Visiting With Walt Whitman

From Wikipedia:

Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America." Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far".

The literary critic, Harold Bloom wrote, as the introduction for the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass:

If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

---Walt Whitman, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I’ve been spending some time with Walt Whitman lately—with his poetry, that is. Why it has taken me so long to become better acquainted with his verse, I do not know. I’ve shared with you before “O Captain! My Captain!” and excerpts from “To See God,” some of the best of what little I've more recently read. I’d read much of the rest of Leaves of Grass, but 45 years ago, retaining little. I am reading it again, patiently. More, poets I’ve been reading in recent years—Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mary Oliver, particularly—have approvingly pointed me in his direction, urging me to go deeper. So, today I share some more of his verse with you from Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (2004).

 

Roaming in Thought

(After reading Hegel)

 

Roaming in thought over the universe, I saw the little that is

   Good steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge

   Itself and become lost and dead.

 

Thought

 

Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;

As I stand aloof and look there is to me something

   profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the

   lead of those who do not believe in men.

 

Beautiful Women

 

Women sit or move to and from, some old, some young,

The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful

   than the young.

 

Thought

 

Of Justice—as if Justice could be any thing but the same

   ample law, expounded by natural judges and saviors,

As if it might be this thing or that thing, according to

   decisions.

 

Visor’d

 

A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself,

Concealing her face, concealing her form,

Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,

Falling upon her even when she sleeps.

 

Thought

 

Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same

   chances and rights as myself—as if it were not

   indispensable to my own rights that others possess the

   same.

 

Gliding O’er All                          

 

Gliding o‘er all, through all,

Through Nature, Time, and Space,

As a ship on the waters advancing,

The voyage of the soul—not life alone,

Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

 

Gods

 

Lover divine and perfect Comrade,

Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,

Be thou my God.

 

Thou, thou, the Ideal Man,

Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,

Complete in body and dilate in spirit,

Be thou my God.

 

O Death, (for Life has served its turn,)

Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion,

Be thou my God.

 

Aught, aught of mightiest, best I see, conceive, or know,

(To break the stagnant tie—thee, thee to free, O soul,)

Be thou my God.

 

All great ideas, the races’ aspirations,

All heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts,

Be ye my Gods.

 

Or Time and Space,

Or shape of the Earth divine and wondrous,

Or some fair shape I viewing, worship,

Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night,

Be ye my Gods.

 

Good-Bye My Fancy

 

Good-bye¹ my fancy--(I had a word to say,

But ‘tis not quite the time—The best of any man’s word

   or say,

Is when it’s proper place arrives—and for its meaning,

I keep mine till the last.)

     1. Behind a Good-bye there lurks much of the salutation of another
         beginning—to me, Development, Continuity, Immortality,
         Transformation, are the chiefest life meanings of Nature and
         Humanity, are the sine qua non of all facts, and each fact.

            Why do folks dwell so fondly on the last words, advice, appearance,
         of the departing? Those last words are not samples of the best, which
         involve vitality at its full, and balance, and perfect control and scope.
         But they are valuable beyond measure to confirm and endorse the
         varied train, facts, theories and faith of the whole preceding life.

 

 

More, another time, other faces of Whitman. For there appear many to the man credited with being the bridge between Emerson and the transcendentalist school, which characterized much of his early work, and the realist school of poetry of which he became a leading figure and which characterized much of what came later.