What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
By Mark Doty
W.W. Norton 2020

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,” writes nineteenth-century author Walt Whitman in his poem “To You.” Is Whitman addressing a stranger he walks by in the streets of New York—a stranger he recognizes as the whole of humanity? Or, perhaps, he is addressing his readers. “I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you,” he continues. Contemporary poet Mark Doty takes Whitman’s words seriously in his lyrical new book What is Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, a combination of biography of Whitman, literary analysis of Whitman’s poetry, and an intimate exploration of Doty’s own life.

Doty structures What is the Grass by positing five “sources” of Whitman’s timeless power. The first source is perhaps the most difficult to grasp: “a mystical experience, a peak experience, a blurring or merge between self and other, a liberation from the limits of space and time,” suggests Doty. This kind of experience allowed Whitman to write active, immediate poems that give the reader “a remarkably intimate relation with the interiority of another,” as Doty says. He explains that the title of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass might specifically be referring to that kind of dynamic and unmediated response. To test the look or setting of type, printers produced practice pages, or “leaves,” filled with “bits of nonsense, trial runs, nothing to be taken too seriously,”—that is, words “springing into being everywhere.” His poems embodied that same experimental and personal spirit.

The second source of Whitman’s genius is his fascination with the physical body, especially the masculine body. Despite the fact that a few scholars—and Whitman himself—have denied that the poet felt sexual desire for other men, Doty insists otherwise: “They are wrong, and he was lying.” Doty’s exploration of the history of sexuality makes it clear why queerness often remained unseen in literature until fairly recently. He then shows that Whitman “infuses his descriptions of men’s bodies with such palpable longing that anyone sympathetic to such desires cannot miss his intent.” This section is the longest one in the book, and here Doty extensively explores not only Whitman’s writings about masculine physicality and same-sex love but his own personal experiences as he first came out as a gay man, then as the AIDS epidemic tore through the community, and finally as queer culture became more visible and more accepted throughout American society. Throughout it all, his literary relationship with Whitman is that of reader—but also that of student, lover, and finally mirror.

Another inspiration for the poetry of Walt Whitman was the bustling city that surrounded him. As the poet walked the streets of New York, he saw the great diversity of America’s growing population, of all social classes and kinds of employment—from artists, blue collar workers, farmers, and traders to slaves, soldiers, and prostitutes. These Americans were from a diversity of backgrounds as well: among others, they were male and female immigrants from across the globe, American Indians, African Americans, and people with disabilities. The vastness of the city encouraged the development of a democratic spirit in Whitman’s poetry, a spirit of embracing and celebrating multiplicity and expansiveness—within the city and within the self. Doty shows that Whitman’s spirit encouraged a multitude of more contemporary poets, from Langston Hughes to Adrienne Rich, who joined him in being “note-keepers of the urban soul,” as Doty writes.

Living in the metropolis also meant that Whitman was exposed to a changing oral language—the colloquial speech rapidly developing in urban areas of the United States. Doty compares Whitman’s words to “the lexicon of Chaucer or Shakespeare—poets who also heard, in their times, their language renewed.” He argues that the sound of spoken American English infused Whitman’s poetry with a freshness as well as with “a stance toward experience and the world.” The poet turned what had been seen as unpoetic language into the language of modern American literature.

Whitman’s final source is his awareness of death. During his life, Whitman insisted that he was a poet of the body, but Doty points out that the only kind of body that has remained is his body of work. Whitman wrote that after he died and was buried in the ground, we would find him in the dirt under our boot-soles and in the grass growing anew from that dirt. And we find him in the pages of Leaves of Grass, still speaking to us. Doty recognizes—and helps us see—how much the poet is still part of the world of the living. At the end of his book, he asks with deep thoughtfulness, “Have I looked back to Whitman because he has all my life, though I did not know it, looked forward to me?”

—Hannah Joyner is an independent historian living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.