“If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”

– Walt Whitman

“I am the man. I suffered. I was there.” – Walt Whitman

“A splendid old soul.” – Mark Twain on Walt Whitman

“Whitman is my daddy…Opulence is the end.” – Lana Del Rey

These are the words of Walt’s that first chilled my bones (when I was seventeen years old) (from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”):

“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you – I laid in my stores in advance, / I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”

And these are some of the words I read aloud from the pulpit at my mother’s funeral twenty-seven years later (from “Song of Myself”):

“This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, / Darker than the colorless beards of old men, / Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. /

“O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. /

“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, / And the offspring taken soon out of their laps. / What do you think has become of the young and old men? / And what do you think has become of the women and children? /

“They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. /

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

….

PERSONAL DECLARATION:

Today on this day that is the day that is one day before the 207th birthday of Walt Whitman, I hereby formally declare myself to be a BLOOMIAN critic, which means I follow Harold Bloom, although not in all things, which would have made perfect sense to Harold, who, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, never wanted anyone to follow him in all things. Bloom has done more to boost Walt Whitman’s reputation than any other critic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, by far.

The title of Walt Whitman’s book was/is so great that it matches Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE: LEAVES OF GRASS. His book itself is so great that it too matches Tolstoy, although in a different mode, the mode of poetry. (There is also a reason why they both had long white hair and long white beards.)

The other day I was observing my Siberian Husky mix, Boo, and I realized that he was individually sniffing every single blade of grass in the area in which he was standing in a field in northern Illinois outside Chicago. Let me repeat that: individually sniffing every single blade of grass. It was like Horton discovering a WHO! inside a clover, it was that mind-blowing.

Walt Whitman used to watch Abraham Lincoln walking around Washington during the Civil War. Lincoln knew who Walt was, and would nod to him, although they never spoke. But Whitman was studying Lincoln. Whitman was working, for free, as a volunteer nurse for both Northern and Southern soldiers in the hospitals of D.C. He saw the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the horrors of war (many, many times), and did things like write letters home for the incapacitated soldiers, hold them while they died, and write to their families (beautifully) after they expired. During this time, he was also working as a humble and lowly government clerk. He had numerous nervous breakdowns during this time, small and then large, and eventually a stroke at the age of 54.

Walt Whitman was very concerned with the way his beloved America would turn out. He lost much of his faith in the USA during the Gilded Age (named by Mark Twain). But he never lost all of his faith.

So let me say this:

There are many, and I mean many millions, of physically living human beings walking around among us now who have zero, and I mean zero (no), human emotion/s at all. They feel nothing but nothing (unless it’s a smoldering rage), and the occasional sneer (or a chuckle at someone else’s pain) is all they can muster. (See the President of the United States as well for this, as well as all of his henchmen and henchwomen.) (No wonder zombie and vampire movies are so popular.)

WATCH OUT!

There are also people walking around among us now who act like (or are) angels.