ADAMIC WALT WHITMAN 73things,” he tells himself, “minerals, vegetables, animals etc,” and he calls this life ’s
work his “Great Construction of the New Bible,” then late in life wonders if
Leaves of Grass was perhaps “only a language experiment.”
It was all these at once: organic whole, American anthem, new Scripture,
and more, with its sexual candor and democratic zeal. And his groundbreaking
language tries just about everything human and nonhuman nature will bear.
As did Whitman’s own life. His early years on New York’s Long Island (which
he gave its Indian name Paumanok, “fish-shaped”) meant spearing eels under
the ice, gathering seagull eggs, sailing around Montauk Point, fraternizing with
fishermen and herdsmen, walking the plains and woods and shores. Specimen
Days in America, a “huddle of diary-jottings, war memoranda of 1862–’65,
Nature-notes of 1877–’81,” details the life behind Leaves of Grass. In Brooklyn
during the 1840s, for instance, he often went to Coney Island, “a long, bare
unfrequented shore, which I had all to myself, and where I loved, after bathing,
to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakspere to the surf
and sea-gulls by the hour.” (“Unfrequented” will daze anyone who knew Coney
Island a century later, mackerel-crowded with sunbathing bodies.)
“Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps a poem,
about the sea-shore,” says Specimen Days, “the solid marrying the liquid.” The
seashore meant “an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my
composition”: “a stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth
and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-
measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam.” A century later, William Carlos
Williams would date “the American poem” from Whitman on the sands, gazing
out to sea. That “slow-measured sweep” of ocean onto land keeps his verse lines
swelling and reforming in changeless change. Crossing the East River on ferries
between Brooklyn and Manhattan, he feels a “still excitement,” that sensation
“as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current.”
Whatever else may be true of Walt Whitman, he sensed all things connected
—poems, surroundings, doings of his body and spirit. After his Civil War
years with the wounded in Washington, comforting, writing and reading letters,
bringing gifts, speaking poems, or simply sitting at bedside, Lincoln’s assassina-
tion evoked a very long elegy with an American dooryard grounding its title.
“When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” follows the coffin across this
country, always in earshot of a hermit-thrush warbling with “bleeding throat
... And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.”
A paralytic stroke hit Whitman in 1873, and two years later another. Unwell
and depressed, he spent long periods at a New Jersey farm, outdoors and alert
to sights, sounds, smells, trees, flowers, fruit, birds and birdsong, bees, night
sky—“no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners.” He ’d walk down the