Leaves of Grass

Scholars consider this poem the weakest in the collection. Whitman revised it several times in different editions, adding some lines and deleting others. It appeared in all editions up to and including the fifth (1871-72) but was dropped from Leaves of Grass in 1881. However, two couplets were salvaged to form the poem “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night,” which appeared in the 1881 edition. The poem’s theme is a familiar one, with opposites of all kinds having equal value.

Readers may feel that in this poem the word “great” appears so often that its effectiveness is diluted—34 times in a 67-line poem (including 17 times in the first 18 lines, 11 times as the first word in the line). This is similar to the poem “Who Learns My Lesson Complete,” in which “wonderful” occurs 13 times, with 12 such occurrences occurring in the final 13 lines.

The poem expresses the speaker’s belief in common humanity in which all have Social, Political, and Spiritual Equality, all are capable of all things, and all are great in their own way. Acceptance, faith, liberty, and democracy are core aspects of life experienced from this level of understanding. In later poems, Whitman praised democracy more effusively; here, its mention is measured by comparison: “Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy” (Line 9).