Photo by George C. Cox

Walt Whitman- American Poet

By Menachem Luchins

    Considered one of America's finest poets, Walt Whitman was more than just a producer of words or a painter of verbal images, he was a man who never ceased seeking knowledge from any source. Due to a childhood of poverty, Whitman left the world of formal education at the age of 11 to seek employment as a means to adding to his family's income and eventually got a menial job at a Long Island, New York paper, The Patriot. This was more than just the beginning of his life as a newspaperman it was also the first place he gathered skills and information from anyone and anywhere he could.

    Having gone through a variety of jobs before the age of thirty, all-self taught, Whitman founded his own newspaper, The Long Islander, which still exists to this day. Before then he had been a printer, a teacher, an anonymous poet, a compositor and a patron of the arts. Never one to settle down long, Whitman only kept the paper for a year. While working a variety of newspaper jobs and writing articles for sundry newspapers across New York, Whitman took it into his head to become a "real" poet and began work on what would eventually be heralded as his masterpiece; Leaves of Grass. He self-published the first edition of the book and gave it to family members. Though the author's name does not appear on the cover or the title page, there is a portrait of Whitman in the book which has this description next to it: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest"

    "...no stander above men or women or apart from them..." It is those simple lines that make Walt Whitman what he was, what he is and why we are still writing about him to this day. Having been educated by life, rather than a classroom or college, and having been taught by experience, Whitman rose above the Transcendentalists who came before him. He did not look to nature to explore morals or ponder abstract philosophical concepts, but asked the big questions that pertain to everyone, great or small, such as: "Why are we here?" "What makes a person whole?"

   In his sublime "A Noiseless Patient Spider" The poet compares humanity to arachnid, sending out strands in hopes of making some sort of connection that would give them purpose:

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

    But more than a poet, Whitman was a compassionate patriot who volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War. A job that would not only allow him to give aid to his fellow man and the Union he loved but to see President Abraham Lincoln as he walked among the wounded; inquiring about their lives before the war and offering comfort when he could. The effect of seeing that great man, who Whitman had already admired politically, moving among the people and connecting with them, connecting in the way Whitman believed all men should and needed to, was incalculable- Whitman would go on to write many poem about Lincoln and about his tragic death, the most famous of which, "O Captian! My Capitan!" is still taught today in classrooms around the world.

    But it was not his tireless effort for the country that makes Whitman a hero or, as Harold Bloom once said, the "imaginative father and mother" of all Americans. It is his vagabond ways; his interactions and interests in people from all walks of life. Till his dying days Whitman was always interested in the story and personality of each person he met, be they a captain of industry or a newsie- working for the Attorney General Whitman had the job of interviewing soldiers of the Confederacy, those same Americans he had swore to help defeat during the Civil War, men whose cause in that battle Whitman found detestable. He said this: "There are real characters among them..."

    Whitman was able to find an interest in the lives and the personalities of men who only a few years earlier he had been rooting for the destruction of. Whitman would be the model for the traveling "seeker" poet of the 20th century, inspiring the Beats, the Snyder brothers and many others. We can all, poet or not, learn from Walt Whitman, always seeking Wisdom and lessons from all those around him- attempting to, like the spider, make that "ductile anchor hold" and make some connection in this life.

Principle: Wisdom