On Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman set out to write the poetry of American democracy, and in Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and expanded and revised throughout his life, he came closer than anyone before or since. This is not poetry about democracy from the outside; it is an attempt to embody democracy in the very form and voice of the verse, to make the poem itself democratic, sprawling, inclusive, unruly, equal, a literary expression of the nation it celebrates. Whitman wanted to be the poet the new republic deserved, and he largely succeeded.

The democratic spirit runs through everything in the book, beginning with its famous opening declaration that the poet celebrates himself and sings himself, and that what he assumes, the reader shall assume, for every atom belonging to him belongs as well to the reader. This is a radical gesture of equality, the poet insisting on his kinship with every reader and, throughout the book, with every kind of person in the country. Whitman's long catalogs sweep across the whole of American life, naming the laborer and the prostitute, the slave and the president, the carpenter and the mother, refusing hierarchy, insisting that all of them belong to the poem and to the nation equally. The form itself, free verse unbound from traditional meter and rhyme, was a declaration of independence from inherited European convention, a poetry as new and self-made as the country claimed to be.

The vision is generous, embodied, and physical. Whitman celebrates the body and the senses alongside the soul, the ordinary and the common alongside the grand, and he does so to assert the dignity and the divinity of every individual, however humble. His democracy is not an abstract political arrangement but a felt fellowship, a love of the multitude of his fellow citizens in all their variety, a faith that the common people, taken together, are the true grandeur of the nation. He saw the poet's task as binding the diverse people of the republic together through a shared and celebratory vision of themselves.

Whitman was not blind to the country's failures; he lived through the Civil War, nursed its wounded, and mourned Lincoln in some of his greatest poems, and his later work carries the weight of that experience and of disillusionment with the corruption of his age. But the core of Leaves of Grass remains an affirmation, a sustained act of faith in democracy as a way not just of governing but of seeing and loving one another as equals.

The book belongs in a library of the republic as its great poetic statement, the work that asks what a democratic culture might sound like and answers with a voice unlike any other. It sits with Emerson, whose call for an American literature Whitman answered, and with the other distinctively American voices closing this collection. Leaves of Grass is public domain and freely available. Read it not for argument but for the experience of democracy rendered as poetry, an exuberant insistence on the equal dignity and the shared belonging of every member of the republic.