As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

Seasoned poetry readers in late-19th-century America would have been accustomed to the tidy rhythms and tight rhymes of a generation of American poets—despite nearly a century since the country’s independence—intent on importing the conventional sing-song metrics of British poetry. For these readers, lines that include “I see the ships (they will last a few years) / The vast factories with their foremen and workmen, / And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object” (Lines 10-12) would not read as poetry. There is no carefully crafted sonic structuring, no rhythm, no rhyme. The grammatical construct itself is careless and haphazard. It draws on no inherited sense of prosody or metrics.

Frankly, Whitman’s literary context raises more questions than it answers. The abiding mystery of American literature is determining from where Walt Whitman the poet came. Generations of Americanists have sifted through Whitman’s biography for some episode, some influence, some epiphany that might account for how the itinerate, disenfranchised son of a career failure prone to violence and drink, and a doting, barely literate mother, scratched out a living as a journalist despite having only a sixth-grade education, and went, in his late thirties (at a time when life expectancy was barely 40 years), from writing doggerel wisdom verses and didactic parables intended largely as newspaper filler to writing the stunning opening 13 lines of “Song of Myself.”

How did a self-educated local newspaper columnist intuit that conventional (read British) poetry—tightly metered, richly allusive, formally conservative—had become entirely unworkable and wildly irrelevant within the bracing environment of the new that was antebellum America? Where did this blue-collar journalist find the nerve to dismiss the most accomplished poet-practitioners in America, most notably the revered New England Fireside Poets, as fussy “tea-drinkers” and unimaginative “upholsterers?” How, indeed, did that same journalist create single-handedly and against a chorus of establishment nay-sayers who dismissed his experimental line as inchoate and blasphemous, how did that journalist dare to return poetry to its most ancient roots: that poetry, Whitman’s every crude and undisciplined line testified, happens in the ear.

Where did Whitman’s verse come from? Maybe from a childhood in rural Long Island spent listening to the rich cadences of the Bible read to him by his doting Quaker mother. Maybe from an adolescence joyfully entombed in Brooklyn public libraries amid stacks of classical literature—Dante, The Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Homer. Perhaps from a decade spent happily immersed in the cacophonous blab of Manhattan’s crowded sidewalks. Could it have come from countless nights Whitman spent listening enthralled to repertory opera despite not knowing the languages but enthralled by how sounds controlled and directed emotions? Could it have come from Whitman’s reading Emerson’s clarion call for a truly American poet, the polished Emerson playing a buttoned-down Sinatra to Whitman’s wild Elvis? These are the major thematic elements that continue to inform Whitman’s literary context.