This Old Book

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Last summer as I was leaving for a week in Ocean City with family on the way to the Finger Lakes, I mentioned that my wife and I were stopping in Camden, New Jersey. “Why?” my mother asked, dumbfounded. “We’re making a pilgrimage to the grave of Walt Whitman.” She shrugged, a devotee of other prophets. But for American writers and thinkers, there could be no more holy place. Leaves of Grass is one of those amazing books that was considered blasphemy upon its publication, but now has the resonance of a deep and profound spirituality. This might seem a gross anomaly, until we look closely at the history of every sacred text that has graced the human eye, and realize that this development may be the rule.

Leaves of Grass refers to that “green hair of graves” that covers the American landscape in a ubiquitous sheet. Each blade is distinct and individual, as we fancy ourselves to be. But underneath the surface, the rhizomatic roots are all connected. “I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass./ My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air…” With this central metaphor, Whitman grants us a physical description of spirituality like no other. With his exhaustive lists and joyful tone, he connects the earth and everything on it equally and without classification.

In poems like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman brings Augustine’s City of God to earth, in the form of Manhattan. His first line echoes St. Paul’s famous “through a glass darkly” passage, when we will finally be “known” by the only one who can know us, God. Despite this and other echoes and references to Christian mythos, one would have trouble saying Whitman’s spirituality was Christian. Instead, it is supra-Christian, Buddhist, Pagan, encompassing all religions and faiths, gregarious and tolerant, shrugging off the narrow definitions of scholars and priests. Leaves of Grass takes the best of all religions, and reaches beyond them to new ideas. Instead of crossing a ferry to some vague afterworld, the poet crosses it through time, speaking to us. “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.” What Whitman sees “face to face” is not an omniscient God, it is us, and we him, and all people in the great world city. He posits a remarkable democracy of spirit rather than a singularity.

Another project of this astonishing tome is to bring the material body back to our belief system, and into unity with the soul itself. In “I Sing the Body Electric” he gives a long descriptive list of his body parts, ending with “The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,/ The exquisite realization of health;/ O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,/ O I say now these are the soul!” The dichotomy between body and soul that had pervaded Western Culture since Aristotle and St. Paul is swept away with this bold pronouncement. Spirituality is about the search for connection, and like all prophets Whitman is trying to connect. But not only soul to soul, or soul to unknowable God. No, he connects body to body, each divine in its rough physicality.

In this way, Leaves of Grass seeks to abolish all the dialectics that divide human thinking. Much of human spirituality springs from our struggle with death, or our lust for life. Whitman sees no difference between them. The ending of “Song of Myself” gives perhaps the most honest and alive acceptance of corporeal death ever written. “I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,/ I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift in lacy jags./ I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,/ If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

I thought of this passage when my wife and I stood at his hillside grave in Camden, and I felt the springy grass and gray-barked beech trees, knowing that they were part of him, that he could see them with clear eyes so many years before. A great blue heron watched us from the shore of a nearby pond. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” continues: “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,/ But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,/ And filter and fibre your blood.” It was tempting to take this as an ordinary metaphor for art and for our everlasting, connected souls. But I tried to think of Whitman meaning this literally, picturing the decaying nutrients of his body fostering the grass, the trees, the heron, and myself. This transformation seems obvious and basic, but we as a species have always shied away from it. That he could accept the dissolution of his molecules, and think of his immortality in such a disconcerting way, without horror or regret, is one of the most divine things I have ever read or imagined.

Eric D. Lehman is a Professor of English at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.He has previously published essays, fiction, and poetry in various online and print journals, such as The New Formalist, Red River Review, Switchback, Venture Magazine, and Entelechy: Mind and Culture.