UPDATED BELOW: These lines are from Whitman’s most famous poem, “Song of Myself,” which first appeared untitled in his self-published collection Leaves of Grass, in 1855.
The runaway slave came to my house and
stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the
twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the
kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led
him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill'd a tub for
his sweated body and bruised feet,
And gave him a room that enter'd from
my own, and gave him some coarse
clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his
revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the
galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was
recuperated and pass'd north,
I had him sit next me at table, my
fire-lock lean'd in the corner.
•••
Whitman is idolized as much as he is loved. Karl Shapiro takes Whitman down a peg — well, half a peg — in this poem, which appears in his 1992 collection, The Old Horsefly:
WHITMAN
Like Queen Victoria, he used the regal we,
Meaning the disciples of Leaves of Grass,
The American Bible they literally believed;
Sat by the hour to photographers,
The Open Shirt frontispiece,
The Good Gray, the Jesus, the Laughing Philosopher,
The Old Poet in the crumpled high crown hat
Gazing in rapture at the butterfly
Perched upon his forefinger
(It turns out was a cardboard butterfly);
To Tennyson the greatest of his time,
Inviting Walt to sail to the Isle of Wight;
Our first and probably only guru,
Whose opinion of niggers (his designation) was low,
But worshipped Lincoln, to whom he scribed
His second greatest song;
Who opened the Closet but wouldn't come out;
Who lived in a kind of luxurious poverty,
Housekeeper, male nurse, amanuensis, carriage,
On the bounty of admirers,
Adored as Gandhi or a Dr. Schweitzer
Visited by Oscar Wilde and English titles,
In Camden, New Jersey;
Two hundred pounds of genius and hype,
Nature-mystic who designed his tomb
Solid as an Egyptian pyramid,
American to the soles of his boots,
Outspoken as Christ or Madame Blavatsky,
Messiah, Muse of the Modern, Mother!
