Walt Whitman by George C. Cox, 1887. Source: Library of Congress

Song of Ourselves?

Walt Whitman and the American Imagination

05.31.19

May 31st marks Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday. In honor of the man known as America’s “bard of democracy,” we explore diverse aspects of Whitman’s life and legacy – from sexuality to spirituality, poetics to place.

Walt Whitman; poetry

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Segments

Whitman on the Waterfront

Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia, historians at the Brooklyn Historical Society and co-hosts of the podcast “Flatbush + Main,” talk to Joanne about Walt Whitman’s early days as a young journalist in Brooklyn and how he came to plant roots in the city for generations of queer artists after him.

Music:

Light Touch by Podington Bear

Brooklyn; New York; Walt Whitman; queer culture; queer history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week, along with our colleague, Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Ed Ayers: I celebrate myself and what I assume, you shall assume.

Joanne Freeman: That’s a bold statement [inaudible 00:00:45].

Ed Ayers: Kind of audacious, huh? Well, I’m doing that because today marks what would be the great American poet Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday. So on this week’s show, we’re going to explore how the author of Leaves of Grass and “Song of Myself” tried to forge a unified American identity at a time of national crisis and division. We’re going to talk about how Whitman tries to thread differences across sexual identity, race, religion, place, and politics. Let’s say, just to paraphrase the poet himself, this week’s show is going to be large and might just contain multitudes.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll discuss how Brooklyn shaped Walt Whitman, and what exactly he was doing wandering around the waterfront at all hours of the night.

Ed Ayers: Harold Bloom tells us why Whitman’s greatest achievement wasn’t his poetry.

Nathan Connolly: And we’ll uncover the link between Walt Whitman and Barack Obama.

Joanne Freeman: New York has always been the literary capital of America, but in the 1840s, Walt Whitman made the then city of Brooklyn his stamping ground, and pretty much the place where he developed his writing and his identity. Historians at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and cohost of the podcast Flatbush and Main, Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia tell me how Whitman was formed by his experiences growing up in Brooklyn. I started by asking Zaheer what Whitman was doing before he published his epic poem, Leaves of Grass.

Zaheer Ali: He founded a newspaper called the Long Islander, and that lasted for less than a year. And then he had a few more jobs. And then in 1841, had his first writing job as a journalist that he could actually make a living off of, and that was writing for the New World newspaper. So during this period, he’s kind of moving around. He’s trying to find himself. But by the early 1840s, he really has settled into the idea that he could make a living as a writer, as a journalist, and that would lead of course to him becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1846. He’d often take breaks during the day and walk down to Fulton Ferry Landing. And his kind of daily routine, he would write in the morning, take a break, walk down to Fulton Ferry Landing, come back, review the drafts. At the end of the workday, he’d go down to Gray Swimming Bath, again also on the waterfront. So this was, his work was very integrated into his actually kind of physical moving throughout the city.

Joanne Freeman: In 1848, Whitman lost his job at the Brooklyn Eagle, but it’s not exactly clear what happened.

Julie Golia: There are some people who argue that Whitman was just too radical, too egalitarian, too antislavery in a period in which people were really starting to choose sides. But there are other people actually who argue that his problem wasn’t that he was too radical, it was that he wasn’t political enough. In the Eagle, during his tenure there, you really do see him kind of trying to split the baby down the middle a little bit. I mean, this was part of the idea of putting in more cultural content. He wanted to tamp down the sectional politics and actually make this something that was palatable for all, and it actually ended up being kind of divisive for all.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah. And I think even the coverage of the hard news that he did, covering a lot of the experience of workers and labor strikes, this is also a period of increasing nativism. And so his focusing on these plight of immigrants and workers also put him at odds with the growing anti immigrant sentiment at the time.

Julie Golia: And yet, he wouldn’t come down on hard on the side of laborers either.

Zaheer Ali: That’s right.

Julie Golia: There’s this sort of famous labor strike in 1846 at the Atlantic Docks, which was a newly opened warehousing facility, that essentially pitted Irish workers against newly arrived German workers. Whitman writes about the strike with real sympathy for the workers, but at the end of the article comes down very clearly and says that labor unions are a problem. They are bad for the economy, and he wholly sort of denounces them. And so even that is a perfect example of how he’s kind of trying to please both, and ends up pleasing no one.

Joanne Freeman: If in his political views, as expressed in the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman was pretty much trying to nod to both sides of the political divide, so the man identified today as a great gay pioneer was deliberately ambiguous about his sexuality.

Zaheer Ali: I think Whitman himself, he was interviewed near the time of his death, and refused to admit the sexual connotations, and certainly the homosexual connotations of his poetry, especially Calamus, which was probably the more explicit. But this was not unusual, right? If you follow the work of people like George Chauncey, who talks about the 19th century experiences of men who had sexual relations with other men, you know, there isn’t necessarily a label that they identify with. Many of them had a kind of fluidity to their sexuality that didn’t lock them into a particular identity the way that I think maybe it would in our contemporary way of talking about it. That doesn’t mean that, it’s clear that Whitman’s work was written and it was published at a time, and it was being read, and so there were people who were reading or consuming this material and for whom there was resonance. And so I think the challenge for us as historians is how do we surface that without forcing people into categories that maybe weren’t as solidified as they are or have been now.

Joanne Freeman: Right. And in a sense, I mean, in Whitman’s case, you might say that it’s the lack of category that really gives it meaning, right? That it’s that fluidity that kind of defines him.

Julie Golia: I think he’d love that, because he loved the waterfront, and he wrote about the East River and ferries and that kind of liminal space of the East River between these two cities with passion and eroticism.

