I Sing the Body Dialectic

mickey

Dec 28, 2025

An exercise in singing yourself into being. An almost blasphemous celebration of the self but with enough reverent faith in a world that could be to justify it. Muses aren’t invoked in favor of singing inspiration out of Whitman’s own life, and he evokes himself through almost four decades of writing in a turbulent changing world. He laments the “War of Secession” that would divide the US in the 1860’s. He speaks of Paumanok and Manhatta, the native names for Long Island and Manhattan. April, by the time of writing his deathbed edition (the one I read), becomes “fourth month.” There is something ancient that he’s trying to pick up on, while memorializing a very tangible present. Whitman never flinches from looking his time in the face and as a result he really does do a great job of creating the first American Epic. Meter be damned.

And I think it’s fitting that the epic he creates is almost a self portrait. No matter how much Whitman tries to write of the host of the nation and its myriad components, he can’t help evoking the facts around his own life. A Long Island-born man who wandered the nineteenth century states looking for a way to sing himself into the world, compassionately considering everything taken into his mind’s lens. It takes an exercise in almost alien empathy to create a ballad of the time that considers all parts so fairly and so artfully. This is a man who nursed soldiers on both sides back to health during the Civil War. This is a man who wanted the blue collar people that represent this country to enjoy his poetry more than the dandies that ended up comprising its audience. It’s a man who lived before there was a Brooklyn bridge or an Empire State Building, but who showed us that at the end of the day Long Island doesn’t look like a fish any less now than it did while he sat on its shores.