"Song of Myself" and Bell's Song of Myself
Last year, I wrote an entry on the Philadelphia Brewing Company’s Walt Wit, in which I requested that breweries make more beer inspired by great literature. Bell’s Brewery, in Michigan, has heeded my call, and in a major way: they’re releasing not just one literary beer but an entire series inspired by Whitman. They call it the Leaves of Grass series, and it will include seven beer released intermittently through the summer of 2020. Each beer is named after a different poem in Whitman’s monumental Leaves of Grass (which started out as a thin volume when first released in 1855 but grew to a tome as Whitman constantly revised it until his death in 1892).
The first beer in the series - called Song of Myself and described as a “German Inspired American IPA” - came out in May, to celebrate Whitman’s 200th birthday. The next six releases in the series will be:
The Prairie-Grass Dividing (July) – Gose-Style Ale Brewed with Plum, Salt & Coriander
Oh, Captain! My Captain! (September) - Black IPL
To a Locomotive in Winter (November) - Smoked Porter
Song of the Open Road (January 2020) - Winter Warmer
Salut Au Monde! (March 2020) - Lager with Old World Grains
Spontaneous Me (May 2020) - Wild Fermented Beer (obviously!)
Go Bell’s! I really heart this project. (Photo credit: Bell’s Brewing Company)
Larry Bell, Bell’s founder, has been similarly inspired by music: in 2014, Bell’s released a series of beers named after the movements of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32. I missed those beers but won’t miss a single one of the Whitman ones, all of which will appear on this blog.
The Beer
What is a “German Inspired American IPA,” anyway? It’s an American IPA but with 100% German malt and hops. So the hop profile is going to be more floral and perfumey than the tropical, pine, or resinous hop profile of traditional American IPAs.
And Song of Myself is true to style. It pours straw yellow with some haze but no particulates. White head with a little lacing. The aroma is primarily of Pilsner malt, with the floral and perfume notes that you’d expect from German hops, with some grassy aroma on the exhale. The taste has the moderate-high perceived bitterness that an American IPA should, but with honey and orange on the tongue as the lingering bitterness falls away. It finishes less dry than I’d expect from a German beer.
This feels like an apt enough profile for a beer named after Whitman. Whitman is a quintessentially American poet (if not THE quintessential American poet).* Poets as diverse as Yeats, Pound, Ginsberg, Rich, Walcott, and Mayer regard him is a capstone of their craft. So Bell’s had to prefer an American IPA to a traditional British India Pale Ale. But like Whitman, the beer innovates on style. Song of Myself takes a classic form (the American IPA) but experiments with it - the beer asks us to reconsider a classic beer style just as Whitman’s free verse and long lines asks readers to reconsider poetry.
The Poem
For Philadelphia Brewing Company’s Walt Wit, I looked at the first nine lines of “Song of Myself.” For Bell’s Song of Myself, let’s go to the final section of the 1,346-line poem. Note the long lines, the lack of rhyme, and the effusiveness tone of joy. These traits were largely new to American poetry, which was Whitman’s goal: “to give something to our literature which will be our own, with neither foreign spirit, nor imagery nor form, but adapted to our case, grown out of our associations, boldly portraying the West, strengthening and intensifying the national soul, and finding the entire fountains of its birth and growth in our country.” **
52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Whitman wrote this final part of the poem after the Civil War, yet somehow it maintains Whitman’s characteristic patriotic exuberance for America as both a nation and a landscape. In it, the speaker melts into the landscape, conversing with a hawk, “not a bit tamed,” coaxed out of existence by “day” itself and into “air,” “eddies,” and “the dirt to grow from the grass [he] love[s].” Like a final letter from a loved one, he comforts us that you can always find him “under your boot-soles.” He also warns us that his is the future that waits for all of us. “Missing me one place search another,” he says. “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” The conclusion to this epic poem is both inspiring and haunting.
Whitman couldn’t have delivered this message without experimenting with form. Such a new content - in the case of this final section of the poem, of immigrants literally becoming part of the American landscape - needed new form: longer lines, a 26-year drafting process, a “barbaric yawp.”
It’s at once completely American and non-traditional, just like a “German-Inspired American IPA,” which initially sounds like a paradox but resolves nicely when you think about it.
I’ve loved Bell’s since I first got interested in craft beer, when I lived in Ann Arbor, just a few hours away from the brewery. With this series, Bell’s has really won me as a lifelong fan. Looking forward to the next beer in the series, which should be out this month.
* Interesting that both Bell’s and Philadelphia Brewing Company connected their Whitman beers to other countries: Germany and Belgium, respectively. Whitman was born on Long Island to an English father and a Dutch/Welsh mother. Go figure.
** From an 1866 letter to William D. O’Conner, page 3 of the Volume I of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. (2003).