Zaheer Ali: He definitely had a thing for transportation.

Julie Golia: Fetish.

Zaheer Ali: He definitely had a thing for movement, almost a fetish. He definitely liked moving from one space to the next, and so that could almost be a perfect kind of embodiment of how he thought about his movement in terms of his sexuality.

Julie Golia: It was not an easy life, right? And it was not a simple life, and there was threat of danger. There was the threat of rejection. But nonetheless, he interwove this experience into the fabric of all aspects of his life.

Zaheer Ali: Yeah. I mean, I think you see that frustration and repression being expressed in his poetry, and certainly the relationship he had with Fred Vaughn bears this out. I think Whitman has kind of ghosted Fred, because he’s like, I’m not hearing from you. But it’s this relationship with Fred that many people credit with the material that comes out in Calamus, and then eventually Fred gets married and invites Whitman to his wedding, is just like, I haven’t invited anyone but I want you there, and Whitman doesn’t go. I think in a subsequent relationship, Whitman writes a note to himself, like remember Fred Vaughn. Just inability to be public about your relationships, but also just inability to be public about your heartbreak.

Joanne Freeman: By night, he strolled along the waterfront looking for sexual partners.

Julie Golia: Whitman, as we’ve talked about, loved the built environment, the landscape of Brooklyn, and he spent a lot of time on his feet. As Zaheer described, both day and night, basically walking around was part of his work process, but he also spent a lot of time in the evenings walking along the waterfront. We know this in part because he kept journals that read a lot like commonplace books, describing where he was, where he walked, from the street, the blocks that he went on, the parts of the waterfront he went to, and also who he met along the way. He described many of the men that he interacted with sometimes in very sort of chaste or cursory terms, and sometimes in terms that were more descriptive, that at least reading briefly between the lines, indicate some kind of romantic or sexual triste.

Joanne Freeman: In his journals, he would record things like, Gus White, 25, at ferry with skeleton boat. Five foot nine, round, well built. David Wilson, night of October 11, ’62. Walking up from [Middaugh 00:09:46], slept with me. Works in a blacksmith shop in navy yard.

Julie Golia: In some ways, if you come to Brooklyn and you walk around in Brooklyn Heights and then down to the waterfront, you’ll be struck at first by a real geographical barrier. Brooklyn Heights is built on a bluff, and the waterfront, the kind of working class, bawdier area of the waterfront is really separate from that. It’s down by the water, right? And so you have this kind of symbolic but really truly experienced boundary between the gentile suburban neighborhood of the Heights and the waterfront, the working waterfront, which would have been teeming night and day, but also would have provided spaces, darkness, you know, lots of tunnels and bridges, and parts of the growing waterfront that would have given people cover to experiment.

Joanne Freeman: Is there a legacy, a broader legacy for his writing and looking at Brooklyn as a queer space in some way? What is that legacy?

Julie Golia: If you look at the long span of cultural or literary history in Brooklyn, I think there would be little argument to the fact that Whitman is really like a forefather of the artistic queer experience here in Brooklyn, and particularly in his kind of relationship to the waterfront, his relationship to the built environment. I can think of so many people who draw on that precedent. Hart Crane in the early 20th century, living not far from where Whitman himself walked day after day, night after night with his lover, and writing about the Brooklyn Bridge with the kind of passion that Walt Whitman himself wrote about the ferry and the East River.

Julie Golia: I think of Carson McCullers and some of the other people who lived in a house called February House in the 1940s, many of which were queer, who drew on Whitman’s sort of veiled homo social style to tell a story that is all about the queer experience, even as a straight person might read it and not even see that queer experience in the book. He set such precedents for people to take, and inspiration, a really complex inspiration from the landscape of Brooklyn to create their own art.

Joanne Freeman: Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia are historians at the Brooklyn Historical Society and cohosts of the podcast Flatbush and Main. If you want to hear more about Whitman’s life in Brooklyn, check out their upcoming episode.

Still Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Poet and LGBTQ activist Robin Gow reads a section of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and reflects on Whitman and queer poetry today.

Brooklyn; New York; Walt Whitman; poetry; queer culture

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Robin Gow: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” by Walt Whitman. What is it then between us? What is the count of our scores or hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not, distance avails not, and the place avails not. I too lived. Brooklyn of ample hills was mine. I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it. I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me. In the day among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me. In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me. I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution. I too had received identity by my body, that I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

Robin Gow: I think that specifically the word queer is really appropriate for Whitman, and I think that the queer sensibility comes through in Whitman’s questions. I don’t think his poems have sure landing places, and I think that that’s the beauty of them, the sense that they don’t ever decided upon one thing, that they’re kind of in a constant attempt to, I guess attempt to find more questions. I think like a queer poetic sensibility, it can be applicable to definitely people who aren’t queer in the sense that, like allowing a self to be fluctuating and allowing a self to change.

Robin Gow: The reason why I love queerness is, well one of the reasons, is that idea of movement within one name. So you can have movement under the queer umbrella. And I think everybody under themselves can and probably should have movement throughout their lives and throughout what they want to consider themselves.

Joanne Freeman: That’s Robin Gow. He’s a poet, an LGBTQ activist, pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Adelphi University.

Whitman, the American Redeemer

Harold Bloom tells Ed about Walt Whitman’s religious background, how he strove to redeem America with his poetry and why he remains America’s unsurpassed literary figure today.

