If patriotism had a face, it would be Walt Whitman.

i only read song of myself and i sing the body electric but i loved how celebratory they were of life and the human body. he was reveling in the simplest of pleasures, like a blade of grass or a lover's touch, but also so appreciative of the sublime

sometimes (most times) poetry makes me want to put my head through a wall (in the good way).

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want to see me again look for me under your bootsoles.”

“What good amid these, O me, O life? / Answer: / That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

“Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, / There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”

i read this for school but i am foaming at the mouth and high off of walt whitman’s poetry. i can’t explain it i just love real, good poetry. favorite poems: “song of myself,” “out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” and (FAVORITE EVER) “when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”

Da ne lažem, stoji Vitman na stočiću već mesec dana nedodirnut. Što ne znači da je loš. Samo sam se eto malo prezasitio poezije. Ali jesam pročitao hevi-hitere kao Song of Myself i ceo onaj serijal posvećen Linkolnu. I to što sam pročitao - suvo lepa emancipacija. Tek ponekad mrvicu naporna.

4+

How the years change taste. When in college I took a course in American Lit of the 19th century and remember being absolutely blown away by Whitman's long sentences, lists, expansive details and subjects. Now, sadly, these same things felt grating. I understand the reasons behind his decisions for those lists, but they just got tiresome and it didn't feel right anymore. I never finished the whole collection back then, only parts of Song of Myself, so I felt it necessary to fully give him a try. I found I really enjoyed "I Sing The Body Electric" and "To Think of Time" more than Song of Myself.

All being said and done, his ego and grandiosity really got in the way of this for me. Good to know his voice so as to recognize its influences in subsequent poetry (I am in no way denying that this poet was a huge influence on American poetry), but just not in my taste any longer.

Great is life... and real and mystical... wherever and whoever,
Great is death... Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all
parts together;
Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is
great as life.

-Great Are the Myths



All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion.

-I Sing the Body Electric



The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you
are;
The President is up there in the White House for you... it is not you
who are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you... not you here for them,
The Congress convenes every December for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of states, the charters of cities, the going and
coming of commerce and mails are all for you.

All doctrines, all politics and civilization exurge from you,
All sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are
tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in
you this hour-and myths and tales the same;
If you were not breathing and walking here where would they all be?
The most renowned poems would be ashes... orations and plays
would be vacuums.

-Carol of Occupations

Tak Terrence Malick v pesmih.

As America was swept by a religious fervor during its "Second Great Awakening," its poets and philosophers alike dreamt of a world free from political oppression. Freedom of religious expression, equality and individuality tinted every line and page crafted by these visionaries of a new age. Just as Melville's "Moby Dick" weaves visions of brotherhood, Emily Dickinson yearns to see and be seen in her poem "Before I Got My Eye Put Out”, Walt Whitman in the year of 1855 wrote "Leaves of Grass" - a thin collection of twelve poems that was later to become “The Great Construction of the New Bible".

Walt Whitman's career had humble beginnings. Born in 1819 as the son of a slaveowner, Whitman left school at the age of eleven to support his family. Over the following years, he took on various occupations such as a "printer's devil," newspaperman, and realtor. However, it was in 1850 that he made the decision to reinvent himself as a poet. It took him five years to complete the initial manuscript of "Leaves of Grass," and a lifetime of refining and revising it, to rise from obscurity to become America's greatest poet.

A cynic may pose the question, "What is it that makes 'Leaves of Grass' so remarkable?" The individual being peevishly interrogated would then either grapple to find the right words, fearing misinterpretation, or spontaneously burst forth with sheer joy. It is the free-flowing form of words, breaking traditional ‘laws’ of poetry. The freedom of expression. The sublime highs of transcendence and the lows of earthly mundanity; soot, bloody corpses and milknosed maggots; cosmic unity, birth, and eternal resurrection. All these things are the same to him. Like God, he refrains from judgment; the speaker does not draw lines or makes distinctions. Men are equal to women, and white people are viewed no differently than slaves: “And all these things bear fruits …. and they are good” (p. 134).

In a similar vein to the European tradition of Mysticism, Walt Whitman delves poetically into questions of identity and spirituality. While mysticism, in its purest sense, focused on individual ecstasy through union with God, Whitman aimed for the “complete renovation of the world”. As the speaker oscillates between different modes of existence, being at once a woman and a slave, he portrays Americas complex character by constructing tableaux of its inhabitants. By employing a technique of poetical collage, the reader is intended to empathize with the prostitute as deeply as to identify with the fallen king of a once-glorious empire.

In his lifetime, Whitman did not himself align politically with abolitionism. Instead, he was an ardent proponent of the "Free Soil Movement", thus considered slavery as a threat to the economy and white labor. All the same, in "Leaves of Grass," Whitman expresses a profound belief in the humanity and dignity of African Americans, a sentiment that resonates even louder than any expression of hatred could ever do.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

It is mind-blowing to think that he self-published this the same year Longfellow's the Song of Hiawatha came out. The voice is SO modern. If I keep rolling with his lists and moments of merge in his longer poems such as 'Song of Myself" or "I Sing the Body Electric, I am moved if not transported, but they are so hard to analyze. Shorter poems are easier to analyze. It was amazing to read this first draft - many critics say it was his best. I can't say but I love how he just keeps writing it through his life. I do love the historicity of this version. After all these years, I still love part 6 of Song of Myself best though I first read it in high school. His expression of women's sexual freedom is nothing but revolutionary. His universalism that celebrates nationalism is something that makes me a little uncomfortable now.