Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Quoted by Paul Harris in
"My Road to Rotary" in the context of
how a boy is shaped
and thus shapes the man. And, near the end of this book, he
again quotes the poet
from an essay written
around 1876.
 This fisherman, editor, journalist, carpenter, bureaucrat, and poet
revolutionized poetry by choosing such uncommon subjects such as the
"values of the common, the miracle of the mouse, the wholesome soundness
of the calloused hand, the body's sweat," and men and women's sexuality
in his anthology Leaves of Grass. His free verse, use of rhythm and
choice of symbols pushed the limits of the poetic form and made it
accessible even to the common man/woman. Several of his masterpieces
include the poems "When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," or "Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking" where he paid tribute to
Abraham Lincoln and his cause and which revealed his American democratic
idealism. He sympathized with the efforts to end slavery and save the
Union during the American Civil War.
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He strongly believed in the liberty of all human beings
in this cosmos of which we are all part. The preface to the Leaves of
Grass reveals his idealism:
- They are the voice and exposition of liberty….The attitude of
great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of
their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are
full of hazard to the one and hope to the other.
-
- When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or
third to go…it waits for all the rest to go…it is the last…when the
laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and the laws of informers
and blood money are sweet to the taste of the people…when I and you
walk around upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of the
numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man
master-and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves…or
rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged
from any part of the earth-then only shall the instinct of liberty be
discharged from that part of the earth.
-
(copyright, University of California, Davis)
The
Poem which Paul Harris Quoted
The portion of
"My Road to Rotary" from which it came |
