Counting from One to a Million: Whitman's Engagement with Large Numbers

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,There is no better than it and now.-Whitman, "Song of Myself," Section 221I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.-Whitman, "Who Learns My Lesson Complete" (LG1881 305)There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.-Oliver Sacks, "My Own Life"2One of the many unique aspects of Whitman's poetry that would have unsettled nineteenth-century readers of Leaves of Grass is the poetic presence of large numbers.3 Whitman expanded the realm of poetic diction in many ways, of course, but one of the most striking remains his absorption of the terms for large numbers that long had been familiar in the realm of mathematics4 and more recently had been utilized in a widening array of sciences, particularly astronomy. The names for large numbers, then, were in the language but in the early years of the nineteenth century were still not commonly used; as the 1840 Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge put it: "the terms billion, trillion, &c., though defined by arithmetical writers, have never found their way into common use, the want of such numbers having never been experienced."5 These large numbers had long been a theoretical tool in mathematics, but, with advances in astronomy and geology, and early glimmerings of atomic physics, vast numbers gradually entered into the realm of the actual. The explosion in the perception of time and distance brought on by scientific advances necessitated thinking of the earth's age and the earth's place in the cosmos in terms beyond the familiar and comfortable numbers that had previously served most humans well for dealing with the material world.As a former teacher of arithmetic himself, and as a journalist keenly interested in the emerging genre of American schoolbooks, Whitman was well aware of how these large numbers had quickly become a staple of every child's education. The arithmetic book he recommended in 1846 for use in the Brooklyn schools, James B. Thomson's Practical Arithmetic,6 provides students with a "numeration table" taking them up to the quadrillions, and among the student "exercises" is a directive to "read" large numbers (like "504069470300400") and to write out in figures numbers like "One hundred and thirteen billions, six hundred and fifty thousand."7 And the very first section ("Numeration") of Benjamin Greenleaf's influential 1847 Introduction to the National Arithmetic ("Designed for Common Schools") requires students to memorize and write out numbers from "units" to "thousands" to "millions" to "billions" to "trillions" to "quatrillions" to "quintillions" to "sextillions" and on up to "tridecillions." Student assignments included writing out in words the names of numbers up to forty-five digits long.8Arguably, then, the audience for Whitman's poetry was better attuned than twenty-first-century audiences to the particular definitions of the numerical terms that Whitman so frequently employed in his poetry, even if they would have been surprised to find such arithmetical diction in a poetic context. Not only did these giant numbers appear in arithmetic textbooks, they were also frequently tossed about in early debates over whether scientific discoveries about the vastness of time and space made the existence of God more or less likely. Baptist minister Eli Noyes, for example, in his 1853 Lectures on the Truth of the Bible, argues that "the scientific man, who looks into the intricacies of nature," can only ultimately "corroborate the teachings of the Bible," for "the one who studies nature, becomes more devout. …