Whitman opened up a pronominal poetics that has become a hallmark of recent American poetry.
– Bonnie Costello, The Plural of Us

1Because Whitman is generally remembered as the poet of “Song of Myself,” little attention has been paid so far to his deployment of the first-person plural, to what Bonnie Costello in her latest book compellingly named “the plural of us,” a phrase she borrows from Louise Bogan’s correspondence.1 Like Costello, I would like to take the “plural of us” as an invitation to approach the we-mode as “foundational to the grammar of politics,” and a “crucial index for how we speak of togetherness.”2 At issue here is the phrase’s disturbing ability to acknowledge that “we” is hardly ever truly plural; that for all its outwardly displayed inclusiveness (and however much “we” seemingly brings together an “I” and one or many others), “we” tends to dangerously coalesce into the voice of one. Yet at the same time, it seems that “we” can never fully emerge without simultaneously fabricating an oppositional “they” that is all the more powerful as it remains imaginary and undefined. Who then is left out, when we say “we”? Who does the we-mode disqualify, and where does the dichotomy between “we” and “them” leave the common good?

2The new upsurge of interest in the pronoun “we”—and the wealth of essays it has recently elicited in the fields of political theory, philosophy, and literary criticism3—evidently testifies to the ethical turn in the humanities. More importantly, it signals a pressing need to reinvent the language of democracy and citizenship, and ultimately ensure that a phrase such as “We the people” that opens the preamble of the United States Constitution truly represents “the plural of us.”4

3“What is it then between us?” one might ask, echoing the speaker of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (LG, p. 137).5 Whether we understand it as a call to reappraise “intimacy in America” (as does Peter Coviello) or as a test of poetry’s impulse toward community (as does Costello), the question urges us to probe into Whitman’s poetics of relationality, to explore the undefined “it” that lies “between us.” Costello warns us, however, that “‘We’ can register many different forms of togetherness. It can be royal or communal, universal or parochial, intimate or public, personal or impersonal, inclusive or exclusive […].”6 Where, when, and under what conditions does “we” emerge in the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass? How well does “we” fare on Whitman’s pronominal scene, and to what extent does the self-proclaimed democratic bard manage to sing the “divine average” (LG, p. 20), not the paranoid “we” of populist rhetoric, a monological “we” only masquerading as a plural?

4As it turns out, Whitman’s query into “the plural of us” is less assured that one might think. “For what are we,” the poet is begged to answer (in “Song of the Banner at Daybreak”): “mere strips of cloth profiting nothing, / Only flapping in the wind?” (LG, p. 241). Only three poems (out of the 384 that make up the 1891-2 edition) bear the first-person plural in their titles, either in pronominal or adjectival form ( “we,” “us,” “our” or “ours”), a surprisingly low figure for a poet determined to “utter the word […] En-Masse” and “give the sign of democracy” (LG, p. 3, 46). (By contrast, 63 titles make use of the first-person singular, a total of roughly one in six). Whitman’s “we” is not, as one might have expected, an entitled “we”; rather, it tends to be provisional and precarious—a construct, rather than a given. In other words, “we” in Whitman conjures up a “plural of us” that, like the pluralism of the U.S. to which it inadvertently beckons, forever points toward what Judith Butler calls “a unity it can never be.”7

5In examining how the we-mode in Leaves of grass lays the groundwork for the collective, I hope to delineate a shift from Whitman’s poetics of assemblage to his politics of assembly. Looking primarily at the three poems in which “we” and “our” figure prominently in a titular position (i. e. “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d,” “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Our Old Feuillage,” LG, p. 92-93, 111, 145-149), I shall suggest that even those poems most firmly anchored in the first-person plural repeatedly ask who “we” stands for, a question that lies at the heart of representative democracy. Arguing first that Whitman’s pronouns are almost always both singular and plural, I will then approach Leaves of Grass as an experiment in collecting, a pre-modernist assemblage that explores parataxis on the scale of the book, not just within the poems. Itself a “literary inter-state exhibition”8 (in the words of a contemporary reviewer), Leaves of Grass never quite recants what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the disturbance of violent relatedness,” where “From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity.”9

6While the title’s organic metaphor invites an analogy between the poet’s art of collecting and the botanist’s plucking, sampling, and gathering of “specimens,” I wish to carry the analogy further to ponder over Whitman’s obsessive reshuffling of Leaves of Grass and his relentless assembling of leaves into clusters as an attempt to “re-assemble the social” (in the words of sociologist Bruno Latour), eventually to show that “we,” in Whitman, is never “a group, only group formation.”10

