New Orleans Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass

As good poems do, New Orleans opens hearts. It split wide the soul of Walt Whitman, the man who became the nation's poet during America's darkest hour, the Civil War.

The city itself is a poem, pricking over the ages the imaginations of writers around the world. Its unique rhythm is the beat of human passion rushing through every city artery and canal, cloaked in music and poetic mystery. And so, since April is National Poetry Month and since Walt Whitman once slept here, we have a ready excuse to gaze at NOLA and consider how the city influenced literary history.

More than likely, you know of Whitman even if you don't consider yourself a poetry lover. Across this nation you'll find schools, parks, and buildings named to honor him. Furthermore,you may have had to study his poems in a class. But did you know that the first lines of his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, evolved after he lived for a time in New Orleans? The Crescent City directly influenced Whitman's beliefs about human rights and the power of the individual voice.

Born on the north shore of Long Island, N.Y., in 1819, Whitman moved with his family as a young child to Brooklyn. When old enough, he apprenticed with a printer and later moved to New York City. By the time he was 16 he returned to Long Island to teach school, and before he was 30, he began editing newspapers. It was his journalism work that brought him to New Orleans.

In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. (from Poets.org)

Writing about Whitman and the New Orleans Crescent, author Maverick Martin Harris says Whitman's job at the paper was unclear, that he may have been not the sole editor but one of several. 

Whitman sojourned in the Crescent City briefly but in that time, according to the PBS show The American Experience, Whitman fell in love with New Orleanians, free and slave alike, blossomed in the arms of our city's bohemian decadence, and changed his opinion on slavery. Here he percolated the first lines of Leaves of Grass, a book of poetry that introduced the world to free verse and extolled self-governance.

"In New Orleans, Whitman encounters a racially mixed society -- and the stark fact of human bondage. He searches for a poetic voice to unite the fraying body politic." (American Experience video)

Ed Folsom, co-editor of The Whitman Archive, says in the documentary that Whitman's job in New Orleans was the poet's "chance to see the nation in a way that he has not at all. ... Whitman's equivalent to the trip to Europe that the children of the privilege classes took."

 From Whitman's notes on New Orleans:

Women with splendid bodies — no bustles, no corsets, no enormities of any sort: large, luminous eyes, faces a rich olive, fascinating, magnetic, sexual, ignorant, illiterate; always more than pretty. Pretty is too weak a word to apply to them." (American Experience, Whitman)

Scholars speculate that Whitman had a falling out with his bosses at the New Orleans Crescent. Three months after arriving in the city, he leaves with his "favorite" brother, Jeff, a young man who'd been ill but who had joined Whitman on his New Orleans adventure. 

Shortly after returning to Brooklyn, Whitman processes what he'd seen down south. He also starts his own newspaper, The Brooklyn Freeman. An examination of his notebooks reveals that soon he found his clear poetic voice.

Folsom says in the documentary that "as you read through his little notebook you can see the moment where Leaves of Grass begins to emerge."

... And it starts, 'I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves. I am the poet of the body and I am ... ' and then he stops. And in that moment where he writes 'and I am' I can feel the moment where Whitman senses that "I" that is going to become his main character in all of his poems. That "I" has come into existence. 'And I am.' And then he crosses those little lines out. And there's a little space. And then he writes the first lines that are going to get into Leaves of Grass. 'I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul. I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters. And I will stand between the master and the slaves, entering into both so that both will understand me alike.' And there it is. Everything that's going to be great in Whitman is in those lines.

Whitman scholars think that in New Orleans the poet saw a glimpse of democracy's hope, experienced a mixing of the races that he understood would enrich America, and that slavery, with its cold brutalities in direct opposition to freedom for all, killed the spirit of this nation. 

Here is a video from YouTube that includes commentary about Walt Whitman from New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Whitman is strongly associated with New Jersey because he moved to Camden, N.J., in the 1870s and died there in 1892.