 Insofar as this course moves toward a consideration of the modern, American literature is a good place to start. Since in the last century, America was very much the site of the new, the modern, the future, and the alarming. America, we should recall, after 45B, is the product of England, Europe, and so is regarded as culturally subordinate, secondary, and minor, second-rate in culture as the child of a much stronger and long-standing parent country, and some of you know that America is still regarded that way in Europe by some people. The first settlers of this country, moreover, were to draw on the title of a book by a Stanford professor named J. Flegelman. The first settlers were prodigals and pilgrims. People were looking for refuge from bad circumstances in Europe or religious fanatics like the Puritans who were looking for a place where they could worship freely and do experimental religious colonies. In the south, of course, there were penal colonies, and the colonies were full of people who were looking for ways to make a buck, adventurers and people by definition, poor. Joyce writes in one of his short stories of America as the sweepings of other countries, and that's one way in which America has been regarded as Europe's underside, the rejects to the trash and the sweepings. And you still hear that attitude sometimes in Europe, where Americans are regarded as modern, capable of high-tech wonders, but are morally socially and intellectually inferior. By the 20th century, it's quite possible to see America as Europe's underside, its dark side, where everything that Europe rejected. So in the 19th century, though, America was still regarded as new, largely wild, undeveloped, largely unexplored, chaotic, a landscape of spectacular deserts and forests, but also wastelands slowly being domesticated by steam engines, factories and cotton gins. It's a landscape of pigs and pigsties and pig iron, and of unschooled yokels and hicks and rednecks, in the views of some people having no culture, except for poetry written about our great resources, the natural landscape, and, of course, the binauromanticized Native American. It's still possible to see the subsidiary status of America, but in two ways. On the negative side, it's possible to see America as a place that's undergone a loss and degradation of European culture, a place in which European culture has been devalued. On the positive side, and maybe the most dominant way of seeing American culture is that it's no culture, it's an experiment in social organization that starts out in pure innocence and creates a society and culture from scratch. And a corollary to all these considerations is that poetry, through the mid-19th century, the point at which we begin this course is largely an imitation of a superior European model. So those of you who have taken 45B, if you've read poetry at all, will encounter two dominant modes of poetry. There's the heroic couplet, rhyme verse, which dominated the poetry of the Enlightenment, and then a romantic blank verse and ballad kind of writing, which just picked up an imitation of English nature poets. Whitman and Dickinson, who grow out of the romantics, are bent on producing in different ways a distinct American voice, new voices that are modern. And Whitman, as I mentioned last time, is the inventor of free verse, verse without restrains, which is, in ways we're going to see, something uniquely American. And since invention and freedom have been two of our preeminently celebrated cultural practices, it's possible to see Whitman as both an inventor and as the originator of this free verse for him. Inventors are among our heroes. So I think of Eli Whitney or Robert Fulton, after whom Fulton Street is named, or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, or even Steve Jobs, who brings us this wonderful little iPod on which I have a recording of Walt Whitman reading on a wax cylinder that was recorded by another inventor, Thomas Edison. So I hope this works. I'm giving you guys a pound instead. Let's start out with a virtual beverage, if I can get this thing to work. Okay, you can tell he's from New York. I don't know if you picked up the Long Island accent. He says ample instead of ample, but he comes from Long Island, and this is recorded late in his life. He still has the New York accent. So Whitman, to be regarded as one of the inventors, I may name, since he's the inventor of a form of verse that's free from restraints, free to embody America's sense of vast possibilities. In actuality, Whitman is not the first person to write a free verse. Those of you who have read William Blake know that he wrote some long poems in unmetered poetry. In the 18th century, some of you may have run across Christopher Smart, who writes some blank free verse poems based on biblical rhythms. But those two poets were kind of buried in the 19th century and went nowhere. Whitman is the person who introduces free verse to an audience in a way that's picked up and followed and emulated throughout the rest of subsequent literary history. Its freedom is even bragged about in the poem. The poem brags about its lack of restraint from the start. I'm