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p In the earliest of Whitman’s extant notebooks the owner’s address is given as the editorial offices of the Brooklyn Eagle, and it is fairly certain that he began making entries in the little notebook while still working for Van Anden. A few pages in the book are given to records of expenses and notes of a similar nature, but most of the space is devoted to aphorisms and strange-looking lines of unequal length, which somehow resemble lines of poetry. These were not outlines for editorials, and one feels that such notes of Whitman’s are something very intimate.

p The journalist who daily discussed current political problems on the pages of his newspaper, was tormented by a longing to understand, visualize and interpret the world. He was trying to write poetry which was peculiar both in content and form. Yet the very first note in Whitman’s little book reads: "Be simple and clear.—Be not occult.”  [54•2  This demand he followed both as a thinker and as a poet. The striving towards the real and the genuine can be felt in everything he 55 wrote. In the little notebook we also discern a powerful love of freedom. It breathes a most uncompromising democratic faith.

p Let me start with the aphorisms. "I never yet knew how it felt to think I stood in the presence of my superior.” It is possible that Whitman had in mind, above all else, God. Further on we read: "If the presence of God were made visible immediately before me, I could not abase myself.”   [55•1  Still less would the owner of this notebook agree to abase himself before any human being at all. "Liberty is not the fruition but the dawn of the morning of a nation.”  [55•2  In another place we find him saying: "He has the divine grammar of all tongues, and says indifferently and alike, How are you friend? to the President in the midst of his cabinet, and Good day my brother, to Sambo, among the hoes of the sugar field, and both understand him and know that his speech is right.”  [55•3  On this occasion “he” is both a philosopher and a poet at one time. In re-worked form these lines became part of Leaves of Grass.

p Throughout the notebook there gradually arises the image of a man incarnating Whitman’s ideal: a democrat, opposed to “gentlemen” of aristocratic origin, a man independent and good-natured, a man who demands equality for everybody, who prefers to be poor rather than rich. "The ignorant man,” we read in one remark, "is demented with the madness of owning things.... But the wisest soul knows that no object can really be owned by one man or woman any more than another.”  [55•4 

p Taken together, the aphorisms of the notebook tell us something about Whitman’s understanding of the social life of the country. By 1847 it grew subtler, as his democratic bent became more militant and his thirst to understand life in its fullness more imperative. Whitman was like a coiled spring, challenging all who thought, felt and acted differently from him or, one should rather say, from the character depicted by Walt Whitman. The owner of the notebook not only advocated the equality of the President and the average American, but also put the President and a Negro slave on the same level. 56 Moreover, Whitman called Sambo, laboring on the plantation, “brother”, while the President was only a “friend”.

p Besides the aphorisms, and echoing them, there appeared in the little notebook lines liki this:

p I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves
I am the poet of the body
And I am

p This line remained unfinished, but later Whitman repeated: "I am the poet of the body.” And, at last completing his thought, "And I am the poet of the soul.”   [56•1 

p Such, apparently, were the first lines of the very first verses of the new type which Walt Whitman committed to paper. It is still too early even to speak of “verses”; it is as though the first lumps of formless ore had been cast to the surface by the shovel. But it was from this ore that the poetic metal was to be smelted. In the poem "Song of Myself”, published for the first time at least seven years later, we find, for example, the following lines:

p I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me
          and the pains of hell are with me,
But first I graft and increase upon myself,
          the latter I translate into a new tongue.

p In reading the poet’s early notebook, one seems to see the rudimentary beginnings of Leaves of Grass. This is the first glimmer of the dawn of Whitman’s poetry. On the eve of the fifties he deliberately renounced the poetic canons which he had earlier followed faithfully. Traditional rhythms and rhymes began to shackle Whitman. He wanted to say something which could not be contained within the usual poetic conventions.

p The poet understood perfectly well that at first sight the verses, which were not only "without rhyme, but whollv regardless of the customary verbal melody & regularity...”  [56•2  57 would strike the reader with "incredulous amazement”. He says this in the introduction to the London edition of Leaves of Grass (it was not to be published in Whitman’s lifetime). Here, however, it must be observed that even the very first lines of verse that we find in Whitman’s notebook had certain elements which gave the feeling of rhyme and of rhythm.

p “I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul.” "I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves.” Words are repeated and word arrangements are repeated. These repetitions make us feel something similar to what we experience when we come across an internal rhyme in traditional poetry, and a complicated rhythmic pattern is also formed. Let us recall the lines in "Song of Myself" where Whitman speaks of his origins:

p My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d
          from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents
          the same, and their parents the same...

p In these lines, too, we find repetitions and sense a distinct rhythm. Repetitions and parallel grammatical constructions are also typical of the lines mentioned above: "The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me”, and so on....

