ABSTRACT

American national poetry in a distinctly American (as opposed to European) style begins mostly with Walt Whitman after the failed European revolutions of 1848-49. Whitman was the first poet to articulate an almost-Darwinian enthusiasm for American diversity – ‘Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations …’ (By Blue Ontario’s Shore 5) – and perhaps the only 19th century national poet who, instead of wanting to shoot foreigners, made poetry out of welcoming them to New York. In the decade prior to the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman witnessed in New York the arrival of about three million immigrants, the largest proportionate increase at any time in American history. A large number were Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine. These new arrivals were not welcome but were admitted in the absence of immigration restrictions.1 America in the 1850s was in an economic crisis and gripped by one of its periodic bursts of religious enthusiasm. In the years leading to and including the Civil War, it was questionable if Americans could live with their fellow Americans, let alone millions of new immigrants. While the argument over slavery raged, a virtual civil war in New York was caused by the Protestant American party (the ‘KnowNothings’), who aimed to exclude Catholics and foreigners from public office and limit Irish and German Catholic immigration. The ‘Know-Nothings’ reached the height of their influence as Leaves of Grass came off the press in 1855. Whitman adopted some Know-Nothing attitudes ‘to the extent that he would once say that America’s digestion was strained by the “millions of ignorant foreigners” coming to its shores’ (Reynolds 1996: 86). Yet in Leaves

of Grass, Whitman’s response to the new arrivals as Americans in the making, and the making of America, was a total rejection of immigration restrictions and nationalistic and ethnic hatred, which he associated with Europe after the failure of the 1848-49 revolutions: ‘lend us the children of the poor’, he writes in his notebooks, ‘the ignorant, and the depraved’. America ‘rejects none’, Whitman declares in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass; and Jesuslike he comforts the ‘shunned men and women’ of the world in ‘Children of Adam’: ‘I will be your poet’.2