At the center of a poem that so baldly celebrates working and the rewards of having an occupation is a most complicated question, never actually addressed, of what exactly is the work of a poet? It is after all the poet’s song we actually hear.

In a poem that celebrates other occupations that clearly focus on pragmatic productivity—boats docking safely, clothes getting washed, bricks being laid, timber being felled—the central figure, really the only figure in the poem, is the poet/speaker. What does a poet do? Before Whitman’s generation, the answers were fairly clear. Poets either tell stories, fictional or historical, in lines of engaging sonic delight that manipulate rhythm and rhyme to enhance the reading/listening experience and at the same time reveal the poet’s deft command of language, or they use the chiseled lines of carefully metered poetry to inspire, to share lessons, to teach insights to live better, more moral lives.

Neither appears to apply here—the poem offers no tidy moral insight, it shares no story, and its manipulations of language, its rhythm and rhyme schemes, seem at best careless and at worst juvenile. What then is the poet’s work? Infused by the soaring arguments of Whitman’s generation of Transcendentalists with their conception of a material world that sustains a profoundly spiritual reality, Whitman offers a third possible role for the poet: a spiritual seer, a mystic, more like a religious figure or prophet than an artist, not just inspiring but radically realigning the axis of the listener’s perception of the world. Poets see so that others may glimpse. We see slivers, poets see the whole.

The opening line stakes out the poem’s conception of the role of the poet: “I hear America singing” (Line 1)—the uncompromising audacity, the sheer nerve, the ego of Whitman. But this is not Whitman speaking. This is not Walter Whitman, failed New Jersey housepainter and out-of-work printer—this is Walt Whitman, priest-seer, able to tap into the deepest reservoirs of spiritual energy, able to hear and see and feel what the rest of us cannot, and in sharing that aural vision, the joyous song of America working, he offers not the chance to hear it for ourselves—after all, no Christian is expected to possess the spiritual sensibility of the Christ—but rather we are to trust in the sensibilities and spiritual reach of the poet/seer and in turn embrace the offer to celebrate labor, what would, without the poet/seer’s message, corrode the spirit day after soul-crushing day.