WALT WHITMAN AM A CAMERA
by John H. Lienhard
Click here for audio of Episode 342.
Today, Walt Whitman responds to photography. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Walt Whitman's epic poem,
Leaves of Grass, grew from the soil of
19th-century technology. It's a sprawling portrait
of America, published in 1855 -- just as we were
coming into industrial power. The work reveled in
our new machines. They're all there: locomotives in
the Wasatch Mountains, the steam-driven Brooklyn
Ferry, the use of ether in surgery.
The Leaves of Grass was a new poetic medium
-- unconstrained free verse about a free land. It
unleashed a firestorm of literary controversy. Yet
it struggled to speak with photographic accuracy.
One section begins with the words
Whitman wrestles with his "terrible
doubt" through 300 lyric pages. Out of the struggle
comes a rich portrait of a modern world, rising from
a wilderness. And the new technology of photography,
more than any other, obsesses him. On the one hand,
OF THE terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all,
that we may be deluded, ...
Poet! beware lest your poems are made in the
spirit that comes from the study of pictures of
things, [and not from] contact with real things
On the other hand he's drawn to the new
cameras. His name doesn't appear on the title page of
the first edition. Instead, he gives us the thing
itself -- his own daguerreotype, in a casual pose.
Later he said about that,
The contents of the book form a daguerreotype of
[my] inner being, and the title page bears a
representation of its physical tabernacle.
As photography swept the American mind,
photo galleries sprang up. Even before Leaves of
Grass, Whitman used those new galleries as models
for his own mind in a poem titled "Pictures."
And in the Leaves of Grass he
says of himself that he "peers along the
In a little house pictures I keep, many
hanging suspended -- It is not a fixed house,
But behold! it has room enough -- in it,
hundreds and thousands, --
all the varieties; ...
Poets have always seen themselves as
picture-makers. But Miles Orvell thinks the camera
brought Whitman to a new level. He was deeply
affected by the photographic vision of reality. And
the new poetic photography of the Leaves of
Grass pans across the American scene just
the way a camera would.
Two years later, Whitman was enchanted by the
Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Like Leaves
of Grass, the Crystal Palace was an utterly new
structure that housed an indiscriminate panorama of
modern life. It may have been English, but Whitman
called it the "perfectly proportioned American
Culture is, after all, the mirror of technology.
Whitman saw that truth with photographic clarity,
and he used it to build a vision of America that
lay beyond even the camera's reach.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Orvell, M., Whitman's Transformed Eye. The Real
Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American
Culture. 1880-1940, Chapel Hill, NC: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Chapter 1.
Whitman, W., Leaves of Grass. New
York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1940.
For more on Whitman and his use of visual imagery,
see Episode 1030.
Image courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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