Meditations on America 250 with Walt Whitman–1. Starting from Paumanok

Image: Mathew Brady photograph of Walt Whitman. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Strike up for a new world. America is vastly bigger than any of our ideas of it.

If, like me, you’ve been hungry for a way to observe this quarter millennium of the American project that might bypass the corrosions and corruptions and brutality of our present moment — that might overleap the squalid and small-minded partisanship that has always permeated our civic discourse — then allow me to invite you to see America 250 through Walt Whitman’s eyes.

Walt’s vast, staggering, and inexhaustible generosity of spirit is an antidote to trolls and gaslighters and frauds. Starting from Paumanok (a native American name for Long Island) where he was born in 1819, he opened his eyes and heart and felt his nation as a challenge to expand his capacities. He saw an America that was exploding with creative possibilities, and he sang what he saw. His poetry so successfully fuses with the infinitude, the range, and the depth of America that Walt himself came to embody the nation’s challenge.

Walt challenges all of us — you and I, comerados — to be as large as he is.

So, in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, Meditations from Papa Walt. Number 1. The opening section of “Starting from Paumanok” in the 1891 edition of Leaves of Grass:

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born

Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother,

After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,

Dweller in Manahatta my city, or on southern savannas,

Or a soldier camp’d or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California,

Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring,

Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,

Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy,

Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara,

Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull,

Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze,

Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk,

And heard at dawn the unrivall’d one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars,

Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

Word to meditate on: — vast —

Walt’s insight: That this new, expansive spirit America awakens in us carries the spark of a New World.