Leaves of Grass

Early reviewers and readers of Whitman sometimes saw in his innovative, prose-like free verse traces of earlier poetic voices. One was James Macpherson, an 18th-century Scottish poet who composed a cycle of highly acclaimed epic poems purportedly written by an ancient bard named Ossian. Whitman knew and enjoyed Macpherson’s work, but did not emulate the Ossian style. Also often cited as a possible influence on Whitman was 19th-century English poet Samuel Warren, whose free verse prose poem “The Lily and the Bee” (1851) abounds in Whitmanesque parallelisms, apostrophe, and exclamatory tone, as well as the rhythms of the King James Bible. Some critics today still assert that the poem was a source for Whitman’s developing style. The third name often linked to Whitman was that of 19th-century English poet Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose Proverbial Philosophy (1838) was a best-seller in England and America. Whitman owned a copy and annotated it. Tupper wrote in long lines of free verse that resembles Whitman’s but lacks his originality of thought and boldness of expression. However, Tupper is notable for, like Whitman, proclaiming the value of insignificant things in creation:

The sea-wort floating on the waves, or rolled up high along the shore,

Ye counted useless and vile, heaping on it names of contempt:

Yet hath it gloriously triumphed, and man been humbled 

[…]

Be this, then, a lesson to thy soul, that thou reckon nothing worthless 

(Tupper, Martin Farquhar. “Of Hidden Uses.” Project Gutenberg. 1838).

In contrast, Whitman did not have much in common with the prominent American poets of the 1840s and 1850s, such as William Cullen Bryant, Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. Known as the Fireside Poets, they wrote in conventional metrical forms that did not interest Whitman. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, featuring Indigenous characters, was published in 1855, the same year as the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The following year, it sold 50,000 copies, and the Grolier Club named it as the most influential book of 1855. However, while Longfellow’s reputation declined drastically in the 20th century, Whitman’s steadily grew. 

One American author did have a major influence on Whitman: poet, essayist, and transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1837, Emerson spoke at Harvard University’s commencement. Titled “The American Scholar,” his address spoke of the need for the US to develop a national literature that was not dependent on previous models. Five years later, in March 1842, Whitman attended Emerson’s lecture, “Nature and the Powers of the Poet,” later published as “The Poet” (1844). In it, Emerson worried about the lack of dazzling, purely American talent:

We have yet had no genius in America […] which knew the value of our incomparable materials […] Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations […] the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres (Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” Poetry Foundation, 2009).

Whitman later acknowledged how much Emerson had inspired him. The writer John Townsend Trowbridge, in his 1902 Atlantic article, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” recalled that when he visited Whitman in 1860, the poet acknowledged that he would have been unable to write his poems had he not “come to himself” and that reading Emerson helped him to “find himself.” Trowbridge noted that Whitman, “used this characteristic expression: ‘I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil’” (Trowbridge, John Townsend. “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman.” Atlantic Monthly, 1902).