Being Singular Plural

A single being is a contradiction in terms.
To want to say “we” is not at all sentimental, not at all familial or ‘communitarian.’ It is existence reclaiming its due or its condition: coexistence.
– Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural11

7Whitman’s “I” is a pluralized pronoun that weaves together a plural and a singular and this “being singular plural” may well be one of the defining features of what Costello calls his “pronominal poetics.”12 Indeed, “[a] lways a knit identity,” Whitman’s first-person singular is relational, “interlink’d” or, to borrow from his carpenter’s idiom, “well entretied, braced in the beams” (LG, p. 28, 22, 28). Even “Song of Myself” embraces a dynamic trajectory from its much-anthologized opening ( “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”) to its less-acknowledged final words ( “waiting for you”) ending with an open invitation to the reader—all the more so thanks to the once missing period at the end (see figure 1).13 Between the inaugural “I” and the closing “you” that frame the poem, other lines replicate the invitational gesture, such as “I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you” (where the “I” becomes a crowd pressing forward into the line, gathering momentum simply by “looking toward you,” LG, p. 48); likewise, “myself” translates into “us” in “It is time to explain myself—let us stand up,” which shifts characteristically from a singular to a plural (LG, p. 70).

Figure 1 – Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman, The Whitman Archive. https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/figures/ppp.00271.063.jpg

8“Le je, que nous nous figurons comme première personne du singulier, est pourtant tout entier un envoi […],” poet and critic Jean-Christophe Bailly muses in his essay entitled “La scène pronominale.”14 And indeed, much of Whitman’s first-person singulars are in fact addressed to an other, thus “spring [ing] from the pages” (LG, p. 424) toward a you that ultimately pluralizes them.

“We Two” and the Plural of Them

9As one leafs through the table of contents of the 1891-2 edition of Leaves of Grass, the first two poems that happen to use the we-mode in their titles turn out to be love poems, celebrating the gender-specific, intimate “we” of two lovers. The first, “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d” (LG, p. 92-93), and the second, “We Two Boys Together Clinging” (LG, p. 111), appear in close succession in the twin clusters Children of Adam and Calamus, both of which exalt “the manly love of comrades” (LG, p. 101). Interestingly, the scientific name “calamus” (an aromatic rhizome whose vernacular name “sweet flag” would have resonated differently in the cluster) calls to mind the conjugated Latin verb amamus (meaning “we love,” from amos, amas, amare, the first conjugation that Latin students learn by heart), thus suggesting that we read Calamus as an extended comment on how “we love.”

10Both of the aforementioned poems certainly make a show of circumscribing a community of two (no more) as the comma isolating “We Two” in the first title further emphasizes ( “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d”). While that poem doesn’t seem quite as gender-specific as the second ( “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” my emphasis), it nevertheless celebrates homoerotic freedom, and the sexual bliss of two (presumably male) humans “drop [ping] scents around lanes mornings and evenings” (l. 9) and “interwetting each other” (l. 15) —a striking image even by the standards of Whitman’s “spermatic imagination.”15 (Note, incidentally, how the poet-as-typesetter managed to place the graphic phrase precisely at the tip of its elongated line, so that it juts out of the poem and spills unabashedly into the next).

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d

We two, how long we were fool’d,
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.
(LG, p. 92-93)

11The anaphoric repetition of “we” in all but one of the poem’s nineteen lines contributes to the building of a sexual choreography through an accumulation of parallel structures staging along the way a variety of erotic assemblages—from “seas mingling” and “waves rolling over each other” (l. 15) to wild “four-footed” dances in the woods—that continue unabated all the way to the poem’s one and only period (l. 19), where they culminate in a stunning declaration of love and self-reliance à deux. The emphatic possessive at the poem’s end makes it clear that joy, here, is the gift of two (not just “our joy” but “our own joy”). Even the poem’s circular movement, which brings us back to where we began ( “we have arrived home again, we two,” l. 18) suggests an exclusive relationship, as the commas framing “we two” once again help visualize.

