Thanks for pointing out this defect!

“Since inequality of income is greater now in the U.S. than at any time since the ferocious 1890’s; since the executive branch is arrogating more and more powers to
it muster the forces to aid the victims of natural disaster in our own country, having so squandered our resources else where and for lies, it seems
appropriate to quote these lines from Whitman’s DEMOCRATIC VISTAS, published in 1871:

‘I would alarm and caution even the political and business reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, industry, etc….do,of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the fruitage of success…Society, in these States, is canker’d,crude, superstitious and rotten. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking or seriously enfeebled or ungrown.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.
The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. …A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage…The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state and
municipal, in all their branches and departments except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashonable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims , or no aims at
all, kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern word business) , the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the
field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulagarians…’

Whitman knew what he was talking about. He worked in government offices in Washing D.C. from 1865 until he was incapacitated by a stroke in 1873. Maybe it’s time we took a good look at ourselves.”

Rosanna Warren

….or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… – Walt Whitman

“This is what you shall do:
Love this earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown”……..Walt Whitman

I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you;
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best;
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning;
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own;
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers;
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields;
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them;
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, elder, mullen and poke-weed.

I like this, thank you.

Robert Pinsky added another distinction this evening: the Internet is lacking a body, a spirit. That’s what the poetry has.

Chris you are stretching a point.

Emerson and Whitman bloggers? Dont think so.

First, these were professional writers in as much as they cared about their published work. Whitman wrote and rewrote Leaves of Grass all of his life.

Second, they weren’t responding in their work to other people’s comments but to a life time of reading.

No one who has read Emerson polished essays, like the one on Montaigne, would mistake him for a blogger.

Blogging has its own distinctive features which include spontaneity and timeliness while tradional writing’s distincitve features are thoughtfulness and revision.

I just got a message from the make-up man Skeet from our independent film Hymns of You about this program.
I am not sure if it has already aired – or how you get content (This is the first page like this I have been on)

My friend Michael did a beautiful song for our film using Whitman’s own words -
mostly from the poem “To You”. Our independent film’s site is
http://www.sailforth.com – Whitman is a character.

The film is about how a pastor taking a leave of absence from the church finds a more earthy spirituality though Whitman. This is a semi-autobiographical film in that my co-writer/director was a pastor, did leave the church, and indeed found Whitman to be a guiding light to balance the rigid dogma of some churches he had known. I find the words from “To You” to be amazing:

“…I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself;

…There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;
..No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you…

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. “

AMERICA.

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Kurt Elling’s Jazz singing of “song of Myself” is worth hearing.

Emerson was an essential blogger in his writing and lecturing, as you say, and in his publication with Margaret Fuller of what they called a magazine — what I would call a group blog — titled “The Dial� in the early 1840s. Still more profoundly Emerson in “Self-Reliance� and elsewhere invented the all-American idea of expressive individuality in an egalitarian democracy. Which is why I have held him up for some time now as A God for Bloggers. Please check it out. It was Emerson of course who blurbed Whitman’s first “Leaves of Grass� in 1855 [�I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed…] And it was Emerson who got Whitman’s special gratitude: “�I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil. …�

So there are a lot of family connections here.

Yes, abolutely: he is our great champion of democratic vistas and voices.

ls there a more crystalline one-sentence definition of Blogger Nation than this:

“Whitman’s ideal America is a country held together not by law or custom but by a network of imaginative filaments thrown out by autonomous individuals who want to include as many people as they can in their own acts of self-definiton.”

From the poet Carl Dennis’ book “Poetry as Persuasion,” University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Whitman the visionary was also, as it happens, a terrific poet.

But the man should be fairly fresh in her mind, since she her most recent book — Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats — was just published last year.

And my take on “getting Whitman?” How about trying to place himself as the man between the phenomenal and noumenal? Some artists exist as bridges between the everday and the transcendental, where they attempt to fashion something for the reader’s feet to “walk upon,” and if you try and cover all the bases — if you say, here’s every road you can possibly travel that you are a part of, then you cross over into that eerie Schopenhauerian realization of man being connected to something greater than himself. In one small part, it’s a secular search to placate existential anxiety.

The great whobbling goose flies through the skies of Brooklyn
see, he mends the sick in body and mind, see, he hears
voices when before him they only threw mud, see, he
channels the non-combatant members of the unseen classes,
see, he speaks for the nameless, the lost, the ones who pull legs
under the bridges, who suffer with loneliness because of gods
misunderstood by legions of hell breathing human demons who never
saw God is love and suffering is not devine. See somebody had to
say it. See his name was Walt Whitman. See see see

“In cabin’d ships at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine,
Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
many a star at night,
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.”

I would like to do part of the ‘Salut au monde’ section:

“I see the cities of the earth, and make myself a
part of them,
I am a real Londoner, Parisian, Viennese,
I am a habitan of St. Petersburgh, Berlin, Constantinople,
I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne,
I am of Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick,

“I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons,
Brussels, Berne, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin,
Florence,
I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw — or north-
ward in Christiana or Stockholm — or in
some street in Iceland,
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them
again.”

It has resonance for me in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks…

Naturally, I emailed some of Walt Whitman scholars on this; they thought it was a curious connection, but as far as I know, didn’t pursue it anymore.