Walt Whitman and New York City

Paper Summary:

Content of Walt Whitman's poems "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "L. of G's Purport," "Song of Myself," "Once I Walked Through a Populous City," and "Manhattan" plus his essay "Human and Heroic New York," from Specimen Days, are analyzed to argue the thesis that New York City provided a major source of material for Whitman's poetic vision. Central to the argument is how Whitman embraced all aspects of the city as equal, valuable and holy. Close examination of Whitman's works demonstrates that New York City was a major influence in forming his democratic vision of the world as he reached for transcendental levels of communication.

From the Paper:

"New Yorkers today call it THE CITY as if no other city existed on this or any other planet. Whitman, born near Huntington, Long Island, grew up in the shadow of this city in its period of greatest expansion. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, linking the Hudson River and Lake Erie, and opening the lucrative markets of the west, New York experienced phenomenal growth. Immigrants flocked to the burgeoning center of finance, manufacturing, and shipping. In the years between Whitman's birth and the time he was twenty one, the city's population more than quadrupled. From 1841 until the Civil War, Whitman lived and worked as journalist, printer, writer in the flourishing metropolis, absorbing it all. It was a time of nationalistic populism in journalism as penny papers proliferated, perfectly fitting Whitman's egalitarian propensities. The city that Whitman preferred to call Manhattan was his poetic and spiritual university. City streets were his science laboratory as he took in the urban realities in all their disturbing darkness and transformed them into a democratic vision of optimism and hope. He absorbed the present osmotically and linked it diffusively with past and future. Passing through the membrane of self, the immense material of the city emerged in the seething solution of the poetic product, the heady brew of democracy, the distillation of the individual into divine oneness with all humanity."

More papers on Walt Whitman and New York City:

• Analytical Essay # 8141 : "City of Superb Democracy"
• Comparison Essay # 5259 : "The Port Cities of New York City & Dublin"
• Book Review # 97548 : "Specimen Days"

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