12And yet, the incantatory “we” that begins most lines invites the reader into the dance, including any of us (or all of us) into Marielle Macé’s definition of reading as a “two-partner dance”: “Dans la lecture s’esquisse ainsi le ‘pas de deux’ de toute relation esthétique (et à vrai dire, de toute expérience).”16 In retrospect, the title’s passive form ( “were fool’d”) already summons an elusive third-person (fooled by whom, one might ask?), thus suggesting that “we” only gradually conquers its agency, as it yanks itself away from the hovering presence of a spectral “them” toward an affirmation that “we are” (l. 17) and eventually “we have” (l. 18). In other words, even at its most assertive, “we” needs to deploy what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics,”17 plotting a “swift escape” (l. 2) to claim its own right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

#We Too: Humans, Animals, Posthumans

Noah was the first collector. Adam had given names to the animals, but it fell to Noah to collect them: “And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive” (Genesis 6: 19-20). Menaced by a Flood, one has to act swiftly. Anything overlooked will be lost forever: between including and excluding there can be no half measures. The collection is the unique bastion against the deluge of time. And Noah, perhaps alone of all collectors, achieved the complete set, or so at least the Bible would have us believe.
– John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting

13Whitman’s love poem “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d” expands the first-person plural of its title eventually to include all of God’s kingdom, “beasts, vegetables, minerals” (l. 10), and all of its creatures—or in the words of W. B. Yeats, “Fish, flesh, or fowl, […] / Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” ( “Sailing to Byzantium”).18 A biblical hymn to the Earth’s creatures (human and nonhuman alike) the poem skillfully challenges our anthropocentric belief in human exceptionalism, as the pair foregrounded in the title morphs into a series of animalistic pairs as if Whitman, like Noah, were summoning them two by two onto his paper Ark: “two fishes,” two “hawks,” two “suns,” “two comets,” “two clouds.” In the end, “we” is repeated 34 times in the poem, but it is never quite the same “we.”

14The poem thus exposes what Jean-Christophe Bailly calls “cette possibilité de dilatation offerte à tout sujet à même ce qui l’entoure, c’est-à-dire aussi dans ce qui n’est pas humain, dans les bêtes et les choses.”19 Two, according to Bailly, is the first step toward existence experienced as co-existence (what Nancy calls “being-with”): “Deux est donc l’ouverture initiale et absolue, ce qui rompt avec l’impuissance de l’unité indifférenciée […]: du un au deux, on passe du non-existant à l’existant, c’est-à-dire au multiple, c’est-à-dire au vivant.”20 The poem gives birth to a trans-species ecosystem that undermines any stable boundaries within species (human / nonhuman), genders (male / female), and numbers (singular / plural), proposing instead a continuum not to be confused with homogeneity. As long as the circle isn’t allowed to close in upon itself, as long as it remains open and dynamic, “emerging in the constant shuttle of ‘I’ and ‘you’” (Costello),21 “we” can stand for each of us as well as all of us, acknowledging each singularity within “the plural of us”:

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth, […]
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
LG, p. 125

“My Book and I”: Whitman’s Poetics of Assemblage

A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
– Walt Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”

15Whitman’s explorations of the “plural of us” cannot be fully grasped, however, without attending to his (intimate) relationship to the book ( “My book and I—what a period we have presumed to span!” he exclaims in A Backward Glance, LG, p. 475) and particularly his lifelong experimentation with the poetry collection. By poetry collection, I mean a largely overlooked literary genre whose existence is predicated on the acts of plucking, picking, sampling, and collecting, all of which are generally regarded as the particular province of the naturalist.22 Critics have profitably read Leaves of Grass as an herbarium, a collection of “glean [ed]” leaves and “emblematic […] blades” (LG, p. 97, 98), with the poet intent on

Collecting, dispensing, singing, […]
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side
(LG, p. 101)

16The book was to be literally “experimental” (LG, p. 472), conservative only in the sense of an attempt to preserve and perpetuate the diversity of the earth’s innumerable species.23

17Whitman was aware, no doubt, of the etymological connection between the gathering of poems and the gathering of flowers that dates back to ancient Greek poetry. Etymologically, to anthologize is to gather flowers into a bunch (from the Greek anthos meaning flower and legein to collect).24 Each cluster in Leaves of Grass, each “Bunch Poem” (to take up the original title of “Spontaneous Me,” LG, p. 89) repeats the gesture of gathering leaves into an aromatic bouquet fit to be handed out as a gift to a lover or reader— “These I […] collect for lovers” (LG, p. 101)—or, more dramatically, bequeathed to the living from the ageing poet’s deathbed— “the Earth […] gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last” (LG, p. 311), Whitman writes in “This Compost,” a poem that explores the affinities between composing and composting, leaves and leavings, crops and corpses.

