JIM COHN

MEDITATION ON LEAVES OF GRASS AT 150

Leaves of Grass is still the best book of poetry ever produced in the United States, 150 years after its original publication. It is the holy individualized commentary on the inner meaning of democracy. It remains the authoritative subjective exegesis of the Constitution. As time passes, it is no mere work of poetics, but the soul of what America could be. It wound-dressed and outlived the intuitive President Lincoln at the center of a hemorrhaging nation’s War Between the States. 150 years later, Leaves provides a profound countercultural treatment of President George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror.

It’s common knowledge that the slim, indy publication by Walt Whitman, published on the Fourth of July in 1855, could just as well have ended up in the garbage pile of forgotten poesy. Nobody in Great Gotham was interested in a self-educated slacker looking at a blade of grass. But what Whitman did, said, and thought established compassionate democratic awareness as basis of the American Creative Record. Every line and every poem of the First Edition, which Whitman would expand upon over the course of his life in grander reworked volumes, became not simply the poetic measure of all future emanations of democracy. Leaves of Grass is the deposited essence of the march of Freedom recorded in the memory of the United States.

My first real acquaintance with Walt Whitman occurred in the early 70’s. Leaving the northeast, I hitchhiked west, keeping a copy of Leaves in my backpack and reading it across Midwest snowstorms, over the Rockies in the dead of winter, down along the Mexico border the day Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War, up the West Coast where I would meet with psychedelic adventures and back across the frozen northern plains via freight train. Wherever I was, Whitman and Leaves were there, introducing me to the distinctive perfection of his poetic achievement, pointing out the specific features of mind and space, providing special instructions on the means of glimpsing, deepening and stabilizing realization.

Leaves offered mystical direction in a surreal world of truck-stop all-night coffee shops and cars pumped with gasoline, sex, music, and drugs. While police trolled the shoulders of liberty, I met witches and vets, perverts and cowboys, truckers and low-riders living by a whole other set of laws, men and women from all walks of life––desperate, exuberant, on business, on vacation, on the run, en route to a funeral, a wedding, a birth, a festival. Impoverished bums of the street-chant anonymous prayer would speak to me of Walt Whitman. Desperate and near-froze boxcar hobos would turn serene over the bitter cold pass in full moon light hearing the poems. Great wilds of American deserts and forests, canyons and oceans, mountains and rivers only confirmed him.

Many a lonesome night I read from Leaves. Sometimes in my simple bedroll in a ditch on the side of the road, deep in a cornfield under field of stars, in a wooded grove, under an interstate bridge. Other times, under the eaves of some kind stranger I would fall asleep with its pages in my hands, inspired. One night, at the end of the decade, I was staying at a Colorado youth hostel and met a young man no more than twenty, a hairdresser from Florida. He told me that he knew no poetry, nothing at all, except all of Leaves of Grass, which he could recite in its entirety by heart.

In the 1980’s, I was reacquainted with Whitman through the immediacy of Allen Ginsberg whose poem “Howl” was first given public performance at the catalytic Six Galleries reading one hundred years after the publication of Leaves. Ginsberg had so utterly absorbed Whitman that he made Whitmanic candor––speaking one’s secret mind as a means of connecting to mass suffering––a foundational element of Beat and Postbeat literature. “A Supermarket in California (1955),” composed by Ginsberg in conscious celebration of the centennial year of Leaves, and in tribute to Whitman’s profound influence, began with the famous phrase, “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman....” Whitmanic poetic practice, as begun in the First Edition, is at the bedrock of experimental strands that comprise the lineage of American Roots poetics.

In the 90’s, I encountered Whitman again. In Valparaiso, I visited Pablo Neruda’s home high on steep hillside narrow impossible streets overlooking the city and the sea. I was struck that a poet’s home could offer such solace to people from around the world. It had a magnetism all its own. Neruda was a Leaves of Grass collector. He had all the editions. Walking into his study, I was taken aback by the large photograph of Whitman in pinstripes and began to weep. Standing there, gazing on the rock star-sized image of Whitman dressed to the nines across from Neruda’s writing desk, I felt the great heart of the eloquent postcolonial Chilean ghost calling upon the strident ghost of American colossal nationalism and universal liberation. In “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age (A Speech to P.E.N.),” published in the April 14, 1972 New York Times, Pablo Neruda declared:

For my part, I, who am now nearing seventy, discovered Walt Whitman when I was just fifteen, and I hold him to be my greatest creditor. I stand before you feeling that I bear with me always this great and wonderful debt which has helped me to exist.

