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THE PERSIAN WHITMAN
BEYOND A LITERARY RECEPTION
BEHNAM M. FOMESHI
The Persian Whitman
iranian studies series
The Iranian Studies Series publishes high-quality scholarship on various

aspects of Iranian civilisation, covering both contemporary and classical
cultures of the Persian cultural area. The contemporary Persian-speaking
area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Central Asia, while classical
societies using Persian as a literary and cultural language were located in
Anatolia, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. The
objective of the series is to foster studies of the literary, historical, religious
and linguistic products in Iranian languages. In addition to research mono-
graphs and reference works, the series publishes English-Persian critical
text-editions of important texts. The series intends to publish resources and
original research and make them accessible to a wide audience.
chief editor
A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden University)
advisory board of iss

A. Adib-Moghaddam (SOAS)
F. de Blois (University of London, SOAS)
D.P. Brookshaw (Oxford University)
J.T.P. de Bruijn (Leiden University)
N. Chalisova (Russian State University of Moscow)
J.T.L. Cheung (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales)
D. Davis (Ohio State University)
M.M. Khorrami (New York University)
A.R. Korangy Isfahani (Societas Philologica Persica)
J. Landau (Harvard University)
F.D. Lewis (University of Chicago)
L. Lewisohn (University of Exeter)
B. Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari (University of Tehran)
S. McGlinn (unaffiliated)
Ch. Melville (University of Cambridge)
F. Melville (University of Cambridge)
D. Meneghini (University of Venice)
N. Pourjavady (University of Tehran)
Ch. van Ruymbeke (University of Cambridge)
A. Sedighi (Portland State University)
S. Sharma (Boston University)
K. Talattof (University of Arizona)
Z. Vesel (CNRS, Paris)
M.J. Yahaghi (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad)
R. Zipoli (University of Venice)
the persian whitman
beyond a literary reception
by
Behnam M. Fomeshi
Leiden University Press

Cover design: Tarek Atrissi Design
Cover illustration: Walt Whitman in portrait from Mathew Brady studio, ca. 1863
(Shutterstock, 239399233)
Lay-out: TAT Zetwerk, Utrecht
isbn 978 90 8728 335 3

e-isbn 978 94 0060 356 1 (ePDF)
e-isbn 978 94 0060 357 8 (ePub)
nur 635
© Behnam M. Fomeshi / Leiden University Press, 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no
part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and
the author of the book.
This book is distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press

(www.press.uchicago.edu).
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 
1 – Walt Whitman’s Life and Works 

Childhood and Adolescence, 1819–1836 
Early Adulthood, 1836–1848 
Wandering and Experimenting, 1848–1855 
Leaves of Grass 1855–1861 
The Civil War, 1861–1865 
Post-War Washington, 1865–1873 
Camden, 1873–1884 
Mickle Street, 1884–1892 
2 – From Democratic Politics to Democratic Poetics 
Whitman’s Poetic Innovations 
Whitman’s Poetic Innovations and Democracy 
3 – Democracy and Nationalism Intertwined 
Democracy and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America 
Literary Democracy in Nineteenth-Century American
Nationalism 
Leaves of Grass: Democratic National Poetry 
4 – A Persian Translation of Whitman 
The Persian Constitutional Movement and American
Literature 
The New Intelligentsia and Poetry 
The First Translator of Whitman 
The First Translation of Whitman in Persia 
1943 Reception of Whitman’s Translation 
The First Persian Whitman: An “Urban” Progressive Poet 
5 – Critical Reception of Whitman 
Literary Modernism and the Initial Reception of Whitman 
vi | The Persian Whitman
Nīmā Yūshīj, New Poetry and Whitman 

A Nīmāic Whitman: An Urban Innovative Poet 
6 – Creative Reception of Whitman 
Parvīn’s “God’s Weaver” and Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient
Spider” 
The Emergence of a Mixed-Breed Spider: When Two Literary
Minds Meet 
7 – Political Reception of Whitman 
Poetic Modernism and Iranian Left 
Persian Poetic Modernism’s Oppositional Position 
8 – A Persian Translation of Whitman’s Image 
“The Laughing Philosopher” in a Persian Costume 
Persian Poetry, Iranian Politics and Whitman’s Image 
9 – A Post-2009 Reception of Whitman 
A Persian Mystic Poet on the Front Cover 
The Game Is Not Over Yet: The Rival Discourses Emerge 
The Interaction of Competing Discourses 
Conclusion 
Chronology 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 
‫ﺗﻘﺪﱘ ﺑﻪ ﭘﺪر و ﻣﺎدرم‬
‫و‬
‫ا ٓدﯾﻨﻪ‬
Acknowledgments
My debts for this book are so many that I cannot be sure I am recollecting
all of them at this moment. Writing a book about the poet who calls himself
“large” would not be possible without great help of many people. They are
not responsible, I quickly add, for any errors.
Words cannot express my gratitude to Editor Asghar Seyed-Gohrab for
his professional advice and assistance in polishing this manuscript. I had
known him from his scholarly publications in the field of Persian literature
before I came to know him in person in August 2016 in Iranian Studies
Conference at University of Vienna. He accepted to act as my academic host
during my research stay at Leiden University, where he encouraged me to
submit my manuscript to Leiden University Press, for which I thank him.
I am grateful to him for his reading of this manuscript at different stages. I
have learned from him on various occasions about the life of an Iranian in
Western academia.
For the discerning readings and advice offered at various stages in
completing this book, I am grateful to Walter Grünzweig, who has been
there from the early stages of this project, when he accepted to support
my Humboldt application. My colleagues at TU Dortmund, including
Randi Gunzenhäuser, offered valuable responses to different parts of my
manuscript when I delivered them at the staff meetings. I am grateful to
the Department of American Studies in particular our small writing group
where I discussed different parts of my project with Sina Nitzsche and Eriko
Ogihara-Schuck.
I owe Ed Folsom my appreciation for his wise counsel and unbounded
patience, at different stages of completing my project. His presence is felt
everywhere in this book, particularly in chapter six. I have been fortunate to
attend the 2017 International Whitman Week in Paris where I met for the
first time the distinguished Whitman scholars, including Betsy Erkkila and
Kenneth Price, with whom I had been in touch through emails from my
PhD days in Shiraz and whose kind words supported me during this project.
x | The Persian Whitman
I also had the opportunity to present portions of this work as it developed at

two symposia held by the Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association in 2017
and 2018.
Portions of this book have been presented at various conferences and
workshops, including International Comparative Literature Association
congress at the University of Vienna; “The Religious Right: Republicans,
Preachers and Presidents” conference at Saarland University; The American
Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting at Utrecht University;
the 3rd Summer Workshop in American Studies at TU Dortmund University;
and the Deutsche Orientalistentag and DAVO Conference at Friedrich
Schiller University. I am grateful to my audiences and their feedback. During
my visits and research stays at University of Bamberg, Shiraz University,
University of Marburg, Leiden University and University of St Andrews I have
presented parts of this manuscript. For the comments and encouragements
I received I am grateful to the friends and colleagues.
I benefitted from the exceptionally generous support of Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation without which this book would never have come to
be. It was Behzad Ghaderi Sohi who first piqued my interest in Whitman
when as a PhD student I turned to him to help me narrow down the subject
of my dissertation. I thank Hasan Javadi for both providing me with materials
and reading parts of the manuscript. I would like to express my appreciation
to Andreas Drechsler and the staff of the University of Bamberg Library who
have been generous with their time, resources, and advice. I owe a great deal
to translators of Whitman Mohsen Towhidian and Farid Ghadami for reading
specific chapters and answering patiently my many questions. I should also
thank Esmail Beheshtizadeh for introducing me to Amin Alijanlou who has
kindly provided me with two photos for chapter eight. I would like to thank
the members of the Iranian Studies Network at UNSW, in particular Max
Bledstein, whose insightful comments contributed to this work.
A number of friends and colleagues have kindly accepted to read specific
chapters or sections of this manuscript in its different stages of comple-
tion. My heartfelt thanks to Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Matthew Blackwell,
Maryam Mosharraf, Mohammad Taghi Ghasemi, Amir Ahmadi Arian,
Bahee Hadaegh, Mostafa Hosseini, Eugene Eoyang, and Morteza Shaabanifar.
For the materials they provided me with I am pleased to thank Daniel Thomas
Potts, Ghader Shenivar, Arash Maadanipour, and Mansooreh Bakvai. This
project also reflects the positive influence and contributions of the following
colleagues, correspondents, and friends: Arash Moradi, Ali Sobati, Mehrdad
Fallah, Farzān Nasr, Omid Azadibougar, Esmail Haddadian-Moqaddam,
˙
Acknowledgments | xi
Christine von Ruymbeke, Laetitia Nanquette, Roxane Haag-Higuchi, Alireza

Anushiravani, Christoph Werner, Saeedeh Shahnehpour, Saeed Talajooy,
Parmis Mozaffari, Bahar Abdi, Mahtab Saadatmandi, Fatemeh Khansalar,
Mohammad Emami, Salour Malayeri, Farshad Sonboldel, and Maryam
Ghorbankarimi.
Above all, I wish to thank Adineh, my friend, my wife and my mentor,
who contributed far more than I can possibly acknowledge.
Earlier versions of some parts of the book have previously appeared in
print elsewhere. A portion of chapter six has been published as “‘Till the
Gossamer Thread You Fling Catch Somewhere’: Parvin E’t esami’s Creative
Reception of Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 35, (2018):
267–275. An earlier version of chapter eight has appeared in “‘Something
Foreign In It’: A Study of an Iranian Translation of Whitman’s Image,” Transfer
14,1–2 (2019): 49–72. I am grateful to these journals for publishing my work
and for allowing me to incorporate it here.
The photos used in chapter eight are from the following libraries and
collections: Bayley/Whitman Collection of Ohio Wesleyan University; Ed
Folsom Collection; Gay Wilson Allen Collection; Library of Congress; Rare
Book Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden
Foundations; and U.S. National Archives.
A note about language. All citations from Persian language texts are my
translations unless otherwise indicated. For transliteration I used IJMES
style.
Introduction
Born in mid-1980s Iran, I grew up hearing “Marg bar Āmrīkā” (Down with
the US). This was my first encounter with the US and this still continues to
be the Iranian state’s way of introducing the US to us: the “Great Satan.”1
As a schoolboy I was exposed to the school textbooks, which “sketch a
dark picture of the Iranian regime’s alleged enemy.”2 At the same time, my
parents sent me to a language school to learn English. The textbooks were
not Iranian and the image they depicted of the US was not that of the “Great
Satan.” After the 9/11 attacks and during the period in which “axis of evil”
discourse was popular, I started studying English literature at university. As
an undergraduate, I came to know a different US, a country that was not as
evil as depicted by the Iranian state.3 Although there has been (and still is)
no major for American literature in Iranian academia, I did a comparative
study on R.W. Emerson and Suhrāb Sipihrī in my MA thesis and I could find
some points of similarity and, of course, points of difference between two
enemy countries.
In my PhD dissertation, a comparative study of Walt Whitman and
Nīmā Yūshīj’s literary innovations, I investigated the sociopolitical and
literary contexts of nineteenth-century America and those of constitutional
Iran to analyse how Whitman and Nīmā translated the discourses of their
societies into literary discourses and developed free verse and New Poetry.4
There I realised some significant points of convergence between the two
countries. Having worked comparatively on American literature and Persian
poetry, I became interested in the cultural and literary relations between
the two countries. In a section entitled “Suggestions for Further Study” in
my dissertation I mentioned the reception of Whitman in Persian-speaking
countries as a topic one can delve into. During my Humboldt postdoctoral
fellowship I turned towards reception studies and developed my research
into a broad study of Whitman’s Iranian reception to delve into the cultural
and literary relations between the “Great Satan” and a significant constituent
of “the axis of evil.”
2 | The Persian Whitman
In Iran American literature is known mainly for plays and novels, with
staged performances of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller along
with translations of works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Herman
Melville and Mark Twain, and more recently Jhumpa Lahiri, J.D. Salinger,
Paul Auster, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. However, American literature
remained almost entirely neglected in Iran in the period up to the end of
Riżā Shāh’s reign in 1941, when the focus of literary translation into Persian
was predominantly on French and Russian literature. A significant factor
at the time was the cultural influence of France; Iranian intellectuals were
mostly educated in France, and they translated various literary works from
French. Lack of familiarity with English was another reason for neglecting
American literature.
In 1940s Iran there was an explosive increase in the number of trans-
lations. Due to the rise of the Leftist movement after the fall of Riżā Shāh,
Russian literature dominated the translation of literary works into Persian.
Following World War II, through a translation effort of the pro-Soviet Tūdih
Party of Iran, Marxist ideas became popular in Iran. The increasing Rus-
sian influence in 1940s Iran was an alarm call to the US. During the cold
war, Iran turned into a front line of cultural cold war between two super-
powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The 1953 coup increased
the US’s influence in Iranian politics. There was also a need to take some
measures in cultural diplomacy, the idea behind which was to use books,
among other things, as a cheap and peaceful instrument in order to increase
the US cultural presence and influence and to counter the growing threat of
communism in Iran. The establishment of the Tehran office of the Franklin
Book Programs, Inc. in 1954, not long after the coup, was one such measure.
Founded in 1952, Franklin Book Programs was an American corporation
whose main focus was on assisting the publication of translations of US
books into local languages in the developing countries of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. Franklin turned into “the unofficial representative of
the entire American book world to book interests of other, usually Third
World, countries.”5 The program had seventeen offices around the world, the
largest of which was the one in Tehran. Some of the most outstanding public
figures and intellectuals including Ahmad Ārām, Īraj Afshār, Muhammad-
˙ ˙
Jaʿfar Mahjūb, Muhammad Moʿīn, and Ehsan Yarshater participated in
˙ ˙
Franklin/Tehran. In 25 years of activity in Iran, from 1954 to 1979, it
published about eight hundred books, most of which were translations of
American works,6 including The Call of the Wild, an edition of Robert Frost’s
poems, Gone with the Wind, The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, The House
Introduction | 3
of Seven Gables, an edition of Whitman’s poems, Moby Dick, My Antonia,

The Sound and the Fury, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Thanks to
the efforts of the Franklin/Tehran and a few major publishers including
the Institute for Translation and Publication of Books (Bungāh-i Tarjumih
va Nashr-i Kitāb), founded in 1953 by Ehsan Yarshater, the translation of
American novels remained a vibrant segment of the publishing field by
attracting many young translators. Having been introduced to American
fiction, Iranian audiences felt the desire to know the history of American
literature. Hasan Javadi’s translation of Willis Wager’s American Literature:
A World View (1968), published in 1976, was the first step to satisfy such a
desire.
The increasing American influence in the four decades preceding the 1979
Revolution was disapproved of by the new “Islamic” system. Turned into the
official discourse of the post-1979 political system, the discourse of “āmrīkā-
sitīzī” (i.e. hostility towards the US), depicting an image of the “corrupt” “evil”
“enemy” out of the US, tried to erase the manifestations of the American
influence of the pre-revolutionary period. However, other discourses were
also at work and American novels remained popular. After a decade of stag-
nation that covered the Cultural Revolution (1980–1983) and the Iran-Iraq
War (1980–1988), translations of American works along with retransla-
tions and reprints of previously translated works continued. Instrumental
in introducing American literature into Iran were translators of Ameri-
can literature into Persian including Muhammad Qāżī (1913–1998), Sīmīn
˙
Dānishvar (1921–2012), Ibrāhīm Gulistān (1922–), Parvīz Dāryūsh (1923–
2001), Najaf Daryābandarī (1929–), Karīm Imāmī (1930–2005), Bahman
Shuʿlihvar (1941–), Sālih Huseynī (1946–), and Ahmad Ukhuvvat (1951–).
˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
American novelists popular in Iran include Jack London, Mark Twain,
John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isaac Asimov, Salinger, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner and Herman Mel-
ville. Some works by the aforementioned writers have been translated several
times by different translators. From among the contemporary writers Toni
Morrison, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster should be mentioned.
Huckleberry Finn, one of the first American novels translated into Persian,
has been translated six times and reprinted many times. Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Moby Dick, Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Old Man and the Sea, Of
Mice and Men, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Call of the Wild are among
the most popular American works in this genre. American novels have also
been adapted for the screen; Riżā Mīrlūhī’s adaptation of Of Mice and Men
˙
in Tupulī (1972) is an early example. According to Iranian film critics Nāsir
˙
Taqvāyī’s adaptation of To Have and Have Not in Nākhudā Khūrshīd (1987) is

the best adaptation of world literature in Iranian cinema. The only adaptation
of J.D. Salinger to screen worldwide is worth mentioning; Dariush Mehrjui, a
major figure of Iran’s New Wave cinema, did not require permission for Parī
(1995), an adaptation of Franny and Zooey and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,”
from Salinger’s Nine Stories.
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936), translated into
Persian by Gulistān and published in 1949, was among the first American
short stories translated into Persian. Along with Hemingway, Stephen Crane,
Faulkner, and Stephen Vincent Benét are the first American short story
writers translated into Persian. Hemingway, Melville, Raymond Carver,
Steinbeck, Salinger and Falkner are among the most read American short
story writers in Iran. American short stories have also been adapted for
the screen; Hinrīk Istipānīyān and Sālār ʿIshqī’s adaptation of “The Million
Pound Bank Note” in Chik-i Yik Mīlyūn Tūmānī (1959) is an early example.
One may also refer to Mansūr Tihrānī’s adaptation of “The Last Leaf ” in
˙
Barg va Bād (1985).
American plays such as The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, A
Streetcar Named Desire, and A View from the Bridge have been translated
and staged in Iran. The translation and staging of American plays have been
increasing in recent decades. Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, Sam
Shepard, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller are the most popular American
dramatists. American plays have also been adapted for the screen; Bahrām
Tavakkulī’s adaptation of The Glass Menagerie in Īnjā Bidūn-i Man (2011)
and his adaptation of A Streetcare Named Desire in Bīgānih (2014) along with
Asghar Farhādī’s adaptation of Death of a Salesman in Furūshandih (2016)
are just a fewrecent examples.
It is American fiction and particularly the American novel that most
attracted Iranians’ attention. In contrast to the other genres, American poetry
is not very popular in Iran. Generally speaking, poetry is not the most popular
genre in Persian translation; perhaps the rich tradition of Persian poetry
does not feel the need to translate foreign poetry. And when foreign poetry
is translated, it is traditionally dominated by French and Russian. However,
a few American poets have found their place in Iran. As the number and
chronological precedence of translations indicate, Whitman is one such poet.
Following the practice adopted in post-colonial studies of distinguish-
ing between “English” (the language of England) and “english” (the world
language), Thomas distinguishes between “Whitman” (the historical figure
embedded in nineteenth-century American culture) and “whitman” (the
Introduction | 5
world poet who has been radically realigned as various cultures have adopted
him into their own literary traditions and have read his works in defamiliaris-
ing contexts).7 As American literature turns into World Literature, multiple
Whitmans are appearing, and we have entered the era in which we need to
study both “Whitman” and “whitman.” Analysing how Whitman becomes
whitman contributes to the globalisation of American studies.8
Moving in the same path as that of Walt Whitman and the World, the
present volume intends to provide readers with fresh insights into the
reception of Walt Whitman (1819–1892) in unfamiliar cultural contexts to
broaden “the rather provincial understanding of Whitman held by many
American readers and writers” who, still seeing him within the American
context, “tend to be oblivious to the variety of ways that Whitman has been
construed for the purposes and needs of other cultures” (emphasis added).9
Whitman scholars based in US universities often hear about historical events
of the US when they discuss Whitman, so it is definitely amazing to learn
about Whitman in non-American contexts such as post-constitutional or
post-2009 Iran. As Gutman argues, the “study and reception of American
literature reveals national identity. When one culture abuts another, the way
in which one encounters or assimilates the other is defining in special ways.”10
Tracking the ways in which Whitman becomes a Persian Whitman in Iran
contributes not only to the globalisation of American studies, but also to a
better appreciation of Iranian culture.
Whitman, the poet of “Salut au Monde!,” has been received by diverse
audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have
studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements
of different countries. Along with Blodgett’s 1934 book, Walt Whitman
in England, which was the first formal reception study of the poet in an
international context, Erkkila’s Walt Whitman among the French (1980),
Grünzweig’s Constructing the German Walt Whitman (1995), Thomas’s
Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K. (2005), Skwara’s
“Polski Whitman”: O Funkcjonowaniu Poety Obcego w Kulturze Narodowej
[“The Polish Whitman”: On the Functioning of the Poet in a National Culture]
(2010) and Polskie serie recepcyjne wierszy Walta Whitmana [Polish Serial
Reception of Walt Whitman’s Poems] (2015) are the major monographs in
the field.11 On a smaller scale, Whitman’s reception has been studied for
such diverse countries as Spain, Brazil, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Italy, the Former Yugoslavia, Croatia, Slovenia, Russia, Iceland, Sweden,
Denmark, Norway, Finland, Israel, India, Korea, China, Australia, Canada,
New Zealand and Japan.12
The history of Whitman’s reception in Iran, which started in 1922 with

Yūsif Iʿtisāmī’s one-page translation, has so far witnessed four book-length
˙
translations, a significant number of translations published in newspapers
and other periodicals along with activities in academia including theses and
papers. One should also bear in mind the creative and critical reception of
Whitman, tracing back to the early stages of Whitman’s presence in Persia,
and a forthcoming book-length translation by Mehrdad Fallah (1960–),
a poet. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in
this country has remained unexplored by Whitman scholars. Furthermore,
Iranian reception of Western literature is a field still in its infancy and
under-researched, particularly due to contemporary political circumstances.
The present volume fills this significant gap by examining the process of
Whitman’s heretofore unexplored reception in Iran. Like Hermans, who
elaborated on translation not as a question of transmitting content, but
instead as a question of the recipient construing meaning,13 the present
volume is primarily involved with the Persian Whitman Iranians construe
and construct rather than the American Whitman’s travel to Iran.
Modern Iran saw increasing American influence in the four decades
preceding the 1979 “Islamic” Revolution. Calling the American influence
an instance of “cultural invasion”, the new “Islamic” system tries to reduce
this influence. Contradictorily, Whitman is even more strongly present
in this post-Revolutionary period than in the previous period. With its
changing attitude towards the US, modern Iran deserves a significant case
study.
Whitman was undeniably a force in the development of modernist poetry
in different national contexts. His role in the modernist Chinese literature
and in Brazilian literary modernism was investigated.14 One can trace a
relation between the desire to break with traditional norms of literature and
attention to the father of American free verse in various countries. One can
also trace a relationship between the rise of Persian literary modernism and
the emergence of Whitman in Persia. The first four decades of the twentieth
century were significant in the development of modern Persian poetry. As
this volume will show, the outcome of the modernist poetic activities in those
decades was New Poetry developed by Nīmā Yūshīj. It was no coincidence
that the first four decades of the twentieth century witnessed the first critical
reading of Whitman in Persian, along with the first creative reception and
the first translation of Whitman into Persian.
In his study of West-China comparative literary studies, Cai writes about
the polemics of similitude and the polemics of difference and calls for the
Introduction | 7
elimination of superiority/inferiority binary opposition which will lead to a

better understanding of the other.15 Thinking about the West-Iran compara-
tive literary studies, I should mention “the polemics of influence/reception
and call for the elimination of superiority/inferiority binary opposition in
Iranian comparative studies. Appreciating the significance of reception study
may contribute to the elimination of the cultural superiority in the practice of
comparative literature in Iran.”16 A recently published paper of mine studies
a nineteenth-century US reception of Hāfiz.17 My concern with reception
˙ ˙
covers both directions: the reception of American culture in Iran and the
other way around. This approach to the question of reception leads to a clear
understanding of reception as an intercultural dialogue.
The present volume studies Whitman’s Persian reception on three levels.
The first critical reading of Whitman was offered by Nīmā Yūshīj, the pioneer
of modern poetry in Iran. He made a seminal statement on Whitman’s
relevance to the emerging “urban” modernity, highlighting Whitman’s poetic
innovations and free style. The present monograph also examines the creative
reception of Whitman in Iran. The earliest instance of such creative receptions
is Parvīn Iʿtisāmī’s reworking of Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” in
˙
“God’s Weaver”. Parvīn, the acclaimed twentieth-century woman poet of
Iran, introduced in her poetry a spider with unprecedented characteristics
which, as I discuss in Chapter six, was an appropriation of Whitman’s “A
Noiseless, Patient Spider”. The other level of Whitman’s reception is that
of translation. Yūsif Iʿtisāmī’s translation brought about the emergence of
˙
the first Persian Whitman, a figure that, if not radical or revolutionary, was
progressive and corresponded with the country’s constitutional movement
towards democracy and human rights. The present volume studies the
ways different Persian translators of Whitman produce their own unique
Whitmans. Despite the differences, these versions of Whitman have some
points of convergence that form the Persian Whitman.
In discussions on the development of democracy in the Middle East, much
attention has been paid to the recent developments known as the Arab Spring.
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) indicates that democracy
in this region has a much longer history. From a literary perspective, this
revolution is the starting point of the reception of the American poet of
democracy and of hetero-/homosexuality in an Islamic Middle Eastern
country moving towards democracy. Challenging the widely-held perception
of Iran as an isolated society and that of the antagonism between Western
culture and the “Islamic Middle East”, the present monograph contributes to
the understanding of Iranian assimilation of modern ideas.
According to Prawer, a writer’s willingness to connect with another writer

and “to allow it to affect his own literary creations, must depend on a feeling
of kinship, or fascinated hostility.”18 These factors have determining roles in
the reception of a writer in a foreign country. The cultural importations do
not materialise spontaneously, but according to the ideological necessity of
the receptor. The present monograph takes into consideration the role of
Iran’s sociopolitical and literary necessities in the reception of Whitman. The
volume makes use of the well-established analogy between Whitman and
Persian literature in its investigation of Whitman’s reception in Iran.19 Since
reception theory forms the theoretical framework of the present monograph,
it studies translations of Whitman into Persian in combination with other
reception documents such as reviews and statements by translators; the role
of the translators as cultural mediators will also be highlighted.
Since the present monograph studies various discourses of Iranian
society and their interaction with Whitman’s reception, it will employ
New Historicism as a critical approach. Discourse, a key concept in New
Historicism, is defined as “a social language created by particular cultural
conditions at a particular time and place” that “expresses a particular way
of understanding human experience.”20 The present volume studies how
Whitman’s reception in Iran represents the interaction of different discourses,
including democracy; how it affects and is affected by them; how it deals with
the dominant discourse; how it interacts mutually with the contemporary
discourses; and how this interaction has changed throughout history. It will
elaborate on how Whitman’s subversive energy was at work when his writing
was deployed by political parties to further their political ideology.
From a New Historicist point of view, all events shape and are shaped by
the culture in which they emerge. The present monograph extends this New
Historicist view to the field of reception studies. It pays close attention to the
sociopolitical context, as well as the literary context of Whitman’s reception
in Iran. It takes into consideration that the relation between a given text and
its context, whether sociopolitical or literary, is mutual.
Studies on the status of a writer in a foreign country often pay too much
attention to the writer, sometimes to the point of ignoring the inevitable
dialogue between the writer and the foreign context. Even the studies that
recognise a dialogue between a given writer and a foreign context consider
the dialogue to be mostly, if not merely, diachronic. For instance the influence
of a classical, medieval or modern literary or philosophical movement or
school on a given writer is studied along with the influence of the same
writer on the country or culture which previously influenced the writer. This
Introduction | 9
view of the dialogue between a writer and a country uses a chronological

approach to elaborate on a diachronic mutual give and take.
The present volume recognises a dialogue, a synchronic reciprocal inter-
action between Whitman and modern Iran. As Whitman brings his modern
messages to Iran, modern Iran constructs its different versions of Whitman. It
deals not just with Whitman, but the Persian Whitman, a new phenomenon
that is the outcome of the dialogue, both diachronic and synchronic, between
the Persian culture and an American poet. This monograph tries to elaborate
on how sociopolitical and literary discourses of Iran engage in a dialogue
with Whitman; this simultaneous mutual give and take is a significant aspect
of reception. The Persian Whitman is a new phenomenon that is both Whit-
manian and Persian, and it is more than the sum of the two. This focus on
synchronic reciprocal intercultural dialogue in the study of a writer in a
foreign context is the focus in the approach of the present monograph. Social
Sciences and Humanities scholars will find this approach particularly useful
in studying the reception of ideas and schools of thought in foreign contexts.
It will lead to a deeper appreciation of how various literary, social, political
and philosophical theories are translated, received, adapted, indigenised and
appropriated in different countries and how each context is an individual
case different from any other.
Considering both the “cultural turn” and the “sociological turn” in
Translation Studies, the present volume pays close attention not only to
source text, but also to the target contexts and many different agents working
in between the two. As paratext, including epitext and peritext, plays an
important role in the interpretation of a text, the present volume does not
confine itself to the study of the texts of Whitman’s poetry and their Persian
translations. It pays close attention to both the epitext (things outside a
volume such as reviews and the translator’s comments) in chapters four,
five, seven, eight and nine, and the peritext (things inside the bound volume
such as the table of contents, footnotes, the covers, the publisher’s and the
translator’s prefaces) in chapters four, seven, eight and nine.
Organisation of the Book
The chapters in this book are divided according to the different forms of
reception including creative, critical and political, along with, of course,
translation (both of the written text and of image). Although the chapters are
not divided according to the periods in the history of Iran, the chronological
order is observed to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of

the formation and development of Whitman’s reception in Iran.
In writing this monograph I have been keenly aware that such an inter-
disciplinary study draws at least three distinct audiences from different
backgrounds, including Persian literature and comparative studies. Follow-
ing Whitman’s democratic inclusive approach, I tried to receive all these
audiences warmly and to provide each group with fresh insights. The first
three chapters focus on Whitman, his poetic innovation and his literary and
sociopolitical context including the dominant discourses of the nineteenth-
century US. What is discussed in these chapters on Whitman’s life and work is
primarily intended to relate to his reception in Iran. Therefore, these chapters
are selective and they do not delve into certain aspects of his work. Chapter
one, which covers Whitman’s life and work, discusses different editions of
Leaves of Grass, particularly the first edition published in 1855. Chapter two
investigates Whitman’s turn from Democratic politics to democratic poetics.
Whitman understands the sociopolitical context of his country and feels
the necessity of developing a new poetics and a new poetry. He realises the
necessity of democracy to his nation, but he does not confine democracy
to politics. He undertands that the democratic culture needs a democratic
art; thus trying to translate democracy into poetics. The new nation, having
achieved political independence from Britain, needs a new poetry that would
be an artistic manifestation of American democracy. Whitman strongly
believes that art has the power to transform the aristocratic culture and art
into democratic ones. His democratic poetry and poetics is an attempt to
bring democracy to the mind and manners of every individual.
From the revolutionary era to the culmination of Whitman’s poetic career,
American nationalism and American democracy were the dominant dis-
courses of the country and the two discourses were interconnected. Chapter
three delves into the interconnectedness of democracy and nationalism in
a certain period in the history of the US. In the political context it can be
traced in Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, George
Washington and the Civil War. In the literary context the interconnectedness
of literary nationalism and literary democracy can be traced in Alexis de
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Jefferson, Bryant, The Young America
Movement, Emerson and Whitman.
Chapter four studies the first Persian translation of Whitman by Yūsif
Iʿtisāmī published in October 1922. This is the period following the consti-
˙
tutional revolution, which took place in the early twentieth century. Born
in Tabrīz, an intersection of native and foreign cultures, and familiar with
Introduction | 11
several languages, Iʿtisāmī was an intellectual who tried to transfer his knowl-
˙
edge of other cultures, including the American, to his compatriots. In the
post-constitutional period in Iran a poet was mainly regarded as a cultural
reformist informing the nation of its backwardness and Western progress. As
the chapter indicates, the first Iranian Whitman, depicted in Iʿtisāmī’s trans-
˙
lation, was progressive, if not radical or revolutionary, and corresponded
with the country’s constitutional movement towards democracy. The fact
that the Persians chose Whitman from among American writers in 1922,
when there was not much American literature and even less American poetry
in Persia, is itself significant in their movement towards modernity.
Characteristically, the rise of literary modernism coincided with signifi-
cant developments in the reception of Whitman worldwide. One can also
trace a relationship between the rise of Persian literary modernism and the
emergence of Whitman in Iran. To modernise Persian poetry, Nīmā Yūshīj,
known as the father of Persian New Poetry, elaborated on modern European
poets as well as Whitman as a modern American poet. Chapter five closely
reads Nīmā’s Arzish-i Ihsāsāt dar Zindigī-yi Hunarpīshigān (1939–1940) to
˙
study the modern Persian poet’s critique of Whitman’s free verse and its
literary and sociopolitical contexts. To Nīmā, Whitman observed the devel-
opments of modernity and brought it into his poetry.21 Considering a relation
between city, industry and machine on one hand and art on the other, Nīmā
referred to Whitman’s poems as quite “urban,” a term that signified “devoid
of traditional rhyme scheme and meter” among other things.
The literary connection between Parvīn Iʿtisāmī and Walt Whitman
˙
remains a largely unexplored field. Chapter six analyses the relation between
“God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvīn’s cre-
ative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider and combining
characteristics from both Whitman’s arachnid and the Persian spider demon-
strate Parvīn’s successful poetic inventiveness. The interaction between many
forces – including Persian traditions of munāzirih and mystical poetry,
˙
Parvīn’s poetic genius, her personal life, and the unique characteristics of
Whitman’s spider – led to Parvīn’s creative reception of Whitman. Parvīn’s
cross-bred spider, Persian and Whitmanian at the same time, is neither Whit-
man’s creature nor that of the classical Persian literature. It provides us with
an example of the cultural interaction involved in the reception.
Persians tend to look at Whitman through Nīmā Yūshīj or the other
way around. Chapter seven elaborates on when and how the association
between the two modern poets of Persian and American literature formed.
The association between the father of Persian New Poetry and the father of
American free verse owes a great deal to an Iranian philosopher’s activities

in the 1940s. Ihsān Tabarī, a leftist thinker, connected literary modernism in
˙ ˙
general and New Poetry in particular with leftist ideology. He was the first
critic to support Nīmā strongly and to publicise his poetic modernism on
various occasions. He was also among the first writers to translate and to
introduce Whitman to the Persian-speaking world. The connections between
Tabarī and Nīmā along with the connection between Tabarī and Whitman
˙ ˙
developed an association between Nīmā and Whitman and linked the two
modern poets under the leftist discourse in Persian literary and intellectual
circles.
Studies of the reception of a writer in another culture primarily deal with
the translation of the works into the target language. Such studies usually
ignore the translation of the writer’s image. What does the Persian Whitman
look like? Studying the common image of the poet in contemporary Iran,
chapter eight answers this question. In this study, “image” refers both to visual
representations, such as pictures or photographs, and the mental conceptions
held in common by members of a group, such as is the subject of imagology.
Through a close analysis of the front covers of two recent book-length Persian
translations of Whitman, the chapter examines the interaction of different
literary and sociopolitical discourses that affect the translation of the image
of the American poet into an image of a Persian Whitman.
Whitman, the American poet of democracy, was translated both before
and after the 1979 “Islamic” revolution in Iran. A closer look at how he is
depicted in the Iranian cultural arena can contribute to a fuller appreciation
of poetry, politics and the relation between the two in post-revolutionary
Iran. Although the anti-US, anti-West sentiments of the pre-1979 period,
which found a safe place in the post-1979 political system, tried to erase the
manifestations of the American influence of the pre-revolutionary period,
the interest in Whitman was increasing. As explained in chapter eight, the
cultural policy of the new political system was to propagate the image of
a poet as a mystic, a person often indifferent to the immediate situation.
However, as chapter nine shows, the opposing discourses were also at work
to present a different image of the poet. This chapter studies Ey Nākhudā
Nākhudā-yi Man [O Capitan my Capitan], a 2010 book-length Persian
translation of Whitman by Farid Ghadami (1985–), to elaborate on the
dynamics of Whitman’s representations in modern Iran to investigate the
intricate relationship between poetry and politics along with the interactions
between the opposing discourses in modern Iran particularly in the post-
2009 period.22
Introduction | 13
After analysing the interaction between the literary, cultural and sociopo-
litical issues of Iran and Whitman reception in various periods in the history
of modern Iran, the concluding chapter elaborates on the development of
Whitman reception in Iran. The Iranians’ increasing interest in Whitman is
discussed and some thoughts on the future of this trend and its relation to
the Iranian society are proposed. A chronology of sociopolitical and liter-
ary events of modern Iran interspersed with significant dates in Whitman’s
reception forms the appendix.
While employing various methodologies and critical approaches familiar
to scholars in the Humanities, I tried to avoid too many technical terms and
too much jargon so as not to appear unintelligible and confusing to the wider
audience. Each chapter in the present volume stands alone and can be read
independently of the other chapters. Chapters of the present monograph
can be read in any order that readers wish. However, the chapters together,
particularly in the order presented here, lead to a deeper understanding of
the formation and development of Whitman’s reception in Iran.
chapter 1
Walt Whitman’s Life and Works
Childhood and Adolescence, 1819–18361
Walt Whitman, the American poet of democracy, was born on 31 May 1819
in the Long Island village of West Hills, some fifty miles east of Manhattan.
The poet’s mother was Louisa Van Velsor Whitman and his father Walter
Whitman. Walt’s ancestors were two branches of early American settlers:
English on his father’s side and Dutch on his mother’s.
Although the poet was never close to his father, the latter’s “admiration
of freethinkers and radicals left an unmistakable influence on his namesake’s
early intellectual development.”2 The names he chose for the sons younger
than Walt – Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson
Whitman – indicated his patriotism. The poet’s “fondness for his father,
however, did not match the intensity of his love for his mother.”3 The poet’s
mother was “barely literate and sometimes hypochondriac.” She was also
“imaginative, a good storyteller, and the family peacekeeper.”4 Although
the mother never appreciated her son’s poetry, the poet believed she had a
significant influence on his work, saying, “Leaves of Grass is the flower of her
temperament active in me.”5
Walter took the growing family to live in Brooklyn in 1822. The poet’s
formal education began in the 1824–1825 educational year when he went
to the only public school in Brooklyn. The poet was apparently an average
student. He left school in 1830 due to the financial difficulties of the family
and had no formal schooling after that. The 11-year-old son would take a job
as an office boy in the summer of 1830 in the James B. Clark & Son law firm
to earn some money on his own to support the family. The Clarks provided
the young Walt with a subscription to a circulating library that opened up the
world of literature to him. Later he was hired as a newspaper apprentice to
Samuel E. Clements, editor of the Democratic weekly the Long Island Patriot,
who was replaced by the paper’s foreman printer, William Hartshorne, who
taught the young Walt the rudiments of printing. “The education in printing
led to a succession of newspaper jobs.”6
Early Adulthood, 1836–1848
In 1836, the printing district of New York was destroyed by a major fire.
Walt returned to rural Long Island to work as a travelling schoolteacher.
His relaxed teaching approach was markedly different from “the rigid
Lancastrian system of his childhood and accorded with the more liberal
methods introduced in the 1830s by Bronson Alcott and Horace Mann.”7
In the spring of 1838, he temporarily abandoned teaching and founded a
weekly newspaper in Huntington, the Long Islander.8 Walt’s earliest known
poem, “Our Future Lot,” was first published in the Long Islander. Later he
was hired as a typesetter in the Long Island Democrat for two years. The
editor, James Brenton, “appreciated Whitman’s literary talents and published
his articles and poems – rhymed, metrical pieces that often took death as
their theme.”9 After teaching intermittently for four years, Whitman got
tired of the school environment and the students; in May 1841 he gave up
teaching.
After leaving school, he started to work for the New World, first as a
printer, then as a writer and reporter. For the next 13 years, Whitman edited
nine different newspapers and published his articles in several others. In
the meantime, he wrote and published fiction. His first fiction published,
“Death in the School-Room” (1841), was “loosely autobiographical” like
“most of the two dozen stories Whitman published from 1841 to 1848.”10
While scholars denigrated Whitman’s early fiction as “sensationalistic and
conventional,” in recent years they “have reassessed the stories, working
through the undistinguished style and haze of sentimentality to discover
social and psychological themes that would grow to greater significance in
Leaves of Grass.”11
Between 1841 and 1845 Whitman worked as a journalist and printer for
several newspapers in Manhattan. In this period his works published in
these papers were in the popular taste. His works included “poems that used
traditional rhyme and meter, short stories that ranged from the sensational to
the moralistic, and a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842).”12 Whitman’s
best-selling work, it sold some 20,000 copies. It was issued in “cheap format
as a twelve-cent pamphlet novel” and it was, in Whitman’s words, “written
for the mass.”13 He told Traubel that he wrote the novel “only for the money,
in a fever of productivity fueled by alcohol.”14
Whitman’s important journalist position was the editorship of the Brook-
lyn Daily Eagle from March 1846 to January 1848. It was the most important
paper in his fast-growing hometown. In his editorship, he wrote more
Walt Whitman’s Life and Works | 17
than 1,000 articles and editorials.15 As a free-soil Democrat, he used the

columns of the Daily Eagle to intensify his political commitments. He became
involved in the controversy over slavery and supported the Wilmot Pro-
viso, a proposal to stop slavery from spreading to newly-acquired western
territories.16 In January 1848, he was dismissed as editor due to political
disagreement with the owners who considered the Eagle a Democratic Party
organ.17
Wandering and Experimenting, 1848–1855
Walt edited the Brooklyn Freeman from 9 September 1848, to 11 September

1849. A month later, he founded a Brooklyn newspaper, the Daily Freeman, to
advance the cause of the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party. It was short-lived and by
the following autumn it was taken over by conservative Hunker Democrats.
A weak economic situation made Whitman open a small shop in Brooklyn
in 1849 and it was sold three years later. Unhappy with the unpopularity of
the free-soil cause, Whitman began writing political poetry which expressed
dismay and anger over the political compromises surrounding slavery.18 His
early poems were even more conventional than his prose. He published Life
and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography under a pseudonym and
serialised it in a newspaper in 1852. How did the writer of conventional
poetry and ordinary prose in the 1840s turn into a highly innovative
writer of experimental poetry? This significant change can be attributed
to many factors. Loving mentions “Emerson, the Italian opera, and the
New Testament” as the three influences most often credited with Whitman’s
conversion from an ordinary journalist into a revolutionary poet.19
The 1850s was a decade of extraordinary political corruption and class
divisions.20 Disagreements over slavery broke up the Whig Party in 1854;
Whitman’s Democratic Party was in no better a situation. The collapse of
the party system, one of the major events in American political history,
happened in the early 1850s. The unwillingness of either major party to
oppose slavery disillusioned Whitman with politics. The poet’s aversion to
the established parties made him turn towards “humanistic alternatives to
the party system.”21 His disappointment with political figures turned him
towards the mass and a kind of poetry moving the common people for
change.
Leaves of Grass 1855–1861
Iambic tetrameter quatrains with rhymed second and fourth lines form
the bulk of Whitman’s poetry published between 1838 and 1850. While the
wording in the earliest poems was conventional, some later poems were
experiments in blending the poetic and the vernacular. Leaves of Grass (1855)
was not only an abrupt departure from Whitman’s previous style, but also an
absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English poetry. Whitman did
not invent free verse; the poetic style he used in Leaves is the verse form of
much of the Old Testament. The poems in the book “did not look like poems
but rather like rhythmic prose pieces. Their punctuation was erratic – short
on commas, periods, and other normal marks, while heavily dependent on
ellipses. Their content was as unconventional as their style.”22
In 1855 Whitman gathered together 12 untitled poems he had written along
with a hastily composed 10-page introduction. The poet himself supervised
their printing in Brooklyn and he had them published “as a broad quarto with
a green jacket on which “Leaves of Grass” was embossed in gold letters. The
book was unlike any poetry volume that had ever appeared in America.”23
There was the title but not the author’s name on its title page. In lieu of the
author’s name “appeared an engraving of the casually dressed Whitman,
looking like a grizzled worker whose expression and posture radiated relaxed
confidence and subtle sensuality.”24 “Grass” was a term printers used to refer
to throw-away print samples that they wrote themselves. “Leaves” referred
to pages and to bundles of paper.25 The first poem which is also the longest
would be entitled “Song of Myself ” and the introduction would later be called
a Preface. Whitman in Leaves surpassed the traditional metrical systems and
regular patterns of rhyme; it was a turning point in the history of poetry in
English.
Some early reviewers did not appreciate the book. It had some pos-
itive reviews which slightly outnumbered negative ones. But the nega-
tive ones were harsh; they attacked it for “its sexual explicitness and its
egotistical tone. The fastidious critic Rufus Griswold blasted the volume
as a ‘mass of stupid filth,’ ” and another insisted that its author must be
“some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.”26 The sexuality in the
poems – praise of the human body in general and sexual love in partic-
ular – was a major problem. It was also branded as egotistical by some
prudish reviewers. The Boston Intelligencer described the book as a “het-
erogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense.”27 Even
the discerning Henry David Thoreau’s comment seems surprising; while
generally enthusiastic about Whitman, he wrote of the volume, “It is as if

the beasts spoke.”28 Charles Eliot Norton in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine
believed that Whitman’s poetry was “monstrous in its ‘self-conceit.’ ”29 More-
over, the book was attacked for its free-flowing style. Nineteenth-century
American readers were in favour of conventional rhythm patterns and
rhyme; poets in England and America followed the readers’ taste. Charles
Eliot Norton criticised Leaves for its disdain for “all usual propriety of dic-
tion.”30
The book was an oddity in both content and form. It was the same
qualities – exaltation, egotism and free style – that attracted Emerson’s
attention. Whitman sent a copy of his volume to Emerson. Emerson wrote
in a letter, “I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must
be”. In a soon-to-be-famous declaration, Emerson wrote, “I greet you at the
beginning of a great career.”31 He admired the volume for the differences that
distinguished it from the poetry of the day. “I find it the most extraordinary
piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed,” Emerson wrote to
Whitman. “I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy
… I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the
solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”32 The poet fails, he insisted, “if
he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides
… if he be not himself the age transfigured.”33 The philosopher’s comments
overjoyed the poet, so much so that he indiscreetly had it published in the
New York Tribune without the writer’s permission. Whitman was so lucky to
have Emerson read his poetry because the philosopher could see something
that nobody else could:
What Emerson saw was the possibility that the author was the first truly
American poet in the nation’s short history. Other popular poets of the
time, Emerson realized – BRYANT, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, perhaps
especially Emerson himself – were old-stock English poets. Whitman was,
on the other hand, raised not among the New England elite but among
the farmers on Long Island, a mix of English and Dutch working-class
blood, “one of the roughs.” In a lifetime of writing poetry, he never left
those roots.34
Whitman’s passion for popularity resulted in unabashed self-promotion.

Whitman used his connections in journalism to promote his book. He
wrote three long, glowing reviews of his work and had them published
anonymously in three New York periodicals.35 In the American Phrenological
Journal, he praised the work as poetry for the common people and declared
American literature’s independence from the English, whose poetry, for all
its greatness, still emitted an “air which to America is the air of death.” And
in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he extolled the artistic innovation of the poet
whose writing “conforms to none of the rules by which poetry has ever
been judged.”36 In these reviews, Whitman presented the poet of Leaves as
a totally American poet, independent of European tradition, who expanded
the frontiers of cultural togetherness and cohesion. “An American bard
at last!” he eulogised the poet in a review published in the United States
Review.37
Although the slim volume did sell poorly and the first reviews were
negative ones, Whitman was not discouraged. He continued writing new
poems, contributed articles to Life Illustrated and worked on a political tirade
called “The Eighteenth Presidency!” The poet quickly prepared the second
edition of his poetry, got it published in 1856, just a year after the first one
had appeared. He added twenty new poems to this volume, bringing the
total number of the poems to thirty-two. The new edition was in many ways
different from the previous one. Unlike the long and slender 1855 edition,
the new book was small and thick. Furthermore, each poem was titled and
each title contained the word “poem” (e.g., “Poem of Walt Whitman, an
American,” the later “Song of Myself ”). Without asking Emerson, he printed
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career. – R.W. Emerson” on the
spine of the book in gold lettering. He “thus introduced the practice of using
promotional “blurbs” into American literary history.”38 He also reprinted the
whole letter, as an after matter to the volume, of course without the writer’s
permission. Although the new edition’s sale was poor, perhaps worse even
than that of the first, Whitman continued to draw literary admirers, including
Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau that autumn. These two
distinguished friends of Emerson’s made a special trip from Concord to
Brooklyn to visit the poet. They met him twice during the autumn of 1856.
The second time Sarah Tyndale, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate
from Philadelphia, accompanied them. She was interested in Whitman’s
equal treatment of women in his poetry.
The poet’s personal life was not very successful. He probably had a short
affair with a woman, possibly Ada Clare. Brief descriptions of men he met
and short accounts of that kind of friendship were frequently mentioned
in his journals. He regularly visited Pfaff ’s Cellar, a restaurant/chophouse
at Broadway in New York. There he met freethinkers of all sorts including
theatre people, poets, newspaper reporters and editors, musicians, literary
people and critics. “Whitman must have enjoyed the variety of ideas he
heard from such a diverse group of intelligent people.”39 From 1857 to 1859,
Whitman wrote reviews and editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Times. In 1858,
he penned a series of newspaper columns on the subject of manly health and
training under a pseudonym.
He was trying to publish the third edition of Leaves, which he deemed
“The Great Construction of the New Bible”. By June 1857, “he had written
about 68 new poems, though he hadn’t yet located a publisher.”40 In February
1860 Boston publisher Thayer & Eldridge’s unexpected offer to publish a
new edition of Leaves of Grass was happy news for Whitman. Very soon the
two parties had negotiated a contract and Whitman travelled to Boston to
contribute to the process of printing the book. The edition was published in
May 1860.
The third edition’s format was markedly differently from that of the first
two. “Whereas the first two editions had looked plebeian, this one strained for
elegance. Priced high at $1.25, it was a fancy-looking volume with a decorative
cover and illustrations.”41 146 new poems were added to the 32 poems of
earlier editions, earlier poems were altered, and their titles revised. “Also, the
awkward ‘Poem of ’ titles were replaced by ones that, with certain alterations,
lasted over later editions. Thus, “‘Poem of Walt Whitman’ became “Song of
Myself,” “Sun-Down Poem” became “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and so on.”42
For the first time, the poems were placed into distinct, thematic clusters,
with titles that included “Sea Drift,” “Children of Adam,” and “Calamus.”
This categorisation was “a sign of increased attentiveness to the organization
of Leaves of Grass. The volume’s principal themes are religion, democracy,
and love, and ‘Calamus’ brings together all three.” The volume’s “new sense of
structure, all of the new poems, its wider readership, and the critical praise,
made it one of Whitman’s most successful books.”43
In the early 1860s, the situation of Whitman’s family was terrible. The
nation was in the same boat; he found his nation in danger of dissolution.
He deemed the 1860–1861 secession of Southern states from the Union and
formation of the Confederate States of America a threat to the unity of the
nation. Whitman believed in his messianic mission to integrate his broken
country through his poetry. “In the 1860 edition of his poems he had included
several verses stridently affirming national unity and brotherhood, as though
he could repair national divisions by poetic fiat.”44
The Civil War, 1861–1865
When the Civil War began, Whitman’s brother, George, who joined a New
York regiment in September 1861 and spent four years fighting in many
important battles, provided him with direct knowledge of the war through
some vividly detailed letters from the battle front. His early reaction to war
was “recruitment poems,” such as “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Within a week after
the poem’s publication, it had been reprinted in the New York Leader, the
Boston Daily Evening Transcript and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It has been
the most widely circulated poem of Whitman’s career to date.45
On 16 December 1862, the New York Tribune mentioned “First Lieutenant
G.W. Whitmore” in a list of soldiers killed or wounded at the front. Whitman
was worried that it was a misspelling of his brother George’s name. On
reading this news, Whitman travelled to Washington to find his brother; he
discovered that George was wounded, but the wound was not at all serious.
Then he began a 10-year stay in Washington, which “provided a cultural
backdrop to his poetry and prose of the Civil War years.”46 He spent much of
his time as a volunteer nurse in the war hospitals of the city. After the war,
Whitman received many thank-you letters from the soldiers.
Post-War Washington, 1865–1873
After the war, Whitman returned to Brooklyn to meet George and to finish
his new book of poetry, Drum-Taps. On 14 April 1865 President Lincoln was
assassinated during a performance at Ford’s Theatre. The poet was deeply
affected by the death. Some copies of the new book had already been bound
and distributed, but Whitman realised that his book needed something on
Lincoln’s death. He delayed further distribution of the book and started to
work on a sequel to the work. By October, Whitman had finished the sequel
totalling 24 pages. He bound the sequel with the previously printed pages
from Drum-Taps. On 28 October 1865, Drum-Taps was published in New
York along with the poems known as Sequel to Drum-Taps. It was a collection
of his war poems that included four poems about Lincoln as well as many
others about battles and emotional responses to the war. The 18 new poems
included two of his most highly regarded pieces, “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “O Captain! My Captain!”.
In 1865 James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, fired Whitman from
his job in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A copy of Leaves of Grass was found
in Whitman’s desk. A staunch Methodist, Harlan was “outraged by its sexual

imagery and dismissed Whitman on moral grounds.”47 His action contributed
greatly to the poet’s reputation. It so outraged a friend of Whitman’s, the
Abolitionist William Douglas O’Connor, about Harlan’s narrow-minded
judgement that he wrote a fervent essay, entitled The Good Gray Poet: A
Vindication (1866). The 46-page apology, written in the summer of 1865
soon after Whitman was fired from his job, helped to “transform Whitman’s
reputation and make his poetry acceptable to mainstream audiences.”48
O’Connor continued to defend Whitman throughout the 1860s and 1870s
in letters to newspapers, and in 1862 he wrote a short story entitled “The
Carpenter” that depicted the poet as “a Christ-like figure emanating love
for humankind.”49 During his poetic career, Whitman’s public image was
transformed from “the magnetic, sexual rebel depicted in the first editions of
Leaves of Grass” to “a majestic, grandfatherly poet, a patriotic wound dresser
with his long white beard.”50
O’Connor’s essay encouraged other critics to publish positive reviews.
John Burroughs’s “Walt Whitman and His ‘Drum-Taps’” (1866) was one
such review. His Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, published
in May of the next year, also contributed to a positive attitude towards
Whitman. These works were followed by some other public defences of the
poet. In England, favourable reviews for each of Whitman’s books were more
frequently published than in America. In 1866, Moncure Conway published
in England an essay that greatly admired the poet’s poetic achievements.
English writer and critic William Michael Rossetti’s essay on Whitman’s
poems published in the London Chronicle (6 May 1867) was another instance.
This essay was reprinted in America, and along with other positive reviews
from Europe “had an influence on American literary reviewers and readers
in general.”51
The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass (1867) included all of the poems
from the third edition (1860), plus the poems from Drum-Taps, Sequel to
Drum-Taps, and “Songs before Parting”. As the poet’s fame was increas-
ing, his poetic creativity was weakening. The number of new poems in this
new edition of Leaves was just six. In several respects, the poet “turned
his attention not to poetry but prose after the war”;52 this led to the publi-
cation of Democratic Vistas. Published in 1871, the 84-page pamphlet was
a collection of three essays on voting rights, individualism and political
rhetoric. While its “passionate vision of American liberty and struggle”
makes Democratic Vistas “comparable to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia (1782), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), or John Dewey’s Freedom and
Culture (1939)”, it is “one of the most … overlooked works of American

political thought.”53 The work criticised “the materialism and political cor-
ruption of post-war America” and the poet looked forward to a future
when “‘a class of bards’ would arise and instill in the nation a spiritual
element.”54
Whitman did not stop writing poetry. However, “[his poems] were only
rarely as inspired and powerful as his 1855–1865 verse.”55 A fifth edition of
Leaves of Grass was published in 1871. Later, different versions of it started to
appear. The succession of four issues indicates that the poet “was not entirely
certain about the shape, organization, and direction of Leaves of Grass in the
1870s.”56 The year 1872 was the worst year of Whitman’s life. That summer,
his already poor health worsened because of high blood pressure. Still, he
remained active as a writer and lecturer.57
Camden, 1873–1884
In 1873 he went to Camden to be with his mother, who was dying. She
died on 23 May. Her death deeply affected the poet. In January 1873, he
suffered a stroke that paralysed the left side of his body. From then on
he had to use a cane, and later, after several more strokes, a wheelchair.
However, he remained active as a writer. He returned to his Civil War
writings and published Memoranda During the War (1875), a 68-page prose
account of his war experiences that would later be reprinted in Specimen
Days (1882). He also planned a two-volume set that included a “Centennial
Edition” of Leaves of Grass, and an extraordinary new book entitled Two
Rivulets. “Centennial Edition” was an unchanged reprinting of the 1871 (fifth)
edition. Whitman suffered paranoia at the end of 1875 and January of 1876.
He published “Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position,” an unsigned,
third-person article in Camden’s West Jersey Press (26 January 1876), stating
that “Whitman was being neglected in his own country and that he was
publishing the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass in order ‘to keep the wolf from
the door.’ ”58
In 1881, Whitman started to work on the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass
with James Osgood and Co. of Boston. That summer he travelled to Boston
to oversee the printing of the book. The changes to this edition were massive;
he added five more clusters to this new edition, making 12 clusters altogether;
deleted 39 previous pieces; edited or tinkered with most of the others; and
revised punctuations and titles.59 In 1882 Boston’s district attorney, Oliver
Stevens, believed that Leaves of Grass violated “the Public Statutes concerning
obscene literature” and James R. Osgood was forced to stop printing the
book’s sixth edition. The event gave rise to the phrase “banned in Boston.”60
Sales were quick when Leaves was published in Philadelphia. “Although he
never became a bestselling poet, Whitman gained celebrity status.”61
Whitman had an “intense relationship with the moody young man,”62
Harry Stafford. Their friendship began during the preparation of the “Cen-
tennial Edition,” as the poet supervised the publishing process and the young
man worked for the printer. Whitman regularly visited Stafford as a guest at
the family farm, Timber Creek, south of Camden. “The war, family troubles,
and poor health had devastated Whitman; but these visits from 1876 to 1884
and his relationship with Harry brought him back to life.”63
Mickle Street, 1884–1892
In 1884 Whitman’s brother, George and his family moved from Camden.
Whitman did not want to leave Camden. He bought a two-storey house at
328 Mickle Street. The poet was really loved by people. “Gifts from all over –
money, furniture, home furnishings – arrived at Mickle Street to help the
poet settle into his new surroundings. Thirty well-wishers chipped in to buy
him a horse and buggy, and a young man named Bill Duckett soon became
Whitman’s companion and driver on these excursions.”64
By the autumn of 1888, the poet had finished November Boughs. In 1888 a
stroke left Whitman delicate and quite needy; during the last three and a half
years of his life the poet’s health deteriorated. He made his will in 1888. Even
in this terrible situation he wrote and prepared a final, “Deathbed” edition
of Leaves of Grass. The death-bed edition was the reprinting of the previous
edition along with two “annexes,” including “Sands at Seventy” and “Good-
Bye My Fancy,” plus the “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” preface as
a prose finale.
In early 1892 his health began to fail. On 26 March 1892 he died in his
own house in Mickle Street. His funeral “was held on March 30, with several
thousand people walking slowly past the coffin at the Mickle Street house and
thousands following the procession to Harleigh Cemetery.”65 His tombstone
simply reads “Walt Whitman”. In his life, Whitman wrote nearly 400 poems,
24 short stories, two novels, and many prose essays, which, as the following
chapter shows, revolve around the theme of democracy.
chapter 2
From Democratic Politics to Democratic Poetics
Whitman’s Poetic Innovations
Equality
Whitman in his political life was a democrat. In his poetry he believed

in democracy and equality of all members of society. His definition of
democracy can be summarised as the equality of all people. America failed
to live up to its ideal of equality; Whitman believed in the central role of
poets in a democratic society.
Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from
him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity … He bestows
on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is
the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age
and land.1
Whitman decided to play his part in his poetry. In Leaves he portrayed a

democratic utopia where every citizen was treated equally. He called himself
the poet of Equality, between blacks and whites, between men and women.
In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” he wrote “Here are the flowing trains, here the
crowds, equality, diversity, the soul loves.” Equality is the main feature of a
democracy and the central theme for the poet of America. Whitman’s themes
centre on equality; to deal with such themes he created “a new language of
equality”2 which would later be elaborated on.
Body
Whitman broke the nineteenth-century taboos against writing about the

body. While the body was included in the unmentionable topics of respected
communities with puritan and Victorian morality, he spoke about it with
honesty and openness. It was integral to his idea of equality. He was the poet of
equality; that was why he turned into “the prophet of the body.”3 All humans
live in bodies and the body is equal and common to everybody; it represents
equality. His poetry depicts “body as a locus of democratic energies.”4
He believed that sexual expression in popular culture was cheapened; he
treated the body in an artistic manner. He put his poetry in the category of
physiology. That reduced the criticism of his depiction of the body. Ignoring
some parts of the body would reduce the criticism. But he was against
discrimination of any kind:
His democratic belief in the importance of all the parts of any whole was
central to his vision: the genitals and the armpits were as essential to the
fullness of identity as the brain and the soul, just as, in a democracy, the
poorest and most despised citizens were as important as the rich and
famous. This, at any rate, was the theory of radical union and equality
that generated Whitman’s work.5
He was democratic concerning his treatment of the body. “Whoever you are,
how superb and how divine is your body or any part of it!”;6 “If I worship
one thing more than other, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any
part of it”;7 “The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body
itself balks account,/That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is
perfect”;8 “The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred”;9 and
“If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.”10
Free Verse
One of Whitman’s most significant innovations was his break with traditional
poetic forms. European forms did not suit the democratic country. Tradi-
tional formal conventions such as rhyme and meter could only constrain the
literary imagination. He wrote his poems in free verse, a poetic form without
rhyme and meter. “Pictures” was the earliest instance of Whitman’s new
poetic form. He disregarded the arbitrary limits of traditional versification
concerning syllable number, stress pattern, or number of lines. Even Bryant
or Emerson, who experimented with meter, could not get rid of it. Bryant
admired blank verse and called for greater freedom of poets in metrical inno-
vations. One innovation he proposed was feet of three syllables in poems
of iambic measure. Emerson also experimented with different meters and
poetic forms. His works range from poems in rhymed stanzas to blank verse
From Democratic Politics to Democratic Poetics | 29
and also poems with irregular lines. He used tetrameter, trimeter, dimeter,
and monometer in a single poem. His works had lines of varying lengths.
The innovative poets were experimenting with meter, therefore, reinforcing
it. But Whitman put meter aside. He used the Book of Psalms and prophetic
books as models for his free verse. His free verse shocked the readers of
the first edition of Leaves, who were habituated to the rhyme and rhythm
of American poetry popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Whitman has
liberated American poetry from the regular constraints of meter. A poet’s
freedom in choosing the length of lines and position of rhymes contributed
significantly to the freedom in the process of literary creation.
Cataloguing
Whitman uses three techniques in his long lines of free verse: syntactic-
parallelism, repetition, and cataloguing. He “tends to write in sequences
of coordinate clauses, from two to four lines long, based on the parallels
between syntactic units within the lines.”11 There are also repeated words
in his poetry. This repetition includes “anaphora, the repetition of the same
word or phrase at the beginning of lines; epistrophe, the repetition of the
same word or phrase at the end of lines; or symploce, the repetition of both
initial and terminal words or phrases”.12 Cataloguing, Whitman’s most recog-
nisable and memorable formal feature, is the expansion of the two other
techniques to build a rhythm. A catalogue includes different types of people,
situations, or objects. Those long catalogues may be “a reflection of Whit-
man’s own Oriental-style ecstasy-inducing techniques, and … their purpose
is to induce those mystical states in the reader.”13 When he was first translated
into German, a reviewer compared it to “the entries of an encyclopedia, only
not alphabetized, a ‘dictionary-type poetry.’ ”14 Whitman’s democracy needs
a democratic form. He uses the catalogue, a structure that is not logical or
progressive, but pluralistic. His catalogues make his poetry anti-hierarchical.
The poet’s idea of his catalogues is illuminating:
Oh God! how tired I get of hearing that said about the “catalogues!” I
resolved at the start to diagnose, state, the case of the mechanics, laborers,
artisans, of America – to get into the stream with them – give them a
voice in literature: not an echoed voice – no: their own voice – that which
they had never had before. I meant to do this naturally, however – not
with apologies – not to lug them in by the neck and heels, in season and
out of season, where they did belong and where they didn’t belong –
but to welcome them to their legitimately superior place – to give them

entrance and lodgement by all fair means. Maybe I have failed, maybe I
have succeeded – but whatever, my intention has always remained clear,
unshakeable.15
Language
Emerson wrote, “We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the
language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in
a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.”16 Whitman was
“forcible” enough to contribute a few stones to the monument of American
poetic language. He was interested in and studied comparative linguistics and
philology. He also published on language. “America’s Mightiest Inheritance”
(1856) was one of his works on language published in his lifetime. There
Whitman studied the origins and development of language. It also included a
glossary of “a few foreign Words, mostly French,” for the benefit of “Working-
People, Young Men and Women, and … Boys and Girls.”17 “Slang in America”
(1885) indicated his interest in idiomatic expressions. He also had some
unfinished works on language. Once he told Traubel “The subject of language
interests me – interests me: I never quite get it out of my mind. I sometimes
think the Leaves is only a language experiment.”18 He believed “the new
world, the new times, the new peoples” called for a new language to express
their newness.19 The social and political freedom manifested themselves in
Whitman’s linguistic freedom:
To understand the workings of language in Leaves is to come to terms

with America and the promise of America, as Whitman understood them;
it is to see how deeply connected language is to the democratic literary
enterprise in which he was engaged, how his appreciation of America
and the life of its average citizens is reflected at the most basic level of his
art.20
He traced the spirit of America – independence, individualism and democ-

racy – in its language. For him nationalism and linguistic Americanism are
closely related. He wished to create an American poetry out of American
English. He believed American English was applicable to all contexts includ-
ing literary ones. He turned to the language actually spoken by Americans.
Pound believes Whitman is “America’s poet”, because he was the “first great
man to write in the language of his people.”21
From Democratic Politics to Democratic Poetics | 31
Whitman tried his hand at coining words such as “presidentiad”. Although

Whitman did not know other languages, he also borrowed words from them,
particularly French. This can be traced back to his working-class orientation.
“His belief in the need to speak not merely for Americans but for the workers
of all lands seems to have given the impetus for his odd habit of introducing
random words from other languages, to the point of talking about ‘the ouvrier
class’!”22 While dealing with foreign languages, he used different techniques.
In some cases he took an English word and attached a foreign ending to it;
in others, he altered the foreign base to create an original word.23 In some
cases he borrowed words “for expressive effect, to mark a poetic difference
in the subject he treat[ed].”24 “Amie” is one example. It is the feminine form
of the French word for friend, but Whitman used it to refer to male friends.
In fact, it was an attempt to “spiritualize the language and its users,” and “to
project a new social relation between men” in American society.25 He also
borrowed words from new technologies.
Whitman did not limit his poetry to learned sources and books; he
referred to street language and daily life as its linguistic source. To him
slang was “lawless,” and he believed in the “powerfulness” of working life’s
transgressive expressions.26 Whitman’s use of slangs, like his use of catalogue
is democratic. “His use of American vernacular complements his use of
catalogs to present the thematic content of his poems.”27 His use of slang and
conversational phrases can be considered as a part of his mission to give
voice to the working class:
American poetry becomes democratic only when it reproduces the

vernacular idiom used in different regions of the nation. A poet who seeks
out local dialects and conversational phrases proves his commitment to
democracy by transgressing traditional class boundaries. By insisting on
rugged, local speech, the democratic poet tears down the barrier between
“the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics” and working-class
laborers like the “mechanic” or “miner.”28
Whitman’s language is a mixture of anything he read or heard in his life. He

employed the philosophical and mystical language of Middle Eastern and
Asian literature along with the language of journalism and the street language
of America. That is how language is dealt with in Leaves. While Constance
Rourke believes Whitman “‘used language as a new and plastic and even
comical medium,’ one in which aspects of disjunction and incongruity
between linguistic registers are exploited for the purposes of humor,”29 this
incongruity or even contradictory language may be an indication of the

poet’s democratic language. Future generation of poets including modernists
and postmodernists continued with Whitman’s linguistic experimentations.
Expansiveness and Inclusiveness
Whitman’s democratic mentality makes his poetry as inclusive as possible.

He believed that an indication of a great poet is that he absorbs his country.
To become a great poet, he covered almost any aspect of his nation. He
believed in democracy not just as a political phenomenon but also a cultural
one. He overlooked any hierarchies and social boundaries; that led to the
inclusion of all Americans regardless of sex, colour, ethnicity and social class.
He created a little America in his poetry through covering all ethnic groups of
his country. The poet’s inclusiveness is best manifested in his long democratic
catalogues. It is exactly because of this inclusiveness that Whitman believes
“Leaves of Grass does not lend itself to piecemeal quotation”.30 Schoolman
traces all-inclusiveness, aesthetic receptivity, and imitation in Whitman. He
believes:
Inseparably tying together an all-inclusive acceptance of differences just

as they appear, a receptivity to differences as images of how lives could
become different, and the imitation of differences as images through
which lives actually would become different, Whitman’s proposal for
aesthetic education and his image of reconciliation would be among the
most radical notions in the history of political thought, perhaps the most
radical in modern democratic theory.31
Whitman’s preference for photography over painting would be illuminated

in the light of the inclusive and non-discriminatory nature of photography
in contrast to the exclusive and discriminatory nature of painting. Whitman
compared photography to poetry. Whitman loved the non-discriminatory
nature of photography. Whatever was shown on the lens was recorded on the
photograph. It was not exclusive. He believed, “I find I like the photographs
better than the oils – they are perhaps mechanical, but they are honest. The
artists add and deduct: the artists fool with nature – reform it, revise it, to
make it fit their preconceived notion of what it should be.”32 While some
criticised photography because of its inclusiveness which led to the creation
of a cluttered image of the world, Whitman fell in love with photography for
the same reason. Whitman tried to depict whatever he saw:
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humanity. Physically and mentally they have many of the
characteristics of man, but by no means all.
DESERT JOURNEYS.
On the fringe of the desert, under a thick group of palms, a small tent
is pitched. Around it is a motley collection of bales and boxes, built
into a sort of barricade. Outside this some Nubian boys are lounging
or squatting. They are in holiday garb, so to speak, for their glossy
skins have been freshly smeared with grease.
The travellers whom the tent shelters have come so far on a Nile
boat, but as the river now describes a huge curve and abounds in
rocks and rapids, they have decided to cut across the desert.
It is about noon. The sun stands almost vertically above the tent, in a
cloudless deep blue sky, and his scorching rays are but slightly
warded off by the loose open foliage of the date-palms. On the plain
between the river and the desert the heat is oppressive, and the
strata of air above the burning ground are heaving unsteadily, so that
every picture is distorted and blurred.
A troop of horsemen, evidently hailing from the desert, appears on
the horizon. They pay no heed to the village which lies further inland,
but make straight for the tent. The horses are thin, but plainly of no
ignoble breed; the riders are dark brown and poorly clad, with long
loose burnooses more gray than white. Reaching the cluster of
palms they dismount. One of them approaches the tent and enters
with the dignity of a king. He is the chief of the camel-drivers (Sheikh
el Djemali), to whom we, the travellers, had sent a messenger,
asking him to provide us with the necessary guides, drivers, and
camels.
“Peace be with you,” he says on entering, and lays his hand on his
mouth, his forehead, and his heart.
“Peace be with thee, O Sheikh,” we answer, “the mercy of God and
his blessing.”
“Great has been my desire to see you, ye strangers, and to learn
your wishes,” he assures us, as he takes his seat on a cushion in the
place of honour at our right hand.
“May God, the Almighty, reward thy goodness, O Sheikh, and bless
thee,” we answer; and we order our servants to bring him coffee and
a freshly lit pipe before serving ourselves.
With half-shut eyes he comforts his mortal body with the coffee and
his immortal soul with the pipe; and thick clouds of smoke veil his
expressive features. There is almost perfect stillness in the tent,
which is pervaded with the fragrance of the exquisite Djebelit
tobacco and a thin smoke by no means unpleasant. At last we think
that we may venture to begin business without violating any of the
rites of hospitality.
“Is it well with thee, O Sheikh?”
“The Giver of all Good be praised, it is well with your servant. And
how is it with thee?”
“To the Lord of all be honour and glory, it is well with me. Great was
our longing to see thee, O Sheikh.”
“May God in His compassion fulfil your desire and bless you. Are ye
in your state of health well content?”
“Glory be to Allah and to His Prophet, on whom is His grace.”
“Amen, be it as thou hast said.”
Fresh pipes revive the immortal soul; renewed, almost interminable
courtesies are interchanged; and at last the rigid conditions of
etiquette have been fulfilled, and it is permissible to turn to business
matters.
“O Sheikh, with the help of the All-merciful, I would travel through
this stretch of desert.”
“May Allah give thee good speed.”
“Art thou in possession of camels both to run and to carry burdens?”
we ask.
“I am. Is it well with thee, my brother?”
“The Almighty be praised, it is well. How many camels canst thou
provide for me?”
Instead of an answer only countless clouds of smoke issue from the
Sheikh’s mouth, and it is not until we repeat our question that he lays
aside his pipe for some moments and says with dignity, “Sir, the
number of the camels of Beni Said is known to Allah alone; no son of
Adam has ever counted them.”
“Well, then, send me twenty-five beasts, and among them six
trotters. And I have besides need of ten large water-bags.”
The Sheikh smokes afresh without giving answer.
“Wilt thou send the beasts we desire?” we repeat with emphasis.
“I shall do so to serve thee,” he answers, “but their owners require a
high price.”
“How much?”
“At least four times the customary wages and hire will be necessary.”
“But Sheikh, Allah, the Most High, preserve thee: these are demands
which no one will be willing to grant. Praise the Prophet!”
“God, the Preserver of all, be glorified and His messengers blessed!
Thou art in error, my friend: the merchant who has his camp over
there has offered me double what I ask; only my friendship for thee
has allowed me to make so small a demand.”
In vain seems all haggling, all further business. Fresh pipes are
brought and are smoked; renewed courtesies are exchanged; the
names of Allah and His Prophet are freely misused on both sides;
most precise inquiries after health and comfort are made mutually;
until at length the studied courtesy of the native begins to waver and
the traveller from the North loses patience.
“Then know, Sheikh, that I am in possession of a letter authorizing a
demand for means of convoy from the Khedive and likewise one
from the Sheikh Soliman; here are both of them, what dost thou
demand now?”
“But, sir, if thou holdest a safe-conduct from his high majesty, why
dost thou not demand the head of thy slave? It is at thy service, on
his orders. I take thy wishes on my eyes and on my head. Command
and thy servant obeys. Thou knowest the government prices. Allah
protect thee; in the morning I shall send thee men, beasts, and
water-skins.”
If any one imagines that all the preparations for the desert journey
were thus brought to a satisfactory conclusion, he is indeed totally
ignorant of the manners and customs of the people. In the morning
none of the promised drivers or beasts had put in their appearance;
only by afternoon did they begin to come in; not even on the
following morning, but at soonest about the time of afternoon prayer,
could one think of starting. “Bukra inshallah—to-morrow, if God
will”—is their motto, and it baffles all commands. Indeed, there is
much to do, much to arrange, and much to be planned before the
journey can be undertaken.
In course of time the tent is the centre of a gay and lively picture.
The sunburnt children of the desert bustle about among the
baggage. Their activity is unbusiness-like to a degree, but they seem
to try to make up for this by incredible noisiness. The baggage,
which had been arranged in a sort of barricade, is scattered about;
individual pieces are lifted and tested as regards both weight and
bulk; one package is compared with another, selected and then
rejected, strapped together and then pulled apart again. Each driver
tries to outwit his neighbour, each endeavouring to secure the
lightest load for his own beast; each one rushes about in opposition
to the rest, and all are shouting and roaring, screaming and scolding,
swearing and cursing, entreating and execrating. In anticipation of
what is coming the camels also add to the noise right lustily, and if,
instead of roaring, and growling and grumbling, they should keep
silence for a while, that only means: Our time has not yet come, but
it is coming! Anyhow, with or without the camels’ accompaniment,
the stranger’s ear is harassed, literally tortured, by all the medley of
sounds which fall upon it at once. For hours together the bustle, the
racket, the uproar continues; the men scold and quarrel over the
loads until they have had enough or more than enough; and at last
the prelude comes to an end.
After peace is concluded they begin to twist the bast fibres of the
date-palm into cords and ropes. With these they sling the bales and
boxes cleverly together; they make hooks and eyes so that the two
bundles may be fastened quickly to the saddle and as quickly
loosened; they mend the ready-made nets which they have brought
to hold the smaller packages; and they test the large and small skin
bags, patching them where need be, and finally smearing them with
ill-smelling varnish of colocynth. Lastly, they examine the sun-dried
flesh, fill several bast bags with Kaffir-millet or dhurra, others with
wood-charcoal, and some perhaps with camels’ dung, rinse out the
skin-bags and fill them with water fresh from the stream. As the
tedious business is brought to a close one hears each utter a hearty
“Thank God”—“El hamdu lillahi”.
To look after all these preparations is the duty of the Chabir or leader
of the caravan. According to its importance is his rank, but in all
cases he must be what his title signifies—one who knows the way
and the existing conditions. Experience, honesty, cleverness, mettle,
and bravery are the requirements of his difficult, and not rarely
dangerous office. He knows the desert as a mariner the sea, he can
read the stars, he is familiar with every oasis and every spring on the
course of the journey, he is welcome to the tent of every Bedouin or
nomad chief, he understands all sort of precautions against break-
down or peril by the way, he can cure snake-bite and scorpion-sting,
or at least alleviate the sufferings of the injured, he wields the
weapons of the warrior and of the huntsman with equal skill, he has
the word of the Prophet not only on his lips but in his heart, he utters
the “Fatiha” at starting, and discharges the obligations of Mueddin
and Iman at the appointed times; in a word, he is the head of the
many-membered body which travels through the desert. In the
solitudes where nothing seems to point the way which other
caravans have taken, where the wind obliterates every track almost
as soon as the last camel has passed, he finds signs unseen by
others which guide him aright. When the dry, ill-boding dust of the
desert hides the everlasting heavens, his genius is his guiding star;
he tests the drifting sand, measures its waves, and estimates their
direction; he reads the points of the compass on a stem of grass. On
him every caravan, every traveller depends without mistrust. Ancient
and in part most remarkable laws, inscribed in no charter, yet known
to all, make him responsible for the welfare of the journey and for the
life of each traveller, except in so far as any inevitable dispensation
of the Ordainer of destiny may decree otherwise.
Fig. 49.—Caravan in the African Desert.
At the sacred hour, the time of afternoon prayer, the leader

announces to travellers and drivers that all is ready for the start. The
brown men rush around, catching, leading, saddling, and loading the
camels. Resisting to the utmost the beasts are forced to obey; they
seem to have a vivid foreboding of a stretch of toilsome days. Their
time has now come. Roaring, screaming, snarling, and grumbling, in
obedience to the inimitable guttural commands of their masters and
sundry gentle hints from the whips, they sink down on their bended
knees; bellowing they adjust themselves to receive the unwelcome
burden on their humped backs, and still bellowing they rise with their
load. Not a few kick and bite in their efforts to resist being loaded,
and it indeed requires all the inexhaustible patience of the drivers to
subdue the obstinate creatures. But patience and tact master even
camels. As soon as the rebellious beast has consented to kneel, one
of the drivers stands up on its bent fore-legs, and with a quick grip
seizes the upper part of the muzzle so that by pressing the nose he
can stop the camel’s breathing; meanwhile two others from opposite
sides lift the equally poised burden on to the saddle; a fourth runs
fastening pegs through the loops of the ropes; and the fractious
camel is loaded before he has quite regained his senses. As soon as
all are loaded, the march begins.
It is now the turn of the well-saddled trotting camels. Each traveller
fastens his weapons and indispensable personal luggage to the
high, trough-shaped saddle fixed over the hump. He then proceeds
to mount his steed. For the novice this is usually a critical business.
With a bold spring he must leap into the saddle, and, as soon as he
touches this, the camel bolts up. He rises backwards, first on his
fore-knees, immediately afterwards on his long hind-legs, and finally
on his fore-legs. To the second jerk the novice in camel-riding usually
falls a victim, he is hurled out of the saddle and either kisses mother
earth or falls on the beast’s neck and holds on tightly. The camel is
much too ill-humoured to treat this as a joke or an accident. An angry
cry bursts from its ugly lips; it flies into a passion with the poor
traveller, hanging in a most unenviable position on its neck, and
proceeds to shake itself free both of him and his baggage. It takes
some time before the traveller from the North learns to bend his body
forwards and backwards at the right moment so as to keep his seat
as the camel springs up.
For our own part, we swing ourselves into the saddle with the agility
of natives. Urging on our steed with a few strokes of the whip, and
keeping it in due check by means of a fine nose-rein, we hasten after
the leader. Our camel, a lank, loosely-built, long-legged creature,
falls at once into that uniform, persistent, long-stepping, and most
effective trot, to which it is trained from earliest youth, and which
raises it high above all beasts of burden, and closely follows the
leaders. The small head is stretched far in front; the long legs swing
quickly backwards and forwards; behind them sand and small stones
rise into the air. The burnooses of the riders flutter in the wind;
weapons and utensils clatter together; with loud calls we spur on the
beasts; the joy of travel seems to give our spirits wings. Soon we
overtake the caravan of baggage-camels which had preceded us;
soon every trace of human settlement disappears; and on all sides
there stretches in apparent infinitude—the desert.
Sharply defined all around, this immense and unique region covers
the greater part of North Africa, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic,
from the Mediterranean to the Soudan, including whole countries in
its range, embracing tracts of fertile land; presenting a thousand
varieties, and yet always and everywhere the same in its essential
features. In area, this wonderful region is nine or ten times larger
than the whole of the German Empire, and three or four times larger
than the Mediterranean. No mortal has thoroughly explored or even
traversed it; but every son of earth who has set foot on it and
crossed some part of it, is in his inmost heart impressed with its size
and grandeur, its charm and its horror. Even on the most matter-of-
fact Northerner who sojourns in the desert a lasting, ineffaceable
impression is left by the glowing splendour of the sunlight and the
parching heat of its days, by the heavenly peacefulness and the
magical phantoms of its nights, by the witchery of the radiant
atmosphere, by the dreadfulness of its mountain-moving storms; and
many a one may have experienced, what the children of the desert
so acutely feel—a longing to return, to breathe its air for a day, an
hour, to see its pictures again with the bodily eye, to experience
again that “unutterable harmony” whose echoes the desert awakens
in the poetic soul. In short, there is a home-sickness for the desert.
It is literally and truly “El Bahhr bela maa”—the sea without water—
the sea’s antithesis. To the sea the desert is not subject as are other
parts of the earth; the might of the vitalizing and sustaining element
is here annulled. “Water silently embraces all things”—the desert
alone excepted. Over the whole earth the winds bear the clouds, the
sea’s messengers, but these fade away before the glow of the
desert. It is rarely that one sees there even a thin, hardly perceptible
vapour; rarely can one detect on a leaf in the morning the damp
breath of the night. The flush of dawn and the red glow of sunset are
indeed seen, but only, as it were, in a breath which is scarce formed
when it passes away. Wherever water gains the mastery, the desert
changes into fertile land, which may, indeed, be poor enough, but the
limits between them are always sharply defined. Where the last
wave of the sacred Nile, raised above its level by man’s ingenuity,
loses itself in the sand, the contrast is seen; the traveller, whose way
lies from the river to the hills adjacent, may stand with one foot on a
field of sprouting grain, and with the other touch the desert. It is not
the sand itself which hinders the growth of plants, but solely the
scorching heat which radiates through it. For, wherever it is irrigated
or periodically watered, there, amid the otherwise plantless desert, a
green carpet of vegetation is spread, and even shrubs and trees may
grow.
Fig. 50.—An Encampment in the Sahara.
Barren, pitifully barren is the desert, but it is not dead—not, at least,

to those who have eyes to see its life. Whoever looks with a dull eye
sees nothing but sandy plains and rocky cones, bare low grounds
and naked hills, may even overlook the sparse reed-like grasses and
shrubby trees of the deeper hollows, and the few animals which
occur here and there. But he who really wishes to see can discover
infinitely more. To the dull-eyed the desert is a land of horrors; they
allow themselves to be so depressed by the glowing heat of the day
that the blissfulness of the night brings them no comfort or strength;
they ride into the desert trembling, and leave it shuddering; their
sensations are all for the terrible, their feelings for the annoyances
attendant on the journey; for the infinite sublimity of the desert such
hearts are too small. But those who have really learned to know the
desert judge otherwise.
Barren the desert is, we confess, but it is not dead. Thus, although
the general aspect is uniform, the nature of the surface varies
greatly. For wide stretches the desert is like a rocky sea, with
strangely-shaped cones, abrupt precipitous walls, deeply-riven
gorges, sharp-angled ridges, and wondrous towering domes. Over
these the ceaselessly-blowing wind drifts the sand, now filling up
hollows, now emptying them again, but always grinding, polishing,
hollowing out, sharpening, and pointing. Black masses of sandstone,
granite, or syenite, more rarely of limestone or slate, and here and
there of volcanic rock glow in the sun, and rise in expressively-
outlined ranges. On one side the wind robs these of every covering,
driving the fine sand uninterruptedly over their summits, completely
enveloping them in a veil in times of storm, and leaving no particle of
sand at rest until it has been blown across the ridge. On the lee side,
protected from the wind, lie golden yellow beds of the finest rolled
sand, which form terraces one above another, each about a yard in
height. But they also are in ceaseless movement, continually
displacing one another from above downwards, and being renewed
from the other side of the range. Strikingly contrasted with the black
walls of the exposed side, these terraces of sand are visible from
afar, and in certain lights they sparkle like broad golden ribbons on
the hills. We may venture to call such ranges the regalia of the
desert. No one unacquainted with the glowing South can picture the
marvellous wealth of colour, the splendour and glamour, and the
infinite charm which the overflowing sunlight can create on the
dreariest and wildest mountains of the desert. Their sides are never
clothed with the welcome green of woodland, at most the highest
peaks bear a scant covering of bushes, to which the precipitation of
vapour at this height allows a bare subsistence and a stunted
growth. One misses the whispering of the beeches, and the rustling
of the firs and pines; there is none of the familiar murmuring, or
joyous chatter, or echoing roar of running water, which lays silver
ribbons on our mountains at home, fringing them here with verdure,
while in another place the sun shining upon rushing waterfall and
whirlpool enhaloes them with rainbow colours; there is no mantle of
ice and snow which the sun can transfigure into purple at dawn and
sunset, or into glowing brightness at noon; and there is no fresh
green from any mead. In short, all the witchery and charm of
Northern mountain scenery is absent; and yet the desert mountains
are not deficient in wealth of colour, and certainly not in majesty.
Every individual layer and its own peculiar colour comes into
prominence and has its effect. And yet, brilliant as may be the
brightly-coloured and sometimes sharply-contrasted strata, it is on
the continuously sand-polished, grandly-sculptured cones, peaks,
gullies, and gorges that the light of heaven produces the finest play
of colour. The alternations of light and shade are so frequent, the
flushing and fading of colours so continuous, that a very intoxication
of delight besets the soul. Nor do the first and last rays of the sun fail
to clothe the desert mountains in purple; and distance sheds over
them its blue ethereal haze. They, too, live, for the light gives them
life.
In other regions the desert is for wide stretches either flat or gently
undulating. For miles it is covered with fine-grained, golden-yellow
sand, into which man and beast sink for several centimetres. Here
one often sees not a single stem of grass nor living creature of any
kind. The uniformly blue sky roofs in this golden surface, and
contributes not a little to suggest the sea. In such places the track of
the “ship of the desert” is lost as it is made; they are pathless as the
sea; for them as for the ocean was the compass discovered. Less
monotonous, but not more pleasant, are those regions on which
loose, earthy, or dusty sand forms a soil for poisonous colocynth-
gourds and the wholesome senna. Long low hills alternate with
shallow and narrow hollows, and a carpet of the above-named
plants, which from a distance seems green and fresh, covers both
alike. Such places are avoided by both man and beast, for the camel
and his driver often sink a foot deep into the loose surface-soil. Other
tracts are covered with coarse gravel or flints, and others with hollow
sand-filled balls, rich in iron, which look almost as if they had been
made by human hands, and whose origin has not yet been very
satisfactorily explained.[75] On such stretches, where the camel-
paths are almost like definite highways, thousands of quartz crystals
are sometimes exposed, either singly or in groups, like clusters of
diamonds set by an artist hand. With these the sun plays magically,
and such stretches gleam and sparkle till the dazzled eye is forced to
turn away from them. In the deepest hollows, finally, the dust forms a
soil, and there one is sure to find the reed-like, but very hard, dry,
sharp, dark-green alfa, umbrella-shaped mimosas, and perhaps
even tom-palms, pleasant assurances of life.
But of animal life also there is distinct evidence. To think of the
desert as a dead solitude is as erroneous as to call it the home of
lions. It is too poor to support lions, but it is rich enough for
thousands of other animals. And all these are in a high degree
remarkable, for in every respect they prove themselves the true
children of the desert.
It is not merely that their colouring is always most precisely
congruent with the dominant colour of the ground, that is generally
tawny, but the desert animals are marked by their light and delicate
build, by their strikingly large and unusually acute eyes and ears,
and by a behaviour which is as unassuming as it is self-possessed. It
is the lot of all creatures born in the desert to be restless wanderers,
for sufficient food cannot be found all the year round at one place,
and the children of the desert are endowed with incomparable agility,
indefatigable endurance, untiring persistence; their senses are
sharpened so that the pittance which is offered is never overlooked,
and their clothing is adapted to conceal them alike in flight or in
attack. If their life is perhaps somewhat hard, it is certainly not
joyless.
The fact that almost all the desert animals agree in colouring with
their surroundings explains why the traveller, who is not an
experienced observer, often sees, at first at least, but little of the
animal life. Moreover, the desert seems far poorer than it is, since it
is not till dusk that most of its tenants leave their places of rest and
concealment and begin to be lively. Some, however, force
themselves on the attention of the least observant. Even though the
traveller may fail to notice the various species of desert-lark which
cross his path everywhere, and are noteworthy for their likeness to
the ground and for their extraordinarily developed powers of flight, he
cannot possibly overlook the sand-grouse; and though he may ride
unobserving over the burrows of the jerboas, he is sure to observe a
gazelle feeding not far from his path.
Fig. 51.—Gazelles lying near a Mimosa.

This antelope may be regarded as typically a desert animal.
Although it is proportionate in all its parts, the head and sense-
organs seem almost too large, and the limbs too delicate, in fact
almost fragile. But this head carries a brain of unusual cleverness for
a ruminant, and those limbs are as if made of steel, exceedingly
strong and elastic, admirably suited for agility and untiring
endurance. One must not judge the gazelle of the desert from its
appearance in captivity, cooped up in a narrow space. What activity,
adroitness, suppleness, grace, and spirit, it displays in its native
haunts! How well it deserves to have been chosen alike by the
Oriental and by the native of the desert as the image of feminine
beauty. Trusting to its tawny coat, as well as to its incomparable
agility and speed, it gazes with clear, untroubled eyes at the camels
and their riders. Without seeming to be disturbed by the approaching
caravan, it continues to browse. From the blossoming mimosa it
takes a bud or a juicy shoot; between the sharp alfa leaves it finds a
delicate young stem. Nearer and nearer comes the caravan. The
creature raises its head, listens, sniffs the air, gazes round again,
moves a few steps, and browses as before. But suddenly the elastic
hoofs strike the ground, and the gazelle is off, quickly, lightly, and
nimbly, as if its almost unexcelled speed were but play. Over the
sandy plain it skims, quick as thought, leaping over the larger stones
and tamarisk bushes as if it had wings. It seems almost to have left
the earth, so surprisingly beautiful is its flight; it seems as if a poem
of the desert were embodied in it, so fascinating is its beauty and
swiftness. A few minutes of persistent flight carry it out of reach of
any danger with which the travellers can threaten it, for the best
trotter would pursue in vain, and not even a greyhound could
overtake it. Soon it slackens its speed, and in a few moments it is
browsing as before. And if the bloodthirsty traveller begins the chase
in earnest, the sly creature has a tantalizing way of allowing him to
get near it again; a second and a third time it cleverly gets out of
range of his murderous weapons, until at length, becoming scared, it
leaves all danger far behind. The further it gallops the more slender
seem its body and limbs; its outline begins to swim before the eyes;
at length it disappears on the sandy flat, merging into it and seeming
to melt away like a breath of vapour. Its home has received and
concealed the fugitive, removed it, as if magically, from vision, and
left not a trace behind. But if the vision is lost to the eye it remains in
the heart, and even the Western can now understand why the
gazelle has become such a richly-flowering bud in the poesy of the
East, why the Oriental gives it so high a rank among beasts, why he
compares the eyes which kindle fires in his heart to those of the
gazelle, why he likens the neck around which he throws his arms in
love’s secret hour to that of the swiftest of the desert’s children, why
the nomad brings a tame gazelle to the tent of his gladly-expectant
spouse, that she may gaze into its tender eyes and reflect their
beauty on the hoped-for pledge of their wedlock, and why even the
sacred poet finds in the fair creature a visible emblem of his longing
after the Most High. For even he, removed from the world, must
have felt a breath of the passion which has purified the words and
made smooth the verses and rhymes of the fiery songs in praise of
the gazelle.
Less attractive, but by no means less interesting, are some other
desert animals. Among the sparsely sprouting alfa there is a
numerous flock of birds about the size of pigeons. Tripping hither
and thither, scratching and scraping with their bills, they seek for
food. Without anxiety they allow the rider to approach within a
distance of a hundred paces. A good field-glass enables one to see
not only every movement, but also the more prominent colours of
their plumage. With depressed head, retracted neck, and body held
almost horizontally, they run about in search of seeds, the few grains
which the desert grasses bear, freshly unfolded panicles, and
insects. Some stretch out their necks from time to time and peer
circumspectly around, others, quite careless, paddle in the sand,
preening their feathers, or lie at ease, half sideways, in the sun. All
this one can distinctly see, and one can count that there are over
fifty, perhaps nearly a hundred. What sportsman would their
presence not excite? Sure of his booty, the inexperienced traveller
shuts up his field-glass, gets hold of his gun, and slowly approaches
the gay company. But the birds disappear before his eyes. None has
run or flown, yet none is to be seen. It seems as if the earth had
swallowed them. The fact is that, trusting to the likeness between
their plumage and the ground, they have simply squatted. In a
moment they have become stones and little heaps of sand. Ignorant
of this, the sportsman rides in upon them, and is startled when they
rise with simultaneous suddenness, and loudly calling and scolding,
take wing and fly noisily away. But if he should succeed in bringing
one down, he will not fail to be struck by their colouring and marking,
which is as remarkable as their behaviour. The sand-coloured upper
surface, shading sometimes into gray, sometimes towards bright
yellow, is broken and adorned by broad bands, narrower bars,
delicate lines, by dots, spots, points, streaks, and blurs, so that one
might fancy at first sight that birds so marked must be conspicuous
from a distance. But all this colour-medley is simply the most precise
copy of the ground; every dark and light spot, every little stone, every
grain of sand seems to have its counterpart on the plumage. It is no
wonder then that the earth can, as it were, make the bird part of
itself, and secure its safety, which is further assured by the creature’s
strong wings, which are capable of incomparably swift flight. And so
it is that the poetic feeling of the Arabs has idealized these sand-
grouse in luxuriant fancy and flowery words, for their beauty
fascinates the eye, and their marvellous swiftness awakens longing
in the heart of mortals who are bound to the earth.
All other desert animals display characters like the two which we
have described. Thus there is a lynx, the caracal, leaner and lanker,
with longer ears and larger eyes than the rest of his race, moreover
not striped nor spotted, but sand-coloured all except his black ear-
tips, eye-stripes, and lip-spots. His hue varies slightly, being lighter
or darker, and with more or less red, according to the locality in
which he lives. There is also a desert fox, the fenec, the dwarf of the
dog family, with dun-yellow fur, and extraordinarily large ears. The
desert also harbours a small rodent, the so-called jumping-mouse,
the jerboa: he suggests a miniature kangaroo, and has exceedingly
long hind-legs, diminutive fore-legs, and a tail longer than the body
with hairs in two rows. He is more harmless and good-natured, but
also swifter and more agile than any other rodent.
The birds, the reptiles, and even the insects show the same stamp,
though form and colouring may vary greatly. When any other colour
besides sandy-yellow becomes prominent, if hair, feather, or scale
be marked with black or white, ashy-gray or brown, red or blue, such
decorations occur only in places where they are not noticeable when
looked at from above or from the side. But where a mountain rises in
the midst of the desert, it shows its varied character also in the
animal life. On the gray rocks of the mountains in Arabia the steinbok
clambers, the hyrax has its home, the bearded vultures nest, and not
a few other birds are to be found on the peaks and cliffs, in the
chasms and valleys. But from the dark rocks of more low-lying
deserts the only sound one hears is the loud but tuneful song of the
deep-black wheatear.
Thus the desert exhibits harmony in all its parts and in every one of
its creatures, and this fact goes far to strengthen the impression
made on every thoughtful, sensitive, and healthy mind—an
impression received on the first day in the desert, and confirmed on
every succeeding one.
If one would really know the desert and become in any measure at
home there, one must have a vigorous constitution, a receptive
mind, and some poetic feeling. Whoever shrinks from enduring the
discomforts of the journey, whoever fears either sun or sand, should
avoid the desert altogether. Even if the sky be clear, and the
atmosphere pure and bright, even if a cooling breeze come from the
north, the day in the desert is hard to bear. Almost suddenly, with
scarce any dawn, the sun begins to exert his masterful power. It is
only near the sea or large rivers that the dawn is heralded by a
purple flush on the eastern horizon; amid the vast sand-plains the
sun appears with the first reddening in the east. It rises over the flats
like a ball of fire, which seems as if it would burst forth on all sides.
The coolness of the morning is at once past. Directly after sunrise
the glowing beams beat down as if it were already noon. And though
the north wind, which may blow for months at a time and is often
refreshing, may prevent the unequally expanded layers of air from
shaping themselves into a mirage, yet it does not bring sufficient
cooling to annul the peculiar heaving and quivering of the
atmosphere which is seen over the sand. Heaven and earth seem to
float in a flood of light, and an indescribable heat streams from the
sun, and is reflected again from the sand. With each hour the light
and heat increase, and from neither is there any escape.

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Writing Beyond the State Post Sovereign Approaches to

Sofreh A Contemporary Approach to Classic Persian

A Map of Selves Beyond Philosophy of Mind 1st Edition

The Iranian Studies Series publishes high-quality scholarship on various

advisory board of iss

Leiden University Press

isbn 978 90 8728 335 3

© Behnam M. Fomeshi / Leiden University Press, 2019

This book is distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press

1 – Walt Whitman’s Life and Works 

Nīmā Yūshīj, New Poetry and Whitman 

I also had the opportunity to present portions of this work as it developed at

Christine von Ruymbeke, Laetitia Nanquette, Roxane Haag-Higuchi, Alireza

of Seven Gables, an edition of Whitman’s poems, Moby Dick, My Antonia,

Taqvāyī’s adaptation of To Have and Have Not in Nākhudā Khūrshīd (1987) is

The history of Whitman’s reception in Iran, which started in 1922 with

elimination of superiority/inferiority binary opposition which will lead to a

According to Prawer, a writer’s willingness to connect with another writer

view of the dialogue between a writer and a country uses a chronological

Organisation of the Book

order is observed to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of

American free verse owes a great deal to an Iranian philosopher’s activities

Walt Whitman’s Life and Works

Childhood and Adolescence, 1819–18361

Early Adulthood, 1836–1848

than 1,000 articles and editorials.15 As a free-soil Democrat, he used the

Wandering and Experimenting, 1848–1855

Walt edited the Brooklyn Freeman from 9 September 1848, to 11 September

Leaves of Grass 1855–1861

generally enthusiastic about Whitman, he wrote of the volume, “It is as if

Whitman’s passion for popularity resulted in unabashed self-promotion.

The Civil War, 1861–1865

Post-War Washington, 1865–1873

in Whitman’s desk. A staunch Methodist, Harlan was “outraged by its sexual

Culture (1939)”, it is “one of the most … overlooked works of American

Mickle Street, 1884–1892

From Democratic Politics to Democratic Poetics

Whitman’s Poetic Innovations

Whitman in his political life was a democrat. In his poetry he believed

Whitman decided to play his part in his poetry. In Leaves he portrayed a

Whitman broke the nineteenth-century taboos against writing about the

but to welcome them to their legitimately superior place – to give them

To understand the workings of language in Leaves is to come to terms

He traced the spirit of America – independence, individualism and democ-

Whitman tried his hand at coining words such as “presidentiad”. Although

American poetry becomes democratic only when it reproduces the

Whitman’s language is a mixture of anything he read or heard in his life. He

incongruity or even contradictory language may be an indication of the

Expansiveness and Inclusiveness

Whitman’s democratic mentality makes his poetry as inclusive as possible.

Inseparably tying together an all-inclusive acceptance of differences just