Leaves of Grass

hardly literature.

we may close our retrospect of american literature before eighteen sixty one with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the time the leaves of grass of walt whitman published at brooklyn in eighteen fifty five The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, schoolteacher, editor, and builder.

He had

scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too

an irregular rhythm of this kind to say nothing of the old anglo-saxon poems like beowulf and the scripture paraphrases attributed to but this species of oratio soluta carried to the lengths to which whitman carried it had an air of novelty which was displeasing to some while to others weary of the familiar measures and jingling rhymes it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom there is no consenting estimate of this poet many think that his so-called poems are not poems at all but simply a bad variety of prose that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and indecency, and that the Whitman cult is a passing fad of a few literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have something unmistakably American, that is, different from anything else, in writings from this side of the water, before they will acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering in Whitman the poet of democracy.

others maintain that he is the greatest of american poets or indeed of all modern poets that he is cosmic or universal and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet

whether whitman's poetry is formerly poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has usually left out the ugly the earthy and even the disgusting the under side of things which he holds not to be prosaic when apprehended with a strong masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects the lack of these elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in leaves of grass particularly that entitled children of adam which gave great offence by its immodesty or its outspokenness

Whitman's holds that nakedness is chaste, that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean, that all in fact are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit.

You might be thinking, the Yoppers, that's a little bit of a quirky name.

And the band's name is a nod to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The quote that they took it from is, I sound my barbaric yop over the roofs of the world.

So that's pretty cool, pretty easy listening.