I studied English literature in university, and in one of my courses, I read a lot of Walt Whitman. At the time, I was quite taken with his writing, although I haven't read much recently. (I still have a copy of Leaves of Grass on my Kindle, should the urge strike me). What I remember most about his poetry was the energy and vividness in which he described the turbulent times in which he was living.
The New York Times has just published a long appreciation of Whitman and his writing, and they feel that he's now especially relevant.
IF IT IS presumption to scrutinize forebears through modern lenses, what is it for those forebears to scrutinize us? More than any poet I’ve read, Whitman dedicated himself to that retroflex scrutiny, writing directly to future readers. He sees us — “you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” — walking the same streets he walked, watching the same sea gulls, boarding the same ferries. And, often enough, we see him back. Before the pandemic, when my husband and I visited Fulton Ferry Landing for ice cream, we watched the sea gulls and the run of the flood tide just as he said we would, and from the same spot as in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Even the ice cream spoke of Whitman, being the product of Ample Hills Creamery, a name likewise drawn from that poem.
History walks the same ground as the present, I said earlier. But history is also the ground itself. The dirt beneath our feet, Whitman often observed, is the residue of our elders; the flowers we lay on graves are born of the bodies interred there. If the Civil War was won by the Union at the cost of a generation of young men he loved, so too was his vision of a greater American people — a casteless, democratic American people — built from loves, like Doyle’s, he eventually outlived. Yet flowers, or at least grass, grew from all their graves.
It's a long article but worth reading, especially if you haven't encounter Whitman before.
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