After reading my snarky comments about Walt Whitman’s poem “I hear America singing” in the July 6 issue, my brother AF set me straight…
Hey Mark,
I’m afraid you did Walt wrong.
The reason this poem may seem flat is that you are trying to read it (as many do) as a 4th-of-July poem, when it is no such thing. It isn’t a patriotic ode – though mid-19th-century America was Whitman’s great and only theme – but an acoustic hallucination of the land, Blakean in its surrealism: Where others hear the hustle and bustle of nameless immigrants working day and night, he hears an immense symphony; American energy redefines the nature of poetry.
It is true that the lines you cite are a little short on drama, but this litany is a part of that single, ever-evolving epic poem, to which Whitman added throughout his life, that goes under the title Leaves of Grass.
Whitman is American poetry (Dickinson his backup; Eliot a prissy, anxious Anglophile). Among its many descendants is Woody Guthrie’s “If I Had a Hammer.”
