Everybody Likes Walt Whitman

I never read any Walt Whitman until just weeks ago-in the first semester of my sophomore year of college. I had heard of him before then, but my impression was rather blurry; when I thought about Walt Whitman, I imagined a huge, bearded man walking around Civil War battlefields, looking stoutly on the aftermath of bloody skirmishes, and then going home to his white farmhouse to sit by his fire and write poetry about what he had seen.

I knew he was The Great American Poet, but that knowledge was perhaps why I've avoided him until now; I tend to vainly shy away from things that everybody likes, preferring instead to seek out the little-known, the unusual. I thought Walt Whitman's poetry would be brilliant, but worn out. I thought that years of praise and criticism and analysis would dull his words on the page for me.

The first Walt Whitman poem I read was assigned in my American Literature class. The poem was "Song of Myself."
Daunted by the length, I initially decided to skim, turning pages swiftly and without interest. But then a stanza caught my eye, and I found myself really reading. Quickly flipping back to the beginning, I proceeded to read the entire 52 section poem aloud to myself.

I think I now know why 'everybody likes' Walt Whitman.

Walt Whitman stands in the middle of a vast, empty field blowing up a balloon. As the balloon expands, it begins to encompass nearby trees and a creek rippling a few miles away. The balloon grows still larger, and soon it encompasses farm houses, children playing, animals, and then entire towns, roads, lakes, forests, cities, clouds. Everything is operating with a deafening roar inside that one balloon, and the roar only grows as the balloon does. Ladies chatter at their tea, trains hum along their endless tracks, crowds cheer after lines of racing horses. People are born and live and die inside Walt Whitman's balloon, trudging along while entirely unaware that they are a part of one man, and that he is a part of them. Walt Whitman knows, though. He knows that he is the barking dog and the coal miner and the giant sequoia tree. Walt Whitman walks the Civil War battlefields and and writes in a farmhouse by a fire and feels always the slightly uncomfortable tug of the entire universe.