Music:

Rarified by Podington Bear

Walt Whitman; poetry; religion; writing

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaims in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” we have yet had no genius in America, yet America is a poem in ours. Its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters. Emerson was write. America did not wait long. Walt Whitman heard and responded to Emerson’s call. Literary critic Harold Bloom believes that Walt Whitman remains unsurpassed in American letters today.

Harold Bloom: A few figures who could compete, the Herman Melville of Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter, and elsewhere Mark Twain, Emerson, Emily Dickinson. No single writer that we’ve had is anywhere near as powerful, original, influential, and deeply poignant and moving as Walt Whitman.

Ed Ayers: What I’d like to do is, if we can, is to put ourselves back in the moment when Whitman emerged.

Harold Bloom: Let us do that immediately. He goes home after years of journalism. He joins his father and his brothers. They’re all carpenters. They build houses. He turns his back on the kind of dandy he had been and reinvents himself, and the early notebook fragments, which are tremendous, flower into the great poem “Song of Myself,” which is still the greatest American work of art.

Ed Ayers: One of those fragments reads, I am your voice. It was tied in you. In me, it begins to talk. I celebrate myself to celebrate every man and woman alive. I loosen the tongue that was tied in them. It begins to talk out of my mouth. I celebrate myself to celebrate you. I say the same word for every man and woman alive, and I say that the soul is not greater than the body, and I say that the body is not greater than the soul.

Harold Bloom: Oh, that is astonishing. This is the only poet who could have written as he did. In one of the 1856 poems, called “To You, Whoever You Are,” he actually says in it at one point, “I place my hands upon you, that you may be my poem.” I mean, Shakespeare is of course the greater poet, Dante, but they have nothing like that amazing immediacy in which the poet is actually putting his hand on you and saying, “Of course I’m touching you. You may be my poem.” There is something Christlike about that. But then I think there was a kind of deliberate attempt to be a kind of American Christ or redeemer on Walt’s part. He was brought up a Hicksite, or radical Quaker, and he always remained one, sort of Evangelical Quakerism, the original kind practiced by George Fox. But he really, as he said, wanted a new bible for Americans, and amazingly he tried to write it. Obviously, you can’t do that, but he did as much as anybody could have done.

Ed Ayers: Bloom says that “Song of Myself” is suffused with Whitman’s biblical sensibility, most notably in constructing the poem’s central trope. Whitman borrowed from a verse in the First Epistle of Peter, for all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fall off the way. Through Whitman, that verse famously became-

Harold Bloom: A child said, “What is the grass?” Fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child? I do not know whether it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition out of hopeful green stuff woven, or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, “Whose?” Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Harold Bloom: Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, and it means sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff. I give them the same. I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass. It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men. It may be if I had known them I would have loved them. It may be you are from old people, and from women and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps. And here you are, the mothers’ laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. Darker than the colorless beards of old men. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. That’s astonishing. In the entire history of literature, there’s nothing that direct. He’s really beyond praise.

Ed Ayers: When his book first came out, it was not universally admired. Is that right?

Harold Bloom: Oh no, far from it. He said that he was writing for the average working man or woman, but he’s actually a rather difficult poet. He invents a new metric, which is very delicate. He has rethought things for himself. You have to be a considerably educated person, even though he didn’t want to hear that. He would not have wanted to have any elitist or university [inaudible 00:21:07]. He wanted people in the streets and on the farms.

Ed Ayers: And while it wasn’t necessarily despised and rejected, “Song of Myself” was in general initially met with a kind of tepid indifference, except by one prominent author.

Harold Bloom: He sent a copy of it to Emerson, and Emerson in I think the greatest critical act of any American writer got this strange poem, reacted to it with a tremendous enthusiasm, and wrote a famous grand letter to Whitman, saying, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. I think this is the finest piece of wits and would that has come out of America,” which was true. And then the two men met, and essentially Emerson is the father of Whitman. Even though I’m a fierce Emersonian, I think Walt surpasses him.

Ed Ayers: And yet, according to Bloom, it is not through the written word that Walt Whitman reaches the height of his greatness.

Harold Bloom: The thing that I think makes him the greatest American, beyond even say George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, is what he did during the American Civil War. The hospitals were horrible. They were just unpainted shacks, and in it, there were in Washington DC thousands, untold thousands of soldiers, some Confederate, mostly Union, mostly white but also black. Walt Whitman went there and for years, from dawn until midnight, he served selflessly, beautifully, as an unpaid wound dresser and nurse. He did everything for these pour maimed and dying and frequently desperately illiterate people. He read books to them. He wrote letters home for them, and read the letters. He did everything he could to buy little things that would make life better for them. You know, some fresh fruits or a little brandy or something. And hundreds and hundreds of them died in his arms. It had a permanent effect on him. It broke his health. A stroke followed. His great poetry really ends in 1865, though he lives on until the 1890s. So that really makes him a kind of ministering angel, almost the great secular saint of American civilization.

Ed Ayers: And even today, Walt Whitman, this American saint of vitality, angel of perpetual life, continues to sustain Harold Bloom and urge him onward.

Harold Bloom: I’m 89 years old. I still teach. I still write. My whole life long, I’ve been reading Whitman. I still don’t feel I’ve reached a full understanding of him.

Ed Ayers: Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the Anxiety of Influence, the Western Canon, and most recently Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. As Harold Bloom just said, Whitman became a kind of visiting angel in Civil War field hospitals. But what initially prompted Whitman to leave New York during the Civil War? In 1862, Whitman received word that his brother George had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. During the worst, he traveled down to the Virginia battle site. Much to Whitman’s relief, he found that his brother had sustained only minor injuries. While he was there, Whitman was moved by an especially brutal scene.

A Full Load for a One-Horse Cart

In 1862, Walt Whitman traveled to Virginia, after receiving word that his brother had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Once there, Whitman was moved by an especially brutal scene. Scholar and artist, Robert Schultz, talks about Whitman’s efforts in caring for wounded Civil War soldiers and how he became a kind of visiting angel in Washington DC hospitals.

Music:

Skeptic by Podington Bear
Associations by Podington Bear

Fredericksburg; Virginia; Walt Whitman; injury; tragedy

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Robert Shultz: He records a dramatic moment where he’s standing in front of this field hospital and sees at the foot of two trees a pile of amputated limbs. He says, “A full load for a one horse cart.” And these are limbs that had been thrown out the windows of the surgery in the haste of the battle and the emergencies.

Ed Ayers: That is scholar and artist Robert Schultz. He says that this was the inciting incident that sparked Whitman’s passion for tending the wounded.

Robert Shultz: And then he saw the men, and he traveled back by boat and rail to the Washington DC hospitals and stays there for the duration of the war. He finds clerical work in the government, but spends his most valuable hours among the men in the hospitals.

Ed Ayers: How old was he at this time?

Robert Shultz: Well, let’s see. He was in his mid 30s. He’s in his middle age. He really gave himself, even his health… I mean, it was a terrific strain. He talked to Horace Traubel, the man who documented almost everything Whitman said late in life when he was living back in Camden, New Jersey in the years before he died. He told Traubel about the way he ruined his health. He suffered a few strokes, pretty bad strokes at the end of the war. He really wore himself out. He told Traubel, you know, “I had to pay a lot for this experience, but it seemed cheap.” And then he says, “And what did I get? Well, I got the boys. For one thing, the boys. Thousands of them. They were, they are, they will be mine. I gave myself for them, myself. I got the boys. Then I got Leaves of Grass, the consummated book. The last confirming word.” So he understood that his vocation during the war and the writing that he did completed and consummated this lifelong book, Leaves of Grass, that he started building in 1855.

Ed Ayers: So he dealt with Confederate soldiers as well. How would that have been?

Robert Shultz: Well, whoever was wounded and got scooped up was tended all the way back to DC and in the hospitals. They were not separated out.

Ed Ayers: What was his sympathy toward them? Did he sort of hold them to account for rebelling against the United States, or did he approach them on a more personal level?

Robert Shultz: That’s really interesting because there’s sort of two levels here in which he deals with any individual, and certainly we know he was all for Union. He would certainly have condemned the rebellion, as he would have termed it, and he would have certainly judged the soldiers who fought on the wrong side. But then on another deeper level, the one that we see in “Song of Myself” and all through the career, there was a sense that every man is, every woman is an eternal soul in passage through this lifetime toward an eventual transcendental perfection. And in his wonderful postwar poem “Reconciliation,” we see this gesture whereby he honors the enemy. He says, “For my enemy is dead. A man divine as myself is dead. I look where he lies, white faced and still in the coffin. I draw near, bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.” So at some ultimate level, he believed in every self as divine.

Ed Ayers: There’s a sympathetic tone in Whitman that we also find in Abraham Lincoln. Maybe you could talk about the relationship that those two men had, and what Lincoln meant for Whitman.

Robert Shultz: He first saw him when Lincoln was traveling to DC after his election. He only ever saw Lincoln from afar. They never met. There’s some evidence that Leaves of Grass was seen by Lincoln in his Illinois law offices. We don’t know for sure.

Ed Ayers: Let’s assume that it was. I just like that image too much.

Robert Shultz: Yeah, me too. But from the very beginning, from his first glance at this westerner, this tall, bearded westerner, Whitman idolized him. I mean, he always thought of the western states and its dirty hands, its brawny shoulders, the men and women, a kind of American rough or pioneer, and idolized them as the strength and sinews of the nation. And once Whitman had an apartment in DC during the war years, it turns out that his street was on the route that Lincoln took in from Soldiers’ Home when he spent the nights out there during the hot summers. And often Whitman would apparently stand in the street and the president go by in his carriage, or sometimes simply on a horse with a few calvary accompanying him. He records some various sightings and says that once he thinks that they met eyes and wonders if there had been a recognition.

Ed Ayers: You’re involved in a very interesting effort of your own, an art project, War Memoranda. Could you tell us about that?

Robert Shultz: Yes, sure. It started quite a long time ago when I first saw some very interesting artwork by the photographer Ben Donne, who works in the Bay Area. His work was about the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide. He took iconic photographs and Khmer Rouge portraits of their captives and developed these images in the flesh of leaves through a chlorophyll action. They’re kind of sun prints. And I walked into the Art Museum of Western Virginia about 12 years ago and saw these things, and they just knocked my socks off. These genocide victims resurrected in leaves that grew out of the ground. And I thought, does this guy know Whitman? This is amazing. This is the central trope of Whitman, death goes into the ground and life comes back out of it.

Robert Shultz: So I contacted him, and I started writing poems in response to these beautiful artworks. Someone else must have fallen in love with this work, because Hollands University invited him to spend a semester here as a resident, and we started working together face to face. He had not read Whitman, so I took care of that. We started traveling up the East Coast, visiting the battlefield sites. He’s very much a landscape photographer too. And in these car trips, we started talking about Whitman and the Civil War landscape and art, and an art exhibition developed out of it. And recently, we’ve made a book encapsulating our art response to Whitman and the war, and it’s called War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials.

Ed Ayers: We know in recent years, people have criticized the Confederate memorials as a kind of false attempt at reconciliation, as a kind of shallow reconciliation over the lives of African American people. How would Whitman’s ideas of reconciliation differ from those ideas of reconciliation we see in the Lost Cause?

