Leaves of Grass 1135and innovations are singled out for praise, includ-
ing “the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press,” the
telegraph, the locomotive, the factory, and so on
(ll. 255, 258). Similarly, in the 1871 poem “Song
of the Exposition,” Whitman praises the industrial
advancements and activities of the country—“Mark
the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents,
/ thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising”
(ll. 195–196)—and he describes the country’s natu-
ral resources as “limitless” (l. 201), “endless” (l. 202),
“incalculable” (l. 204), and “inexhaustible” (l. 205).
The many advances in science and technology
in the mid- to late 19th century must have contrib-
uted in no small part to the optimism in Whitman’s
poems. One line of “Starting from Paumanok,” for
example, commemorates the laying of the first trans-
atlantic telegraph cable: “See, through Atlantica’s
depths, pulses American, Europe reaching—pulses
of Europe duly return’d” (l. 260). The construction of
the first transatlantic telegraph cable began in early
1857 and, after several failed attempts, the cable
was laid and the first message was sent in 1858, just
two years before Whitman published “Starting from
Paumanok” (under another title) as the introductory
poem to his third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860).
The poem “Passage to India” similarly opens with
praise of three “great achievements of the present”:
the opening of the Suez Canal, the joining of the
American transcontinental railroads, and the laying
of transatlantic cables.
A shorter well-known poem in Leaves of Grass,
however, complicates Whitman’s optimistic views
of scientific inquiry and technological progress.
In the frequently anthologized poem written in
1865, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” the
speaker attends an academic lecture full of “charts
and the diagrams” (l. 3), only to suddenly feel “tired
and sick” (l. 5) and to seek solace in the “mystical
moist night-air” (l. 7), away from the lecture hall,
outside and alone under the star-filled sky.
In the end, what emerges from these apparently
contradictory positions of optimism and disgust is a
synthesis of sorts. Science and technology are to be
embraced, according to many of the poems in Leaves
of Grass, but they are not a goal in and of themselves:
They are tools, a means to a greater end. Recurring
imagery in Whitman’s poetry reinforces the idea
that the greater purpose of science and technology is
to connect humanity and thus help to realize Whit-
man’s own vision of an international and democratic
brotherhood. In “Salut au Monde,” for example, the
railroads and telegraph lines of the world are praised
alongside the world’s most famous rivers. If the poet
were writing today, he would probably include the
Internet in his list of innovations and advances that
have the potential to bring the different people of
the world closer together: “The earth to be spann’d,
connected by network” (“Passage to India,” l. 32).
James B. KelleyWork in Leaves of Grass
In keeping with his celebrations of daily life in
mid- to late 19th-century America, Walt Whitman
plays close attention in Leaves of Grass to the world
of work and the worker. In particular, his poems “I
Hear America Singing,” “Starting from Paumanok,”
and “Song of Myself ” present increasingly compre-
hensive catalogues of labor and laborers of all types
that help establish his inclusive poetic vision and
celebrate values such as joy, energy, motion, variety,
order, and virility. As much a poet of the body as a
poet of the soul, Whitman focuses at least as intently
on work as he does on other exertions of the body,
including sports and sex.
The short catalogues of workers and work in “I
Hear America Singing” and section 28 of “Start-
ing from Paumanok” give way to the much more
extensive and frequent catalogues in the longer and
better-known poem “Song of Myself.” In section 15
of “Song of Myself,” each reference to work usually
fills one long poetic line, if that much. As often as
not, multiple occupations and other positions in life
are expressed within a single line: “The quadroon
girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods
by the bar-room stove, / The machinist rolls up his
sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-
keeper marks who pass” (ll. 279–280). In the shorter
piece “A Song of Joys,” by contrast, the poem’s
attention lingers on fewer occupations. The poem
details “the work of fishermen” (l. 35) in nearly 20
lines and presents “the whaleman’s joys” (l. 73) in
a dramatic scene that encompasses more than 10
lines. Later poems in Leaves of Grass that similarly
celebrate labor and the laborer include “Song of the