With very little knowledge or background on Whitman other than what has been discussed in the first few class sessions, I have always had trouble understanding why Whitman was so intriguing to such a wide variety of people throughout history and even still today. When I was first casually introduced to our dear Walt back in high school, I found him to be a kind of rambling mad man from some other time period in history. Perhaps because I was about sixteen at the time, my lack of interest in Whitman probably stemmed from my utter confusion of his work, which I’m sure my English teacher attempted to explain to us with the best intentions in mind.
So, with a bad after-taste from my first brush with reading and trying to comprehend Whitman, I began to read the Preface to “Leaves of Grass” with my fresh, college eyes. I was pleasantly surprised after only reading a few pages that I was not only understanding what Whitman was saying, but I was totally enraptured by it, even beginning to relate it to my own life and question the world I’m living in. However, what I’d like to point out in concordance with my awakening to Whitman and his philosophy is the religious undertone, or theme, that Whitman obviously carefully crafted into the Preface. And when I say religious here, I mean more of a cosmic sense of individuals finding meaning in their existence in the universe via some lofty ideology.
In the Preface Whitman begins by discussing America, her citizens, and where America stands in a global sense. Then, he moves on to discussing the relevance of the poet in context to the greater universe, which is what really interests me. Whitman begins by establishing the poet by saying: “Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man” (8), continuing on to describe the poet, “He,” in a way that reminded me of how an apostle might describe Jesus, or how a believer of Islam would describe their prophet Muhammad. For example, Whitman says of the poet that, “He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land…out of him speaks the spirit of peace…In war he is the most deadly force of war…His brain is the ultimate brain…He is no arguer…he is judgement” (9).
Whitman even brings God up in relation to the poet in this same passage, saying, “In the talk on the soul and eternity and God off of his equal plane he [the poet] is silent”(9). However, while Whitman clearly reveres the poet as sort of prophet of the universe for the individual man/woman because of the poet’s heightened sensation of “sight”; Whitman also acknowledges that “Faith is the antiseptic of the soul.. it pervades common people and preserves them…they never give up believing and expecting and trusting” (9).
I certainly can’t fully tackle such vast topics in our first blog post, but my point is that Whitman attempted to tackle the cosmic musings we all grapple with as beings trying to figure out our existence. I think that he is relatively successful in this venture, insofar as provoking our thoughts about our place in the universe. Luckily, we have the prophet, the poet – Whitman – to show us the way. Or at least push our thinking in the right direction. I’m simply happy that I gave Whitman a second chance.
We’ve encountered many Whitman’s in this class, but Whitman as Shaman, as prophet, as seer, as a poet of cosmic consciousness (to use a phrase one of his disciples–he had disciples!–used) is certainly an interesting identity to think through. To be a poet of the common person, and yet also a poet of this all-pervading faith is a massive gap to straddle. In a sense, I think Whitman does this by seeing the cosmic in the ordinary, and vice versa. It’s part of that leveling logic that Whitman uses to close the gap as it were between the solitary self and the others, the US and the world, the world and the cosmos.