Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, anonymously, at his own expense, in an edition of roughly 800 copies. He had set some of the type himself. The book was unlike anything in American literature: long, sprawling, written in lines that seemed to have no fixed length, addressed to everyone and no one, insisting on the presence of the body in a literary culture that preferred to pretend the body did not exist. Most reviewers either ignored it or were baffled by it. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Whitman a letter calling it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."
Whitman spent the rest of his life revising, expanding, and republishing Leaves of Grass. The final "deathbed edition" of 1891–92 contains over 400 poems. The project was his life's work: a poem that would contain America, that would speak in America's voice, that would refuse the hierarchies of European literary tradition and replace them with something democratic, inclusive, and entirely new.
The democratic poem
The central argument of Whitman's poetry is that the poem should sound like the country sounds. America in the mid-nineteenth century was cacophonous, various, still working out what it meant to be a nation. Whitman wanted a form adequate to that variety. The long cataloguing lines of Song of Myself — lists of occupations, landscapes, people, the objects of ordinary life — are his answer: a form that can hold everything without ranking it, that places the carpenter alongside the senator, the body alongside the soul, without deciding which matters more.
This is why Whitman abandoned the formal verse traditions he inherited. Iambic pentameter, the heroic couplet, the sonnet — these were European forms, with European hierarchies embedded in them. To write a democratic American poem, Whitman believed, you needed a form that had not yet decided what was worthy of inclusion. Free verse — or what he called "organic form," the line shaped by breath and thought rather than metre — was the result.
“Whitman wanted a form adequate to variety — one that could hold everything without ranking it. That impulse is still the engine of the best American poetry.”
Song of Myself
Song of Myself is the centrepiece of Leaves of Grass and one of the longest and strangest poems in the American tradition. It runs to 52 sections and more than 1,300 lines in its final form. Its subject is, ostensibly, the self of the speaker — but that self expands until it contains multitudes. The poem's most famous line — "I am large, I contain multitudes" — is not a boast. It is a description of what the poem is trying to do: hold more than a single consciousness can hold, become a vessel for the collective experience of a nation.
The poem moves by accumulation rather than argument. One perception follows another, one catalogue follows another, and the connections between them are often left unstated. The reader is expected to hold the multiplicity without requiring it to resolve. This is not intellectual laziness on Whitman's part — it is a deliberate formal strategy, the equivalent of saying that the world is too large for argument and must instead be witnessed.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The body in the poem
Whitman's insistence on the body was genuinely radical in the context of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. The body — its functions, its desires, its presence in the world — had been largely excluded from respectable literary discourse. Whitman put it back, emphatically. "I Sing the Body Electric" catalogues the human body with the same comprehensive attention that other sections of Leaves of Grass give to landscapes and professions. The effect is both celebratory and political: to name the body is to insist on its dignity, to refuse the division between the physical and the spiritual that Whitman believed was doing damage to American culture.
His treatment of desire was equally radical. The "Calamus" poems, first published in the 1860 edition, deal with male friendship and what appears to be homoerotic love in terms that were unprecedented in American poetry. Whitman never named this explicitly — he could not have — but the poems created a vocabulary and a space that later poets, including many in the twentieth century, would return to and build from.
The Whitman line
Whitman's line is long — often much longer than the line of any contemporary — and built on the rhythms of speech and breath rather than metrical feet. It draws on the King James Bible, on opera, on the oratory of his time. It is a line that seems to have infinite capacity: it can absorb proper names, technical terms, fragments of other languages, lists that go on past the point where a more restrained poet would have stopped.
The influence of this line on subsequent American poetry is enormous and largely unacknowledged. The Beats — Ginsberg especially, whose "Howl" is unimaginable without Whitman — drew directly on it. So did many of the New York School poets. The long-line tradition in American poetry, wherever you find it, leads back to Whitman.
The legacy
Whitman is the most influential American poet in the tradition and also, in some ways, the most difficult to reckon with. His vision of America was genuinely democratic in aspiration but blind to some of the most profound injustices of his era. His treatment of race in the early editions of Leaves of Grass is complicated and sometimes troubling. His expansive "I" that claims to contain multitudes can also be seen as a kind of imperialism of the self — absorbing everything into the speaker's consciousness rather than allowing other voices to remain genuinely other.
These are real problems, and serious readers of Whitman need to hold them alongside the genuine achievement. The formal innovations, the insistence on the body, the democratic ambition, the catalogue as a form of witness — these remain vital. The impulse to write a poem that includes everything, that refuses to decide in advance what is worthy of attention, is still the engine of much of the best American poetry being written today. For more on the tradition Whitman helped create, see our piece on what free verse is and our piece on imagism — the movement that reacted directly against Whitman's expansiveness.
