ELH

I. Fighting Filth

To say that New York suffers from waste management problems may sound like a relatively uninteresting claim, and yet for the medical community in Whitman's New York, it was a novel and all-consuming problem.¹⁹ The struggle to keep disease and pollution from overtaking the city began in the 1840s and 1850s, when everything from trash and manure to cholera and pneumonia threatened to bring the city "to the verge of anarchy and collapse."²⁰ This newfound concern with disease and health was in part a function of sheer population growth. A small city of thirty thousand in Whitman's infancy, Manhattan doubled in size every decade, so that by the end of the century its population had reached four million.²¹ The city's rapid demographic change and its primitive infrastructure—scant plumbing, limited sewers, few paved roads—combined to bring a dramatic increase in human disease.²² By the 1860s, cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever had skyrocketed, and the death rate outpaced that of European cities such as London and Liverpool.²³ In the years surrounding the Civil War, New York physicians and officials began to assert a causal relationship between the filth in the streets and the rising death rate with an urgency that reached a desperate pitch in the 1850s. As early as the 1840s, Whitman's prose writings began to address this rising mortality rate in fictional stories like "Death in the Schoolroom" and "One Wicked Impulse" as well as in journalistic features such as "The Board of Health," "Is the Yellow Fever Among Us?," and "A City Sweet and Clean." In one such piece, Whitman cautioned readers that the city's filth "generates all kinds of miasma in the air," reminding that "disease and fevers follow" (J, 314; my emphasis).

The poet's reference to "fevers" invoked the belief—common in Whitman's culture—that the soil was teeming with disease, or, the term more commonly used, "miasma." Linking human illness to sanitary conditions and cleanliness, contemporary New York physicians began to recognize a causal connection between decaying organic matter and diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis:

The scientific eye sees, in those depths, a great charnel-house into which countless remains of living things have been breathed. They are full of the products of decay in some of which the final process is not yet completed. . . . Recent researchers have gone far to show cholera is dependent upon such fermenting miasmata. . . . When, from any cause, they are present in undue quantity, then comes the pestilence. No one can refuse them, they are absorbed with every breath we draw, and diffuse the dire venom through our burning veins. [End Page 803]

So goes the scourge, wandering silently and invisibly through the still air, till its own time comes.²⁴

Writing in 1855, New York physician James Johnston alerted readers to a "cloud of death" hanging over the city.²⁵ A sepulchral "charnel house" filled with "countless remains," the soil spawns "pestilence," "scourge," and "dire venom." Echoing these concerns, Whitman asked his fellow New Yorkers: "What man, woman, or child, can be said to be in health, when he or she is encrusted from head to foot . . . by dry exhalations" and "solid particles" (J, 411)? By "particles" the poet meant the filthy "soil"—excrement and waste—thrown "into the middle of the street," whose contamination by the "impure drainings of grave yards, gutters, [and] sinks" left it harboring disease and infection (J, 309).

As we strive to understand why Whitman and his contemporaries would posit a causal link between the filth on the city streets and the rising death rate, we must consider what it was they meant by "pestilence" and "scourge." First, there was a proliferation of decaying organic matter linked to the city's transportation system—horses—and the waste materials of the system—horse manure—which threatened to engulf Manhattan's streets. The city housed anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand horses—primarily work horses—and each horse gave off twenty-four pounds of manure per day (totaling more than four million pounds of manure daily). In the absence of universal sewerage, sanitation inspectors set aside entire city blocks—many of them just south of Forty-second Street, near Fifth Avenue—as dedicated "manure" blocks.²⁶ Only a decade after the 1855 publication of Leaves, physicians and public health officials would recall "the accumulation of dumping grounds and manure grounds in the vicinity of populous streets."²⁷ Though he boasted of Brooklyn's relative "freedom from the filth, corrupt air, and noisome gutters" common "in the metropolis over the river," Whitman also cautioned that Brooklyn, like Manhattan, was increasingly submerged under what one contemporary called "large deposits of festering excremental matter" in the city streets.²⁸

Despairing of a landscape filled with "foul liquid and meat," the poet confronted an urban environment that was teeming with fermenting, putrefied corpses. By the end of Whitman's lifetime, one Report of the Department of Health showed that in addition to twenty thousand dead horses a year, inspectors routinely disposed of hundreds of thousands of smaller animals—including pigs, hogs, calves, and sheep—as well as 5,669,470 pounds of spoiled poultry, fish, and meat.²⁹ The sanitary [End Page 804] commission's Report of 1866 warned that "filthy streets, reeking gutters and garbage boxes" served to "induce and intensify the typhoid, diarrhoeal, and cholera poisons."³⁰ In the same report, physicians and inspectors cited more than four hundred families whose homes could only be reached by wading through piles of human waste "to the depth sometimes of two or three feet," observing widespread instances of "domestic garbage and filth of every kind being thrown in the streets, covering their surface, filling the gutters . . . and sending forth . . . pestiferous diseases."³¹ Additional decomposing matter issued from the city's numerous slaughter houses, fat boiling establishments, and piggeries. (rendering animals into fat was one of the city's most profitable businesses.) One 1850 inspector noted 206 slaughterhouses, 531 butchers, and 748 other places with "animal matter, undergoing decay."³² By the time of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, hundreds of tons of animal and human waste—and hundreds of rotting animals—were left to decay in the streets unattended.³³ Inspectors admonished that many localities had come to "present the appearance of dunghills rather than thoroughfares in a civilized city."³⁴