18To recognize the poetry collection as a genre in its own right (as I propose to do here and elsewhere)25 is to rediscover it as a unique literary form situated at the intersection of science, politics and aesthetics—one that thrives on “being singular plural.” Through its relentless grappling with, and inquisitive search for, a balance between the one (book) and the many (poems), the poetry collection matters, I argue, because it investigates dynamic modes of assembling that are at once literary and scientific, poetic and political.

19While in English the word collection identifies the acts of collecting, cataloguing and inventorying as central to the production of the poetry book, in French the etymology of recueil (which is generally accepted as its equivalent, though in fact their meanings only partially overlap) points toward a contemplative mood (recueillement) that the English term only marginally recuperates through the derived word “collectedness.” Re-cueillir is to pick and pluck again, and this re-collecting is often charged with valedictory, if not downright funerary overtones, as collecting becomes an attempt to ward off, and domesticate, death—as Jean Baudrillard argued in his 1968 essay “The System of Objects”:

The man who collects things may already be dead, yet he manages literally to outlive himself through his collection, which, originating within this life, recapitulates him indefinitely beyond the point of death by absorbing death itself into the series and the cycle.26

20Absorbing death itself into a series or cycle is precisely what Whitman undertook to do in his ever-growing poetry collection. “The collection is the unique bastion against the deluge of time,” John Elsner and Roger Cardinal write in their introduction to The Cultures of Collecting.27 Thematically as well as structurally, the collecting at work in the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass is an act of postbellum Reconstruction that in many ways becomes an act of mourning, a tribute to the war’s innumerable (and grammatically uncountable) dead :28 “Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made” (LG, p. 13).

21The memorial function of the poetry collection is nowhere more explicit than in the cluster Memories of President Lincoln and especially “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a poem that weaves together (rhetorical) flowers and (textual) leaves into a funerary wreath in memoriam Abraham Lincoln:

With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
(LG, p. 277)

22With its “heart-shaped leaves” operating as a visual token of love for the assassinated president, the broken sprig repeats the violent irruption of death into the poem (mirroring the violence of Lincoln’s death) by way of the deferred action verb “break” which, thus postponed to the end of the line, is poised undecidedly between its death-laden transitive usage (to break a sprig is to pluck it and therefore cause it to wither) and its intransitive usage (‘to break’ as in ‘to break down’ or ‘fall apart’ as a result of shock)—both meanings merging eventually in the abrupt stopping of the (broken) line.

“Take My Leaves America” (LG, p. 16): J. J. Audubon, Whitman, and the Book as Collection

23Whitman’s art of collecting nevertheless extended beyond botany into America’s native fauna, and I propose to regard his ambitious poetic project as continuing the work of America’s most famous ornithologist, John James Audubon (1785-1851), whose equally ambitious book Birds of America (a total of four hundred and thirty-five life-size watercolors reproduced from hand-engraved plates inventorying America’s birds) appeared in London between 1827 and 1837, roughly twenty years prior to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The two volumes certainly share many features—in scope, size and significance—though, to my knowledge, no scholarly work has yet explored the connection.29

24Like Whitman, Audubon was a booklover and a self-taught artist, with a penchant for science and the tireless observation of nature. His greatest ambition was “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person” (emphasis added); the technique he developed enabled him over the years to “draw each individual of its natural size and colouring” to describe each specimen “en masse,” as part of a wider plan (as in an architect’s design or plan de masse). In the letter just quoted, Audubon looks back upon his career in an attempt to justify his method and assess its outcomes, using language that recalls A Backward Glance as when he writes: “I would have liked to raise an everlasting monument, commemorating with a grand effect the history and portraits of the birds of America.”30 The two men obviously shared a common impulse toward typology, toward the book as a memorial wherein to record America’s “specimens” for future generations. It is therefore possible that Audubon’s Birds of America helped spark Whitman’s desire to write America’s first natural history in verse—a “gift outright” to a land “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (Robert Frost).31

25Audubon certainly wanted to portray America whole, and so did Whitman with his “omnivorous lines” (LG, p. 67): “every square mile of these States without excepting a particle” (LG, p. 147). He crisscrossed the continent, “tramp [ing] a perpetual journey” (LG, p. 72), equipped not with a calamus but with his paint and brush. He revolutionized ornithology by representing America’s birds not singly but in pairs ( “The Female equally with the Male,” LG, p. 3), by drawing them from life (not from memory or taxidermized specimens, as his predecessors were wont to do), and in their natural environment, alongside plants and insects, thereby representing nature as an ecosystem made up of interrelated parts.