As remarkable a declaration of influence as Neruda’s statement is, especially considering the impact of the Chilean poet’s own worldwide legacy, it is hardly uncommon. Even Ezra Pound––American poetry’s first half of the twentieth century revolutionary figure, imprisoned twelve years at St. Elizabeths Hospital on charges of treason against the United States––admired Whitman. In 1915, Pound wrote “A Pact“ in which he declared “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman.” Alicia Ostriker suggested in her essay “Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America” (1992) that what Pound likely meant in his own desire to make friends with Whitman is what continues to move women and men most about Leaves––its author’s

...capacity to be shamelessly receptive as well as active, to be expansive on an epic scale without a shred of nostalgia for narratives of conquest, to invent a rhetoric of power with authority, without hierarchy, and without violence. The omnivorous empathy of his imagination wants to incorporate All and therefore refuses to represent anything as unavailably Other.

Whitmanic expansiveness is without diminishment. It is distinct from the narrow ideology of American exceptionalism––the sense that the country is a qualitatively different nation from all others and in its ideals superior. Whitman did not diminish the importance of mind and spirit at a time when urbanization and materialism were on the rise. Leaves of Grass elevates the human form and the human mind, deeming both worthy of poetic praise. Consider his decade long service as an attending visiting nurse for wounded Civil War soldiers in Washington D.C., primarily at the Armory Square Hospital. In Democratic Vistas, the eighty-four-page prose pamphlet self-published in 1871––the same year he brought out the fifth edition of Leaves and was reported to have died in a railroad accident––he wrote,

In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annexed Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as though we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

The vanity of American exceptionalism Whitman wrote of in Democratic Vistas was on full display as the political media circus erupted in calls of racism and classism against the Bush presidency. CNN images followed the story out of the New Orleans’ Superdome, horrific home to some 20,000 unevacuated––mostly blacks, when the city was inundated in the Hurricane Katrina floods of 2005. People on rooftops to escape the rising waters waved flags and wrote signs as they awaited rescue. The lack of adequate and timely federal emergency relief left thousands of citizens stranded, displaced, and without compensation. I recalled that before the release of the First Edition, Whitman edited the New Orleans Daily Crescent. Having arrived in Louisiana in February 1848 after traveling down the Mississippi with his brother Jeff, New Orleans was the turning point in his still young life.

As a principal port in the nineteenth century, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum era in the Atlantic slave trade. Dwarfing in population the other cities in the Deep South, New Orleans had the largest slave market. In The Big Easy, Whitman witnessed the slave auctions firsthand. Living at 67 Gravier Street, only a few blocks from the site of Pierson & Bonneval, whose auction blocks are what started him writing poetry, his favorite spots were along the levees that took the city down in the flood and left corpse “sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in” (“Song of Myself,” 1855, 1129). Poetry soon overtook all other activities Whitman was involved with at the time.

The first great American street poet received formal schooling only to his eleventh year. His first apprenticeship began shortly thereafter at the Patriot, a weekly Long Island newspaper, where he worked as a printer’s devil. In 1850, after knocking around as a newsroom journeyman for two decades, he began writing the poems that would fill the First Edition. On July 4, 1855, an unknown Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) brought out a 95-page book to mixed reviews and general disregard. Ten pages or so were the preface he is believed to have typeset himself. The original twelve poem Leaves was put on sale in two stores, one in New York and the other in Brooklyn. Printed in the shop of the brothers James and Thomas Rome of Brooklyn, the quarto-size volume was designed and published by Whitman himself. 795 copies were printed in all, 200 of which were bound in cloth, the rest in cheaper material. Copies of Leaves of Grass originally sold for two dollars each.

