When we read the shifting, random series of images in Section 15, we have a choice: we can skim quickly, as if we were on a speeding train, quickly passing by an ever-changing sequence of scenes or we can read slowly and deliberately, as the twentieth-century poet William Carlos Williams suggested we should, pausing to savor every moment as its own potential poem.
Soon, everyone was talking about Whitman’s catalogue-technique, and Whitman himself even adopted the term, noting late in his life that “some cuss my long catalogues, some think them holy.” He occasionally expressed frustration with readers who “gagged” at his catalogues: “Oh God! how tired I get of hearing that said about the ‘catalogues’!” He believed reviewers simply could not get past the catalogues: “it is that catalogue business that wrecks them all-that hauls them up short, that determines their opposition: they shudder at it.” Even Whitman’s admirer Ralph Waldo Emerson once commented that Whitman’s “catalogue-style of poetry is easy and leads nowhere.” One early reviewer of the first edition of Leaves of Grass claimed that Whitman “should have been bred to the business of an auctioneer” because he was “perpetually haunted by the delusion that he has a catalogue to make.” This reviewer went on to compare long sections of Whitman’s poetry to an actual auctioneer’s catalogue. Here Whitman offers nearly seventy-five lines of images of people engaging in various activities. Many aspects of Whitman’s poetic form struck nineteenth-century readers as radical, but few provoked more of an outrage than what quickly came to be called his “catalogues.” We saw catalogues earlier in “Song of Myself” (indeed, as early as Section 2), but nothing prepares the reader for the seemingly endless catalogue of Section 15, the second-longest section in the poem.
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