looking now on page four in stanza one, lines 12 and 13, where he says, I harbor for good or bad. I permit to speak at every hazard, nature without check, with original energy. You're getting it straight from the source here without any kind of repression. And later on on page four in line 19, he talks about appearing before you undisguised and naked, again with no restraint. On page four in section two in line 25, he starts to talk about the sound of his belched words. I'm sorry, it's page four. Line 25, the sound of the belched words of my voice, loose to the eddies of the wind, where he's bragging about the way the poem makes rude noises. On page seven in section five, lines 84 and 5, loaf with me in the grass, loose the stop from your throat. He's asking you to do as he does and to free yourself. And at this point, the poem gets dirty. If you follow the next few lines, he asks you to start on dressing him. I'm going to get back to this in a minute. On page nine in section eight, line 154, in a great verse paragraph, he talks about the blab of the pave, the blab that you hear on the pavements. And then a paragraph that goes on to give you the sound of urban America, the blab of the pave, tires of carts, slough of boot soles, talk of promenaders. Read through this. You get the sound of New York City. And finally on page 17, it stands at 52, line 1332, I, too, am not a bit tamed. I, too, am intranslatable. I sound my barbaric yop over the rifts of the world. That phrase, barbaric yop, has been used to characterize Whitman. It goes with the rude noise of belched words. And if we put together lines like these, we see the poem. It's not simply conscious of its unconventional modern poeticism, its unpoeticism, its transgressiveness in voice as well as subject matter, but it exalts in it and brags about it as when Whitman speaks elsewhere in Sog of Myself of I, Walt Whitman, a cosmos of Manhattan the sun, sensual, fleshy, turbulent, eating, drinking, and breeding. So Walt Whitman is at the center of this poem, which is after all called A Song of Myself, the first part of it. His life spans the years 1809 to 1892, which is to say it spanned the 19th century, and it makes Whitman a particularly good touchstone and starting point for this course. He grew up in a family of nine kids, and it was poor. And so he went to school until he was 11 and started to get odd jobs that included like setting type for printers and then helping to print and finally writing articles and the newspaper articles and writing. And it wasn't until he was in his 40s that he decided to launch himself as a poet. And what he did was to look around and see little there in the way of poetry. So his whole ambition was to be the poet of America, the first poet to speak for America without deference to the British. And indeed he regarded America itself as a great poem. And early in the poem he talks about, this is around line 35, stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, because he's using the word poem in a very radical sense from the Greek poesis, in turn from the Greek verb eion, which means to create, poesis is creation. And anything created can be regarded a poem. And in that light, what's the greatest poem of all but America? Something that's been created by the creative spirit of man. He takes that as a subject. Now it leaves the grass as first published in 1855 and Whitman's 44 or 45. And in his lifetime, the book blossomed and went through nine editions. I have here the Library of America edition of Walt Whitman. And I'm gonna show you what the 1855 book looked like. This part of the book was what was published in 1855. By the time Whitman died in the 1890s and produced what's called the deathbed edition, it was this size. So it just ballooned in the course of his lifetime. New editions came out after the first publication in 1855 and 1856, 1860, 1861, 1871, and 1891, all of them getting bigger and bigger. And one of the titles of one of the sections, Democratic Vistas implicitly argues that nothing on the horizon of the American landscape is not fit subject for an American poem. Nothing, because we're all equal and everything in the terrain of poetry is equal. And that's gonna get us into two new terrains that you will not have read about in a lot of poetry in 45B, which are the topics of sex in the city. Whitman brings them into poetry. He first of all tells us there's no subject to trivial for poetry. After all, one of the topsy takes up as a single blade of grass on page four, as he starts to contemplate this blade of grass. I'm in line, section one lines four to five. I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Elsewhere, leaves stiffen drooping and scabs and weeds on page seven in section five. The nearest nat is an explanation he writes on pages 14 and 15 in section 47. And where this is going in the direction of like commonness. It's not, if it plays a grass and gnats and flies and grains of sand can be a topic for poetry. Everything is topic for poetry in common, including the common man. So now recall that verse paragraph I read that begins with Whitman talking about the blabber, the pave and all these city sounds