He gave most of the twelve poems first-line titles, a practice he would frequently employ during the rest of his career. The poems appear in an order significantly different from the arrangement he finally settled on: “I celebrate myself” (“Song of Myself”) came first, as it would in the printed edition. It was followed by “A young man came to me,” the poem that would develop into “Song of the Answerer.” Then came “A child went forth” (“There Was a Child Went Forth”), “sauntering the pavement” (“Faces”), “great are the myths” (“Great Are the Myths”), “I wander all night” (“The Sleepers”), “Come closer to me” (“A Song for Occupations”), “Who learns my lesson complete” (“Who Learns My Lesson Complete”), “Clear the way there Jonathan” (“A Boston Ballad”), “Resurgemus” (“Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States”), “To think through the retrospections” (“To Think of Time”), and “Slaves” (“I Sing the Body Electric”).

“Doubtless in the scheme this man has built for himself,” wrote the 36-year old Whitman in an anonymous review of the First Edition, was an experiment in non-dualistic transcendental awareness. His self-review continued:

The writing of poems is but a proportionate part of the whole. It is plain that public and private performance, politics, love, friendship, behavior, the art of conversation, science, society, the American people, the reception of the great novelties of city and country, all have their equal call upon him and receive equal attention. ... He does not separate the learned from the unlearned, the Northerner from the Southerner, the white from the black, or the native from the immigrant just landed at the wharf. Everyone, he seems to say, appears excellent to me, every employment is adorned, and every male and female glorious.

Experimentation with undifferentiating mind remains a Whitmanic legacy. Leaves is the Great Symbol––famous for its equalizing catalogs and lists, its persona of the “loafer” or “hipster,” its drama of identity characterized by the Empty Self containing multitudes and encountering nothingness, its “leisure” long vowel-toned stanzas, its direct attention to minutiae––as in its mediation on a leaf of grass, its public intimacies, first-person address, its sexual and erotic idiom celebrating the body, its tenacity of the poet as social and cultural witness, activist and critic, its unmitigated epic of killing off past literatures––killing off Homer, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, its vast projecting of democratic vistas.

The centrality of consciousness is perhaps the most prominent experiment of the Whitmanic legacy. Thoreau remarked to Whitman upon reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass that it was "Wonderfully like the Orientals." Emerson told Franklin B. Sanborn that Leaves of Grass was a "mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald." Malcolm Cowley, among others, expressed the view that Whitman was absorbed in the Vedantic transcendental philosophy that had penetrated American literature in the 1840s and 1850s. His introduction of Eastern consciousness to future American poetic explorations was a model of mindfulness widely visible in the Beat Generation.

By the time of Whitman's death in March 1892, the original book went through eight, nine, or, as Sam Abrams pointed out in The Neglected Walt Whitman: Vital Texts, maybe ten editions. Leaves grew from its initial twelve poems to the 289 poems of the deathbed edition (Abrams, 4-5). Of Whitman’s death, there remains the strange case of Guillaume Apollinaire’s April Fools’ Day accounts in the Mercure de France (1913). Apollinaire composed a false description of Whitman’s funeral as being held in a traveling circus tent complete with a barbecue, barrels of beer, tubs of whisky, vats of lemonade, and sparkling pure water. Three brass bands played continuously and over 3500 men, women, and children—everyone Whitman had every known, all without invitation––gave spontaneous readings and remembrances or song punctuated by pounding on the coffin.

At dusk the entire party, enjoined by crowds––workmen searching after damages, unshaved sailors, calm martyrs, old-faced infants, the 28 bathers from “Song of Myself,” nurses, army surgeons, buggy drivers, artillerists, the lunatic and abolitionist just out of the whip-stocks, politicians and journalists, mothers and fathers of boys killed in the war he had held in his arms when they died, dwarfs and harlots and poets he had known and loved over the years––moved to the cemetery outside Camden where 6 drunken pall bearers wielded the poet’s remains to his tomb as minstrels played New Orleans rag-time. Apollinaire employed a good deal of Dada aesthetic in the hoax, which proved scandalous. It took a full eight months for him to respond that the depraved and alcoholic homosexual depiction of Whitman was a bohemian prank.

