ABSTRACT
Years before Auden would write of poetry’s ineffectiveness, Emerson famously complained that the poets of the early American republic would “shrink from celebrating” life, that he and his contemporaries did not “with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address [them]selves to life….”1 As Lowell would respond to Auden, Whitman responded to Emerson’s complaint, though more directly and more voluminously. The first poem of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (the poem later to be known as “Song of Myself”), begins by rejoining: “I celebrate myself.”2 Far from shrinking from celebration, Whitman makes it his first move. The thousands of lines that follow show that Whitman’s fight against the sequestration of poetry from life involves a transformation of style as well as of sentiment. Everything about the 1855 Leaves of Grass, from the engraved portrait instead of the authors name, to the lengthy preface, to the poems themselves-the [number] untitled poems written in no recognizable metrical form and resembling more the Bible or MacPhereson’s hoax Ossian than anything known as “poetry” in the 19th Century (on either side of the Atlantic)—was a deliberate breach of literary decorum. Some readers refused to recognize it as poetry, which was probably just what Whitman wanted, so his work would be judged by new standards. Whitman had begun to remove his work from the vales of timid wit Emerson found all about him just eleven years earlier.