26Only the largest possible format could eventually accommodate Audubon’s life-size drawings (which it took him twenty years to complete) resulting in the double elephant folio edition, the largest book of its kind ever produced. Because it is too cumbersome for a single person to handle on their own, several collectors had special furniture designed and built to facilitate access to its monumental leaves.32 But beyond its sheer size, the book also mobilized a network of some three hundred subscribers—scientists, collectors and librarians whose sponsorship Audubon relentlessly courted over the years, as he struggled to secure the funding needed to keep the collection going. Subscribers would sign up to receive “installments” of five plates several times a year over many years: Audubon’s letters and journals provide a vivid account of his numerous failures and occasional successes as he strove to reach his goal. Meanwhile Audubon, who is generally portrayed as a lone explorer and painter, managed to assemble a devoted community of readers—a fascinating testimony to how a collection can actually give birth to a collective.

27In its own way, the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass also experiments with size,33 redefining the book as an ever-expanding collection, literally a “volume” in the image of the demographically as well as geographically expanding United States. The result is a challenge to any individual bent on (or coerced into) reading it sequentially from cover to cover—its annexes clearly a test of faith, even for the most enthusiastic reader (especially to contemporary readers, whose attention is bound to be preyed upon by digital dispersal and online fragmentation). The book is simply impossible to read continuously, let alone “at one sitting,” as Edgar Allan Poe once prescribed in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition”:

If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression— for if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.34

28Leaves of Grass [1891-2] is definitely “too long to be read at one sitting,” so long in fact that it is impossible not to take the title of its last poem (the aptly named “So Long”) at least partially as a self-reflexive comment on the book’s never-ending ending ( “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme,” LG, p. 480). Whitman’s interminable closing sections gleefully experiment with the “sense of an (un) ending” (to paraphrase Frank Kermode), with the reader teetering dangerously between exhaustion and exhilaration as the poet provides a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new poems, “After these and more” (LG, p. 322).35

29But what if, instead of considering the book’s intermittent reading as one of its failings (or as one of our own), we appreciated it as an invitation to let “the affairs of the world interfere,” as Poe himself suggested? What if Leaves of Grass actually encouraged history’s intrusion, implicitly commending the outside world’s tampering with the reader’s interior monologue? For to accept the book as a test of our sustained attention is to reconsider the act of reading not as the egotistic experience of a withdrawn self, but rather as a form of “being-with,” a way of revitalizing our alertness to the world and of our being in the world.36 All in all, the deathbed edition’s preordained interruptions create a precarious mode of reading that enables readers to fully experience the vulnerability of their attachment, as it requires them to renew their allegiance critically, and provisionally. “To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,” Whitman writes in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”: “That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants” (LG, p. 291).

Birds of America: Whitman’s Ode to the Hermit Thrush

Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it, )
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves,
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place with my own day here.
– Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok” (LG, p. 17)

30The third poem in Leaves of Grass whose title bears the first-person plural is “Our Old Feuillage,” a remarkable poem if only because it is “largely given over to a single extended catalogue” and constitutes “the second-longest such catalogue in all of Leaves of Grass” after section 33 of “Song of Myself”.37 As the speaker explores America’s “ample geography” (Emerson),38 he eventually identifies with a wide variety of birds whose names crowd the poem— sheldrakes, swallows, gulls, snowy herons, king-birds, wild geese and many more—whose actions are vividly depicted, as if from life, in the manner of Audubon: “alighting in autumn to refresh themselves,” “with erect heads watching” or “with wings slow flapping” (LG, p. 148). Whitman’s birds are really bards, however, and the poem’s “I” eventually speaks as one of them, as a bird among birds: “I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida”; “I triumphantly twittering”; “I feeding and taking turns with the rest” (LG, p. 148).