Robert Shultz: I think he has delivered an uncannily direct rebuke to the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting the Nazi slogan, blood and soil, because for Whitman, American blood and American soil was not a tribal claim. And for him, the land entire as he called it, was the most fitting memorial to the war dead. And he wrote in memoranda during the war about the war dead south or north, ours all, and said, “The land entire is saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes, exhalation in nature’s chemistry distilled, and shall be so forever in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows and every breath we draw.”

Ed Ayers: So Whitman really is the poet of egalitarianism, of acceptance, of embrace rather than rejection. Do you think we’ll be listening to him with new ears now?

Robert Shultz: I hope people get sent back to Whitman to read him, because the biggest thing I feel when I think of Whitman is, this picture comes into my mind of the aged Whitman, sort of barrel chested, arms spread wide, because you know, he made his discriminations, he made his judgments, but finally his embrace was wide and his vision was hopeful and humane, and we could use that right now.

Ed Ayers: Robert Schultz is the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College and the coauthor of War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials.

The Two Whitmans

Poet and Professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southhampton Cornelius Eady reads a section of The Wound-Dresser and tells us about the more vulnerable side of Whitman.

Walt Whitman; personality

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Cornelius Eady: “The Wound Dresser,” by Walt Whitman. On, on I go. Open doors of time, open hospital doors, the crushed head I dress. Poor crazed hand, tear not the bandage away. The neck of the cavalryman with the bullet through and through I examine. Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard. Come sweet death. Be persuaded. Oh, beautiful death. In mercy come quickly.

Cornelius Eady: From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood. Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curved neck and side falling head. His eyes are closed. His face is pale. He dares not look on the bloody stump, and has not yet looked on it. I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep. But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, and the yellow blue countenance see.

Cornelius Eady: I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet wound. Clean the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, while the attendant stands behind beside me holding the tray and pail. I am faithful. I do not give out. The fractured thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, these and more I dress with impassive hand, yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.

Cornelius Eady: Now if that’s not the cosmos’ one of roughs, right? You can see how tender those lines are. To me, there’s two Whitmans. There the bombastic, cosmic loudmouth who bounces around the world and declares all these things, and that’s who he invents in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. If you open the 1855 edition, you saw this character that was this guy, with the shirt open and the cocky hat tipped, right? With his hands on shoulder, like what are you doing? What are you looking at? Yeah, I’m a poet, what do you think? It’s that kind of stance. And that to him is his idea of a persona, his idea of American persona. One of the poems he writes for himself, he says that he recognizes no annihilation or death or loss of identity. That’s that guy, right? Someone who doesn’t deal with death.

Cornelius Eady: Well, he sees at the hospitals the suffering and the amputations and the agonies that are going on, and that changes him into the second Walt Whitman, the Walt Whitman who isn’t bombastic, who doesn’t think he’s better or bigger than death. He touches death, and death touches him, and it really changes the way he looks at the world from that point on. The obstructions are all gone. It’s really straightforward. He’s unblinking. It’s still lyric. It’s still beautiful. You still hear the sort of declaration, almost sermonistic kind of tone to the lines, but they’re quieter, so much quieter now, so much more attentive, and he’s paying attention to something else other than himself.

Ed Ayers: That’s Cornelius Eady. He’s a poet, professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, and the editor of the Southampton Review.

From Whitman to Obama

Cristina Beltrán reflects with Nathan on the on-going beauty of Whitman’s democratic vision and the challenges it presents for the hard work of demanding justice.

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Walt Whitman; democracy

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Nathan Connolly: Walt Whitman had high aspirations for his poetry. He hoped to bring disparate elements of the country together through the power of his written word, but how truly inclusive is the vision he articulates? I spoke to scholar Cristina Beltran and started by asking her how Whitman understood the role of the individual in a democratic society.

Cristina B.: There’s always this way in which he’s trying to think about himself as part and parcel of a larger polity, and he’s also always thinking about how he has inside himself the potential to be those other people. Whitman never uses the language of social construction, but he very much articulates that, that you are shaped by your environment. And you hear that in different works of his, where like in the poem, “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” where he says, “I can see them in Germany and Italy and China and Russia, and it seems that I should become attached to them as I do men in my own land.” So he always is sort of pushing past national boundaries at times in his thinking and thinking about how we became who we are, and how, when you look at somebody who seems dramatically different than yourself, that in fact maybe that would have been your story had circumstances been different, had you been born at that time or in that place or under those circumstances.

Nathan Connolly: And it’s one thing to think about bridging international divides or gaps kind of in the abstract, but Whitman is writing a lot of his work obviously on the doorstep of the Civil War.

Cristina B.: Right.

Nathan Connolly: One of the most divided moments in the history of the country, just in the sense of the violence that is either threatened and of course then realized with the war itself. I’m curious to get your sense of whether Whitman believed that his poetry could in fact unify the nation if it was on the brink of this conflict?

Cristina B.: Yeah, yeah, no. There was a real sense in Whitman that he thought that the thing that might possibly save the nation is poetry, right? And that his own kind of adhesive voice could do this important work of reminding people of their shared humanity. There was a way in which he was trying to sort of create what I describe sometimes as a kind of poetics of equivalence, right? Which is that a lot of his poetry, you see him making these catalogs and these lists, I think of the poem “Starting from Paumanok,” where he says, “The Pennsylvanian, the Virginian, the double Carolinian.”

Cristina B.: And so he’s placing Virginia next to Pennsylvania and trying to kind of create this story of massive juxtaposition, and he does that by naming spaces of conflict but placing them next to each other in this sort of poetic relationship, and I think hoping that maybe in that effort we would see something in ourselves differently. If things are side by side, then perhaps we’ll produce a kind of democratic affection for one another through his poetry.

Cristina B.: And he writes about the Civil War and he has poems, like “The Wound Dresser” and some of those poems. You hear him describing in really intense detail the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers and dead soldiers. But what he doesn’t do is he doesn’t talk about an enemy or a perpetrator. So for example, when you read his wartime poems, there’s almost never a mention of the enemy. Instead, it’s always this sort of story of heroism, sacrifice, the equally brave men who fought and died. And so he doesn’t deny conflict but he neutralizes it.

Nathan Connolly: Now, walk us a little bit through what it must have been for Whitman as a white man in an economy of slavery, in an economy of disenfranchisement. But I’m curious, just given what you’ve laid out here, how we might understand what Whitman’s politics were, specifically on the question of race.

Cristina B.: He was an anti-extentionist. He opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. But he was more concerned about preventing the spread of slavery than really getting rid of it.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Cristina B.: He denounced the proslavery southern fire eaters, but he also called abolitionists red hot fanatics. They were the angry voiced silly set, he described them. And at the same time, right, so he took that kind of stance at the time and he did not believe that African Americans were capable of exercising the vote, right? So that’s part of his story. At the same time, abolitionists and radical Republicans strongly identified with Whitman because of his celebrations of brotherhood and equality. And there is something really interesting about the way that he’ll talk about the person with the venereal, the [venerealee 00:44:17]. He’ll mention the thief. But there’s also this way in which he often includes blackness alongside things that are kind of either degraded or-

Nathan Connolly: Oh, interesting.

Cristina B.: Problematic. So in “Song of Myself” he’ll say, this is one of the lines he says, “The kept woman, sponger, thief are hereby invited. The heavy lipped slave is invited. The venerealee is invited.” And so later on he says, “Voices of the diseased and despairing, of thieves and dwarves.” So in “Song of the Open Road” he sort of welcomes everyone and he says, “The black with his wooly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person are not denied.”

Nathan Connolly: Wow. Wow.

Cristina B.: So they’re not denied, but-

Nathan Connolly: Right, right, right.

Cristina B.: It’s interesting to think about where they’re incorporated.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And the way he’s marking blackness, right? Heavy lips and wooly hair. It’s for that reason I guess I have to say that I’m really intrigued by the notion that you hear in Whitman a kind of prologue to Barack Obama, who comes of political age after certainly the great cultural awakenings of black power and the civil rights struggle, and even the 1990s. I mean, there’s a lot that’s happening culturally between Whitman’s era and Obama’s era, and yet you still hear something familiar.

Cristina B.: I mean, Obama was always trying to engage our affections for the country by creating a poetic vision of national life. Even his own description of his own personal story was kind of having this Kenyan father and this white Kansas mother, kind of, you know, [foreign language 00:45:47], out of many, one. He himself is the embodiment of that story. So he is continually kind of telling his own story that also engages in a certain kind of elision of difference. When he would lay things together in even his 2004 speech, about we have some gay friends in red states and we worship an awesome God in blue states, you know, there was a kind of poetic way that he allowed us to see ourselves as one. But it also involved not saying a lot of things.

Nathan Connolly: So you propose that the Chicana poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa offers an alternative to Whitman’s democratic vision, and I suppose by extension Obama’s vision. How do you describe her Mestiza poetics?

Cristina B.: I think one of the things that she produces is another kind of form of democratic connectedness, but that challenges dangerous equivalences, because her characterization of borders is she characterizes them as borderlands are always home and not home. She doesn’t have a dream of home as a space of origins and belonging. For Anzaldúa, home is always characterized by strangeness. It’s always discontinuous and unstable. But it’s not simply tragic. It’s also generative of all these possibilities.

Nathan Connolly: So Cristina, give me a sense of the language that Anzaldúa is using to capture this.

Cristina B.: She has a poem called “To Live in the Borderlands Means You.” It begins by her saying, “To live in the borderlands means knowing that the India in you, betrayed for 500 years, is no longer speaking to you. That Mexicanas call you [foreign language 00:47:21], that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or black. [foreign language 00:47:26]. People walk through you. The wind steals your voice. You’re a [foreign language 00:47:32], buoy, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half, both woman and man, neither, a new gender.”

Cristina B.: And then she goes on to say, “To live in the borderlands means to put chili in the borscht, to eat whole wheat tortillas, speak Tex Mex with a Brooklyn accent, to be stopped by [foreign language 00:47:49] at the border checkpoints.” For her to be Chicana, to be a Mexican American, is to be both Indian and Spanish, right? To be both settler and native. To be both the figure who’s done violence and the figure that’s been victimized by violence, and that you have to sort of sit with the fact that you are part and parcel of all of those stories.

Cristina B.: And I think that… So for me, there was a moment in Obama’s political career when he gave that Philadelphia speech on race after the Reverend Wright scandal, where to me, that was sort of the closest we ever saw Obama get to a kind of Mestiza poetics when he said things like, “I can no more deny Reverend Wright than I can deny my grandmother who loved me but was afraid of black men on the street.” And he sort of forced this encounter to say we love people who are racist. And so those were the moments where you thought, it’s going to be a more grownup encounter with the complexities of racial justice in this country, where there’s not just good guys and bad guys, but we’re actually dealing with the fact that the good guys are the bad guys, and the people who love you are also the people who’ve done enormous violence to you, and they’re part of you.

