The Many Meanings of Walt Whitman's Glasses

The great Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, for Yale Alumni Magazine, wrote recently about Walt Whitman.

From the essay...

If we harbored any collective doubts about whether an object can be too rich and significant to write about, the matter of Walt Whitman’s glasses should put those doubts to rest. I mean, really. Walt Whitman’s glasses.

Like Emily Dickinson’s bed or Herman Melville’s customs office uniform, this particular pair of spectacles resides in that peculiar realm of metaphor so potent as to exist already, fully formed, in all our minds. Nobody who’s read even a little of Whitman needs me to get poetic about What Those Eyes Beheld, or about the nervous system that connected soul to brain to eyes to lenses to nineteenth-century America and which was, ultimately, able to reach back from beyond mortality itself and speak to us, the still-living, about the constant intercession of the past into the present. See, I’m already going misty on you.

I’d rather talk briefly about what the glasses (artificial enhancers that they are) imply about Whitman as a self-invented man. Not as a self-created man—American history is irritatingly full of such people—but as, arguably, the first American artist not only to generate a body of great work but to enhance himself into—invent himself as, if you will—someone who could credibly produce the work in the first place.

The young (and the no-longer-all-that-young) Whitman was a dreamer and a dilettante, prone to half-hearted performances as a teacher and a journalist, among other occupations. He wrote (strictly for money, as he’d later claim) a negligible novel about temperance. It was not until he’d reached his late 30s that this drifty slacker produced, out of nowhere (biographically speaking), Leaves of Grass. He would spend the subsequent 35 years expanding and revising and re-re-republishing it, a total of seven times.