In sketches on such subjects as "Wholesome Water," "Swill Milk," and "Dirt Heaps," Whitman evoked a landscape crammed with filth, excrement, and waste products such as distillery slop.³⁵ The most striking of these, "A Plea for Water," depicts an 1850 city submerged under "slops and rottenness":

Imagine all the accumulations of filth in a great city—not merely the slops and rottenness thrown in the streets and byways (and never thoroughly carried away)—but the numberless privies, cess-pools, sinks, and gulches of abomination—the perpetual replenishing of all this mass of effete matter—the unnameable and immeasurable dirt that is ever, ever, ever filtered into the earth, through its myriad pores, and which as surely finds its way to the neighborhood of pump-water, and into pump-water, as that a drop of poison put into one part of the vascular system, gets into the whole system. . . . Think of this delectable mixture being daily and hourly taken into our stomachs, our veins, our blood.³⁶

The poet echoes the concerns of sanitary engineers and physicians, who in 1866 deplored the "filthy habits of the [city's] occupants," including the "disposition of garbage and slops into the water closets" leading "to offensive emanations, disease, and death."³⁷ Bodily disease and decay derive from the "immeasurable dirt" and "accumulations of filth" that saturate the body of the land. Conceived on the model of the human [End Page 805] body, nature's body suffers contamination and illness. Symbiotically, the earth's human residents absorb illness and disease—"being daily and hourly taken into our stomachs, our veins, our blood"—from a landscape that is seen as both cause and effect of waste and decay. Its "vascular system" pervaded by poison, its "myriad pores" by pollution, the body of the earth "is ever, ever, ever filled" by human filth. Interrelated and symbiotic, the human body and nature's body overlap and interconnect. Human habits imprint themselves upon the earth's exterior—its "pores"—and interior—its "vascular system." Conversely, nature's body poisons or refreshes, taking its cue from human habits of filth or cleanliness.

Beyond the problems caused by decaying human and animal waste, Whitman and his fellow New Yorkers confronted the related issue of the disposal of human remains. The 1845 Sanitary Commission's Report called attention to what it worried was the pernicious "influence of grave yards, vaults, and other burial places, in large cities, upon the health of the inhabitants."³⁸ Increasingly, decaying bodies presented an environmental problem, and treatises like John Brazer's "On the Burial of the Dead" urged the speedy removal and burial of bodies away from the limits of the city.³⁹ In the 1831 dedication of Mount Auburn Cemetery, one leading U.S. physician and chemist decried "cemeteries in our cities, crowded on all sides," lamenting: "Why should we measure out a narrow portion of earth for our graveyards in the midst of our cities, and heap the dead upon each other . . . ?"⁴⁰ The image of "heap[ing] the dead upon each other" finds analogous expression in "This Compost," when the poet queries after "all those strata of sour dead" (L, 212). Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, one of the poet's favorite haunts, owed its very existence to this uncontained proliferation of the dead, as one contemporary account made clear: "The tables of death showed that, already, nearly ten thousand human bodies must be annually interred: while calculations made it all but certain that, in half a century more, the aggregate would be in the millions."⁴¹ Medical experts viewed the garden cemeteries as the solution both to the crowded "strata of sour dead" and to the body-snatching problem noted in Whitman's 1842 Aurora article "Guardians of the Grave."⁴²

In "This Compost," as in contemporary sanitary science, the mounting numbers of corpses threaten to give rise to more and more death, submerging the city under layers of illness. In 1859 one city inspector warned of the "pestilential atmosphere" caused by urban burial grounds.⁴³ In the face of growing evidence that corpses were posing [End Page 806] an environmental hazard, New Yorkers began to develop new ways to mask the decay and decomposition of the corpse, in what one historian has called "a long struggle in Manhattan to keep the dead from polluting the city."⁴⁴ Foremost among these, the city began to pass statutes banning burial within the city limits beginning in the 1830s.⁴⁵ These statutes mirrored those of Paris and London, where cemeteries like Père Lachaise provided a "pastoral retreat for urban dwellers," as well as solving the problem of urban burial overcrowding.⁴⁶ But while solutions such as the garden cemeteries sought to restore the notion that the dead were peacefully returning to the earth, the urban pastoral conception of death barely masked a crisis situation in which death was believed to pose a threat both to individual and environmental health. Warning of the acute dangers of such urban burials, Whitman wrote of a landscape poisoned by death's ordure: "by degrees impregnated with the impure drainings of grave yards, gutters, sinks, and in short of any and all receptacles of filth . . . introducing disease and death into the systems of those who use it" (J, 309).

Viewing infectious disease as controllable by environmental changes such as street cleaning, sewer building, and garbage collection, the physicians of Whitman's era traced the origins of illness and disequilibrium to human waste and filth. Likewise, Whitman's prose writings looked to sanitary reform as the solution to the despoiling of nature that contemporaries viewed as deleterious to human health. By adapting changes such as tree planting, parks, and street cleaning, human society might redress the damage caused by demographic density, commerce, and urbanization. These measures feature prominently in Whitman's prose writings of the 1840s and 1850s, where the poet endorsed municipal sanitary reform: "There is never any thing lost by spending money liberally in behalf of a cleanly city. It has such an intimate connection with the citizens' health,—and the expenses saved by a well population over a sick population are so enormous—that no outlay is too great to make, for the desirable result" (J, 291). Such sanitary engineering was familiar to Whitman through the work of his brother Jeff, "a naturally gifted engineer" who played a "central role" in the water works that would link Brooklyn to "the first scientifically engineered, coordinated system of sewers and water works in the country."⁴⁷

For Whitman's prose writings, as for the proponents of the water works, social institutions and interventions promise to redress the human waste and excess represented in "This Compost." But the poems of Leaves of Grass ultimately retreat from such reformist interventions, touting nature itself as the superior antidote to human waste and [End Page 807] destruction. A powerful antitoxic force, the biochemical processes of the earth, soil, and plants provide the model for physiological renewal and recovery. In a surprising turn away from the logic of sanitary engineering—in which health is keyed to human manipulations of the environment—the poet embraces a competing model of nature-based, botanical medicine, in which bodily processes take their cue, as well as their cure, from forces internal to nature itself.

II. "A Cleanly City"

I have argued that Leaves reflects what was a widespread public health crisis in Whitman's New York, and that it echoes some of what were seen as viable solutions to the problem of environmental contamination. These solutions did not confine themselves to building garden cemeteries, though these cemeteries were the most visible legacy of the crisis surrounding decomposing bodies and waste in urban spaces. A forgotten but no less important solution—for both Leaves in general and its metaphor of grass in particular—could be found in the plants themselves. Scientific ideas about the purifying effects of trees and leaves inspired the book's title, as David Reynolds suggestively observes, and 1840s organic chemistry provides an important source for the contradictory images of impurity we have already seen at work in Leaves.⁴⁸ In the science of plant life, Whitman found a solution to the devastation caused by human filth and waste. Transforming rot into regeneration, phytological processes offered a superior remedy to the decay, death, and disease that dominate Whitman's prose writings. The poems of Leaves of Grass further underscore this enviro-biochemical nexus, offering grass as a kind of antiseptic for human illness and miasmata.

The trees and grass that pervade Leaves of Grass do more than just put a pretty face on death—they promise to purify the earth of the poisonous filth, miasma, and decay that feature so prominently in Whitman's journalistic writings. In "This Compost," the poet's surprising solution to this monumental onslaught of waste and decay is "chemistry." The poem offers a poetic apostrophe to the cleansing properties of the earth, and specifically to the soil. "What chemistry!" the poet exclaims:

That the winds are really not infectious, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, [End Page 808] That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

(L, 212–13)

Elsewhere, the poet recorded his determination to represent "different objects which decay, and by the chemistry of nature . . . are" transformed "into leaves of grass."⁴⁹ Interspersed among the first notations and draft lines for "Song of Myself," these observations point to the specific scientific underpinnings of the poem's botanical figures, which invoke biochemistry to assert a transformative, cleansing power internal to nature itself.

This image of grass inverts the hopeful mood seen elsewhere in "Song of Myself," where the poet optimistically proclaims "there is really no death" (L, 8). In "Compost," by contrast, he oscillates between exaggerated fear that every last spear of grass contains "a catching disease," and wonderment that the grass is "safe." The apples and oranges and plums harbor no contaminants, though the soil they grow in appears to be full of them. The solution to the city's disease and illness could be found in its agricultural landscape, in "the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard," as well as "melons, grapes, peaches, plums." The rural dimension of urban life seldom figures in critical accounts of Whitman as a poet of the city, which tend to equate the category of "urban" with features such as industrialization, immigration, and mechanization. Yet many urban neighborhoods as Whitman knew them remained primarily agricultural. Farms and gardens still comprised nearly five-sixths of Manhattan's landscape, and farm-derived businesses comprised the bulk of Brooklyn's commerce.⁵⁰ The city's agricultural landscape offered the means by which to restore the environmental health of an urban landscape in crisis, and its farming practices held the key to the renewal and restoration of human health.

Although composted animal and vegetable manures had been widely used since the eleventh century, agricultural scientists in Whitman's time had begun to grasp the underlying causes for their effectiveness. Instead of viewing the decomposition of animal substances as a kind of miasma or contaminant, Whitman's contemporaries began to recognize that decomposition involved a diverse set of biochemical reactions that would contribute nutrients and minerals to the soil. Though the exact causes of these reactions continued to elude scientists until later in the [End Page 809] century, the 1840s and 1850s witnessed a growing interest in "the role of soils and manures in plant nutrition," argues historian of science Margaret Rossiter.⁵¹ The decades surrounding the publication of Leaves of Grass saw widespread scientific study of what one chemist termed "fermentations and putrefecations," and 1850s agricultural periodicals such as The Cultivator offered detailed accounts of the chemical reactions by which decomposing matter fertilizes both plants and soil.⁵²

New York's scientific community knew of these developments through the agricultural journals, and the work of German chemist Justus von Liebig, whose Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology appeared in English in 1840. One historian of science has called the book "one of the most important scientific books ever published," and it was well known to the New York medical community.⁵³ Liebig's new chemistry synthesized a range of ideas concerning the decomposition of organic matter existing in the soil. Its ideas quickly circulated in medical and scientific publications such as Jacob Bigelow's book-length study, Nature in Disease, published the year before the first edition of Leaves. Writing in 1854, Bigelow explained the biochemical process by which new life arises out of decaying "animal and vegetable life":

If we take a comprehensive survey of the progress and mutations of animal and vegetable life, we shall perceive that . . . [t]he elements which have once moved and circulated in living frames, do not become extinct nor useless after death—they offer themselves as the materials from which other living frames are to be constructed. What has once possessed life is most assimilated to the living character, and most ready to partake of life again.⁵⁴

In this view, life is a cyclical phenomenon, in which, to paraphrase Whitman, "there is really no death," and "[a]ll goes onward and outward, nothing collapses" (L, 8). Out of the materials of death come "living frames," converting decay into animate organic matter.

Not surprisingly, the science underlying these assertions gave rise to important changes in the cultural rituals surrounding death and burial. Bigelow himself played a prominent role in the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the 1831 legislation that established the cemetery called it a "Garden for the Promotion of Scientific Horticulture."⁵⁵ Garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn and Brooklyn's Greenwood aimed to promote a more hygienic disposal of bodies. Promotional literature referred to the "Experimental Garden," asserting that it was intended for the "improvement of horticulture," as well as [End Page 810] for the decontamination of the "evils" associated with "festering burial places."⁵⁶ Whitman's contemporaries thus viewed the cultivation of flowers and the cleansing of the city as compatible endeavors, asserting horticulture's curative influence upon infectious diseases. Physicians believed that cemetery air was unhealthy unless cleaned by circulation through trees, and we find numerous references to this commonly-held belief in the New York Sanitary Commission Reports—as well as in periodicals of scientific horticulture—in these years.⁵⁷ For a city full of "rot and fume and ferment"—one observer's description of the midtown manure blocks—the air-cleansing properties of leaves and plants offered a solution to the problem of excessive decomposing matter.⁵⁸ Not only did "convenience, health, and decency require that the dead should be early removed from our sight," Bigelow explained in Nature and Disease, the removal of the decaying organic matter to a leafy environment promised to scour that urban environment of miasma and disease.⁵⁹

At the core of the embrace of arboreal plantings and arboretums was a rising interest in the healthful biochemical properties of ozone and so-called antozone. "The decay, disease, and deaths of animals and plants destroy ozone," wrote one physician in 1861: "ozone is absorbed [by these] animal and vegetable substances. . . . Ozone is the great purifier of the atmosphere."⁶⁰ The aptly titled 1850 treatise Poetry and Science summarized this view: "It is probable that ozone may be the active agent in removing, from the atmosphere, those organic poisons to which many forms of pestilence are traceable."⁶¹ Armed with the growing scientific literature on atmospheric chemistry, researchers went out into the field with ozonoscopes and ozonometers, measuring the ozonogenic properties of individual trees such as the pine. One typical essay on ozone from the period urged that only the escalation of ozone production could stem the tide of "extremes of animal and vegetable decomposition," and mitigate the effects of "the decaying mass of vegetable matter" that threatened to blanket the earth's cities in death and disease.⁶² Some even claimed that ozone could destroy malaria and cholera, and an entire theoretical and practical literature emerged to delineate the healthful properties of ozone for human, animal, and plant life.

The trees, flowers, and green landscapes of cemeteries like Brooklyn's Greenwood modeled themselves on visions of Eden, and their arboreal and botanical plantings offered the dead tribute and veneration commensurate with this vision of posthumous paradise. Critical accounts of the founding of garden cemeteries emphasize pastoral [End Page 811] removal as the main impetus for these new modes of burial. The peaceful urban enclaves mirrored a larger "domestication of death" through which Victorian America sought to mitigate the trauma of death and loss through measured genteel rituals.⁶³ But the need to erect gardens for the dead found its primary impetus in a more fundamental set of concerns about disease and pestilence in the soil and in the city. Guided by the findings of agricultural and atmospheric chemistry, sanitation experts offered leaves and trees as the way to purge the air of noxious air and chemicals, and to replenish clean air in a city submerged under poisonous gases. Believed to effect fundamental chemical changes in a soil chemistry tainted by disease, these trees and leaves would restore a balance of oxygen and air purity to what one ozone scientist termed "the unhealthfulness of city atmospheres" sullied by the excessive "dwelling together of human beings."⁶⁴ In a similar vein, Whitman urged Brooklynites to plant trees, citing the benefits of "those kinds of gasses and essences of the atmosphere required for sustenance of vegetable life" (J, 218). For such healthful effects the city should "engage one or two men especially fitted by taste and practice to adorn the city streets with appropriate trees," Whitman advised in the Brooklyn Evening Star on 22 September 1845 (J, 218). Poisonous waste found its natural antidote in such arboreal plantings, the poet recognized, and such scientific findings held special promise both for the city's filth and for the poetic experiment that offered the literary equivalent of the Garden ideal.

For a figure who proclaimed himself the poet of the body at a time when bodily health and cleanliness seemed more endangered than ever before, botanical specimens offered more than a tribute to the dead. They offered a biochemical antidote to the city's festering burial places, at once decorative and curative, whose chemical properties promised to reestablish nature's proper balance. Such formulations, surprising in their technical intricacies, shed new light on Whitman's choice of "leaves of grass," in a context in which plants were seen to hold the key to both decaying miasmata and that "great atmospheric purifier," ozone.⁶⁵ Such agricultural chemistry circulated widely in a context we would now call urban, though urban historians have seldom considered the agricultural dimension of New York City life in these years. Within this expanded purview, rural and agricultural endeavors play a vital role within the urban experience, providing a lens through which we might see aspects of Whitman's writing as committed to a project of environmental health that looks to nature's biochemical properties as a vital source of human health. [End Page 812]

Against this reconstructed backdrop of Whitman's milieu, we may reconsider the verses that occupy the heart of Leaves of Grass, section six of "Song of Myself." There, the poet introduces the grass motif in the book's opening query: "What is the grass?" (L, 6). In response, the poet defines grass in multiple and divergent ways. In line three he says it is the "flag" of his "disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven"—grass is a metaphor for the poet's cheerful temperament (L, 6). In line eight, the poet proposes the grass is an emblem of life: "Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation" (L, 7). At the same time, the grass is an emblem of death, and the equation between grass and death is a quite literal one. "Now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves," says the poet at line 15, in an elegiac tone. Grass grows out of the graves of the dead, suggesting the process by which bodies decay in the soil and then arise again as new plants and life. The poet evokes the process by which grass sprouts out of human remains, addressing the grass as "you": "It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps" (L, 7). Death does not mark a moment of closure for human life, in this view, but a beginning point for physical regeneration and rebirth. Decaying bodies do not wither to dust and rot but reconstitute themselves as new life.

Whitman's use of grass borrows from Isaiah 40:6: "All flesh is grass."⁶⁶ Isaiah concludes somberly: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth" (Isa. 40:7). The formulation echoes Leaves' debt to biblical figurations, in which grass emblematizes human mortality, weakness, and sin. In Psalm 37 we are told that "evildoers" will "soon be cut down like the grass, / and wither as the green herb" (Ps. 37:1–2). Though the "wicked" may be "like grass which groweth up," Psalm 90 assures, they are "soon cut down" (Ps. 90:5, 6). The First General Epistle of Peter 1:24–25 reprises: "For 'All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower therefore falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth forever.'" In these instances, grass evokes the transient nature of human goodness and evil, the flower that "is cut down" in Job 14:2; or that "falleth" and "perisheth" as the sun "withereth the grass" in James 1:11. These biblical figures of grass underscore the brevity of mortal existence, and the irrevocable terminus of embodied human life on earth.

By contrast, in Whitman's revised adaptation, grass figures human durability and survival: "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death" (L, 8). The expired "white heads of old mothers" and the "colorless beards of old men" give rise to fresh new growths of grass, rich [End Page 813] and "very dark" in color (L, 7). Out of the earth comes the "beautiful uncut hair of graves," the grass that sprouts with equal ease "from the breasts of young men" and "from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps" (L, 7). In these oblique reminders of the decaying human remains that lurk below the earth's surface, Whitman reprises the central concern of "This Compost," and of his journalistic writings on environmental health. In "Compost," such decay occasions repulsion and alarm, evoking the "poison" that introduces "fevers" and "disease" into the system of the human body (L, 213). In section six, conversely, these same decaying remains give rise to miraculous life: "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / . . . All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier" (L, 8). Though adapted from Isaiah, Whitman's grass diverges markedly from its biblical predecessor. Where biblical grass asserts the body's inevitable decay, Whitman's grass evokes its eternal life and regeneration.

The poem's concern with the mortality of the grass—and the grass in relation to human mortality generally—alludes both to its biblical precedents and to a set of scientific ideas specific to the poet's milieu. This vision of regeneration reflects contemporary developments within agricultural science and biochemistry, as we have seen. We might also locate this set of ideas about bodily decay in terms of a larger set of changes in the life sciences. Historian of medicine Owsei Temkin has argued that the nineteenth century brought a radical transformation in the science of life and death. In his view, the nineteenth century's advances in chemistry and anatomy entailed a "tendency to consider death a pathological rather than a physiological phenomenon."⁶⁷ Where earlier eras had emphasized the progression of "the phases of man's life and death," nineteenth-century physicians began to embrace the hope "that senility may become a preventable disease."⁶⁸ In its bold assertion that "to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier," Leaves reflects this broad set of shifts by which medical professionals began to view death as a pathological, rather than normal, feature of the human life narrative. Moreover, as we shall see, the regenerative properties seen in section six elevate natural over social prescriptions for human health and longevity. In the effort to forestall death and decay, the human body looks to the biochemical transformations that inhere in the soil and plants, foreswearing society's remedies for health and disease in favor of what Whitman's contemporaries termed "botanic medicines." [End Page 814]

III. "Am I Not Partly Leaves and Vegetable Mould Myself?"

Beyond human longevity, the trope of grass signals that the poet's body and the earth's body share a common composition, and this commonality serves as the basis for the renewal of bodily health and vitality through restorative contact with nature. Explaining his love of nature, Henry David Thoreau had observed: "Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" In nature's "leaves" and "mould," Thoreau proclaimed, the human body would find "Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines." In Walden, Thoreau counsels that these "botanic medicines" will provide "the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented," urging readers to eschew medicines dispensed in "quack vials" and brought in "black-schooner looking wagons."⁶⁹ Against these commercial pharmaceuticals, Thoreau proposes a naturopathic model of medicine:

I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.⁷⁰

In Thoreau's retelling, medicine traces an illustrious genealogy to Hebe, the goddess of youth who was said to have been conceived when the goddess Hera ate a salad of wild lettuce leaves. Nature's "power of restoring" humans "to the vigor of youth" derives not from medical professionals—whose emblem was Asclepias—but from botanical and vegetable plants, whose healing properties induce vigor and health. Thoreau advises that "a draught of undiluted morning air" builds a "sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust" constitution, embracing naturopathic prevention and treatment.⁷¹

In their physical affinities with phytological specimens such as "leaves," "mould," and "wild lettuce," humans find their preferred healing agents. This perspective found numerous adherents in New York's scientific community in these years. Botanical medicine had gained new prominence within the growing movement of Eclectic medicine, beginning with the founding of the Association of Eclectic Physicians in 1823. Teaching natural support for the immune system through diverse therapeutic methods, the Eclectics founded several medical schools in which botanical remedies and native herbalism [End Page 815] played a prominent role. Titles like Vegetable Materia Medica of the United States (1825) and Nature the best Physician, or, A Complete Domestic Herbal (1818) popularized plant remedies, agents, and botanical dispensatories, and journals like the New York Philosophical Journal and the Eclectic Dispensatory recommended vegetable cures for illnesses such as rheumatism, neuralgia, and epilepsy. Spearheading these developments, the Eclectics endorsed herbal salves and botanical dispensatories as alternatives to the heroic practices of conventional physicians and pharmacological drugs. Reynolds notes Whitman's rejection of "so called 'regular' physicians who used all kinds of heroic physical measures—emetics, cathartics, and bleeding—to combat disease."⁷² The conception of "Nature" as "the Best Physician" proposed that bodily health was best ensured through natural, not social, processes.⁷³

For Whitman as for Thoreau, nature's self-cleansing body provides a template for human vitality and longevity. Where Thoreau asserts that the human body consists of "leaves" and "vegetable mould," Whitman asserts a similar equivalence between the poet's body and the body of the earth:

Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! Firm masculine colter it shall be you! Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you! You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of wash'd sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mix'd tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you! Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you! Hands I have taken, face I have kiss'd, mortal I have ever touch'd, it shall be you!

(L, 33–34) [End Page 816]

The poet's body, patterned on the features of the earth, has "winding paths" and "[s]haded ledges." Conversely, nature's body models itself on the features of the human body, as the "[w]inds" of the earth "rub against" the poet with its "soft-tickling genitals." The earth's "sweaty brooks and dews" recall the moisture of human perspiration and corporeality, in a blending of human and natural embodied forms.

Yoking together the surface of the earth and the surface of the human body, the poem asserts morphological equivalence between the "mould" of the human body and that of the earth's body, while also reminding readers that the human body is returned to the earth. The term "mould," from archaic usage, designates both "rotting earth considered as the material of the human body" and the topsoil rich in organic matter. "Man of mould," in one relatively rare idiomatic usage, evokes both human mortality—mouldering human remains—and also human accomplishment: "man of distinction."⁷⁴ Addressing the earth as "you," the poet asserts that his body "shall be" identical to the land, further cementing the equation with images of sexual union between the earth's body and his own.

Beyond ecstatic merger with nature, these descriptions envision a human body elemented of the earth's dirt, rocks, and wildlife. The poet's body exhibits unexpected similitude with the earth's physical body:

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, But call any thing back again when I desire it.

(L, 41)

Natural materials such as "gneiss"—a granite-like rock native to New York City—and "moss" form the basis for a vision of human embodiment that will "incorporate" the materials—"fruits, grains, [and] esculent roots"—of the earth's surface. "Stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over," the poet's physical form mirrors the form of the earth. However different in scale and shape, the body of the earth and the body of the poet assume an equivalent morphology in a metaphorics of radical corporeal identity between human and natural forms.

The poet's claim to "incorporate" elements of the earth gestures both forward and backward within the poem's network of nature imagery. It not only reprises the image of grass from section six, it also anticipates the closing of Leaves of Grass, whose final section reiterates the enviro-sanitary properties of the book's vegetation: [End Page 817]

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

(L, 83)

In this proleptic vision of his own death and immortality, the poet invokes the familiar notion that the human body returns to dust or to "dirt," advising the reader to "look for me under your boot-soles." Thus merged with the earth, the poet's body "shall be good health" to the reader. Corporeal fusion with the poet through the medium of the earth's body—the material substance "dirt"—serves to "filter and fibre" the human blood. Like Whitman's earlier prose writings, the poem looks to the environment—water, soil, plants—to ensure human health and vitality. Unlike those prose writings, however, such poems reject human manipulations of the environment—sanitary engineering and social reform—as the source of such health. Instead, the book's closing vision of "health" and "fibre" locates itself within the internal dynamics of the earth itself. Whether debased—"dirt"—or elevated—"gneiss" and "birds"—these dynamics surpass the social world as a source of healthy human living.

Whitman's medical philosophy was deeply rooted in a set of ideas linked to naturopathic and herbal healing. But to view Whitman as "dismissing drugs" in favor of "natural therapy," as Reynolds does, is to mischaracterize the poet's project.⁷⁵ Today's alternative medicine, with its emphasis on herbalism, naturopathy, and crystal healing, differs markedly from the diverse healing practices—allopathy, homeopathy, and Eclecticism—that struggled for professional ascendancy in the decades surrounding 1850.⁷⁶ Whitman signaled his awareness of these struggles in a Brooklyn Eagle editorial dated 1 June 1846: "[I]n Brooklyn and New York there is at this moment the most terrific war waging between the old doctors and the new school. We belong to neither" (J, 392). Weighing in on the controversy, the poet expressed skepticism towards doctors—then termed "alleopaths"—who attacked the body with chemicals and other measures such as blood-letting:

People are so sick of being drugged—so convinced that there is a simpler and better plan, than the old one—so shocked at the great proportion which the kills bear to the cures—that they are perhaps too ready to encourage innovation, and accept doctrines not founded on deep thorough experience.

(J, 392) [End Page 818]

In opposition to such killing "cures," proponents of homeopathy—led by poet-editor William Cullen Bryant—urged that medicine should be practiced with an eye toward the individual needs of the patient.

The appeal of such innovation was clear, and yet Whitman also mistrusted newer methods such as homeopathy and hydropathy, cautioning readers against adherence to any medical orthodoxy or system:

Of systems of medicine, like systems of religion, it may be allowed, that not one is entirely without commendable points. To elevate, however, any particular individual of either those religious or medical systems into the sole rule and test of truth, the one exclusive reality, while none else possess the least claims to worth—will never do.

(J, 393)

For Whitman as for the Eclectics, so-called regular medicine's interventions enjoy dubious "claims to worth," and few "medical systems" pass the "test of truth." In his loose allegiance to Eclectic medicine's principles, the poet further marked his divergence from the mainstream reformers and dispensary physicians whose prescriptions had shaped his earlier calls for "spending money" on "behalf of a cleanly city." Suspicious of "systems of medicine" and their competing claims of superiority, Whitman's nature-based approach contained recognizable elements of the Eclectic movement's suspicion of totalizing medical orthodoxies and their embrace of botanical and naturopathic healing. Nature was indeed the "best Physician," surpassing mainstream medicine as the means to health and, as we shall see presently, poetic speech.⁷⁷

IV. "Brooklyn Lungs"⁷⁸

To conclude, I will propose that these developments in biochemistry and medicine allow us to make sense of the bizarre formulations in section six of Leaves of Grass concerning the poetic voice and the tongue. After equating the grass and the "uncut hair of graves," the poet observes that grass comes out of "the roofs of mouths" of the dead (L, 7). He extends the conceit still further, asserting that the grass arises "from under the faint red roofs of mouths" and comparing the grass to "uttering tongues" (L, 7). The comparison between the grass and the "uttering tongues" has baffled readers and critics, since the grass and the tongue appear to have little in common. Within the context of the history of chemistry, however, the metaphor assumes intriguing meanings. [End Page 819]

The idea that leaves have tongues closely mirrors a popular scientific study called The Chemistry of Common Life, published the same year as the first edition of Leaves of Grass and reissued in numerous editions in the second half of the century. In a discussion of soil chemistry, the author offers a highly metaphoric description of the cleansing properties of trees:

Over the surface of these leaves are sprinkled countless pores or mouths, which are continually employed in separating and drinking carbonic acid gas. The millions of leaves which a single tree spreads out, and the constant renewal of the moving air in which they are suspended, enable the living plant to draw an abundant supply for all its wants. . . . A common lilac with a million of leaves, has about four hundred thousand millions of pores or mouths at work, sucking in carbonic acid; and on a single oak tree, as many as seven millions of leaves have been counted.⁷⁹

The lilac and the oak figure prominently in Whitman's corpus of poetry, as critics have noted. Grass as an agriculturally-specific form of vegetation seldom figures in discussions of Leaves of Grass, and yet the appeal of grass, in light of Whitman's clear interest in atmospheric biochemistry, seems clear.