Nathan Connolly: And I get the impression that you’re drawing a point to not just talk about him as a rhetorician or somebody who can kind of create this mass support, but that Obama actually governed in a Whitman-esque way, that he drew certain equivalences, and that his political moves as a policy maker and as a leader basically in the political scene was also in some ways steeped in this vision of America.

Cristina B.: Yeah. What struck me was that the strategies that proved productive for getting elected were so different than the strategies one needs for governing. I think we still fetishize this language of unity. The question I always have is, who is getting erased in this story? Whose interests are getting alighted? Whose interests are getting pushed down? And often it’s often the same folks, right? It’s queer people. It’s people of color. You know, it’s poor people. It’s usually similar populations. But there is a kind of dream of agreement that we have. And so I think candidates are always called on to emphasize that language. And one of the problems is is that it is aesthetically and affectively emotionally pleasing to hear the language of unity, but then the reality of governing is a space of contestation and agonism.

Nathan Connolly: Well, this is I think one of the biggest questions that every major political organization is trying to figure out, which is what’s the right tone? What’s the right rhetoric? I mean, there are a lot of ways in which people like to highlight the balkanization of American politics now as needing somebody like Whitman to kind of come in and dampen the divides. But just to echo what you’ve said, I mean, it sounds at least that one of the challenges of having this kind of dampening language is that it doesn’t in fact raise the alarms when there are deep inequalities that need to be considered.

Cristina B.: There’s one thing I think that is also interesting here, is that the adhesive quality of Whitman that is the fact that so often he elides conflict, but he does show these connections. I do think that’s actually democratically important in some contexts, right? Like I do think that when you live in a city and you get on the subway and you look around you, you see all these different kinds of bodies on display before you. You see Orthodox Jewish families, you see migrant families, you see young people, old people, queer people, straight people, men and women. And in seeing that, in seeing all those different kinds of bodies on display, you feel this sense of like, this is us. I mean, I think as a New Yorker, you look around different kind of urban spaces, DC or Chicago, you look at that and you say, “This is who we are.”

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Cristina B.: You feel this sense of collectivity that’s not unimportant, that when you go to your bodega and the guy is Lebanese or Korean, and that’s a kind of daily encounter you have with different kinds of people. Those things do create a kind of sense of democratic solidarity, that we are all in this together. But they are fleeting encounters, right? They’re not sustained encounters, right? If that subway were to breakdown, we might all start hating each other pretty quickly. Or if that subway…

Cristina B.: We all have to kind of become a polity together and try to make decisions, right? Then those differences could become problematic, that there’s like a hedge fund manager in there and a homeless guy. All those people are sharing this public space, and that is I think… I think Whitman understood that those kinds of experiences of sharing the city, sharing city life, being on the ferries, being on the bridges, that sharing civic life together is a beautiful and democratic and important element of how we come to feel each other as equally human. It’s important, but it’s deeply insufficient for the harder work of governing and the harder work of trying to create democratic community.

Nathan Connolly: Cristina Beltran is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She’s the author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity.

Ed Ayers: When did you first become aware of Whitman, and what did he mean to you when you did become aware of him?

Nathan Connolly: For me it was in college, in the American studies primer. He was a figure placed very much alongside people like Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson and obviously Edgar Allan Poe, as part of this 19th century world of letters that really did give shape to American studies for the 20th century. And so there was a way in which you encounter work like Leaves of Grass as almost being unimpeachable in terms of its impact and it being a kind of holy text in some ways.

Nathan Connolly: And in particular, I was among a number of students in the late 90s who were really thinking hard about questions of diversity and inclusion and environmentalism, and Walt Whitman could be absolutely one of your go to heroes when you’re coming to your education in that register. And there were a number of students who were themselves poets who really did gravitate toward and actually helped deepen my own appreciation of Whitman as an artist who, to their mind, really helped to launch basically gay poetic art and really recognized him as a gay artist. Whether or not that interpretation holds up overtime is kind of beside the point, but I think it was really critical for a number of us to take a moment and say, you know, there are really important figures of un-normative sexuality who are part of forming our canon as we know it.

Joanne Freeman: What I remember is my emotional reaction to reading Whitman. For the first time I understood that poetry wasn’t a string of lines that were the same length that rhymed. I read Whitman and it touched me in some kind of a way, and I realized that poetry was a lot bigger. It was a lot more embracing than I had understood it to be. So it really kind of fundamentally changed the way I thought about what you could do with poetry and the way you can communicate feelings in prose that way. But there was a second prong to my learning about Whitman, and that actually took place a couple of years later when I was working at the Library of Congress. This is going to sound goofy, but I was an English major in college, so humor me.

Joanne Freeman: We were doing Civil War research and I stumbled across some of Whitman’s Civil War poetry, and I had this sort of strange aha moment, which essentially was, wait a minute, this poet is writing in the middle of a historical moment, and that’s historical evidence, you know. And I know it sounds goofy, but some part of my brain was like, oh heavens, the connection between literature and history, which I just hadn’t felt in that concrete a way before.

Ed Ayers: Well you know, I was in New York not long ago and came in my room, was welcomed by a framed saying, which I was suspicious of its authenticity. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental,” Walt Whitman. And I thought that sounded unpoetic to me. It also sounded a little convenient, so I did some deep research and looked for Walt Whitman sayings online. You can buy very many very attractive Walt Whitman sayings with sunsets and flowers and things, I’m going back to the environmental thing, but that goes back to Nathan’s point, is that he’s seen as the great poet of not judging other people, of embracing everybody. But I don’t know, that seems a little convenient for us, doesn’t it?

