Thoughts of Uncle Walt

"O! I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O! I say now these are the soul!" - from "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855)

Thank God, Vishnu, Jehovah, Buddha, and Allah, and all other known (and unknown) deities for Walt Whitman. If only ALL humans could search the soul the way Whitman did, we could finally all be able to communicate and express ourselves.

I never, ever, before considered Whitman as a favorite poet of mine. I was always turned off by it because I had this preconceived notion that it was not as "good" as the more formal and structured poems of the pre-modern eras. I had this lofty idea of what "art" was. Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes, for example, would never use free verse, as it did not embody the sophistication of the European forms of writing poetry. They wanted to showcase their art as being explicitly American, yet wanted to prove to Europe that Americans could be artists (yet, to be an artist they had to use European artforms and standards). Walt Whitman, on the other hand, along with the likes of Emily Dickenson, dared to be different. Isn't that what made America NOT part of Europe??? That we dared to take risks, dared to buck the system, set our own ways, and cut our own path out of the wilderness is what made us free.

Not living in that era, I guess I can never fully know what was going through the minds of poets like Longfellow. Maybe it was just that even though America wanted to stand alone and have its own identity, America was still insecure... having only been cut off from its colonial masters for 50 years. Maybe, by the time Walt came around, America had garnered some strength to strike out at the world and reveal its individualism.

Whitman is becoming more and more a favorite of mine. I have yet to read all of Leaves of Grass. But I am going to make it a priority this summer. Consider this a delayed New Year's resolution.

It's time to unleash my "barbaric yawp!" on the world. Until next time...