31Whitman’s self-portrait as a budding poet in “Out of the Cradle…” again pictures him Audubon-like, a “curious boy” observing birds, “Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating” birdsong into poetry, so that “[a] thousand warbling-echoes have started to life within [him], never to die” (LG, p. 207, 211). Likewise in “Starting from Paumanok,” the speaker begins by naming the continent’s manifold creatures like a new American Adam, shifting from quadrupeds to birds to eventually usher in “an American bard at last”39:

Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull,
Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze,
Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk,
And heard at dawn the unrivall’d one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars,
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.
LG, p. 15

32Interestingly, the singing at the end of the stanza can be attributed either to the bird previously named (“the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars,” as the first reading would suggest), or to the poet’s “I” juxtaposed on the same line ( “Solitary, singing in the West, I”), generating syntactic ambiguity. As is often the case with “participle-loving Whitman” (as Randall Jarrell called him), the floating gerunds operate as freestanding entities that can be multiply attached, thus creating an acute sense of syntactic mobility—arguably in keeping with the United States’ glorification of geographic, social and economic mobility. Eventually, bird and bard merge at the end of the stanza as they both “strike up” (rather than simply leave or depart) for a New World.

33I would contend that the hermit thrush that happens to be singled out in the opening stanza of “Starting from Paumanok” is unobtrusively programmatic. For one thing, its name made it particularly well suited to designate the solitary bard singing in the West, “far from the clank of crowds” and “populous cities” (LG, p. 15) or “in secluded recesses […] avoiding the settlements” (LG, p. 277). One can easily perceive the appeal of portraying the American bird/bard as a kind of St Jerome of the (American) wilderness, whose teachings might one day be disseminated across the continent. Strategically placed at the beginning of such a prefatory poem, the hermit thrush also serves a poetic agenda, as Whitman undertakes to write over John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” celebrating instead the hermit thrush (in French, grive solitaire) as “the unrivall’d one”—a phrase itself saturated with tokens of singularity. Buried deep in the first section of “Starting from Paumanok,” then, is a transatlantic poetry contest pitting Whitman against Keats, whose “plaintive anthem fades” as the Paumanok-born poet begins to sing his own powerful anthem. In fact, the hermit thrush is conjured up again halfway through Leaves of Grass in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” this time to lament (or grieve / grive?) the death of President Lincoln:

4

In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
(LG, p. 277)

34A native bird only to be found in North America, the hermit thrush clearly serves a political agenda as well as a literary one. Its ordinary looks and ubiquitous presence across the States made it particularly fit for its role as a democratic bird embodying America’s “divine average” (LG, p. 20). In his Ornithological Biography, Audubon supplemented his drawing (see figure 2) by recording the bird’s preference for low, horizontal branches—closer to the ground and grass than the aristocratic crowns of trees. The hermit thrush “prefers the darkest, most swampy, and most secluded cane-brakes along the margins of the Mississippi,” Audubon writes, and its flight “is performed low over the ground, and in a gliding manner” (therefore, horizontally) so that it “is most frequently seen on the ground” (rather than the upper regions of the atmosphere); even its nests are “placed lower on the branches of trees than those of the Wood Thrush” and “fixed to a horizontal bough.”40

Figure 2 – The Hermit-Thrush (1829), John James Audubon (1785-1851), The Birds of America n^o 12, plate 58, London, engraved by Robert Havell.

35Taking their cue from Whitman, American “Poets to Come” (LG, p. 14) would again turn to the hermit thrush. Amy Clampitt, for instance, wrote a poem entitled “A Hermit Thrush” (1985) that elaborates on the bird’s solitary habits and employs the we-mode profusely to investigate the nature of human attachment. As in Whitman’s poem of dejection “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”—whose speaker “wended the shore [he] know [s]” only to perceive he has “not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can” (LG, p. 212, 213)—, Clampitt’s “I” muses dejectedly that:

Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us, that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing.

36Unsurprisingly, the lines are rife with Whitmanian allusions, as in the opening stanza where readers might be reminded of the “crossing” of Brooklyn Ferry, the low and high tides of “As IEbb’d…,” the “isthmus” and “island” of “Starting from Paumanok”:

A Hermit Thrush

Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island, [… ]41

37Yet Clampitt was not the first to build upon the bird’s intertextual potential. The hermit thrush had already been singing long before in the desiccated pine trees of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a poem whose famous opening lines ( “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”) are a Whitmanian sprig plucked from the heroic breast of Abraham Lincoln—who was indeed “cruelly” shot in April—and ineffectively grafted upon the “dry grass” of the decidedly unheroic post-World War I era:

If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
(l. 352-8, emphasis added)

38Eliot turned Whitman’s Romantic symbol upside down, however, drawing the reader’s attention to the bird’s Latin name in a footnote that long puzzled critics.42 That the bird’s scientific name should be the rather unpoetic turdus (or, according to Audubon, turdus solitarius or turdus minor) must have perversely appealed to Eliot, who managed to send generations of scholars on a wild goose chase, as they hoped to discover the hidden connection between the bird and the bard, beyond the scatological wordplay that just couldn’t be “it.”