p Whitman himself wrote that Leaves of Grass had its very own "rhythmic style"   [57•1  and he used to express delight at the writers who created the most complex harmonies. As a poet he did not reject the use of rhythm, but actually sought to emphasize it. This is evident in one of Whitman’s greatest poems, "Song of Myself”, which we quoted above.

p In the early editions of Leaves of Grass (up to the 1881 edition), the opening lines of "Song of Myself" read like this:

p I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

p Later Whitman felt that the first line was incomplete rhythmically, and somehow hung in the air, so he added 58 several words to it, which gave the line a rhythmical balance and harmony. It now reads:

p I celebrate myself, and sing myself....

p Now read aloud the second and third lines of "Song of Myself”. Their rhythmical quality is obvious. Whitman continued to polish his published poems throughout his life and in new editions of Leaves of Grass poems already known to the reader would glow with new colors. Their rhythm, in particular, grew ever more vivid and exact.

p Of course, it is still early for the reader to judge the wealth of Whitman’s "rhythmic style”. He has only become acquainted with a few lines from Leaves of Grass and the poet’s notebook. Nevertheless it is worthwhile here to make some general remarks about this "rhythmic style" of Whitman’s. Although the poet used metrical forms more often than is usually thought, strict meters in their, so to say, “pure” form are comparatively rare in his work. In Leaves of Grass there beats a multi-hued, shifting, varying rhythm (and it presents no small obstacle in the translation of Whitman’s poems). Correspondingly, in the poet’s work the most complicated melodies arise.

p The musical pattern of Whitman’s verse is achieved by the division of the lines into "rhythmical units”, which, as a rule, are quite large. These "rhythmical units" are organized around several stressed syllables, with the primary stresses forming the rhythmic basis; they are subordinated to a structural pattern which, though not always obvious, is nonetheless undoubtedly there. And, as we have seen, another distinctive feature of Whitman’s verse is the rhyme-like repetition of words. Almost half the lines in Leaves of Grass start with a repetition, and similar repetitions occur again and again at the end and in the middle of lines.

p But even the poet’s very earliest notebook allows us to see something else. In Whitman’s ponderings on philosophy and politics there was an obvious striving to express his thoughts in images (remember the philosopher’s greeting to Sambo). In Whitman’s first poetic jottings of a new type there is even more figurative imagery, even more of the feeling aroused by concrete objects. Whitman wrote of himself, "I am the poet of Equality...".  [58•1  Further on we find the following idea: just as the 59 air belongs to everyone, (”it is for the heroes and sages ... it is for the workingmen and farmers ... it is for the wicked just the same as the righteous”),  [59•1  so equality is the natural right of all. In Whitman’s poetry, even the very earliest, we get to know people, and above all, we see before us that well-defined, concrete person who has declared himself the poet of equality. Walt Whitman is both the author and the hero of the verses in the small notebook. From page to page his character unfolds; he is a man hungry for life. He wants to find out more about the world, to feel more; reality in all its infinite variety is dear to him. Whitman’s lines in the notebook are filled with faith and love of life:

p I am the poe.t of reality
I say the earth is not an echo,
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real....  [59•2 

p The struggle between the defenders of freedom and those who bind people in shackles is real; the physical world is real; the human body is real; man’s soul is real. Some of the ideas noted down by the poet in this little book show that certain pantheistic conceptions were close to his way of thinking. For instance: "The soul or spirit transmits itself into all matter—into rocks, and can live the life of a rock—into the sea, and can feel itself the sea....”   [59•3  These pantheistic motifs helped Whitman to express in images his feeling that the world was a totality, that the material and the spiritual aspects of life formed a unity. At the same time the “new” poet was instinctively driven towards materialism. At the very end of the forties he wrote on the margin of an article in an English magazine that materialism was the basis of poetry, meaning by this, above all, the need for poetry to be closely linked to life.

p There is yet another side to the man who comes to view in the small notebook.... It contains the outline of a poem in which Whitman expressed his idea of the role of the poet in the following unexpectedly bold and lively images:

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p To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
Let the physician and the priest go home.

p I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
0 despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

p I quote the lines in the form in which they later appeared in Song of Myself.

p Thus, Whitman not only grasped the world mentally, constantly inhaling everything around him, including that which is hidden from the human gaze. He did not only proclaim equality. As a poet, he apprehended life actively, he was vigorous, full of strength, full of determination to make people happier.

p In the soul of this American, who by the end of the forties had come to the conclusion that there was a real possibility of putting an end to slavery, a fiery desire was growing to free man from all his torments.

It was then that the poet was born in him.