Blackwell Reference Online

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Slavery was the most important issue facing the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and no one wrote about American slavery in more powerful, imaginative, and self-contradictory ways than Walt Whitman. In The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764-1865, a 700-page collection including the works of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Wheatley, Dickinson, and Melville, the editor Marcus Wood states simply: “Whitman's poetry is the most important writing in this book” (Wood, 2003: 626). The anthology includes the best known of Whitman's passages on black Americans, both slave and free, from the 1855 Leaves of Grass, including three famous passages from “Song of Myself”: the “runaway slave” aided by the speaker, the “hounded slave” with whom the speaker identifies (“All this I feel or am”), and the Negro drayman, for whom the speaker professes love. In the context of dozens of antislavery poems in England and the United States, Whitman's poetry is singularly original and compelling.Yet Whitman's attitudes toward race and slavery continue to mystify his readers. For the poet who cheerfully admits “I contradict myself” appears no more self-contradictory than on the contentious issue of slavery and the future of black persons in the United States. Whitman projects a deep, humanitarian empathy for blacks in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, yet he consistently opposed the extension ... log in or subscribe to read full text