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and shouted jokes and
pelts of snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites .... the fury of roused mobs
(“[Song of Myself],” p. 36).
    The cultural offerings of New York were another source of inspiration to Whitman. He fully embraced the city’s opera rage, which began in April 1847 when an Italian company opened at his beloved Park Theatre. The Astor Place Opera House also opened that year; with 1,500 seats it was America’s largest theater until the Academy of Music opened in Manhattan in 1854. From the late 1840s through the 1850s, Whitman saw dozens of operas, on assignment and for his own pleasure. By the time Leaves of Grass went to press, he had heard at least sixteen major singers make their New York debuts. Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum’s “Swedish nightingale,” had been a smash success at her debut in Castle Garden in 1850; but a personal favorite of Whitman’s was Marietta Alboni, who arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1852 and is said to have inspired these passionate lines:
    I hear the trained soprano .... she convulses me like the climax
of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me .... I dab with bare feet .... They are licked by the
indolent waves,
I am exposed .... cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine .... my windpipe squeezed in
the fakes of death
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being (“[Song of Myself],” 1855, p. 57).
    The wonder of this ecstatic revelation is that it is both a private and a public experience. His feelings are inspired by human connections: Alboni’s voice, the orchestra’s resonance, the excitement of his fellow concertgoers, the hum of electric city life just outside. If anything has ever defined the idea of a “New York moment,” it is this brief and wonderful merge of inner being with common understanding. An accumulation of such moments, plus years of taking in the city and reimagining it on paper, led to the creation of the self-declared “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” (“[Song of Myself],” p. 52). And since Whitman perceived New York to be at the heart of America, his love for the city enabled and inspired the love of his country. The diversity, energy, and ambitions of New York represented the promise of America: By finding his voice on city streets and ferries, he was able to sing for his country’s open roads and great rivers.
    City of the world! (for all races are here,
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in
and out with eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores-city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
(“City of Ships,” p. 444).
    If the poet’s heart was based in Manhattan, the title “Leaves of Grass” for not one but several of his books seems an odd choice. And what of the green cover and gold-embossed, organic-looking lettering that made the book resemble a volume of domestic fiction more than a serious effort? The title and appearance were not the only surprises of the 9- by 12-inch, 95-page volume: Most notably, no author’s name appeared anywhere on the cover or first pages. Though the image of Whitman as a provocative and confident working man looked up from the frontispiece, his name came up only about halfway through the first poem-which was, confusingly, also entitled “Leaves of Grass,” as were the next five poems.
    The quirky details were all deliberate. The title echoed the names of literary productions by women (such as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, Fanny Fern’s popular book of 1853), and the outward appearance also was designed to get readers to question the sexist boundaries of the book industry (note, too, that