Leaves of Grass

There are many ways in which one can commit language to paper, and by far my least favourite of those would have to be poetry. Mostly because no one seems to be any good at it. Unpopular opinion perhaps, but Shakespeare was better at prose. So too was Wordsworth. Keats and Byron are utterly unreadable; as is most of Blake and Milton's work. A term of the WWI poets at school was enough to put me off them, and so much of everything else falls one side of bland, trite or forced. I'm not saying I could do any better, I'm saying that poetry is just extremely hard to do well. And so Shelley, Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti remained about the only poets on my good list. But now Walt Whitman's name can be added.

Leaves of Grass was Whitman's life's work. First publishing in 1855, he revisited the collection up until his death in 1892, during which time it grew from twelve to over 400 pieces. The poems touch on a wide range of topics but there does seem to be a shift over time as Whitman grew older and became more aware of his mortality - earlier poems celebrate the world around us and Whitman's optimistic humanist philosophy, and the achievements of mankind in creating the world's great societies, America among them. Then comes the American Civil War, which perhaps served as something of a loss of innocence for the writer, seeing brother turned against brother, but nonetheless providing opportunities to see small beauties in life. And then as he approaches later life, the tone becomes more reflective and solemn, showing more of an appreciation for the slower moments.

Safe to say, getting through nearly 500 pages of poetry was a task I have never even considered before. It was one I completed - but it was definitely hard going at times. Whitman employs a plodding, lengthy, free verse style that brings to mind the epic poetry of antiquity, and it's coupled with a tendency to labour the point. Several poems devolve into simply listing areas of the US or the world and describing their natural characteristics or the people that inhabit them; it's something he does very well but it comes up repeatedly. Likewise there are odd references that crop up regardless of the context - he seems to love talking about firemen, for example, or the rivers of America. But while it's a slog, at its best it is very good. It's hard not to be caught up in his enthusiasm over the natural beauty of his homeland, and his optimism for the future of humanity. He emphasises that every member of the human race should be considered equal, which was presumably pretty radical given the time and place, and states that modern society and democracy is the world's crowning achievement. I wonder what he'd make of things today.

Whitman's original edition of Leaves of Grass was short because he wanted it to be a book that the reader could carry with them and read in the open air; while I didn't manage that, I did particularly enjoy his appraisal of the natural world. Plus, his shout out to readers hundreds of years in the future did make me smile.

3.5/5

Sometimes it's better just to look on the bright side.