and sights. This is one of the first poems in the English language that makes the city the subject to poetry. Think about Wordsworth writing about London and the Prelude and just despising it and wanted to get away from the city. The city is antipoetic for the romantics. But for Whitman in America and across the ocean in France, we have a poet named Charles Baudelaire writing a book called Flowers of Evil in which Paris and the urban scene becomes a subject for poetry. The city now becomes a topic for poetry. And notice where things go as we read on page 11 of the butcher boy putting off his killing clothes or sharpening his knife, blacksmiths with grime and hairy chests. And in section 13, the Negro that drives the long ray of a stone yard of the stone yard steady and so forth. We're moving in the direction of labor and laborers here and further on the poem and other sections of factories and factory production of iron mills. And then here comes Noah's Ark on page 12. Section 14, where he starts up with the whale gander and then goes off to tell us about the sharp hoofed moose of the north, the cat on the house sill, the chickadee, the prairie dog, the brood of the turkey hen. Note these are all American animals, the moose, the turkey, the prairie dog celebrating America. It's kind of Noah's Ark. And then of course there's sexuality. His penis becomes a subject to this poem as much as anything else. More about this in a minute. But he tells us on page six in section three. 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, if you know what he means and I think that you do. So I think back to the leaves, stiff and drooping. Why does he describe leaves as stiff and drooping? Two interesting adjectives. Sexuality is everywhere in this poem. So women democratize this poetry by championing the freedom or the equality of subject matter. All things are fit to be made poetic. As he puts it in section 14 on page 12, whatever is commonest, cheapest, nearest is me. Actually take a look at this picture of Whitman, too. The front of this piece and compare it to pictures you've seen of poets who published prior to him. Shakespeare, for example, in Tennyson, who have like the ruffles around the neck and usually long cloaks, to suggest that they're disembodied and don't have bodies. Whitman's like in a state of the beginning undress. He's dressed informally, not like Wordsworth in the Black Evening Clothes. And since he invites you to undress him in the poem, this is a kind of invitation to a sign of formality. And then again, the US is treated as the greatest poem in Whitman's survey. Its entire terrain becomes a kind of free field for the operation of the imagination for creativity and invention. Again, to go back to that line I recited in part one, nature without check with original energy. America is in productive turmoil at the time that Whitman is writing. In the process of creation and the world soul is in its full hot, bristling activity. Does anybody know how many people lived in San Francisco in 1847? 459. And then of course, gold was discovered in 1848 and by 1849, there are 25,000 people living in San Francisco. 1,000 people came in every week and look at it now. 1850 is only 150 years ago. From 259 people to everything you see now. America did that in a very short space of time. The idea of the world soul is a romantic idea and it grows into the poem. It's developed in Emerson's essays where he writes about the over soul. And grows out of German romantic philosophy and notably Hegel, whose phenomenology of spirit talks about the human spirit developing evolutionary in time and getting more and more sharp and taking in more and more kind of like an amoeba. Let's recall what the ideas of God are in the 19th century. Those of you taking 45B know that in the 18th century Diaz started to see God, not so much in the Bible as in the universe where Newton started to detect regular laws and patterns suggesting there was an intelligence behind the operation of things. So God was seen to be eminent in nature, a kind of force in nature which philosophers started to explore. And then of course in the romantic era, romantics discovered that God manifests itself in the human spirit. For William Blake, God only is an ax in other men. So the manifestations of God on earth are seen through the operations of mankind and its collectivity and then the evolutionary flowing forth of everything that lives is an aspect of God. God is even eminent in a blade of grass for Whitman and in himself. So if God only acts and isn't living man, then divinity manifests itself in the process of being creative, of creating things, of originating. I'll take you back to that line where Whitman talks about speaking with original energy. Prior to the beginning of the 19th century it would have been blasphemous for anybody to suggest that they were doing anything like creative writing or being original. Shakespeare wasn't original, he copied stories and sources from other people, Milton Coppage the Bible. To be original or creative would have been blasphemous because only God could create things or originate. But after the development of a romantic philosophy