E Pluribus Unum: Whitman’s Politics of Assembly

… all my pieces […] an interpenetrating, composite, inseparable Unity.
– Walt Whitman, 1876 preface (LG, p. 657)

39Whitman’s poetic excursions into the fields of botany and ornithology are always already inquiries into the field of politics. The book’s third we-poem, “Our Old Feuillage” (LG, p. 145-149), interweaves the poetic and the political as if they both grew from the same tree. Its speaker vows to “collect bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States” (LG, p. 149), striving to reassemble the nation’s States into a more stable Union and to reclaim its European past all at once.43 By foregrounding the French noun “feuillage” (where “foliage” might have been less likely to antagonize Anglophone readers), the poem traces a continuity between the U.S. (us) and Europe (you), seemingly arguing that “we” is but a new leaf turned from the old revolutionary stem. The poem’s bestiary eventually ushers in the dream of a reconstructed union in blazing capital letters that visually “spring from the pages” (LG, p. 424): “One identity” (LG, p. 149).

40Following Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, I’d like to suggest that Whitman’s poetry collecting formally explores a politics of assembly, making way for what Butler calls “transient and critical gatherings” as opposed to the homogenized “monological” gatherings that can only tip democracy toward its Other.44 In this light, the editorial history of Leaves of Grass becomes a narrative of how the book itself edits History. Indeed, the various versions of Leaves of Grass form a precarious, multidirectional and dynamic “ensemble,” perpetually seeking to reassemble in the face of the nation’s “unobliterable division line” (LG, p. 485)—a literary assemblage in the image of an assembling nation that remains, as in Clampitt’s poem, “a broken, a much-mended thing.”45

41“I can hardly tell why, but feel very positively that if anything can justify my revolutionary attempts & utterances, it is such ensemble—,” Whitman wrote on a postcard to a friend that accompanied his gift of the last edition (LG, xxvii). Repeatedly in his poetry and prose, Whitman chooses the French word ensemble, originally an adverb meaning “together” (only later used as a noun) to convey a sense of aesthetic unity—as in a musical ensemble, where a group of musicians perform together—emphasizing dynamic process over stable unity. Remember the speaker’s pledge (in “Starting from Paumanok”) that “I will not make poems with reference to parts, / But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble” (LG, p. 21) —where the string of appositive nouns “poems, songs, thoughts” repeats the book’s dynamic assembling of “poems,” many of which are indeed entitled “Song” or “Thought,” even to the point of utter referential ambiguity.46

42The word ensemble clearly puzzled Whitman’s contemporaries. One anonymous reviewer wrote: “Ensemble. What does Walt Whitman mean by that pet word?” Adding sternly: “It is a word without legal status, an innovation, a piece of piracy from the French.”47 Meanwhile the word epitomized Whitman’s singular way of fusing his poetic and political projects, as he undertook the double task of re-assembling the book and salvaging the country’s Union. The analogy between the book of poems and the Union of the States as a “manifold ensemble” (LG, p. 168) is nowhere better articulated than in Whitman’s rewriting of Emerson’s declaration of literary independence ( “America is a poem in our eyes”).48 While Emerson’s statement resorts to the we-mode ( “our eyes”), Whitman’s 1855 preface opts for a third-person aphorism ( “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” LG, p. 616), thus revising Emerson’s singular “America” into the pluralized “United States” whose verb agreement is, strikingly, plural.

43“Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?” Whitman asks in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (LG, p. 293). Formerly entitled “Poem of Many in One,” “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” offers yet another version of Emerson’s statement: “These States are the amplest poem” (LG, p. 288). Crucially for our topic, the poem functions both as an ars poetica and a political manifesto, explicitly bringing together the book’s compositional ideal (as a recomposed unity) and the United States’ federal ideal (as encapsulated in the nation’s former motto e pluribus unum meaning “out of a plurality, a unity”).