If a lilac contains "four hundred thousand million" "sucking mouths" that cleanse the earth's atmosphere, and a single oak contains many millions of leaves, then imagine the cleansing power of grass. Whitman's "uttering tongues" of grass, the oral cavities of the earth's vegetation, spectacularly embody the role of "Plants" as "great purifiers of the atmosphere," as one popular periodical proclaimed in 1862.⁸⁰ In the figure of the grass, with its millions upon millions of leaves—"Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, / Growing among black folks as among white" (L, 7)—we find the ultimate cleansing vegetation, the ubiquitous growth that would purge the earth of the "foul meat," "sour dead," and "distemper'd corpses" that haunt the poet in "This Compost." Observing that the grass is "very dark" to come from the whitened "heads of old mothers," the poet expresses wonderment at the soil's biochemical conversion of death back into new growth. The jubilant tone of section six thus emerges out of a complex nexus of biochemical and medical ideas familiar to the poet, who found in the diverse sciences of his time—agricultural chemistry, ozonoscopy, sanitary engineering—possible remedies for the devastation and disease surrounding him. At the same time, the grass/tongue allows the poet to imagine a form of speech whose vigor arises directly out of [End Page 820] the powers of the earth. Such speech dispenses with the social world as a wellspring of communication, preferring to envision a utopian linguistic form rooted in the earth's air, water, and matter.

My claim that Whitman disavowed social interventions as the preferred means to health finds further confirmation in the concluding section of Leaves, "A Song of the Rolling Earth." "Rolling Earth" follows a short lyric entitled "Transpositions," which unequivocally dismisses social reformers. "Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling—," the poet enjoins: "let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands; / Let judges and criminals be transposed—let the prison-keepers be put in prison—let those that were prisoners take the keys" (L, 265). The "reformers" invoked have clear links to dispensary physicians, who treated the insane and the imprisoned and engaged in a wide range of sanitary and environmental improvement efforts. Dismissing such physicians, the poet turns the reader's attention to the "rolling earth," and the "Air, soil, water, fire," as the poet's preferred healing agents (L, 265, 266). "Amelioration is one of the earth's words," he affirms:

The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out, Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

(L, 266, 267; my emphasis)

In commending the "Words of the Earth" over the speech of reformers, who "scream," "persuade," "threaten," and "promise," the poet takes his distance from the "reformers" whose "bawling" he castigates in the book's penultimate lyric, "Transpositions."⁸¹ "Amelioration" derives not from society's institutions and interventions, but from the elements of the earth, divorced from human institutions.

While the belief that disease and sickness were derived from fermentation and miasmata would soon be discredited by the work of Louis Pasteur and others, the vision of the cleansing powers of leaves, especially for the city, would remain in place across the successive editions of Leaves of Grass. Though much of the biochemical and medical science that motivated Leaves would be entirely forgotten, the book contains powerful evidence of the purifying power of trees and leaves. In Whitman's leaves and grass, as in Thoreau's "leaves and vegetable mould," the poet offers a radical vision of human corporeality, in [End Page 821] which the "mould" of the earth's body fuses with the human body—a fusion made possible by the complex properties of the earth's unique biochemistry. In the image of the human body made of "leaves and vegetable mould," we see the direct reflection of Liebig's chemistry. The scientific breakthroughs that make their appearance in Leaves of Grass are numerous and eclectic, impressive in their range and depth. No wonder Whitman says with admiration, "What Chemistry!"

* * *

Whitman's contemporary Thoreau had urged his readers to "simplify, simplify"—a simplification meant to counter the human waste and excess he saw around him.⁸² Like Thoreau, Whitman displayed contempt for society's destruction of nature's beauty. In his prose writings, he urged restoration of nature's equilibrium and health through the building of parks and sewers, looking to science and engineering for the remedy and thus sparing his readers the preachy prescriptions that sometimes overtake Walden. Whitman's prose writings assert that the excesses of the social world—its waste, its filth, its destruction of nature and health—can be countered through social institutions and intervention. Human excess can be curbed through human engineering; if we counter human destructiveness with endeavors such as water works and parks, both individual and community can be salvaged. Besieged by society's impurities, human health restores itself to equilibrium and vibrancy through scientific and medical interventions. Amid his evident disenchantment with human society, the Whitman of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle still retained substantial faith in the power of human institutions to correct human errors.

Yet in many of Whitman's poems, as I have argued, we find intimations of dissatisfaction with human society so profound that the poet renounces the very social institutions and reforms he had earlier endorsed. In portions of Leaves of Grass, as we have seen, what the poet wants is not to "[a]meliorat[e]" society by reforming it but to rid himself of human society altogether. Both subtly and overtly, the poet disavows the very social institutions—medicine, reform, engineering—to which he had subscribed in his newspaper days. He invites us not merely to embrace nature, but to reject what is human, preferring the company of the sea, the horse, and the earth. Poems like "The Song of the Earth" call for a retreat from human company—from human language, embodiment, and society—and an immersion in the company of nature. The retreat from the human world also shapes the poet's unique vision of embodiment, in which the human body merges with [End Page 822] the body of the earth. Evoking a human body composed of nature's earth, air, and water, these poems divorce human corporeality from the deformations of human society, stripping the body of recognizable human features. Thus freed from human entanglements—and even human identity—the "poet of the body" can celebrate "[n]ature without check with original energy" (L, 1). Disgusted with human society, the poet sought to divest himself of human connections and even human form. Against the backdrop of these complex and varied repudiations of the social world, we should reassess our conception of Whitman as "the poet of urban euphoria" and the urban crowd.