In 1855, with little fanfare and only a few printed copies (which barely included the author's name), Leaves of Grass was published in the United States. It was, as author Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) expected, poorly received.

Bothered not was this hitherto unknown poet.

I resist anything better than my own diversity,
And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
The moth and the fish eggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

Leaves of Grass was free verse. It did not rhyme or contain rhythmic features like the poetry of Whitman's contemporaries Longfellow and Tennyson. It was a collection of fifty-two untitled poems, and the most cohesive became known as "Song of Myself." Its first lines firmly asserted: "I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."   Whitman was in a sense correct although he should have said "gene" rather than atom. For more on the biology of our interconnectivity read Paul Nurse's What is Life?

The epic poem was sexually explicit and contained the unbridled joy of life and love, admiration for the immediate and profound, and a call for human connectedness beginning and ending with Whitman's self.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

River reeds large-leafed grass. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Whitman's first poetic work nevertheless caught the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the foremost philosophical idealist, and writer in the United States.

In response to receiving a copy of Leaves, Emerson wrote: "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy."

Loafe with me on the grass . . . loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I included Emerson's words for two reasons. First, Whitman's poetry was deeply sensual, dealing with what is perceived in sight, sound, touch, etc., and how that data imprints itself in our body of knowledge. Emerson's word choice, "not blind," was thus particularly apt, showing just how affected he was by the poem.   In Spanish there is a word duende, which means a visceral affectation to art. See The Greeks Had a Word For It to lengthen your emotional vocabulary.

Second, Transcendentalism, something Emerson and others like Henry David Thoreau had developed and promoted in hundreds of sermons and lectures, might not have been as long-lasting had it not been for Whitman's poetry.

Swift wind! Space! My soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;
What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,
What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed. . . .
and again as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

"The great function of poetry," wrote French academic Gaston Bachelard in his study of poetics and place, "is to give us back the situations of our dreams." Whitman writes from the height of the feeling of transcendence in the first-person singular. Something Emerson and Thoreau never quite achieved.   The grand sweep of emotion and generous extension of self in Whitman's poetry created in him a bit of a myth, an other-worldy being. Whitman is "a man who cannot be thought away," according to Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges continues: "Walt Whitman himself was a myth, a myth of a man who wrote, a very unfortunate man, very lonely, and yet he made of himself a rather splendid vagabond. I have pointed out that Whitman is perhaps the only writer on earth who has managed to create a mythological person of himself and one of the three persons of the Trinity is the reader, because when you read Walt Whitman, you are Walt Whitman."

"No. 308" by David Hockney, done 14th February 2020 on an iPad, part of Hockney's The Arrival of Spring collection painted during Lockdown.

Emerson once wrote that when looking at a horizon, he felt "joy to the point of sadness." Whitman brings us into the feeling.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart
And reach till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

To be held thus, cradled and penetrated by feeling and light—Whitman returns emotion to our hands and hearts. He expands his self-awareness outside of time and existence: "My foothold is tethered and mortised in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution." Yet, Whitman simultaneously conveys containment and its handmaiden contentment: "I exist as I am; that is enough."

"Turning tides, turning time." Illustration by Natasha Rauf. This Pakistani-born, Texas-raised, Portland-based artist works in digital mediums utilizing intense color palettes and art to materialize emotions.

Whitman was deeply influenced by Emerson, his communion with nature, his need for solitude, and his belief that stars ground our positions in both secular and spiritual worlds.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then... I contradict myself;
I am large...I contain multitudes.
I concentrate toward them that are nigh... I wait on the door slab.
Who has done his day's work and will soonest be
through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

Equally, the relationship between Whitman and later poets (like contemporary American poet Mary Oliver, who cited both Whitman and Emerson as influences) cannot be ignored. All wrote of a tremendous connective continuum of humanity, each contributing to it.

Learn more about free verse and rhythm and why Whitman's Song of Myself was unusual (and initially disliked) in Stephen Fry's highly accessible study of reading and writing poetry. Thoreau's early work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River is also excellent and gives us a sense of what Whitman himself was reading.