It is time again for a new month's worth of themed posts, and this month is is National Poetry Month, featuring 30 poets well worth checking out if you haven't done so. To kick off the month, I present the King of American Poetry: Walt Whitman. Of course, America is founded on the principle that we have no kings (sans Elvis I guess), which means that to be a king here you have to be a supporter of democracy.
Whitman loved democracy with a little "d," that conceptual belief that all people are equal, extolled through form in poem's like "I Hear America Singing." He was also a fan of Republicans, back when they were the good guys, the new kids after Abraham Lincoln became the last third party candidate to win the presidency. No where is Lincoln better memorialized than in "O Captain, My Captain," unless, of course, you are like me and prefer "When Lilacs Last In the Doorway Bloom'd." Lincoln inhabited several Whitman poems, taking the foreground in those and lurking around the fringes of several others.
Unlike poets today who publish several books, Whitman only published one, Leaves of Grass, but he published it eight times, adding poems, subtracting poems, and constantly revisiting with each new edition. By the time he died, the book had grown from a modest 95 page volume into one that was several hundred pages long. It was a book which Whitman commented was "almost always successful in the open air," and he was right. I didn't understand Whitman until one day I decided to recite him out loud, outside. As I did, the words spread out before me, issueing from my mouth and rearranging themselves to show me a whole new world. The experience was fantastic. Try it for yourself! I suggest "Starting From Paumanok" as a good starting point, though the more traditional "Song of Myself'" may work just as well.
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