I Hear America singing: The Radicalism of Walt Whitman
Posted by Pete on May 31st 2020
Walt Whitman, born 31st May in 1819, rendered the ordinary magnificent. A poet and a humanist, his vision of culture was free from snobbery and open to all.
'Culture' used to be a matter of expensive art and expensive people.
Kings’ portraits and court musicians – this was what we were told was art.
But in the 19 th century, this skewed scene began to be challenged.
A people’s art, turning its brush on working people, was fostered by the likes of Van Gogh and William Morris.
Authors and poets, too, began to narrate the world from the perspective of the little guy.
Dickens did this for England, but in the US the task fell to Walt Whitman (1819-92).
This was how Whitman saw the world.
For him, the grandeur of our universe was in everything, however small or mundane.
Such an outlook didn’t lend itself to the view that 'cultural' was the same thing as 'elite'.
Whitman’s poems, most of them found in his iconic anthology Leaves of Grass, weren’t about the exceptional rich, but the magnificent ordinary.
In 'I Hear America Singing', a Whitman classic, he begins,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work…”
Walt Whitman’s America was, more than anything, that of the 99%. It’s why he’s remembered as the first truly American poet.
"You can’t really understand America without Walt Whitman," it’s been said.
In the politics of his day, Whitman was enthused by President Abraham Lincoln, another symbol of the American project.
Not unlike Karl Marx on the far side of the Atlantic, Whitman saw in Lincoln a common man standing up for workers and he was devastated by the President’s assassination in 1865.
It was Lincoln’s murder that prompted his poem, 'O Captain! My Captain!'
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won"
Whitman remade poetry as something rooted in the earth itself, and in the people that worked upon it.
With that achievement, he has since inspired generations of radicals, especially in the Americas, from contemporaries like Henry David Thoreau and José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, to Robin Williams’ protagonist in Dead Poets Society!
Whitman invented a language with which Americans, from Canada down to Chile, could celebrate the real lives they lived.
He democratized culture, paving the way for the likes of Frida Kahlo and Maya Angelou, the Mexican muralists and the beat poets of Greenwich Village.
For this, on his 201 st birthday, we can be grateful.