While channel surfing a few weeks ago I stumbled across a PBS American Experience program about Walt Whitman. It touched me and took me back to my first experience of his poetry.
As a teenager I precociously chose part of “I Sing the Body Electric” for a junior high recitation. The nuns were a bit conflicted. The literal way to interpret this piece from Whitman’s famous Leaves of Grass as a celebration of the sensual, physical human body had them worried. But I, in my youthful beneficence and eagerness to embrace humanity, went for the big metaphor. I loved the image of a body made up all people, connected and charged. I could see sparks leaping tiny gaps of space between ganglia and bone, igniting each other, lighting up and giving life and spirit to a body politic. I was particularly intrigued with the second line—to be surrounded and surround at the same time, to be an individual and yet be part of something else. Here is the first stanza from the 1887 edition of Leaves of Grass:
I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth
them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond
to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the
charge of the Soul.
Whitman saw himself as the national poet and set out to repair great divisions and moral tensions in a time of unrest just before the Civil War. He thought he could inspire Americans to put right the great experiment of democracy.
In this PBS program they used the phrase “urban affection” to describe Whitman’s fascination, appreciation, wonderment, even love for the immigrant citizenry of a young nation. His unabashed, expansive, free flowing poems illuminated the multitudes in intimate detail in hopes of uniting the nation.
Whitman did not see the country unite—in fact he witnessed the deepest sadness and misery of war. But his work continued and the poetry written over the course of his lifetime is timeless and magnificent.
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I can’t help but wonder if we are at another critical point in history. My On the Commons colleague Harriet Barlow speaks of this as a time of “unraveling,” and that is how it feels to me. What has happened to our affection for each other? Affection is different than compassion and more than pity. It surpasses tolerance. It is fondness and tender feeling. Why do we no longer have this fondness for or even recognize the body we are part of? We are literally coming apart. Our connections to nature, to sprit, and to opportunities to develop fondness for each other are eroded. How can the heart know the head or the hand? How can the “I” recognize the “we” when everyday life numbs us and separates us into economic classes, political factions and target markets? The American Dream in this era is to possess for oneself and withdraw.
In one of his last writings Whitman spoke to us, the future generations of Americans:
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles…Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.
I am looking for you Mr. Whitman. We need poets of the commons and we need them now—to introduce us to each other and restore tender feelings for ourselves. We need poets to knit the bones and stitch the tissue of our body back together, then charge it with the charge of the soul.
