Read more about Whitman in Today in History, May 31 (Whitman's birthday).
Read articles and poems by Whitman in The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals (search on "Walt Whitman"). See Whitman's notebooks in Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection. He served as poet in residence at Capitol Hill Day School, where he introduced his students to Walt Whitman in second grade. Inclusive.ĭavid Kresh was the reference specialist in poetry in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress. The America which Whitman heard singing was one which he imagined shared many qualities with himself.Įxuberant. in the older pieces I always had a tune before I began to write." And in the poem "I Hear America Singing," he celebrated the music welling up all around him. "Nobody could write in my way unless he had the melody singing in his ears. In defending his poetry against accusations of formlessness, he claimed to construct his poems in the manner of Italian opera. He told a friend that more of his poems than he could remember had been inspired by music, heard in the streets, in the theater, or in private. He proposed an American opera using three (or more) banjos in the orchestra and including arias accompanied only by the banjo. Whitman wrote an editorial urging the regular study of music in American schools. A performance by a group of nurses and convalescing soldiers in a Civil War hospital. The American classical composer Anthony Philip Heinrich. The "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, on a tour of America promoted by P. Visiting European virtuosi of the violin and the piano. Popular family singing groups like the Cheneys and the Hutchinsons. In Whitman's youthful journalism and in the memoirs of old age, music appears often, music of all kinds. The poems use more than two hundred different musical terms and mention more than two dozen different instruments. He was familiar with contemporary thought about electricity and atoms, with the theology of Elias Hicks, with the historical theory of Thomas Carlyle.Īnd then there was music. Whitman studied Ormsby MacKnight Mitchell's Course of Six Lectures on Astronomy and used its lessons in his poems (his own astronomical observations were so detailed that some of the poems can be dated using his descriptions of the night sky). Whitman, looking back on his early years in New York, recalls frequent visits to the antiquities of the "Egyptian Collection" on Broadway and to the "Phrenological Cabinet" of the Fowler Brothers and Samuel Wells (Whitman had his own "chart of bumps" prepared). Whitman's words, more than 13,000 different ones, by some estimates. Words: cymballine, quoits, simulacrum, gamut, Paphian, agonistic, melange, trottoirs, coreopsis, interstices, mulleins, chyle, riant, autochthons. "One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same." Encompassing even the common grass, everywhere. 
The President, the planter, and the panting fugitive slave. The solitary wilderness hunter and the crowds thronging city streets. The butcher-boy, the blacksmith, the surgeon, the Negro teamster. Including minute details of ornithological observation and the sky studded with stars. Famously willing even to contradict himself. Walt Whitman walked about in his America, noticing and noting down.
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