One hundred and fifty years later, American Democracy would be shaken by Patriot Act mutations and protracted wars in Middle East theaters. The country had slipped into Super Debtor Nation status. There were stagnant wages, stock market busts, prolonged recession, bankruptcies––people stopped paying their credit card bills, their mortgages. There were mass home forfeitures, mass unemployment. With the proliferation of digital video and audio having subsumed the Old Print Industry’s concentration of message and imagery, Whitman could show up anywhere––on C-SPAN, in grocery store tabloids such as the defunct The Weekly World News (September 19, 2005), and thousands of websites, including Leavesofgrass.org (at 150). Bloggers note him as though the lines “If no other in the world be aware I sit content, / And if each and all be aware I sit content” are scotched tape to their monitors (“Song of Myself,” 1855, 414-415).

George W. Bush, the 43^rd President, probably never read Walt Whitman. Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th U.S. President, did––aloud––in 1857. Whitman scholar Daniel Mark Epstein noted that the following year Lincoln’s speeches showed dramatic development with starling influences from Leaves. Bush’s speeches received no similar stimulus. His addresses to the nation were lashed together from action movies and old TV western one-liners. In 1865, only a month before he was assassinated, Lincoln spoke of U.S. karma, its chain of causation, and how slavery implicated the entire nation. Compare the Second Inaugural Addresses by Lincoln and Bush to see how much or little has changed in America in 150 years.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [Italics mine.]

George W. Bush, in his 2005 Second Inaugural Address, faced a divided nation under the fog of war, as did Lincoln. The similarities end right about there. President Bush responded to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with all the fury of the United States Military. He ordered invasions and occupations of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) that by some estimates resulted in the deaths of over one million civilians, became a cause célèbre for jihadists, and cost the U.S. taxpayers over one trillion dollars. The strategy, however, never led to its most elusive goal––the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, the Islamic jihadi mastermind behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on America.

The Bush Doctrine gave the United States a legal right to initiate a preemptive Global War on Terror. Bush was the right man for the fight. He ordered the toppling of the Iraqi regime. He ordered the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. At a plenary session of the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made the case against Iraqi “Mobile Production Facilities for Biological Agents”––the proof, he argued, that the Iraqi president had biological weapons of mass destruction. The following year, Powell’s claim, which he himself called a “blotch” on his record, was discredited by the Iraq Survey Group who determined that Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who the CIA and German intelligence officials had given the code-name “Curveball,” had fabricated the whole mobile bio-weapons laboratories tale in hopes that his lies would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Iraqi ruler. “It will always be a part of my record,” General Powell told Barbara Walters in 2006. “It was painful,” he said, “It's painful now.”

Incorrect about the presence of WMD for nuclear and biological weapons in Iraq, President Bush’s January 20, 2005 Second Inaugural Address gave no hint of soul-searching. The primary purpose of his Second Inaugural Address seemed to be making sure people understood that the four commercial airliner coordinated attacks by nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 would be avenged. He gambled that having to see the world through other people’s eyes is something a majority of the electorate would consider un-American. Unlike Lincoln’s address, which was based upon multiple acknowledgments of error, Bush’s speech focused on The United States being wronged.

We have seen our vulnerability––and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny––prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder––violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. [...] God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now"––they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty. [Italics mine]

For the Bush administration, Lincoln’s exposing of the nation's errors, notably the national sin of slavery for which the prolonged suffering of the Civil War was God's judgment and punishment, would be idiot’s folly. Whereas President Lincoln divined the War Between the States as having a causal relationship to acts of offense in which the entire country was complicit, President Bush denied any American or Executive Branch offense at “the deepest source.” President Bush’s refutation of American responsibility, let alone complicity, regarding the events leading up to and following September 11, 2001 led to a diminution of credibility toward the United States and resulted in federal institutions of national security taking on the intrusive role of an authoritative social management system without any accountability.

Like many presidents before him in wartime, President Bush turned to the mythos that the founding of the Republic symbolized the rise of an American Spirit at one with to the indestructible force of Freedom. The fragility of democratic institutions, however, is no mythos. Lincoln understood that. It was hard to know if Bush did. Instead of leading a national debate on the consequences of unilateral U.S. military action in Freedom’s name, the “vulnerability” of the nation he spoke of was actually a mask of vengeance––the antipathy of Freedom’s “peaceful outrage.” George W. Bush outlived his presidency, returning to private life with a net worth of $26 million while the rest of the country seethed in despairs of his administration’s making, unlike Lincoln who was shot and killed for holding the nation to its highest principles.

