Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 209future. Along with this new material, the poet revised, reintegrated, and rearranged
all his poetic work in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then followed it a year
later with what was intended as a prose companion to his poems, entitled Specimen
Days. Even this was not the end. The final, “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass was
prepared in the last years of his life, 1891–1892. It included two annexes, the “Sands
at Seventy” and “Good-bye My Fancy” groups of poems. And it ended with a prose
piece, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” in which Whitman attempted to
explain both his life and his work.
Along with all the changes in the several editions of Leaves of Grass, though,
went continuity: a commitment to the principles outlined in the preface to the
very first edition. “Read these leaves,” Whitman urged in that preface, “in the
open air of every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been
told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul!”
Openness, freedom, above all individualism: Whitman’s aim was nothing less
than to initiate a poetic tradition in which the one recognition shared is a recog-
nition of difference, one of the few precedents accepted is the rejection of prece-
dent, and truth and beauty are identified with a procedure of constant
metamorphosis. The only genuine way in which an American could acknowledge
his participation in a common cultural effort, he believed, was by behaving as a
supreme individualist. He could pay his greatest respect to the past, Whitman felt,
by rebelling from it, and the finest compliment he could to his nation by denying
its authority over him. In doing all this, Whitman did not feel that he would be
rejecting contact with others – those he lived with, those whom he observed and
addressed in his poems. On the contrary, his essential purpose was to identify his
ego with the world, and more specifically with the democratic “en-masse” of
America. This identification on which all his poems depend, or, rather, the dialec-
tic from which they derive their energy, is established in the opening lines of
“Song of Myself ” (here, as elsewhere, the lines are taken from the version of the
poem in the “deathbed” edition):I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.Two people, Whitman believed, could be “twain yet one:” their paths could be
different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact. Equally, many
people could realize a community while remaining individuals: their lives could be
enriched by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium, a dialectical relationship between
the needs of the self and the demands of the world. As the opening lines of “Song of
Myself ” indicate, it was Whitman’s intention to state this again and again. Like many
other American writers, he was not afraid of the pedagogical role, and he tried to tell,
even teach, his fellow citizens about this dialectical process on which, as he saw it,
their lives depended. His aim, though, was not merely to tell and teach but to show.
He wanted to dramatize the process of contact, to make his audience aware of theGGray_c02.indd 209ray_c 02 .indd 209 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM