As Exuberant and Encompassing as Ever By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Imagine Walt Whitman as he imagines himself, stretched atop a load of hay, one leg reclined on the other, seizing the clover and timothy, rolling head over heels, tangling his hair full of wisps. And then imagine the farmers - puzzled Long Islanders perhaps - and the oxen at the wagons watching that ecstatic performance. "What is that you express in your eyes?" Whitman asks the oxen, which might ask the same of him. "More than all the print I have read in my life" is his answer.

The untitled poem from which these lines come - later called "Song of Myself" - was first published in "Leaves of Grass," which appeared for sale on the Fourth of July 150 years ago. It's a poem, I'm tempted to say, that still surprises, all the compliment being contained in the word "still," as if America had outrun Whitman long ago and left him breathing hard along the side of the road. But wherever we pull up in our own race, breathing hard ourselves, there is Whitman, as loose-limbed and joyous as ever, moved more by the ecstasy of perception and empathy than by any physical effort. There is no catching up with him. He is always ahead of us.

The Whitman of that great poem is a holy fool, a sprite, a personification able to be everywhere at once, thanks to its immaterial nature. But there has never been a spirit so aware of his sinews and veins, so good at loafing and river-bathing and arousal. The body Whitman inhabits is as inclusive as his mind and feelings. "I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,/And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over," he writes, as though he were the subject of a strange Renaissance portrait.

We read in all this the largess of the man, who turned himself from a mild-mannered journalist - Walter Whitman - into a superman of sorts. It is one of the most profoundly successful acts of self-characterization in all of literature. But in the largess of the man we are also supposed to read - and still do, I think - the exuberance of America itself. The Whitman who celebrates himself finds it easy enough to stay ahead of us, who perhaps sometimes feel that life, as he puts it, is "a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears." That is what really keeps Whitman out in front after 150 years: the America he inhabits in "Leaves of Grass." We have not gotten to it yet.

The place is as real as the poet can make it, peopled with figures like the butcher boy who "puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market," before breaking into a shuffle and breakdown. It is crowded with canal boys and one-year wives, with machinists and slaves and drovers. Missourians cross the plains, and patriarchs sit at supper with their progeny, and trappers and hunters rest under the shade of canvas or adobe. Whitman is among them all, touching them, drinking and sleeping with them, waking in the night to speed, as he says, "with tailed meteors." And he decides, as he reports in the prose introduction to "Leaves of Grass," that "the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature."

It is our feeble illusion that there have only been Americans since the continent was first settled by Europeans and only here and that they have not necessarily had the fullest poetical nature. Whitman sets us right. There have been Americans everywhere and at all times, he announces. But how are we to know them? One way is by their resemblance to the poet, free-spirited, frank, afraid of neither the flesh nor the spirit. The Americans Whitman means are like the animals themselves. "They do not sweat and whine about their condition,/They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." The sensuous energy they embody harmonizes perfectly with their practical energy.

They also believe that the great poets extend an invitation to them, as Whitman does. "Come to us on equal terms," he writes, "Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy." The very manner of Whitman's verse reinforces that invitation. It turns no one away. "You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle," he urges, and it's true. We should have been. We would know something about the boatmen and clam diggers even Whitman cannot tell us. We would know something more about the poet and ourselves.

One hundred and fifty years on, this poem has not even begun to tire. It wakes us to the moment of our being and to the place in which that moment is passing. It halts us in our haste and makes us look down at our bodies without reluctance. It leads us to a country whose genius "is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors ... but always most in the common people." Up the road, we can always glance Whitman ahead of us. "I stop some where waiting for you," he writes. "If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles."

Notes: I have avoided archiving stuff from elsewhere at Buoy but this truely is a happy leaf of grass to add to the plie already here!