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Whitman’s omnivorous curiosity embraced far more than crowds and streets. “This is the city and I am one of the citizens,” he declared. “Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, / The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.” He hailed its industry: “On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, / Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, and down into the clefts of streets.” He cherished its multiplicity: “city of the world! For all races are here; all the lands of the earth make contributions here.” He revered its superb shoreline—“hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships”—and its “high growth of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.” “City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!” he exclaimed. “City nested in bays! my city!”

Yet in all this the poet was protesting a bit too much. The dazzling perfection of his “Manahatta” seems strangely distant from Manhattan, the city of grime and crime that journalist Whitman knew. “Manahatta” was Manhattan without a dark side, Manhattan with its contradictions resolved, dissolved. Broadway had become a metaphor—the highway of equal souls—and New York City the symbol of egalitarian and democratic community.

Whitman’s poetry finessed social and class tensions of which he was only too aware, which he himself embodied. It was, to be sure, saturated with a workingman’s sensibility. He was “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,” “one who does not associate with literary people—a man never called upon to make speeches at public dinners . . . rather down in the bay with pilots in their pilot-boat. . . or riding on a Broadway omnibus, side by side with the driver.” And he could be severe with the “upper ten,” referring in “Song of Myself” to the “many sweating” and the “few idly owning” (in his notebooks he denounced the “vast ganglions of bankers and merchant princes”). He disliked posh Grace Church even more than Melville did, and on one occasion, when an overzealous usher removed Whitman’s hat, he grabbed it back, beat the man over the head with it, and swept out in a fury.

Yet Whitman didn’t grapple with the transformations these classes were undergoing. He rhapsodized the city’s growth and progress as if it came without cost, as if skilled artisans like his father were not plummeting in status and income. Nowhere were such changes more pronounced and more obvious than in the world of printing and publishing, where Harpers and the penny press were crowding out small artisanal publishers and one-man newspapers. Whitman himself had abandoned the compositor’s trade and sustained his artisanal journalism and artisanal authorship by moving to Brooklyn, where older ways remained viable. But if Whitman the journalist expressed dismay over aspects of modern publishing, Whitman the poet elided such concerns with a rapid-fire cataloging of the undoubted marvels that world had wrought: the “story papers, various, full of strong-flavored romances, widely circulated . . . the onecent and two-cent journals—the political ones, no matter what side—the weeklies in the country—the sporting and pictorial papers—the monthly magazines, with plentiful imported feed—the sentimental novels, numberless copies of them—the low-priced flaring tales, adventures, biographies—all are prophetic; all waft rapidly on . . . swell wide .. . What a progress popular reading and writing has made in fifty years! What a progress fifty years hence!”

There was little sense in Leaves that the artisanal and republican city was passing and ushering in the metropolis of slums and mansions to which the urban mysteries were calling relentless attention. Whitman didn’t see the imperiled city Melville did, perhaps because he had been relatively successful at negotiating