with the idea that God acts and is in the activities of human beings it becomes possible for humans to be creative and original. So with the romantics creative writing begins and Whitman is writing on the crest of that literary movement. So in Hegel's philosophy the spirit progresses through the world encountering strange cultures and things that doesn't understand undergoing clashes and assimilating them like in Amoeba and taking them in and moving onward and onward to bigger and better things. In fact as Emerson writes about the over soul the spirit has a kind of manifest destiny to move on and conquer what it doesn't know, to conquer the unknown, to subsume it and incorporate it. And so to the poet in whom there is according to Emerson a great concentration of soul. Now we can begin to see the poem oscillating between two kinds of poles. At one extreme of the pendulum you start to get these catalogic edporings of details, turkeys and cats and prairie dogs and particulars and details. But on the other hand the sense of a unifying force that brings all these things together in a kind of panoramic comprehensive view. The poem keeps on oscillating between myself, I sing myself, I love and invite my soul, a very narrow and egoistical kind of preoccupation. But if you start to ask what's inside of that self it turns out to be like all of the Americans encountered. So that the poem keeps on veering back and forth dialectically with the focus on the I and everything that is not I. The poet is like America, a destined to take in and absorb more and more experience without being constrained. And indeed the publishing history of the poem suggests that it's evolutionary. It started in 1855 and it just kept on ballooning and growing organically. Women's Project was to write up America as a realm of the new, open to imagination, an anvil of creative heat where the mind is free to act on any and all raw materials, let it be and to transform them. So given the modern, the modernity of the poem, the amplitude of its subject matter, America and everything in it and its philosophy, romantic philosophy, the question remains of what possible verse form or method Whitman could have used to embody these aspirations. What makes this poem poetic? It's certainly not meter, which is a synonym for measure, meter is a kind of measure and as Whitman tells us on page 13 at the opening lines of 46, I know I have the best of time and space and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey. There's no measure. Instead we might regard the poem, since it is so evolutionary, as having what Coleridge called organic form. He distinguished two kinds of poetry in his critical writing, organic form, which just happens like dreams or daydreams or reveries. It just grows out of you. He famously said poetry should come as naturally as leaves to trees or not at all. And against that mechanical form, which is poetry written by a rule, and Coleridge is of course all for the organic form. And since Emerson was one of his, the people he influenced, Emerson believed in organic form too and said it is not meter, but a meter making argument that makes a poem. A thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing. So we're seeing both in Emerson and in Whitman a new architecture, democratic, inclusive, capable of containing anything and also intent on breaking down hierarchy and rules. Aristocracy is a kind of social structure in which some people and subjects are superior to others. But these kinds of hierarchies have to be thrown off in favor of the democratic. And similarly the idea that the poet must take on only lofty subjects. Petrarch and love and clouds is lost in this poem where we get lice, scabs, weeds, and Whitman's penis. So it's possible to see leaves of grass as a catalogic outpouring of Americana, a kind of cornucopia showing its abundance. This is one way of formally regarding Whitman, but this alone would make a mess of a poem if it was just a long list, a huge catalog. And so you want to see the poem unified both by its recurrent reference to romantic philosophy, but also by the sense you get of the myself, the personality who's speaking this poem, decidedly American. Personally the speaker has variously been characterized by critics as heroically self-celebratory, optimistic, full of gusto, verb, likeably politically and sexually aggressive, braving the open in the vast and taking everything all in and making it his own, a kind of representative American. The loose in lines suggests that the open spaciousness and vastness of America, and at the same time make us acquainted with this unifying personality and making the poem, therefore, something like a union of different states. I always thought that if you could analogize states to states of mind that Texas, for example, be a state you wouldn't want to be in. Well, let's think about all these lines in Whitman and states that are joined together according to the motto, e pluribus unum, out of all these many things. One thing happens, when Leaves Grass was published in 1855, the union had 38 states in it, and when Whitman finished publishing the book, it had 44. So one way of regarding