“Allons! The Road Is Before Us!” (LG, p. 134): The Poet as Public Assembler

44In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” Whitman decisively places “the poet” at the center of the nation’s political system, in a blunt repeal of Plato’s Republic. I would suggest that his poetic meditations by the lake partly originated in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (1820) whose signature poem “The Lake” is generally regarded as France’s first Romantic manifesto. Of course, Whitman’s choice of free verse tends to erase the connection. Yet as a political poet and as a leader of the 1848 Revolution (repeatedly involved in public assemblies and street riots, see figure 3), Lamartine had a tremendous influence on Whitman, who wrote several enthusiastic reviews of Lamartine’s work as a historian of the French Revolution.49

45Whitman’s efforts to rewrite the United States’Constitution are pervasive. The preamble to the Constitution comprises 52 memorable words, just like the 52 sections of “Song of Myself”—a formal correspondence in keeping with Whitman’s views on the political poet. Likewise, the numbered sections into which the longer poems are divided visually replicate the numbered articles of the Constitution. More generally, the multiple versions of Leaves of Grass may be read as legal drafts and editorial amendments destined to reposition the inaugural “we” that the signees once confidently placed at the top of the nation’s Constitution.

Figure 3 – Lamartine refusant le drapeau rouge devant l’Hôtel de Ville (1848), Henri Félix Philippoteaux (1815-1884) Huile sur toile (298 cm x 629 cm), Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

46Against the assumptions of critics who have read the later editions of Leaves of Grass as “foregrounding Whitman’s desire to impose unity on, and thus neutralize, political conflicts” (as Thomas Haddox writes),50 I’d like to suggest that while Whitman’s revisions indicate a longing for unity that the poems formally continue, they also make way for a poetic model that, like the Republic they seek to salvage, is “ever constructive” (LG, p. 291). It is possible that Whitman had in fact devised just the right poetic form to embody his political agenda, namely a poly-centered unit, a “composite,” an ample “Melange,” where each poem-State could be approached individually, or contextually as part of a federalized ensemble.

47Perhaps it would be too much to speak of Leaves of Grass as a pre-modernist assemblage (namely, “a work of art made by grouping together found or unrelated objects”, as defined by the Webster dictionary). Yet to Robert Duncan at least, Whitman’s theory and practice of poetic/political “ensemblism” undoubtedly anticipated the Modernist art of “assemblage”:

Democracy was the politics of the ensemble, and Whitman saw his Leaves of Grass as belonging to the poetics of the ensemblist. […] Back of our own contemporary arts of the collagist, the assembler of forms, is the ancestral, protean concept, wider and deeper, of the poet as devotée of the ensemble.51

48Following Whitman’s foundational project, a number of American poets have since explored the poetry collection as embodying a kind of laboratory of democracy wherein to question the nature and solidity of the social link, a space where the tension between autonomy and relationality can be tested and redeployed to its full force and complexity. Leaves of Grass thus offers a unique and striking mode of poetic gathering, one that simultaneously explores what it means to assemble as a group, and what coming together might, or might not, afford.

Conclusion

49“Let us acknowledge that the subject of politics is us” (“Admettons que le sujet de la politique, c’est nous”), Tristan Garcia begins.52 A uniquely malleable pronoun ( “sorte de sujet plastique,” Garcia continues),53 “we” makes it possible to assemble collectively, therefore politically; and, I would add, to assemble freely. But if to say “we” is to lay the foundations of activism and political change (as in Obama’s 2008 “Yes we can” speech, or Gwendolyn Brooks’ famous opening line “We real cool. We”), why, in the end, does Whitman-the-democratic-bard use “we” so sparingly? Much more frequent than “us,” phrases such as “I too” or “you too” repeatedly gesture toward a plural without ever taking it for granted so that “we” remains a horizon, a modality to be imagined. (Note, for instance, the effectiveness of the phrase #MeToo as signaling not a pre-existing group but rather, as Latour would say, group formation.)

50Ultimately, Whitman’s poems deploy a multitude of singulars that only rarely coalesce into a stable “we.” Even the first-person plural delivered in the closing stanzas of both “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” ( “We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,” LG, p. 140) and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” ( “We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, […] / Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet,” LG, p. 214) remains a precarious, capricious “we”. There is a tentativeness to Whitman’s “we”. It is, after all, merely implied in the French “Allons!” of “Song of the Open Road,” arguably its most coercive, formulaic expression in all of Leaves of Grass. In the poetry collection as both theory and practice, Whitman may in fact have found a collective form that successfully incorporates without subordinating, that integrates without homogenizing, something like—dare I say it? —something like an aggregation.