Song of Myself, Section 1
"I celebrate myself" — the opening that announced an entirely new relationship between poet and reader.
Fetching from Flow blockchain…
Walt Whitman · 1855 · American
I am large, I contain multitudes.— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Section 51
Official judgment: “The 1881 edition was deemed obscene under Massachusetts law; Stevens threatened Whitman's publisher, James R. Osgood, with criminal prosecution for publishing "obscene literature."”
What happened: Publisher Osgood dropped the book rather than face prosecution; Whitman found a new publisher in Philadelphia.
Outcome: The scandal generated enormous publicity. Whitman reportedly said the ban 'had the best kind of effect' on sales. The Philadelphia edition sold well, and 'Leaves of Grass' became more widely known.
Official judgment: “Secretary Harlan discovered Whitman (who worked as a government clerk) had authored Leaves of Grass, which Harlan considered immoral. The annotated manuscript of the book was found in Whitman's desk.”
What happened: Whitman was fired from his government clerkship for being the author of an 'immoral' book.
Outcome: Whitman was immediately rehired by the Attorney General's office, and the incident prompted his friend William O'Connor to write the pamphlet "The Good Gray Poet," which helped rehabilitate Whitman's reputation.
American
Walt Whitman came of age in Jacksonian America, a moment of expansive democratic optimism shadowed by the gathering catastrophe of slavery. He worked as a printer, journalist, essayist, and schoolteacher before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855 — self-published, self-typeset, with the author's name nowhere on the cover but his face engraved as frontispiece, looking out with the informal confidence of a workman rather than a gentleman of letters.
Whitman's America was tearing itself apart over slavery even as it celebrated its continental expansion, and his poetry tried to hold the contradictions together: celebrating the American democratic experiment while demanding it live up to its own promises. He was influenced by Emerson's transcendentalism — Emerson wrote him that the first edition was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed" — but his vision was more physical, more democratic, more insistently embodied than Emerson's. Where Emerson transcended the body, Whitman celebrated it.
The Civil War broke and transformed him. He spent much of the war in Washington, D.C., visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals, writing letters for men who could not write, sitting with the dying. Drum-Taps and Sequel (which included his great Lincoln elegies) emerged from these years as a record of enormous grief. The war confirmed his belief in the Union but shattered his earlier optimism; Democratic Vistas, written in 1871, is a scathing critique of American materialism and corruption that sounds remarkably contemporary.
His later decades were marked by declining health, growing international fame, and the cultivation of a persona — "the good gray poet" — that he managed as carefully as any modern celebrity. He revised Leaves of Grass continuously until his death, producing nine editions that represent one of the strangest, most ambitious revision projects in literary history.
Leaves of Grass was dangerous because it refused to treat the human body as something to be hidden, spiritualized away, or spoken of only in medical or theological terms. Whitman wrote about bodies — male bodies, female bodies, his own body — with the same unembarrassed directness that he wrote about the American landscape. The "Calamus" poems, with their barely veiled homoerotic imagery, and the "Children of Adam" sequence, with its frank celebration of heterosexual desire, represented something American literature had simply never seen before.
But the deeper danger was political, not sexual. Whitman's democratic project — his insistence on cataloguing and celebrating every American, from slave to president, from prostitute to farmer — was an assault on the hierarchical assumptions of genteel culture. To place a slave and a senator in the same line of verse, to treat both as equally deserving of the poet's attention and love, was a radical act in 1855. Song of Myself is a democratic manifesto written as lyric poetry, which made it harder to dismiss than a political pamphlet.
The "I" of Leaves of Grass is also dangerous because it expands to include everything and everyone. "I contain multitudes" is not boasting but ontological: Whitman's self is deliberately coextensive with the American project, which means that any exclusion from America — of Black people, of women, of the poor — is also an exclusion from the self the poem is constructing. This is subversive in ways the Boston District Attorney probably couldn't fully articulate, which is why he fell back on obscenity charges.
The Boston ban reveals the intimate connection between sexual censorship and political censorship in 19th-century America. The District Attorney's office came for obscenity, but what it was really suppressing was a vision of American democracy that included bodies, desires, and people that polite culture preferred to manage through silence and invisibility. Sexual frankness and democratic radicalism turned out to be inseparable in Whitman's work, because both threatened the same Victorian hierarchies of propriety and propriety's close cousin, property.
The firing of Whitman from his government clerkship reveals how completely the state had internalized the idea that an author's published work determined their fitness for civic life. To have written an immoral book was to be, oneself, immoral — irredeemably so, regardless of the quality of one's work performance. This logic — that artistic transgression disqualifies a person from civil society — is one that has been applied repeatedly throughout history, and it's worth noting that in Whitman's case it didn't fully stick: the Attorney General's office rehired him the same day.
The bans also reveal how censorship can backfire. Whitman understood that controversy was a form of advertising, and he was not above cultivating it. He published Emerson's private letter of praise — without Emerson's permission — as a promotional endorsement. He was the first great American poet of self-promotion, and the censors were unwitting collaborators in his project.
The root of the inquisition
Read Leaves of Grass because it invented an American poetic voice that is still the ground on which American poetry stands. Ginsberg's "Howl," Langston Hughes's blues poetry, Galway Kinnell's body-centered verse, Allen Grossman's democratic inclusivity — all of them owe a direct and acknowledged debt to Whitman. To read him is to read the source code.
Read it because Song of Myself is one of literature's great experiments in ego and its dissolution. Whitman's "I" is so large it keeps dissolving into everyone else — "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" — and this movement between self and world, between the individual and the democratic collective, produces a kind of reading experience that no other poem quite replicates.
Read it in the knowledge that it cost its author his government job and nearly his publisher, and that he kept revising it anyway, across nine editions and thirty-seven years, because he believed it was his life's work and America's future. That kind of sustained, obstinate commitment to a vision — in the face of censorship, poverty, and indifference — is itself an argument for why literature matters.
Song of Myself, Section 1
"I celebrate myself" — the opening that announced an entirely new relationship between poet and reader.
Fetching from Flow blockchain…
Song of Myself, Section 11
The twenty-eight young men bathing — the most openly homoerotic passage, veiled in a female persona.
Fetching from Flow blockchain…
Calamus, Number 11
"When I Heard at the Close of the Day" — Whitman's most direct lyric of male love.
Fetching from Flow blockchain…
This book was silenced. It now lives permanently on the Flow blockchain — free to read, impossible to erase.
Open in Alexandria Library →