Walt Whitman‘s birthday today, born 1819 in Huntington New York. Thinking of Whitman in these current times. We are drawn to Martin Espada‘s sadly still-relevant analysis, published in Poetry magazine on the occasion of his bicentennial, 2019, “Filthy Presidential – Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump”.
In it Espada writes:
“These are times when despair beckons. We see ourselves as an occupied nation, defeated by a president who delights in taunting his enemies, real and imagined, with his favorite word: loser. This…calls Whitman to mind, as the poet reminds us that we must reject the false dichotomy of winning and losing, redefine the notion of failure, and remember the unsung heroes who show us a way to survive, and even transform, the historical moment…
Indeed, Whitman was a poet of hope in seemingly hopeless times. With his nation even more divided than it is today, with democracy in crisis even more than it is today, with racial animus even more intense than it is today, Whitman writes, in the foreword to the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855:
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Again, there is language here that anticipates the rise of contemporary demagoguery and resistance to it. “Despise riches?” Check. “Hate tyrants?” Check. “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul?” Check. Above all, however, this poetic prose insists upon sympathy, from “love the earth” to “give alms” to “devote your income and labor to others.” And this is the great void Whitman fills in the Age of Trump – sympathy is the essence of Whitman, and that is the human quality so sorely lacking in this sociopathic president, his authoritarian regime and its legions of supporters.”
Espada also quotes from Whitman in 1888 (via Horace Traubel)
“America must welcome all – Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not – all, all, without exceptions: become an asylum for all who choose to come. We may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back…. America is not for special types, for the castes, but for the great mass of people – the vast, surging, hopeful, army of workers. Dare we deny them a home – close the doors in their face – take possession of all and fence it in and then sit down satisfied with our system – convinced that we have solved our problem? I for my part refuse to connect America with such a failure – such a tragedy, for tragedy it would be.”
Here’s Allen on Whitman – (first appeared in Sulfur 31, Fall 1992, and was subsequently reprinted in Deliberate Prose (2000)) – “Whitman’s Influence – A Mountain Too Vast To Be Seen”