{Journal entry #10} Walt, the quiet gentleman killer

When I was still officially a teen, I read a couple of lines from Song of Myself, and my reading life was changed forever.

This was it. I read this, and thought I had never in my life read something so sexy and romantic. There is something transparent yet elevated in the portrayal of experience (I mean, writing "plunged your tongue to my bare-strip heart" instead of just "licked my chest" is just too beautiful), an element that runs throughout the whole poem. And, I would argue, most of Whitman's poetry.

So, who is this Walt character and why were so many authors obsessed with him? (Just to give you a taste, see Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde.)

Poet and journalist, he was a key figure in the transcendentalist movement (see Emerson and Thoreau), a small group of intellectuals against 18th century rationalism. They placed importance on individual spiritual communion with nature, preached good ol' American self-reliance (although Thoreau supposedly got his food delivered to his cabin while he was writing Walden), and rejected traditional authority in favor of optimistic simple utopianism. It did not win the fight against ruthless capitalism, but it tried—and the literary legacy the movement left in the form of Whitman and Thoreau can be comforting and uplifting to this day. 

By the way, let us take the time to give a shoutout to the group that did the class activity: a guided-meditation while they calmly read from Song of Myself. I adored it. TMI time, my ideal date is a picnic at a park where we just read Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and W.H. Auden to each other. So, you know, this was close-ish.

One thing I definitely do not adore about Whitman is the fact that his artistic utopia is eminently masculine. He actually believed in an almost Greek type of affective relations, where there are Emotiveness (reproductive love, between man and woman) and Adhesiveness ("manly love", friendship, comradeship). But hey, no one's perfect, and even if his powerful emotions were mostly meant for men, his poetry still resonates with me. 

If you are interested in a different side of Walt, I'd recommend Pioneers! O Pioneers!, an ambivalent take on the frontier settlers and their version of the American dream.

I have been low-key interested in Whitman for a couple of years, but I think 2020 will be the year I unleash my full obsession, so stay tuned.