208 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865of that prophecy. He was the man, he felt, with the courage needed to capture the
ample geography of the country in lines as bold and wild as its landscape. And in the
preface to the first, 1855 edition of his Leaves of Grass he deliberately echoed
Emerson. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he wrote,
thereby alerting the reader to what he was trying to do: to invent a poetic form
founded on raw experiment, and a line that swung as freely as the individual voice.
There were many influences that helped Whitman to create this form and line. They
ranged from Italian opera to the insistent repetitions of the King James Bible, from
his interest in the spatial vastnesses of astronomy to his love of American landscape
painting with its dedication to and delineation of another kind of space. But the
crucial factor was Whitman’s sense of himself and the potentials of his craft: for him,
poetry was a passionate gesture of identification with his native land.
Like many other American writers, especially of this period, Whitman was
largely self-educated. He left school at the age of 11 and learned his trade in the
print shop, becoming editor of the Aurora in 1842 and then later of the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle. As he wrote essay after essay about his wanderings through Manhattan,
his “City of ... walks and joys,” he was also serving an apprenticeship for his poetry,
with its expansive rhetoric, ambulating lines, and delight in the spectacle of the
people. It is in his earliest notebook, written in 1847, that Whitman breaks into
something like his characteristic free verse line. Appropriately, for the poet who was
to see himself as the bard of American individualism and liberty, this occurs on the
subject of slavery. And, after Leaves of Grass was published, and enthusiastically
welcomed by Emerson (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson
wrote to Whitman, after the poet had sent him a complimentary copy of the first
edition), Whitman was to devote his poetic life to its revision and expansion. For
Whitman, poetry, the American nation, life itself were all a matter of process, ener-
gized by rhythm and change. And Leaves of Grass became a process too, responsive
to the continuing story of personal and national identity, the poet and his demo-
cratic community. A second edition, with several new poems, appeared in 1856.
While he was planning a third edition of what he called his “new Bible” of
democracy, Whitman had an unhappy liaison with another man, which became
the subject of several poems to be incorporated into that edition, published in- The personal crisis, combined with the poet’s own alarm over the threatened
dissolution of the republic, casts a shadow over this 1860 version of Leaves of Grass,
although this is balanced by Whitman’s celebration of comradeship and “adhesive-
ness” (“the personal attachment of man to man”) and heterosexual or “amative”
love – in, respectively, the “Calamus” and the “Children of Adam” sequences. The
role Whitman then adopted during the Civil War, as “wound-dresser” visiting
sick or dying soldiers, became the source of poems for Drum-Taps and Sequel
(1865–1866). The war poems were then appended to the next, 1867 edition of
Leaves of Grass and incorporated into the main body of the 1871 edition. During
the last two decades of his life, poems such as “Passage to India” and “Prayer of
Columbus” showed Whitman moving away from the material landscapes of America
to a more mystical vision of a democratic golden world that might bloom in the
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