This passage, inspired by Whitman’s own eyewitness accounts of the great fires of 1845, became a popular posting:

I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken ....
tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
Heat and smoke I inspired .... I heard the yelling
shouts of my comrades,
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have cleared the beams away .... they tenderly
lift me forth.

 

I lie in the night air in my red shirt .... the pervading
hush is for my sake,
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,
White and beautiful are the faces around me .... the
heads are bared of their fire-caps,
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches
(“[Song of Myself],”a 1855, p. 68).

“The proof of a poet,” wrote Whitman in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, “is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (p. 27). For decades now, American popular culture has participated in a conversation with Whitman that continues to grow more lively and intimate. The absorption of Whitman by the mainstream is clearly demonstrated in film—an appropriate medium, considering the poet’s interest in appealing to the ears and eyes of readers. When Ryan O‘Neal quotes the last lines of “Song of the Open Road” as part of his wedding vows in Love Story (1970), he pronounces Whitman as the spokesman for love that knows no boundaries of class, creed, or time; “Song of Myself “ is used similarly in With Honors (1994) when read over the deathbed of Simon Wilder, a beloved eccentric (played by Joe Pesci) found living in the basement of Harvard’s Huntington Library. Whitman stars with Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989), and represents proud individuality and independence of spirit—socially and sexually. ”I Sing the Body Electric“ inspires dancers to celebrate physicality in Fame (1980); as Annie Savoy, Susan Sarandon also uses the poem to celebrate her body in the sexiest scene of Bull Durham (1988).

The musicality of Whitman’s long lines have inspired American composers from Charles Ives to Madonna, who quotes from “Vocalism” in her song “Sanctuary”: “Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, / Him or her I shall follow.” Well over 500 recordings have been made of Whitman-inspired songs, with such artists as Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein lending Whitman’s words a classic pop sensibility. Bryan K. Garman’s A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen, introduces Whit man’s influence on rock and folk musicians, far too vast for adequate treatment here. As a single example of the continuing presence of Whitman through generations of singers, consider this: The popular alt-country group Wilco (along with British singer-activist Billy Bragg) recorded a 1946 Woody Guthrie song entitled “Walt Whitman’s Niece” and included it on the 1998 release Mermaid Avenue. Guthrie himself never recorded the song; one wonders how far the joke of the title would go with his own audiences.

Many Americans get the joke now, and can smile about it. Others still don’t find it funny. For few writers have provoked such extreme reactions as Walt Whitman—America’s poet, but also America’s gay, politically radical, socially liberal spokesperson. And few books of poetry have had so controversial a history as Whitman’s brash, erotically charged Leaves of Grass. When the First Edition appeared in 1855, influential man of letters Rufus Griswold denounced the book as a “gross obscenity,” and an anonymous London Critic reviewer wrote that “the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass [the first page of the poem eventually known as ”I Sing the Body Electric“] deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner’s whip.” Finding himself on the defensive early on, Whitman wrote a series of anonymous self-reviews that clarified the goals of Leaves and its author, “the begetter of a new offspring out of literature, taking with easy nonchalance the chances of its present reception, and, through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future reception” (from Whitman’s unsigned Leaves review in the Brooklyn Daily Times, September 29, 1855).

Five years later, Whitman’s own mentor Emerson, who advised against including the highly charged “Children of Adam” poems, tested his “easy nonchalance.” Holding his ground yet again, Whitman explained to Emerson that the exclusion was unacceptable since it would be understood as an “apology,” “surrender,” and “admission that something or other was wrong” (The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 224). In 1882 Boston publisher James R. Osgood was forced to stop printing the Sixth Edition when the city’s district attorney, Oliver Stevens, ruled that Leaves of Grass violated “the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature.” After looking at Osgood’s list of necessary deletions from Leaves of Grass, Whitman responded: “The list whole and several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under any circumstances” (Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life, p. 20). The sixty-three-year-old immediately sat down and wrote the essay “A Memorandum at a Venture,” a diatribe condemning America’s close-minded and unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality. Whitman’s poems continued to provoke harsh criticism and calls for censorship through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: As recently as 1998, conservatives were given another opportunity to condemn the book’s suggestive content when President Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky a copy as a gift. Lewinsky’s own critique of Whitman, enclosed in her thank you note, facilitated the controversy: “Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar—take it, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!”

Whitman would have probably laughed in approval of Lewinsky’s reading. Despite the relentless public outcry and his permanent defensive posturing, he also “took in” and “savored” his poems as well as the writing process. From the publication of the First Edition in 1855 until his death in 1892, he continued to revise and expand his body of work.