National Poetry Month – Walt Whitman

Of all the American poets, Walt Whitman feels like the one who best captures the essence of what it’s like to embrace nature, love, and the human experience. Whitman’s passion for the world around him can be seen in every line of his verse and his love for his country and its people is the driving force behind many of his poems.

His magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, is the epitome of American poetry and a time capsule of a young, growing country. Whitman foregoes writing about religion or spirituality and focuses on nature and people. His verse is so raw and earthy that it has, many times over the years, been deemed as obscene. 

Whitman was also a perfectionist and he continued to edit and revise Leaves of Grass until his death. There ended up being nine versions of the book. Additionally, the book expanded from its original twelve poems to over four hundred. 

I’ve owned a copy of Leaves of Grass for over thirty years. Same copy, a paperback edition, that has kept me company on days at the beach, afternoons on the back patio, and summer evenings laying in bed with the windows open. It’s holding up fairly well despite the stains, yellowed pages, and random bits of torn paper I’ve used to mark specific poems or pages. 

One of his most famous and most often contested poems is “I Sing the Body Electric”. It’s a long piece broken up into sections, each one focused on people, men and women, young and old. Whitman describes them each in a way that is both beautiful and subtly erotic. It’s not that he’s sexualizing the human body, but instead describing the body and people in general as he sees them. 

Here is an example from the section 4: