Every Atom | No. 89

Introduction to Every Atom by project curator Brian Clements

I’ve been spending time with a Penguin Classics paperback copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, and thus with my fourteen-year-old self, who had learned it was a book to be known, and who read part of it. My notes in the margins and my memory tell me I was entranced and not: taken with Whitman’s great catalogues, but perplexed by some of their specifics. I loved his far-ranging lines, and yet I don’t know if I could have been recognized as a fellow traveler by him. Reading him now I find myself searching for the spaces that are in between gender, spaces where I might more easily become one with the poet’s reality, which can be a fetching one. But in many places I’m excluded from that reality, and in many—where the language used to describe women and, especially, people of color doesn’t live up to his avowals about equality or to the newness of the language he finds for other subjects—it’s not a reality I can love. 

I appreciate the way Whitman both pushed against and embodied some problematic views of his time, that he challenged them, if only partially; and that this partialness, known to the poet or not, did not stop him from declaiming his principles—Whoever degrades another degrades me—and attempting to enact them. I still love the rollicking lines, the way they can fall into pleasing amphibrachs: The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. I love all the not-washing and ocean-swimming and closeness to green things.

Though I am in the garden a lot lately and unwashed, and though a perennial love of mine is being in water, the last of these interests me most. How does the plant world—the one that supports us while we work out how to be better to each other, the one under deep threat then and especially now—fare in Whitman’s estimation? 

So I made a catalog of the catalog: an enumeration of all the references to plant life in that first edition of Leaves of Grass, the poems as expressed by their green parts only. For some sections, this means no poem at all, but for many it means at least a few phrases. I transcribed references to living plants, to some things made of plant material, and to soil. I included instances that seem actual and metaphorical and both, as well as every instance I read of earth—the capital-E version being, after oceans, mostly plant-covered at least for now.

In the resulting text, of which the part for “Song of Myself” is reproduced here, the elision of overt description of humans and animals makes it clearer how much of the green world is elided by the complete work, despite Whitman’s exuberant love of that world. By rough count, around sixty-five different kinds of plants (broad groups and particular species) are included. Many references are made to settler-colonial and capitalist efforts to control plants and the landscapes they make. There’s an emphasis on crop plants: vivid and mostly innocuous ones—the longleaved corn; the polished breasts of melons—and many mentions of crops that were dependent on slavery—cotton (six references), sugar (four), rice (one). Some plants noted are native to North America; some are introduced species from Europe and elsewhere. There’s an almost-total lack of acknowledgment in the book (with about one-and-a-half exceptions, both of which do violence to their subjects) of Indigenous people’s knowledge of the plant world. There is what feels like a lot of stumps (three) and logs or log houses (four). Though I didn’t include phrases without a word referencing a plant, plant material or action, or soil, there’s a whole lot of building and framing in the book, a great deal of trees gone from their stumps. 

But there’s also a near-constant remembering of the green world we’re held in—effulgent, varied, erotic both unto its planty self and as a stand-in for or merging with the human body. The smells or tastes of plants float in on the air (five times). And at least sometimes that world seems to exist for itself as it accrues in Whitman’s vision—to do the work of leaf-making, oxygen-making, ground-holding, without regard for human benefit. To insist on and celebrate and sing itself, as it continues to do every day, even as one in five plant species are threatened with extinction. And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven. When he turns his eyes on it like this, Whitman reminds us how dear, how necessary, that green stuff is.

Each Leaf 

from “Song of Myself,” 1855