Whitman in Bolton

From time to time Poetry features online exclusives on its Editors’ Blog. This post is from Evan Jones, who helped host the University of Bolton’s conference celebrating Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday last May.

Bolton, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom: one of many Lancastrian mill towns that bear the visible remains of their history—so much so that history is present. Factories, shells of work and development, the ungentrified North of England: you can see it from the train, from the city center, from the windows. You can see the true state of England not in its overabundance of glass and steel construction but in its redbrick ruins. That was the Lever soap factory (now Unilever); Reebok was there; Warburtons bread; those are the Buzzcocks: the visual anachronism of Bolton resonates with today. And then there is Walt Whitman.

In the mid-1880s, a group of men, readers, and friends formed the Eagle Street College. They were clerks and young professionals—mostly, one was a doctor—lower-middle-class men who were educated to around the age of 14 and saw themselves as “Whitmanites,” disciples of a great poet an ocean away. The group centered around reading and disseminating Leaves of Grass in Great Britain, initially at the home of the architectural draughtsman James William Wallace on Eagle Street (hence the name of the College). The British “dismembered” edition of Whitman’s poetry was published around that time by William Rossetti (brother to Dante Gabriel and Christina)—though earlier unedited books had traveled over. In 1887, the story goes, College members sent Whitman a birthday card, which included a gift of £10. A note of thanks returned, and an exchange between Camden, New Jersey, and Bolton, Lancashire, began. Bolton Central Library holds the largest collection of Whitmania outside the US, including locks of hair, rare editions, letters, notes, and, most famously, old gray beard’s taxidermied canary bird (pictured below), immortalized—as far as a bird can be—in his poem “My Canary Bird” (first published in the New York Herald on March 2, 1888):

Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
Is it not just as great, O soul?

The exchange between Whitman and the men of the Eagle Street College reveals the different ways Whitman is read in the UK. He is central to the cultural development of socialism in the nineteenth century here. But this isn’t unusual. Remember how important he was in the early part of the twentieth century in Russia, for instance, and you start to feel the resonances: Kornei Chukovsky’s 1907 translation of Leaves of Grass went through four editions between 1907 and 1919. The fourth edition was a run of 50,000 copies. Whitman is not America’s alone.

The men of the College came from working-class backgrounds and lived in a mill town. Who else could they be and where else would their interests lie? They sent a copy of Leaves of Grass to Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party (Hardie wrote back that he found “no new messages” in the book, but he wasn’t one to put off supporters and asked where he might obtain an engraving of Whitman). The Eagle Street College acted as a publicity office for Whitman’s message of democracy and equality—and continues to do so: the tradition was revived by a new group of Whitmanites in 1983, who meet annually to celebrate Whitman’s birthday and go on long “Whitman walks” through the local countryside.

There was always an international appeal to Whitman’s Americanness, an ideal that extended beyond borders. That ideal, it’s true, is both problematic and difficult, but it represented a freedom—firstly social, which was its most public face, but importantly around sexuality and the women’s rights movement—that was central for the men of the College. Faced with cultural difference, traveling across oceans, Whitman becomes heroic in a new if similar guise: his pledges for equality, his confrontation of “a history of silence” (in language Martín Espada used in his recent essay, “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump”), accommodated the ideas of the men of the College. Whitman spoke clearly to them and they responded.

Tom Sleigh, in a more critical mode, comes to a similar conclusion: “Who is given voice and who isn’t, who speaks for whom and who doesn’t, and how other people’s lives and speech are implicated in our own seems to me one of Whitman’s central formal struggles.” This is exactly what the men of the College took from Whitman, positioning him as the narrator for a socialism that they hoped would transform society around them.

My colleagues and I at the University of Bolton have tried in our way, in our city you haven’t heard of but Whitman had, to take this further—to take Whitman back to the people. Leading up to his 200th birthday and now in the year following it, we have offered workshops on Whitman’s poetry to community groups; we have read Leaves of Grass with refugees and asylum seekers; we have presented the book to those who might not otherwise have encountered it. The projects we’ve engaged with are part of Bolton at Home, a not-for-profit organization that currently provides housing and support services for more than 18,000 homes in the local area. Bolton at Home’s work in community arts, through the “Percent for Arts Programme” (the arts council encourages a one percent levy on capital projects as a source of income for investment into arts projects), aims to use art as an agent for social change. Through Bolton at Home, we have worked with various groups including the Destitution Project, City of Sanctuary Bolton, and the Wonder Women. We offer free coffee and cakes at our meetings. Bus fare is provided for those participants who need it. There is discussion, reading, encouragement, more discussion. The local connection is important; as soon as we explain that Whitman had admirers here and share the history of the Eagle Street College, Boltonians pay attention. But if the story were just history, it would have ended; what is remarkable about Whitman is the way in which his poetry lives now.

For the safety of those involved, photos of our work with refugees and asylum seekers from Nigeria, Senegal, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Albania can’t be shared. But this video I have full permission to show. It is of the Wonder Women group, who have been meeting on Tuesdays in Hall I’ Th’ Wood since 2012. The group aims to “share knowledge and experiences, make new friends, build confidence and self-esteem, improve health and well-being, and reduce isolation.” The Wonder Women are women from marginalized and disadvantaged backgrounds, and who struggle with social exclusion and substantial caring responsibilities and disempowerment within their homes and communities. They took part in the University of Bolton’s conference celebrating Whitman’s 200th (May 23–24 2019), performing poems from Leaves of Grass that they felt were most relevant to their lives and experiences. Each member of the group chose a poem or a section of a poem, creating a collage of images and text around lines. The poems from which extracts were chosen included “Unfolded out of the Folds,” “My Picture-Gallery,” “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” “Stronger Lessons,” “Unseen Buds,” and “An Evening Lull.” What emerged is the way in which the women sought meaning in poems that echoed their own experiences:

Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you? or who treated you with contempt, or disputed the passage with you?
—From Debris

They recognize in Whitman a fellow traveler, which is what his poems ask. While creating their collages, group members shared why they had chosen a particular poem or lines and reflected on why those issues were significant for them at that moment.

What is continuous in reading Whitman’s poetry, years later, is that home or abroad he continues to “speak the password primeval,” to “give the sign of democracy.” There was hesitation among the Wonder Women initially when I suggested they might recite poetry to a large audience or be recorded doing so. One woman gave a forceful shake of her head and frowned. Some laughed. There was apprehensiveness. But the group, taken with the poems we presented and shared, and later reading on their own, came to an understanding of how Whitman might be singing to them. In our age, “sympathy is the essence of Whitman,” Espada argues. The Wonder Women see this, and their reading of Whitman, the way in which they have warmed to him, reveals their own sympathies with the past and present of their lives in Bolton.