At 150 years, about the only thing that has not changed since Leaves of Grass was first published is the relevancy of the book itself. The dynamism contained in Leaves continues to make a mockery of today’s partisan political speech. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman in the opening stanza of the 1855 “Song of Myself.” That non-dualistic formulation would go far to dissolve hostile representations of other political entities. “Lack one lacks both,” wrote Whitman in “Song of Myself,” “...and the unseen is proved by the seen, / Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.”

Although the number of skillful commentaries by scholars and linguists, biographers, historians and poets will continue to increase, the original 1336 lines of the 1855 “Song of Myself” remain as they are––the original multifaceted break-through by a man whose humble origins and limited education replaced the conventional infestive and destructive society with a new world of infinite capacity for compassion. Putting himself here and now, in “the ambushed womb of shadows” (SOM, 1049), Whitman’s echo affects poets to this day. Among the Postbeat poets, heralds of the 150th year, the Wisconsin poet Antler provides the most comprehensive model of Whitmanic tradition. Allen Ginsberg judged Antler’s long poem “Factory” (Factory, City Lights, 1980, and Antler: The Selected Poems, Soft Skull Press, 2000) as “more fineness than I thought probable to see again in my lifetime from younger self-inspirer US poet” and proclaimed Antler “one of Whitman’s poets and orators to come.”

Antler has written that Whitman would not have had any idea of the world we inherited from him. “In Whitman’s time,” Antler writes in an essay entitled “About ‘Factory’,” “Mannahatta was smaller than Milwaukee is now. When he died in 1892, the tallest building in Mannahatta was ten stories high.” Citing a 1971 interview with Albert Speer, Hitler’s second in command, Antler argues, through Speer’s own admission years after the factories of genocide had risen and fallen, that the greatest difference between our time and Whitman’s is that it is the “vast gulf between our technological potential and our moral development that makes this age both so challenging and so terrifying” (City Lights, 66).

Could Whitman even have gotten anywhere today? What would he think of Ground Zero, Anne Waldman, cellphones, internet porn? How would he evolve, this master who dreamed on paper? You read from “Song of Myself” his words, “I know I am deathless (SOM, section 20), … We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, / There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them“ (SOM, section, 44). To this day, poets scourge the countryside looking for a little child who says from memory "I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-wash’d babe ... and / am not contained between my hat and boots.” (SOM, section 7).

Whitman’s rejection by the literary establishment would be expected today. Anticipated. If invited, he would not turn down literary functions with the First Lady. He would dust off “Respondez!”––his “outlaw moment” as Kenneth Burke calls it, or as Ted Berrigan knew it, “Whitman in Black.” Whitman was no “simplistic optimist,” as Sam Abrams points out (28), and Leaves of Grass is no sound-bite fodder for presidential speechwriters. There’s nothing in it that hypnotizes the masses into accepting abysmal disparity, corporate welfare or in willingly becoming environmental refugees. From “Respondez!” I can hear him, King of the Killers, take his seat before Congress this very day and say with diamond mind credence:

Let the theory of America still be management, caste,

comparison? (Say! What other theory would

you?)

And

Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! every one

who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his

satisfaction.

And

Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few

smouchers! let the few seize on what they

choose! let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!

And

Let the reflections of the things of the world be studied

in mirrors! let the things themselves still

continue unstudied!

“Respondez!” as Abrams pointed out, is to be “read against the acute sense of negativity” from someone “who claims to never doubt America.” This subtext runs throughout the exultant, idealized, athletic America that Whitman portrayed. The poem also signifies a sense that Whitman had an equally dark understanding of an America gone bad, a “vilified America, cursed America.” Citing scholar David Reynolds, Abrams writes that the suppression of Whitman’s “outlaw sermon” after its appearance in the second edition is to be taken as “the substratum for (the) intense affirmations” that permeate all of Leaves of Grass (31-32).

