It was the great poem of being, the epic of life in America, in the solar system, in the Milky Way, in the infinite reaches of space. A poetry that drastically changed the idiom of poetry by bringing into it all sorts of gorgeous untraditional things like Egyptology, carpentry, opera, Hindu epics - the whole big buzzing confusion of life, which he describes as: "life immense in passion, pulse and power." A poetry that celebrates the human body in frank sexual detail. A poetry written in a breathless, ecstatic style. A poetry so aggressively intimate that buttonholes the reader, cries with the reader, woos the reader. I felt those same instincts and still do.īecause there was a new breed of American surfacing in the fast waters of the 19th century, Whitman decided to invent a radically new poetry, by translating the revved up mosaic of the daily newspaper into a poetry full of street talk, everyday events, and long lists. Voluptuously in love with life, he believed a poet's duty was to change people's lives, by throwing a bucketful of light onto the commonest things. Whitman was the first American poet that the Universe didn't scare. Long before the discovery of black holes, he wrote: "The bright suns I see, and the dark suns I cannot see, are in their place." When I first read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in college, I knew I had found a soul mate.
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