from the poet – what I wanted to take – awoke within me. I wondered if I had the right to ignore 17-plus decades of criticism – articles and books numbering in the tens of thousands, and still proliferating – and most of the available biographical information, beyond the distilled, informed sampling the editor offered me. And invoking my rights as a reader, I answered in the affirmative.
I also wondered sometimes if I was guilty of readerly cherry picking: Do I have the right to do my own cataloguing of lines and themes, to emphasize what was important to me, as a reader? My aspiration in putting together my little taxonomy is to have remained faithful to Whitman’s admonition to the reader: “I charge you forever reject those who would expound me” and his related call to his reader “I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.” (“Myself and Mine”). But in the end, Whitman wanted readers, plain old readers, in some respects like him, the highly motivated autodidact whose formal schooling amounted to little more than six years in his youth (even as he read voraciously and educated himself the rest of his life). As he put it in the same poem, he wanted readers who would read and engage with the poetry and take him at his word, not, through “the accounts of my friends.” He understood that Leaves of Grass would be challenging for readers to understand and embrace.
Given his focus on active readers, I like to think Whitman would accept my humble taxonomy, the testimony of one reader, awake to the possibilities of interpretation – my interpretation and appreciation of his poetry – as I sought to take its measure. And I believe he might have nodded in assent to my modest catalogue of wokeness I have claimed to discern in this magnificent collection of poems. For, as with any reading experience and account, it is a testimony, a narrative of impact and response, and an attempt – in this early 21st century timeframe – to order that response in a manner that respects Whitman’s original – and deepest – intentions. To take the measure of the poetry, to assess and appreciate the scale of the achievement, for his time and ours, this is what we readers do.
WILLIAM ROEBUCK completed his diplomatic career in late 2020, after 28 years of service in postings across the Middle East, including Baghdad, Tripoli, Damascus, and Jerusalem. He served as U.S. ambassador to Bahrain from 2015-17. For his 2018-20 service in northeastern Syria, Roebuck received the State Department’s Award for Gallantry and a Presidential Distinguished Service Award. He was a runner up for The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Nonfiction in 2021 and a finalist for the same award in 2020. His work has appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, The Briar Cliff Review, and The Foreign Service Journal. Roebuck was born and raised in eastern North Carolina and currently resides in Arlington, Virginia. He serves as Executive Vice President of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