What is interesting is that “Respondez!”––in its absence––forms the bedrock of unconformity that was later mined so extensively throughout the various schools of Twentieth Century American Poetry. William Carlos Williams––in 1960, just before the end of his life––noted the major contribution Whitman had made to American poetry in his introduction to the big hardbound Illustrated Leaves of Grass (Grosset & Dunlap, 1971):

A jarring note had been struck by Whitman. The use of the language in the New World might have to be modified — if not yet, eventually — to accommodate the more variable principle enunciated for the first time by this man. With a shock we realized that, postpone as we may, this was the time our rigid dictates would be modified. … That the entire structure might be outmoded occurred to no one else of his generation.

Given the enormity of theoretical and formal practice Williams generated, the sense of variability he is credited with developing in his own poetry and prose, and how that “variable principle” opened the field of possibility as to what a poem is in modernity, the “jarring note” Whitman struck in him that “the entire structure might be outmoded” cannot be minimized. Williams’ application of the “variable foot” was derived from Whitman, whose free verse came to offer a release from obsessive mind, turgid self. Dr. Williams casts a person finding himself or herself most completely natural through loving participation in one’s immediate environment—through an actively sought contact with “the flesh of a constantly repeated permanence" by means of which he ascends to the “atmosphere of lovers,” in Whitman’s language, and comes to dwell in an immortal Now.

Finally, Whitman remains America’s first bodhisattva poet. He is the time-spanning wisdom teacher on the path whereby anybody who lets the poems into their heart can become aware of the Greater Self––the celebratory Great Self, the Great “I” he opened with in the 1855 Leaves. Rejecting any and all intermediaries between people and their own inherent nature accords with the self-reliant and unblinking heart of a bodhisattva, his body of work is the sutra of one determined not to leave the world without the total liberation of all sentient beings. When he wrote in the Preface to the ’55 edition “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he was referring to the people themselves, bound to the power of peace beyond human suffering and turmoil.

Also from the Preface to the 1855 edition, Whitman prophesizes American society as a place where individuals do not constantly wish for conditions to change, conditions they desired into being. He understood that there are no conditions to be overcome, that there is no hope in wishing to escape conditions. He imagined an America where the enemies of its anger are not subdued. Though it succeeds in conquering all external foes, they only increase. Only with the militia of love and compassion within its people, he repeatedly suggested, can it subdue its own mind. “America,” he wrote, “does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions … [it] accepts the lesson with calmness … [it] is not so impatient as has been supposed….”

So, in reading Whitman at 150 years, there is always the potential for an individual to experience radical and unfixated mindfulness that cannot be pushed back, mocked, seen cynically or discarded by outcomes that culminate in disappointment. Even though the America I have seen purges on news cycles, thrives on megalomaniacal political repellency, is far too quick to mule its underclass immigrants with beastly burdens, exerts a fundamentalist dogma over all secular and religious believers, expedites anger with Overwhelming Force, assassinates the peace-loving, allows dictators to thrive, creates technology that only promotes the robotic, the stressed-out, the medicated, the willing to trade in their membership as human beings––its suffering is as illusory as that of a child who dies in a dream.

I remain most amazed by the insight with which the teachings of a thirty-six year old poet and his thoughts on Liberty convey themselves across time. “Liberty relies upon itself,” wrote Whitman, “invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement.” Without Liberty, which he called “The Grand Idea,” Whitman understood that there is only illusion, for partial liberty can never be liberty, and any form of inequality is no equality at all, only the accumulation of indignity. In the Preface to the First Edition, he described an America––and through the image of America he signaled an enlightened conduct with all other inhabitants (living and dead)––free from the fruits of wrongdoing.

When I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master––and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves … when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority … when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character bud do not yet … when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no … when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat removed from his head and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart … and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape … or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth––then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

“A child said, What is the grass?” There are many who dream, but few with the inspiration and power to answer. We live in a period of wrenching change. America has a new kind of enemy––a non-state actor that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t operate in normal units, blends into civilian populations, and conducts surprise attacks. But America has an old kind of enemy––it concerns itself with all that is transitory, it knows itself as an entity that profiles friend from foe. The further we go, the more difficulties there are. Whitman stripped the body naked, vaunted its processes, sung our perfections. Many happy returns tender ghost.

19 October 2005, Revised 25 November 2010

[Jim Cohn. From Sutras & Bardos: Essays & Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets & The New Demotics. Museum of American Poetics Publications. 2011.]