the poem is to see it as the union of all these disparate parts and states. So for a second reason, Whitman becomes representative. Emerson wrote a book called Representative Men, in which he argued that the world, the over-soul, the world spirit manifests itself with a particular intensity in certain people who become representative of like the poet or the politician. Napoleon was like the example of the leader for Emerson, Gert of the poet, but Whitman saw himself as a representative poet, speaking for more than himself. Today, if you think about it, the idea of speaking for all of America, of speaking for Upper East Side Manhattan, for South Central Los Angeles and for Wasilly Alaska, it's impossible. Nobody could possibly do it and represent everybody, but Whitman could do it at the time he wrote because America was coming into its own and it's trying to invent itself and come to terms with the question of what is it to be an American if not only a dependent and a reject of a European parent. Whitman is struggling to form American national identity in a way that represents Americans to themselves, optimistically and favorably as inventive, energetic, capable of doing everything, of taking this barren continent and turning it into a land into the city on the top of the hill as the Puritans thought the new heaven and the new earth. Today we can realize Whitman's limits. Langston used famously writes in the 20th century that I too sing America, implying that Whitman has left out good percentages of the population he purports to represent and this kind of like determination to rush off to the west coast and absorb as much as he can. There's a kind of imperialist streak in Whitman too, which we can identify with America, but he is speaking America for Americans in a seminal important time in American history. He's great at emphasizing American idioms, earthy and irresist and vitalistic. If you read these lines out loud, you can start to hear the voices of soapbox orators, ranters, sprawl plazotypes, take these lines. I'm on page, it's section 48. I say to mankind, be not curious about God. For I who am curious about each, I'm not curious about God. I hear about God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. You can hear this on sprawl plaza any day of the week. You also hear the voices of philosophers and preachers, newspaper editors. Whitman was also a fan of Italian opera in a vaudeville and minstrel shows. So you get leaves of grass, something like the voice of the people, the populi in Thomas Jefferson's phrase, a voice that's speaking for the whole, and not just for the provincial, not just for Long Island or for a particular part of the country for all of us. So the personality helps to unify the poem. It's a romantic philosophy. And so does the poem's focus on creation and American creation in particular. We need to recall that America's land is founded on biblical principles. So the Puritans come over to the Bible and start seeding the East Coast with names like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Bethesda, Maryland, and so forth. And on the West Coast we get Sacramento, the Sacramento, Merced, Mercy, San Jose, St. Joseph, San Francisco, St. Francis, and Berkeley. I mean, the Bible is planted all over the American map. And the poem is taken as a subject to creation. So when we were looking at the prosody, so I used this word last time I taught 45C and got an email from a student who asked me about prosody. This is not a word, prosody. This study of poetry and meter. So there's evidence that Whitman studied biblical verse and biblical versification and is using the cadences of the Bible in the leaves of grass. And people who studied Hebrew scripture have pointed out that the Bible is working in a kind of poetry, but it's a poetry that depends on syntactic parallelisms. For example, God said, Let there be light, and there was light. The woman gave me, and I did eat. My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man. A lot of biblical phrases. So the Bible is important to the foundation of America and, again, is an epic of creation. And so it's important to the song of myself, leaves of grass because its subject is Biblically-derived America. So look at some of the parallelisms that he's using in, say, page seven, section five, the last verse paragraph. And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, and I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, and that all men ever born are also my brothers, and the one of my sisters and lovers, and that a calcine of the creation is love, and the limitless are leaves, stiffer, drooping in the fields, and brown ants, and you see the ants at the beginning of the line, setting up a parallelism. And, again, in section 13 on page 12. Not the way he uses participles, words that end in ING in the first three lines of the page. In me, the caressor of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward slowing, Tunisius aside in junior bending, not a person or object missing, absorbing all to myself, and then down at the page the same thing. What is commonest, cheapest is me, me going, adorning myself, not asking, scattering, where