38 pages • 1-hour read
I Hear America Singing
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Background
Historical Context
Two events are critical to the historical context of “I Hear America Singing”: Transcendentalism and the Civil War.
The first is an influence that Whitman readily admitted: the rise of New England Transcendentalism and particularly the motivational arguments of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman attended a lecture Emerson delivered in New York in 1842. He had been deeply moved by Emerson’s radical essay titled simply “The Poet,” which called for a new kind of poet for a new kind of nation. The initial volume of Leaves of Grass, published un-ironically on Independence Day, celebrated the unbounded energy of the American imagination as Emerson argued American poets needed to do. Without that context, Walter Whitman, failed everything, would most likely never have evolved into Walt Whitman, America’s Poet. In “I Hear America Singing,” Whitman’s poetic lines are wonderfully irregular, their rhymes and rhythms subtle and unforced, its temperament undeniably bold and inviting, its themes accessible and clarion-clear, its optimism palpable, all reflecting the influence of Emerson.
On a more sobering note, unlike the earlier editions of Leaves of Grass, the volume in which “I Hear America Singing” (1860) appears was necessarily informed against Whitman’s helpless recognition that the nation whose community and collective energy his poem celebrated was, even as the poem was being read in the teeming streets of New York and Boston, coming apart. That historical context does not disqualify Whitman or his poem as irrelevant and whimsical if artful dodging. It is not that Whitman did not know his country was splitting. His message, like any religious works such as the parables of the Christ or the Buddha or the wisdom books of Quran, is projected to a world bent on ignoring its message. This is not how America is, but rather how America could be. The Civil War then, far from undercutting Whitman’s affirmation of the greatness and unity of a country he loved, gives its message currency, an urgency, and a powerful suasive argument. Much as any Christian would after reading the parables of the Christ, Whitman’s reader, then and now for that matter, would see nation coming apart and understand that, together, we can do better.
Literary Context
Frankly, Whitman’s literary context raises more questions than it answers.
The great abiding mystery of American literature is where exactly did Walt Whitman, poet, come from. Generations of Americanists have sifted through Whitman’s biography for some episode, some influence, some epiphany that might account for how the son of a career failure, a father prone to violence and drink, and a smothering, barely literate mother, how a boy raised amid poverty in a large dysfunctional family, a part-time carpenter, a failed house painter, a disillusioned schoolteacher, a journeyman printer who, with only a sixth grade education, scratched out a living as a journalist, went, in his late thirties (at a time when life expectancy was barely 40 years), from writing doggerel wisdom verses and didactic parables intended largely as newspaper filler to writing the stunning opening 13 lines of “Song of Myself.”
How did a self-educated newspaper columnist intuit that conventional (read British) poetry—tightly metered, richly allusive, formally conservative—had become entirely unworkable and wildly irrelevant within the bracing environment of the new that was antebellum America? Where did this blue-collar journalist find the nerve to dismiss the most accomplished poet-practitioners in America, most notably the revered New England Fireside Poets, as fussy “tea-drinkers” and unimaginative “upholsterers”? How, indeed, did that same journalist create single-handedly and against a chorus of establishment nay-sayers who dismissed his experimental line as inchoate and blasphemous, how did that journalist dare to return poetry to its most ancient roots: that poetry, Whitman’s every crude and undisciplined line testified, happens in the ear.
Where did Whitman’s verse come from? Maybe from a childhood in rural Long Island spent listening to the rich cadences of the Bible read to him by his doting Quaker mother. Maybe from an adolescence joyfully entombed in Brooklyn public libraries amid stacks of classical literature—Dante, The Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Homer. Perhaps from a decade spent happily immersed in the cacophonous blab of Manhattan’s crowded sidewalks. Could it have come from countless nights Whitman spent listening enthralled to repertory opera? Could it have come from Whitman‘s reading Emerson’s clarion call for a truly American poet, the polished Emerson playing a buttoned-down Sinatra to Whitman’s wild Elvis? These are the dizzying elements for Whitman’s literary context.
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