Sounding his ‘barbaric yawps’

Tristram Fane Saunders enjoys a poet’s eccentric love letter to Walt Whitman

WWHAT IS THE GRASS by Mark Doty 274pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, ebook £9.99

hat Is the Grass, the American poet Mark Doty’s deeply personal love letter to Walt Whitman, belongs in the pantheon of poets’ lovably eccentric books on other poets, beside Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being and Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Its subtitle, “Walt Whitman in My Life”, is key: there’s as much here about Doty as Whitman, whose poems provide springboards for the author’s reminiscences. As admirers of his poetry and memoirs will know, Doty writes about his life with a rare warmth and candour.

He makes you lean forward to listen as he talks unselfconsciously about his doomed relationship with the older woman he married while “trying on heterosexuality”, and the closeness he felt to her son (“I was 18, and so was my stepson”), and nature (“We were alive in the world together, the young tree and I”), and even the monthly masked orgy where, now in his 60s, he rather sweetly volunteers as an attendant in the clothes-check room.

That intimacy, the sense of writing to the reader as if speaking to them alone, is a trick Whitman perfected: “This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.” No poet ever insisted so often that he is with us, and loves us, and is us: “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”.

If every reader discovers their own Whitman – and they do – then Doty’s is the young “Kosmos” of the 1850s, with the world at his fingertips, not the tamed national mascot of the later years. Doty’s cut-off point is the 1860 third edition of the endlessly reworked Leaves of Grass. Aside from the homoerotic “Calamus” sequence, Doty focuses his attention on just three poems: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and the great, sprawling masterpiece eventually titled “Song of Myself ”. (He isn’t keen on “O Captain! My Captain!”; “a decidedly Victorian performance of grief ”.)

With the 1855 first edition of

Leaves of Grass, where the then-untitled “Song of Myself ” first appeared, Whitman arrived with a voice like no one else’s: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world”.

Where did that “barbaric yawp” come from? According to Doty, “the fountaining outpouring of Leaves of Grass was fed by five sources, five streams” that give this book its structure: it’s split into five sections, from “The

First Source” (spirituality) to

“The Fifth Source” (mortality).

The space Doty gives to each reveals his priorities. “The Third Source”, city life, gets about 25 pages. “The Fourth Source”, the American lexicon and speechpatterns Whitman forged into a wholly new verse style that has since become “the template for most American poetry”, is covered in less than 20 pages. “The Second Source”, queer love, gets more than 100.

Doty is particularly good on the way queer writers through the ages have seen themselves in Leaves of Grass, and his line-byline readings show a fine poet’s ear. He brings in insightful biographical titbits (did Whitman’s visits to a failing Egyptology museum inspire his idea of grass as a “hieroglyphic”?) and surprising comparisons

(with, say, Bijou, the 1972 art house porn film). He reads with care, in the sense of both attentiveness and love.

I wish Doty was read with the same care by his publishers, who have let through some absolute howlers. What strange lives Jonathan Cape’s editors must lead. Not one of them has read Dracula, or been to Reading, or can count up to seven. (Space, and your patience, bar me listing the factual errors that reveal this.)

“Do I contradict myself ?” asks Whitman. “Very well then .... I contradict myself.” If Doty slips up on details, well, he slips up. But when he’s describing the feelings great poetry can inspire, he doesn’t put a foot wrong.

KOSMOS Walt Whitman, c1880s