you get parallels and participles, a Biblically kind of rhetorical construction. So focusing on parallel lines makes me start to think about the line as the poem's real unit of construction. Each one is independent because it doesn't depend on the line that comes before, it doesn't have to rhyme with the line that comes before or after it. It doesn't have the same number of syllables. So relations of lines to lines are kind of relative. Each is individuated and kind of self-sufficient and self-governing and self-reliant. You could excise a line from leaves of grass and still the poem would make sense. Each line is a kind of cornucopia, an abundant outpouring of American diversity, making the poem a kind of finely organized community of lines. There are places in leaves of grass not anthologized in this book that adopt a modern strategy of commenting on the poem and how the poem was to be read, how to view its poetics. Sometimes he analogizes what he's doing to the engineering of locomotive. There's a section of leaves of grass that's called I Sing the Body Electric, where he sees himself as electrical technician. Lines of a song of myself are locomotive and power, in part because they give you what you'd see if you were on a transcontinental train crossing nine or 10 states. On page seven, look at section six, where he talks about grass making unifying hieroglyphic in line 106. And it spreads alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white, Canuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same, where the footnets tell you those four distinctly American names. Canuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman and Cuff names four kinds of people. This sort of diverse population you'd see if you were crossing the continent in a train. What if you cut this poem apart, cut all the lines that singly and put them in to end? Would they form a single line long enough to stretch across the continent in a kind of transcontinental train of thought? This poem is kind of taking you on a transcontinental train of thought. And let's recall also that the 19th century is a period of history that sees the lineation of America. We see the laying down of lines all over the continent. First of all, railroad lines. Let's try to recall, it's the Southern Pacific to connect the two tracks in 1865 in Utah with the Golden Spike. I do know that between 1830 and 1865 in England virtually all the railroad track that's there today got laid down. And the same in America, the land was covered with lines of train tracks. And also with other kinds of lines, property lines, border lines, fences. We see the song of myself and leaves the grass a kind of reflection of what's happening to America in the 19th century as it gets lineated and turned into a grid. The language too expands like the lines that breaking no restraint. It too wants to be free. So single words are bent in strange new combinations to express new matter. It's here I want to consider the sexuality of the poem and how often he talks about his penis. What a subject for poetry. What he calls in the sections of the poem that he can give to you the hubding of myself or this poem drooping strong and unseen that I always carry and that all men always carry. And the other part of the poem says, I want you to put me in your pocket so that I'm really close to your hips. I'm going to read you a section of a part of the poem called Calamus. This is called Whoever You Are Holding Me in Your Hand. Whoever you are holding me now in hand, put your lips upon my lips, I permit you, with the comrades long dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss, for I am the new husband and I am the comrade, or if you will, thrusting me beneath their clothing where I may feel the throbs of your heart arrest upon your hip, carry me when you go forth over land or sea. I always tell you to kiss the book or put it into your pocket so it's close to your body. I'll talk about his relationship to the reader shortly. The reader is part of the poem in ways that is true of no other poet. You've read the lines in which he says, on drape, you are not close to me. I can see through calico or gangam, I can see you naked. So in section five on page seven, starting in line 87, I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, how you settle your head a thwart my hips and turned over upon me, and part of the shirt from my bosom bone and plunged your tongue to my beer stripped heart and reached to you felt my beard and reached to you felt my feet. Figure out what's going on there and write a paper about it for me. So intercourse means many things and he really gets inside of you if you'll let him. So sexuality in the 19th century, if you took 45B you know that it was a taboo topic. Pianos in the 19th century had to be covered up with drapes because it was thought that seeing legs was obscene. You couldn't show piano legs to children because it was too suggestive. If you were at a dinner table and wanted a piece of white meat, you had to ask for a piece of chicken bosom because breast was a dirty word and the word pregnant you didn't use. Then a story that encapsulates for me the