24 pages • 48 minutes read
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman (1860)
Perhaps the most familiar of Whitman’s pre-Civil War patriotic poems, here the poet emerges, much as in “As I Walk,” as a kind of visionary prophet speaking on behalf of Americans earnestly, happily dedicated to their work and seeing in their pursuit of labor a spiritual elevation. In both poems, however, Whitman treats less the topic at hand—working, in one case, and the resurgence of America after the war in the other—and more centers the poet—Walt Whitman, American Poet—as the crucial energy in the nation’s evolution.
“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus (1883)
Originally written as a sort of fundraiser for the newly arrived Statue of Liberty in New York harbor (the poem is now on a plaque at the base of the statue), this sonnet embodies the same soaring optimism that defined the Gilded Age in Whitman’s own perception of an America on the rise. If Whitman celebrates the growth of cities and the boom in factories, Lazarus reminds the nation that such American environments rely on the dedication, diligence, and sweat of the immigrant working class. As with Whitman, Lazarus celebrates not the mighty and the powerful but rather extols the heroic energies, and the spiritual and emotional restlessness, of the great and wide reach of working-class (immigrant) America.
“Poem 1227” by Emily Dickinson (circa 1872)
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have been positioned as the grandparents of 20th-century American poetry, the precursors of 20th-century American poetics. Dickinson, although she published little in her lifetime, created the modern school of intensely emotional, introspective confessional poetry, while Whitman influenced the 20th-century free verse revolution and the grand Panavision poets of American culture, history, and society. A comparison of Whitman’s celebration of American survival of the war with Dickinson’s far more muted and far more agonizing sense of what the war cost America spiritually, how wounded America still is, almost a decade later, juxtaposes against Whitman’s yawping optimism.
Further Literary Resources
“The Presence of Walt Whitman” by Edward Davidson (1983)
Written by one of the most respected commentators on 19th-century American poetics, the article first established the danger of so much Whitman critical work devolving into fan appreciations and indulging baggy generalities about the “power” of the poems. The article proposes looking at Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, despite its multiple volumes published across more than 30 years, as a single grand poem. Davidson challenges his generation of scholars to look more carefully at the metrics of Whitman and its evolution into the carefully crafted poems of his later years.
“Why Walt Whitman Called America the ‘Greatest Poem’” by Karen Swallow Prior (2016)
Published in The Atlantic, the article offers an introduction to Whitman’s concept of poetry (and the poet) as a force for democracy, a force in defense of the American experiment during and after the war that nearly ended that experiment. The article uses Whitman’s America poems, among them “As I Walk,” to reveal how deeply Whitman tied his conception of the role of the poet to the poet’s national roots.
“New Topics, New Powers, New Spirit: Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg and the Power of the Poet” by Peter W. Rosenberger (2014)
In drawing specific ties between Whitman’s evocative free verse and, nearly a century later, the open verse of the Beats, the article defines how Whitman’s perception of the poet as a spokesperson for democracy would influence the Beats’ perception of the poet as critic of democracy. The article compares not only the use of chanting as a metric form and the creation of a larger-than-life persona/poet to speak the poems but also investigates how Whitman, in the poems before his stroke, edged more toward criticism, but how the Beats, with the dawn of the Kennedy era, edged toward a forgiving embrace of a complex nation.
Listen to Poem
Whitman’s poem awaits a definitive recording. Oddly, given the poem’s unabashed and unironic celebration of America’s resilience and its embrace of technology, “As I Walk” has seldom been recorded and maintains a very thin profile on YouTube. Although there is an instrumental recording with lots of waving flags titled “Whitman’s ‘As I Walk These Days,’” that recording offers no reading of the poem—only the uplifting music. There is one recording available on YouTube—it features a photo of Whitman from his later years that, through digital wizardry, appears to be speaking the poem. The reading, however, is even more problematic—the overly-dramatic reading (curiously with a British accent) lapses into lingering syllables that entirely lose the startling forward momentum of Whitman’s cataloguing.
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By Walt Whitman
