Walt Whitman has come to represent many of the positive qualities Americans associate with America: expansiveness, open-mindedness, youth and dynamism. Perhaps no other writer was so enamored with the potentialities of American democracy as Walt Whitman was in his writing.
Whitman’s inspirations seemed to come from his country and his countrymen as well as from a sense of himself as an American, open to new and rich experiences and fully aware of his own ability to achieve honor, act honorably and to move forward in a changing world.
Walt Whitman saw in America what America has almost always wanted to see in itself. Whitman’s 19th century portrait of America was flattering for this reason but also challenging. The enormous potential to lead the world to greater feats of science and commerce that Whitman identified in the United States was in no way automatically achieved. Work had to be done.
The democratic values and equitable society that Walt Whitman envisioned and chanted about in his poetry would not come about just because they were possible. Work had to be done.
For Walt Whitman, America was just beginning. The poet’s sense of possibility and of the richness of life everywhere are some of the most tangible elements of his work.
In Leaves of Grass, most especially in the long poem “Song of Myself”, Whitman sees himself as a miracle. The fact that he was able to be the person he was, the fact of his formation, his circumstances, his relationships, his surroundings — it was all a miracle and had never happened before in the history of mankind. He had never happened before.
He was unique. And he was grateful to the country that produced him.
This self-reverence translated into a reverence for a great many things in Walt Whitman’s work. Love, death and nature each were deeply considered in Whitman’s poetry and with a force that was borne, seemingly, directly out of his sense of himself as a miracle.
Whitman knotted the wildly disparate experiences of living into a coherent sense of his own individuality and he connected this potent singularity and privilege to every element of his world. Through his poetry, Whitman endowed death with grace, strength and beauty. Birds became symbols of longing and hope.
There was sadness and grief in his poetry and in his world. There was loss and isolation. But the fervent self-belief always triumphed. Whitman’s enduring youth always triumphed, as did his sense of fate.
Walt Whitman was fated to live on as the bard of America. He said as much in his poetry.
The passion and verve of Whitman’s poetry inspired countless American writers who followed Walt Whitman. His use of rhapsody, repetition, synecdoche and rhythm can all be found to some degree in the work of the poets and novelists he inspired. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and even Wallace Stevens have each written about Whitman and presented the American Romantic poet as a bard, a muse, and a symbol of inspired poetic overflow.
Over a century after his death, Walt Whitman still seems to know his country intimately and to inspire it to greater and greater things. Walt Whitman holds on to us just as tightly as we hold on to him. And it seems like he always will.
More from this Contributor:
Walt Whitman’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg
Wallace Stevens & the 3 Planes of Reality