How The Poetry Of Walt Whitman Can Soothe Our Nation

Walt Whitman, born in 1819, as a young man. Whitman tried to capture the expansive American spirit in his poetry. (Photo courtesy of PBS).

Walt Whitman famously wrote that “The United States themselves are the greatest poem.”

A poem takes disparate threads of thought and image and creates a unity. Whitman called his greatest work, his vast love song to America, Leaves of Grass. Each blade of grass is its own distinct entity. Every blade, like each American state, is essential to the whole. A “uniform hieroglyphic,” as Whitman puts it:

… Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones

Growing among black folks as among white …

I give them the same, I receive them the same.

I turn often to poetry for guidance, and started delving more deeply into Whitman in 1988 when I began writing poems again in earnest after a long hiatus. Whitman is the great channeler of the American spirit. He reveals our struggles and our scars, and reaches out with solace and hope.

I sought comfort once again from Whitman after watching both political party’s conventions. Americans seem to be living in parallel universes — we see the same events but draw far different conclusions about what they mean and how the country is to move forward.

This morning, the nation woke up to news of a violent clash in Portland between supporters of the president and protesters for racial justice. One person died. Last week, a young, self-described vigilante shot two demonstrators in Kenosha.

Meanwhile, the death rate from COVID-19 spiked this week in my own community in central Illinois, affecting mainly students. Deaths continue to tick up nationally — to 180,000 and counting.

Like us, Whitman lived in a troubled and divided time. He wrote some of his best work in the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet he believed America’s many branches —what he called its “multitudes” of contrasts and complexities — are what drive its dynamism.

Whitman viewed American as having a great collective soul. (Photo courtesy of NBC)

I read Whitman’s poetry as I often do the Psalms — as a kind of prayer. Ironically, like many prophets, he was denounced in his time for his counter-conventional views. His poems were banned in certain parts.

Still, Whitman’s hope for America as a country where each person has worth and a part to play continues to resonate. The role of the sexes and the type of work Americans engage in has evolved since his time, but his vision remains worth believing in. It is a vision of individual dignity rooted in the gospels.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck …
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else

As Professor Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia has observed, Whitman “moves at visionary speed, seeing what there is to see of American life.” Whitman saw the role of a poet as that of an “equalizer.” Someone who “supplies what wants supplying … checks what needs checking … sees eternity in men and women and does not see men and women as dreams or dots.”

Whitman as an older man served as a nurse during the Civil War.

Most touching to me is Whitman’s concern future generations. I am usually moved to tears re-reading his long poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

Whitman addresses those who will one day pass the same stretch of the East River that he is crossing, and where the engineering feat of the Brooklyn Bridge would soon rise.

I think of his words every time I return to my home state of New Jersey and look across the railing of a ferry to the shores of Manhattan.

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried …

Whitman makes a promise to those who will come after him, that still speaks to us today.

… We plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not — we love you — there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

For Whitman, America is a giant beating heart, an organic being with a collective soul. Each of us by our actions, he suggests, adds to or detracts from that soul.

On this Labor Day, as the election season begins to unfold, how are we “planting” future generations within us? What is the love we want to pass on? What is the vision of America we will leave behind?

Are there poems that refresh your soul they way that Whitman’s do mine? Let us share them with each other as we navigate, as Whitman did, an extraordinary time.

Walt Whitman’s signature. He considered himself an American “everyman” and tried to reflect the country’s vast diversity in his poems. (Photo courtesy of PBS).