My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil,
this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and
their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
– “Song of Myself”
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Oh, do I have to explain why Walt Whitman is, for me, the poet of my heart? Freethinker! Lusty! Loud! Embodied, no dualist he! Sensualist! Democrat! A man who demands !’s!
Keats, in his poem “Written Against Vulgar Superstition” bemoans the melancholy sound, the dreadful sermon, the chill of death. Whitman is like the embodiment of its opposite — he is outdoors, in the sun and rain, hot and sweaty, a creature of bodily odors and sounds and feelings. And he revels in the same in others. His God is no Christian God, no aloof, distant Being, but the world itself. The Kosmos, as he calls it at times, as he calls himself (“I, Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of Manhatten born”). It’s Spinoza’s God writ large in sex, in the joy of hard labor honestly done, in the meeting of people, minds and bodies one and the same. Squelchy pantheism, brilliant and lusty and pure and innocent. And indistinguishable from any atheism with a sense of poetry and joy.
This is the man who could weave a whole, brilliant poem — a piece of writing far more worthy of being Scripture than any of the dreary bibles and qurans of the world — out of staring at a blade of grass. He gloried in the physical world, and what’s more, he gloried in what the science of his time had revealed about it. Though, granted, he had a complex relationship with science:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
–”When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
But then, how many astronomers, too, sometimes have to step away from the charts and just go out and look up? In “Song of Myself,” he has something else to say about science:
I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of
the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and this is a
mathematician.Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.
So there you have it. Walt Whitman, materialist, realist, idealist. Passionate, lusty, full of this world, this life. If there is any one person worthy of being the Muse of the Modern Age, it’s ol’ Walt. When the world has beaten me down, when I’m losing hope, or when I’m getting lost in my head, this is the guy I turn to. So, friends, let’s greet the world with our mighty YAWPS!
