Free American Philosophy by John Kaag

Irish revolutionary and—as far as the English were concerned—terrorist, was condemned to a sunbaked penal colony in Australia, he had risked everything to escape. I’d overlooked this shelf for many months, thinking that it had nothing to do with the history of Transcendentalism and American pragmatism. My angle of vision had kept me from seeing what was now patently obvious: Most of the books weren’t written by O’Reilly. They were written by one of his closest American friends: Walt Whitman.
    Lined up like sentinels were early editions of Leaves of Grass ; I recognized the brown leather cover of the 1860 edition. This was the third printing. In the years that followed its initial 1855 publication, Whitman had decided that his work was too short. He’d been right about the massive volume that came out a few years later: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I paged through quickly: “I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness.” I had finally come to terms with James’s dark meditation at Holden Chapel, and perhaps I could even accept Emerson’s suggestion that I should be self-reliant, but Whitman’s buoyancy—that I could not abide. William James would, with equal parts admiration and bafflement, call the famous poet one of the temperamentally optimistic. Whitman even wrote anonymous reviews of his own writing—sparklingly reverent reviews. He sought out an endorsement of Leaves of Grass from Emerson and emblazoned the praise from his “master” on the spine of later volumes: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson was nonplussed but could hardly criticize Whitman’s ingenuity—after all, Whitman had probably just taken Emerson at his word: “genius borrows nobly.” Once his reputation was solidified, Whitman sat for dozens of daguerreotype portraits and gave them away like business cards. Many of these photos—now framed and under glass—became heirlooms, passed from one generation to the next as evidence that the family had once cared about poetry and ideas. Even the Hockings were not immune from this sort of display.
    The frame was oblong and larger than I’d expected—it was on the floor, propped haphazardly against the shelf. I pulled it out of the shadows and wiped the grime from the glass. There was Whitman, peering out like Rip Van Winkle. Beneath the portrait was a note:
    Camden, New Jersey
    March 26, 1885.
    Dear Boyle,
    I send you some mail with this little roll of pictures—take your choice, what you like for yourself. Send one to Bagenal, as I have not got his address … I am well as usual—but am very lame—Have not been anywhere outside for over a year …
    Walt Whitman
    The discoveries at West Wind were no longer shocking, but the idea that things so precious could go to waste so easily was deeply unsettling. Then again, sometimes West Wind could be exasperating: “I am well as usual ,” Whitman wrote. How could one be at once “very lame” and “well as usual”? You’d have to be either a superhero or a liar.
    A mature and healthy Whitman met John Boyle O’Reilly four years earlier, in February 1881, at the inaugural meeting of the St. Botolph Club, a literary society that was modeled after the Century Association in New York. Its membership list read like a Who’s Who of Boston: Henry Cabot Lodge, John Singer Sargent, and Henry Houghton and George Mifflin of the eponymous publishing house were all in the club. St. Botolph’s was a swanky Brahmin affair that convinced Whitman—if he still needed convincing—that he’d finally made it into the New England literati. He was in the process of finishing what many scholars consider the last true edition of Leaves of Grass . The little volume had started as twelve poems but three decades later was edging toward four hundred.