Whitman knew (and Emerson did too) that this could not last forever. Up to now, our betters had kept us in line: The aristocracies of Massachusetts and Virginia had shown us the enlightened path and dragged us along behind them. Who were we, after all? A nation of castoffs, a collection of crooks and failures, flawed daughters and second sons of second sons, unquestionable losers and highly dubious winners. The people were too ignorant, too crude, too grasping and greedy to come together and from their many create one. The wise believed that it probably could not be done. “Emerson brought me to a boil.” Whitman understood that he was a part of one of the greatest experiments since the beginning of time: the revival of democracy in the modern world. “ I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman told a friend. I can’t imagine that when he asked for volunteers, he believed a jack-of-all-trades in his mid-30s, headed no place in particular, could possibly take up the task.

We had a mind, the mind created by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders, but we did not know our own best spirit.Įmerson couldn’t answer the call, and tacitly admitted as much. What America lacked was what Emerson called for: an evocation of what being a democratic man or woman felt like at its best, day to day, moment to moment. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution-those were political documents, pragmatic in their designs for democracy. Though America had been a nation for nearly 80 years, it was incomplete. One sentence in particular in his essay opens the prospect of a new world-a new poetic world, and perhaps a new world of human possibility as well: “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.” What America lacked was what Emerson called for: an evocation of what being a democratic man or woman felt like at its best, day to day.Įmerson was looking for a poet whose vision didn’t derive chiefly from books, but from American life as it was. But as to knowing “the value of our incomparable materials”-maybe that was something Whitman could claim. There was nothing especially tyrannous about him, nor would there be about his poetry. Sitting quietly, Whitman read, “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials.” I suspect that the phrase tyrannous eye puzzled Whitman. He surely read “Circles” and “Self-Reliance,” and “ The Poet,” an essay in which Emerson called out for a genuinely American bard. Whitman was taken with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson that summer. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Leaves of grass poem