Revisions

Since I have only really read the Preface and Song of Myself in the 1855 edition of Leave of Grass, those two are the main differences I see when comparing the 1855 edition and 1860 edition.  Obviously Walt felt the need to make some major changes in those five years.  The 1855 edition has a really long preface in which, long story short, he talks about America and poetry.  I read over Proto-Leaf and it seems to me that he cut out the preface and replaced it with Proto-Leaf.  The themes of the two are very similar and I think the message Walt is trying to convey is the same.  Proto meaning first, it is obviously the first poem, but I find it interesting that he no longer leaves it as the preface, what seems to be a free write essay for him.  He changes it into a poem.  This poem similarly addresses America and poets.  Take stanza 13 in the 1860 edition for example, "Take my leaves, America! Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring." As well as stanzas 17-18, "Here lands female and male, Here the heirship and heiress-ship of the world...Yes here comes the mistress, the Soul.  The SOUL!"  I think this goes along with the preface of the 1855 edition, "Of all mankind the great poet is of equable man.  Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.  Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad.  He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less...He is the equalizer of his age and land....he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking" (preface, pg v).  He still keeps to the same theme is both which doesn't really mix it up that much, but the fact that he changes the way his message is written says something else.  I think it speaks to the uniformity of the book.  A preface is a preface, it is an introduction to a book.  I don't know about people in the 1860's, but I know a few people, myself NOT included, that skip introductions and prefaces.  Oh what? These aren't even real numbers? They're just ROMAN NUMERALS?! SKIP! So many people skip that beginning because they feel it will just be addressed in the book and might not be important.  I think Walt knows that he says, "Fuck that! ALL of my writing is important and should be read!"  Preface is no longer an introduction, it is the first poem of Leaves of Grass.  It is a poem AND it has real page numbers! No one will skip over it anymore!  The second difference I see is that he renamed Song of Myself to Walt Whitman.  Now, one can think, how self involved must this guy be if he wrote a poem after himself?!  I actually like the change.  It was easy to see that Song of Myself was going to reflect Walt's own vision and beliefs, but changing the name to Walt Whitman makes his beliefs more firm.  It's like he is more confident with the poem the second time around.

On pages 50-53 of the blue book, Walt makes a lot of changes, not just to capitalization of letters, grammar, and punctuation, but to the addition and subtraction of full on lines.  On page 51 he removes a stanza consisting of 2 lines, but still a stanza!  On page 52 he writes a new stanza that he thinks he could include then later crosses it out and it never makes it to the 1867 edition.  On page 53 he adds a new stanza that I think is a nice addition.  He says, "It alone is without flaw-it rounds and completes all; That mystic, baffling wonder I love, alone completes all."

UPDATE:  I just read Whitman's biography.  It seems that "Proto-Leaf" was previously "Starting from Paumanok" and not the preface. :( bleh. Oh well, I'm still sticking to what I said.

Hot Weather New York

As the temperature rises it seems that people's focus gets lost.  The focus to work gets lost daydreaming about frolicking about outdoors in the beautiful weather.  In "Hot Weather New York", Whitman describes a hot day in New York.  His description of the city and the people around him make it seem like life stops when it is nice outside, when the weather is perfect and all you want to do is enjoy the sun.

This speaks to Whitman's loaferness.  People don't need to sit in their cubicles, they shouldn't be cooped up indoors when it is beautiful outside.  He says, "I linger long, enjoying the sundown, the glow, the streak'd sky, the heights, distances, shadows."  I really like this sentence mostly because of the first part, "I linger long."  I picture Whitman by the shore, wandering about as if he has no where to go.  He is just taking in his environment, the sun, the shadows, and everything around him.  He has nothing of much importance to do at that time, the only pertinent matter is to be there, where he is.

This reminds me of a guy I used to work with.  I work in downtown San Francisco, next to Yerba Buena Gardens.  It was a beautiful summer day so sitting at a desk, staring at a computer was not someone's ideal situation for the day, particularly this gentleman at work.  At 12:30pm, He decided to walk two blocks down to the gardens to have lunch.  Two hours later, my boss is walking around asking where Ted is.  All we know is that he went to lunch.  It wasn't until about 3:30pm that Ted comes running back into the office profusely apologizing that he was so late.  I asked Ted why he was so late.  His response, "It is such a beautiful day outside, I went to Yerba Buena to enjoy the sun.  I closed my eyes and lost track of time." 

May Walt Whitman be with you!

You might need to turn the volume up since I couldn't figure out how to make it louder.

Barnum's American Museum

Barnum's Amercian Museum was a museum in "Whitman's New York."  He was recorded as going there at least a couple times and he even interviewed Mr. Barnum himself whose vision of the museum was to show what life is.  He is quoted as saying, "here it is life" (240).  I feel like Whitman would be intrigued with the attractions of the museum.  There was a Lecture Room, wax museum, zoo, and theatre.  All attractions that have to do with the arts, with the art of imagination and nature.

I see Whitman going here to experience the quirkiness of life.  There were such things as a mummified monkey and exotic animals.  The types of people going here would be an eclectic mix as well since the items in the attractions were probably not part of the social norm.   It seems that Whitman is very conscious of the people around him which could mean that he would be the type to enjoy people watching.  In an excerpt from Specimen Days, Broadway Sights, he describes Edgar Allan Poe.  "I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded.  For another of my reminiscences..a bent feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head..."  His descriptions are so specific.

Unfortunately, Barnum's American Museum burned down in 1865.

Alcohol Free Happy Hour

One would think that the title "Happy Hour's Command" would mean that there would be some story about how Walt had one too many pints and got lost on his way home.  I guess the term happy hour means something completely different now.  When I think happy hour, I think what is the drink special?  When Walt thinks happy hour, he thinks, "what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul."  Walt isn't having a drink!  Instead, he is relaxing, which is what happy hour is really about.  It seems that he is using this hour to write, be productive, and let his surroundings be his guide for his book.  There is a similarity to these two types of happy hours.  Both are a way to relax, both have very positive connotations.  While one might have cheaper drinks than the other, or drinks at all, the end result is the same.  People go to happy hour to relax and get away from the day's work.

Whitman's Poetic Peers

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "The Village Blacksmith"

This poem has a similar theme to Whitman.  The line that goes, "The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands" reminds me of something that Whitman would have said.  It would be a way he too would describe someone, especially the "sinewy hands."  This reflection of life and how working gets him through life speaks to Whitman's belief of going out into the world and not being stagnant in your life.  There is a rhyme to this poem as well as a constant beat. It seems to be alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the trimeter being somewhat of a resolution or reasoning to the line prior to it.

William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Bailey Aldrich both use the outdoors and nature in their poems.  Bryant uses the word "She" to label nature, "She has a voice of gladness, and a smile..."  Whitman, being an outdoorsy man himself, I think would love the way he describes nature.  This means that Bryant is experiencing the outdoors, he is going out there and living it which Whitman is definitely for.  Aldrich on the other hand, his poem isn't as pleasant as Bryant's since his has more to do about death, but the use of imagery having to do with nature is a commonality between the two.

The Voice

The sound a person makes or their own personal expression can be defined as a voice.  People often refer to their voice as their own opinion, something that they identify as their own individual values and beliefs.  One such person could say that they were just "voicing their opinion."  There are many different ways the word voice can be looked at.  Whitman does just that in "Song of Myself."  Not only does he use the word voice as a way to express the speakers opinion but he uses it both directly and indirectly.  An individual's speech or vocal expression is discussed throughout the poem.  He says, "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person" (27).  This speaks to Whitman's acceptance of others.

Here are all the instances in which Whitman uses the motif voice in "Song of Myself."

"Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd." (17)

"My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach" (19)

"I heard the sound of the human voice....a sound I love" (19)

"Pleased with the quakeress as she puts off her boneet and talks melodiously" (25)

"My voice is the wife's voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs" (26)

"I take part....I see and hear the whole,

The cries and curses and roar....the plaudits for well aimed shots" (28)

"I laughed content when I heard the voice of my little captain,

We have not struck, he composedly cried, We have just begun our part of the fighting" (29)

"The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty" (30)

"Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction" (34)

"My own voice, orotund sweeping and final" (34)

"You are also asking me questions, and I heard you;

I answer that I cannot answer....you must find out for yourself." (40)

"I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;

It is you talking just as much as myself....I act as the tongue for you,

It was tied in your mouth....in mine it begins to be loosened" (41)

"The farmboy ploughing in the fields feels good at the sound of my voice" (41)

"Toss to the moaning gibberish of my dry limbs" (42)

"I too am not a bit tamed....i too am untranslatable

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" (43)

Comments:

"I heard the sound of the human voice....a sound I love" (19)

This is one of my favorite times he talks about the voice.  Maybe it is because I can relate or maybe it is because I like the way the line sounds.  In this stanza, Whitman describes the sounds around him.  The beautiful music of the birds, the sounds of the city, alarms, fires, etc, but the sound that he loves the most is the sound of a human voice.  This could go both ways - the fact that he loves that people are expressing their opinions or maybe it has to do with just the sounds of people's voices, they are communicating, talking, conversing.  When people are talking they are doing something, they aren't just sitting around being a bum which I think is one of the Whitman's biggest beliefs about life.

"You are also asking me questions, and I heard you;

I answer that I cannot answer....you must find out for yourself." (40)

Along with the word "voice", Whitman uses the voice in other ways.  He doesn't specifically say "voice" but in these lines it is like he is telling the reader to voice up, ask around, "find out for yourself."  There is more to life than just asking questions, there is an exploration aspect.  As mentioned in the previous comment, Whitman doesn't think people should be stagnant, they need to move about.  While Whitman says he loves the human voice, I think he wants people to use it wisely.

""I too am not a bit tamed....i too am untranslatable

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" (43)

Towards the end of the poem, Whitman says this.  A barbaric yawp, I think referring to a loud expression, maybe a scream.  Either way, this sums up the two previous quotes I mentioned.  He wants people to talk, he wants people to explore, and all the while, he wants people to freely express themselves.  He says that he is untranslatable, his words cannot be translated.


The idea of the voice helps to articulate his idea about both the self and probably the poet.  After reading all this, it is almost as if he is preaching, telling people to speak up, get out, and explore!  Maybe he is telling himself to do the same thing and he is doing so with this poem.