Nathan Connolly: Well, I think the fact that you found a quote on the wall in a hotel actually says a lot, which is that we furnish our lives with Walt Whitman and people of his kind. And I do think there is something about the present day relationship with Whitman and his generation of poets that helps to give and kind of ground a sense of depth to an otherwise really in some cases light American existence. I mean, just think about American culture. Whitman is part of this discussion of this great canon. He helped in a lot of ways to deepen otherwise possibly frivolous art forms. I’m thinking specifically of a movie where Whitman’s line that jumps out to me is “Oh captain, my captain.” I know that line because of the final scene-

Joanne Freeman: Dead Poets Society.

Nathan Connolly: Dead Poets Society. The whole point of that movie-

Joanne Freeman: Yes.

Nathan Connolly: Was to capture the depth and the power of poetry through this master teacher that Robin Williams is portraying. And what do they use? They use this Whitman moment as a way to really elevate the drama of the whole affair. [crosstalk 00:57:49]

Ed Ayers: In part by standing on a desk to read it.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely.

Joanne Freeman: And I love the fact that all three of us have that moment. In a nanosecond we’re like, Dead Poets Society.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so Whitman’s gravity as a figure is evident in those kinds of moments, and you can almost add a Whitman quote to anything. Put it on a webpage or put it on a hotel wall and it all of a sudden-

Joanne Freeman: Tee shirts.

Nathan Connolly: Tee shirts. The depth factor goes up immeasurably. And so I think it’s worth unpacking that a little bit now.

Joanne Freeman: You know what that makes me think of though, because as soon as you started describing Whitman that way, the first person I thought of was Jefferson [crosstalk 00:58:23] because-

Nathan Connolly: Whoa, that’s weird. I’m sorry.

Joanne Freeman: No, but follow me. Come with me here. I’m going to take it home, I promise. In many ways, when I teach Jefferson, I teach him as the poet of the founding. He put into words what Americans want-

Nathan Connolly: Oh, interesting.

Joanne Freeman: The founding to be, and we hang onto those words. And I’m not even just talking about the Declaration of Independence. But when we read about America through Jefferson, it’s what we want America to be. And in some ways, you could say Whitman is kind of a poet of democracy. It represents what we want in some ways America to be.

Nathan Connolly: So this is really helpful actually because as we’re talking and thinking and just thinking about the 20th century and art, my first impulse was to say, okay, do we have a 20th century poet who can really capture the national sentiment in the way that say Walt Whitman could, or to your point Joanne, which got me thinking along these lines, Jefferson. And the person that came to mind was in fact Martin Luther King, Jr., right? As somebody just from the rhetorical stance, whose words are etched into granite.

Nathan Connolly: Who are the kinds of wordsmiths who get their words etched into granite in national memorials or on the walls of buildings? There’s something about the coming together, the bridging, the universal themes that someone like Walt Whitman helped to consecrate. Obviously Jefferson, to your point, as being the great founder of this kind of language. And King has so many of these quotes, in some cases without a context, to do exactly that kind of work, that it feels in a weird way that Whitman is kind of a halfway point between these two figures who in some ways define these different epochs of American history.

Ed Ayers: That’s really great. And we think about Whitman’s kind of twin in his own period is Abraham Lincoln, who I think is the other person who tries to find what’s redeemable in this country, even in the face of the unredeemable.

Joanne Freeman: In a really distinctive language too.

Ed Ayers: Exactly. And you know, we recognize their language enough perhaps to put it on posters in hotel rooms that sounds like an authentic voice. Lincoln is taking the King James Version of the bible, and so does King, and turning it into an American idiom. What’s interesting about-

Nathan Connolly: Nice, yeah.

Ed Ayers: Whitman, and [inaudible 01:00:40] and about Jefferson as well, they’re speaking in a non Christian way. It’s funny that you might think of as sort of the great… And frankly Lincoln as well is not really speaking in explicitly Christian language as well. And it’s funny when we think about this canon that you were talking about Nathan, that we celebrate people who don’t embody sort of the cultural traditions of the majority population. Somehow they take a distillation of what’s best about the United States and give it back to us in a new language.

Joanne Freeman: And a language that, it’s a, I don’t want to say limited, but a channeled language, right? It includes a very specific vision, and there’s a lot of stuff happening outside of that vision, but the purity of the language kind of holds you there in the center.

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely. Whitman is speaking at a time when obviously a lot of the country is having its citizenship and its democratic rights being taken away at the end of Reconstruction. The 1880s are a really tough period in America for a lot of people. Obviously westward expansion is another one of these extraordinary processes that are growing the country in some ways but deeply antidemocratic in other ways. And I guess when we think about the long history of these great voices, one of the things that is so common through them is that they’re oftentimes speaking over or trying to capture these moments of great contestation and doing it in a way that has you feeling in some ways connected again. There’s a way that they’re trying to cross certain fissures or chasms and bring people together when the news cycle may be telling us to do otherwise.

Joanne Freeman: Just as you’re saying in that sense, by doing that, they’re providing a tool that people can use that language to demand their rights, to get through those moments, to institute change.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. One thing about these voices is that Whitman can be, has been criticized for not really having any sense of sin or evil in his poetry, and yet, it’s hard to think of anybody who embraced suffering more than he did, choosing to go among all those shattered young men in the hospitals of Washington day after day, year after year.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Ed Ayers: He knows about evil. He knows about sin. He knows about loss. And yet, as both of you were saying, he speaks abridging language to get us to the other side of that. He holds up an aspiration that would be America at its best.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger. Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 12: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.