Now I'll like to have a few words about
Whitman's poetry and poetics
I am large I contain multitudes
says Walt Whitman
toward the end of his Song of Myself
a long poem which introduces him
to American readers
when Leaves of Grass
first appeared in 1855
And this line best describes
the poet Walt Whitman
and his life-long work
Leaves of Grass
Probably the best known book of
American poetry ever written
Leaves of Grass is first and foremost
a testament to Whitman's oceanic mind
and his enormous imagination
It does contain multitudes of people
including characters
as vivid as those
in the stories and novels
of American prose writers
The most vivid character
in Leaves of Grass
is Walt Whitman an American
one of the roughs a kosmos
a persona created as part of his goal
to revolutionize American poetry
So in Song of Myself
Whitman even says
Stop this day and night with me
you shall possess the origin of all poems
You shall no longer take things
at second or third hand
nor look through the eyes of the dead
nor feed on the specters in books
You shall not look through my eyes either
nor take things from me
You shall listen to all sides
and filter them from your self
To me
these lines echo exactly what
Ralph Waldo Emerson questioned about
in his essay Nature
The sun shines today also
There is more wool and flax in the fields
There are new lands
new men new thoughts
Let us demand our own works
and laws and worship
It seems to me
that both of their remarks
have merged
into one common voice of their age
America had long been calling for
a new poet so as to present
the new land
new men and new thoughts
Unlike most of his contemporary poets
Whitman opened up
an unlimited space for American poetry
His accents were primitive
his tones crude
his lines broke away
the tradition of British poetry
In fact
ever since the beginning of his career
Whitman had assumed for himself
the role of a poet prophet
the primitive seer
and the American frontiersman
of democracy
Whitman's Song of Myself therefore
turns out to be a song of
Walt Whitman an American
one of the roughs a kosmos
It is large and
contains multitudes of people
It is a song of common men
including the poet Walt Whitman
and every one of us
Whitman achieved that goal
because no poet before him
was so wholly American
so committed to celebrating American
democracy and identity
And for this reason
Whitman has been honored as
the father of modern American poetry
the first truly great American poet
an artist who sprang off a platform
of European poetic models
and soared into new territory