puritanicalness of America in the 19th century is that the English critic Matthew Arnold came over to give a lecture to her and after he gave a talk in Chicago one of the ladies book club members asked him if he wanted a drink and he said sure I like some whiskey so she brought him a bottle and a teaspoon. That was the Victorian era. Whitman doesn't break any of these restraints. He's telling his readers that he does not want to cut it off because his lines are long. Ladies could not read Whitman in the 19th century and it's almost certain that Dickinson never read him because he was just advertised as being uncouth and rude. Not respectable. And the sexuality of the poem, it's everywhere and it's fascinating and it raises all kinds of questions. One of my favorite sections is number 11 on pages 10 to 11 which is basically an account of a spinster, an unmarried woman staring out of her window at 28 men who are bathing on the seashore and the young men float in their backs where the white bellies bulge the sun. They do not ask who sees as fast to them. They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arcs. They do not think whom they south with spray. It's not a poem because the point of view is of a female looking at these undraped male bodies and admiring their sexuality so it seems like a heterosexual moment but you have to remind yourself that a writer is a male who's writing about what it's like to be a female desiring a male but where else do you see the word bulge in south with spray? This is followed by a section I read to you, a section about labor in America where we see the butcher boy putting off his killing clothes and blacksmiths and grime and hairy chests and the last year of their wastes and their massive arms. It's like a beefcake cattle cage in here. Is it not? The butcher boy takes off his clothes and pulls out his tool. So to be fair to Whitman, there's just as much a description of female sexuality in this poem too. On page 16 of section 49 you got an account of a couture or midwife delivering a birth and Whitman is exploring the way the baby comes out of the exquisite flexible doors of the female genitalia. So these passages have raised the question for readers of Whitman's sexuality. Was he homosexual or bisexual? Somebody asked him this question in the middle of his career and it kind of shocked him and then he started talking about how he had spawned like 10 or 12 legitimate children and was really like, he was going around the, in the words of the poem, he went around the country jetting the stuff of New Republics. But some suspicion is that he made up these stories about having illegitimate kids to act as a kind of disguise for the fact that he may have been gay. You would not believe some of the stuff that is in this book. This is the female form. It goes on to describe like the conception of a child. Love flesh, swelling and deliciously aching, limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white blow and delirious juice, bridegroom night of love working surely and softly in the prostrate dawn, and I'm embarrassed to go on. I urge you to explore this book. So, women's sexuality. I like the idea that America is a place that's polymorphously perverse. We're free to do anything. We're free to connect anything with anybody anytime we want. Anything goes here. We're the country of freedom. Lots of energy and productivity and room for invention too. To be fair to Whitman, in the 19th century it was like just a matter of course that if you went to visit somebody you would stay in the bed with a member of the same sex. Furniture was expensive. It was common for guys to sleep together when they visited for women too. And it may have been common for guys to get frisky because as you know if you've read the work of Michelle Foucault either in the birth of the clinic or in the history of sexuality there seems not to have been any sex thing as a homosexual until the late 19th century when with the rise of medical professions and psychiatrists people started classifying other people as this kind of neurotic or that kind of neurotic. There's no doubt that homosexual acts existed before the 1880s but they weren't labeled that way. People didn't think about it. So Whitman probably had a pretty liberal sexual life but he never admitted to being homosexual or gay and kind of hit it and left us guessing. It would have been he was smart not to want to get boxed into a hole but to represent the kind of freedom of everybody to be the kind of person they want to be. Even so, the erotic glow that you get in this poem the loss, it's an essential part of it Whitman is enthralled by sexuality and I think what you see him doing is rejecting normal conventionalized arrows for a fitter one not bound by monogamy exclusively an exclusively procreative focus or sexualized as a form of sublimated work because sexuality in this work is creative original and free-associated free associative and that one's another dialogue to this amazingly contradictory poem. On the one hand it seems at some moments narcissistic he's talking about like his genitalia and his sex and it's a song of myself after all but on the other hand it's a song that celebrates everything he's come into contact with it's excited him and fill him with erotic desire other human bodies with the whole prospect of adventure in America and you're implicated too in this the personality of Whitman emerges from all the effects I've been talking about the poem's vast descriptive panorama it's a philosophical grounding it's novelineation it's vocabulary, it's sexuality, it's biblicism, what comes out of all of this is the sense of an American adventurer somebody's lusting and lusting and eager to move on in life a social radical egalitarian and abolitionist we have two sections one on page 10 section 10 in which we get an account of the speaker taking in a runaway slave reminding us too of the the dating of the poem and then section 13 on page 11 talks about the negro worker the draid driver talking about the free man Whitman's politics on the subject of slavery and clear, I don't think he was ever like a full blown abolitionist but he was a free stater and opposed the expansion of slavery into other into these states and of course he was a ferocious supporter of the union of Abraham Lincoln during the civil war and worked as a male nurse for a reason you can think about patriotism and he's a complex guy so he comes across as sexually radical, egalitarian enthusiastic about the future unconquered always seeing something delicious and exciting on the horizon let me turn that into poetry I can bring it into these states I put together and make it mine the speaker seems open minded and good-willed and practical and full of youthful vitality close to natural impulse I'm speaking without restraint unchecked and that's to say not putting any kind of restraints on sexuality as well so the effect of all this is a powerful voice close to the natural striving to take on more and more the poem thematizes and formalizes and celebrates this kind of power the power of line 13 nature without check with original energy innocent and constantly productive during the middle of the evolution of leaves of grass there's a famous painting by a guy named Frederick Church I just discovered there's a data projector here so maybe I'll be able to do some projections it's a painting of Niagara Falls it's just like water pouring over a cliff without stopping it just keeps on going the painting was viewed by 100,000 people in the first month of its exhibition it's kind of like an artistic equivalent to leaves of grass we keep on pouring it out so the poem is full of ciphers for inventions and machines signs of the imagination trying to think over raw materials and multiplying its power and affecting earth-shaking metamorphoses creating poetry out of dross and using technology to shape the world of raw nature I'd call attention last time to the way poets are in competition with scientists in the middle of the 19th century science is doing so much to improve human life that artists start to feel threatened and therefore they get interested in technical effects too an invention of the sort we saw in Whitman the poet is in competition so Whitman applies technology to raw materials of the senses eroticizes them and gives us this poem and it's part of the poem's democratic vistas of making nothing not a subject of poetry it's important that you're part of it too there are two sections of Leaves of Grass one is called Sons of Adam which is kind of heterosexual the other is called Calamus which is about friendship or love among men there's room in this poem for everybody and there are a lot of passages like the one I read you where Whitman invites you to take him in your hand and kiss him and put him in your clothes and walk around with him he makes you a part of the poem and asks you to reflect upon your investment in this he also leaves you with a lesson when he tells you where he leads you on page 13 in section 46 I have no chair no church, no philosophy I lead no man to a dinner table library exchange but each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll my left hand hooking you around the waist my right hand pointing to landscapes of continents a public road, not I nor anyone else can travel that road for you you must travel it for yourself so that the poem ends up telling you as somebody's taken into his embrace and confidence that you have to be like him by not being like him you have to be yourself be unique and individual and sing the song of your own self so let me just close by saying that the 20th century poetry is heavily influenced by Whitman and we're going to see his effects and his voice reemerging in the history of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound those of you who have the Northern Anthology of Modern Poetry want to go ahead and volume and explore Pound's cantives William Carlos Williams wrote a long epic poem called Patterson about Patterson, New Jersey we've got a poem in this anthology by an English poet David Jones called the Anathemata which is taken after Whitman and Hart Crane's famous epic poem The Bridge is very much in competition with Whitman and there are more it's just that he leaves an indelible print on the subsequent shape of American literature