'I Am the Poet of Reality'

Why America needs Walt Whitman now more than ever.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892)

By Michael Judge

Today is the birthday of one of our country’s most celebrated poets, who came into this world on May 31, 1819, the second-born of eight children to Walter and Louisa Whitman. But perhaps the more significant birthday is July 4, 1855, the publication date of Leaves of Grass, when Walter Whitman Jr. from Brooklyn and Long Island suddenly became the great white-maned poet, Walt Whitman, “untamed” and “untranslatable,” sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

Robert Hass, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing years ago, describes Whitman before the publication of Leaves of Grass as a “mediocre half-educated journalist” who “suddenly produces the most amazing and original poem in the English language with ‘Song of Myself.’” Hass calls Whitman’s rebirth a “mystery,” and makes it sound as if the 36-year-old former printer’s apprentice and newspaperman went down to the crossroads—like blues legend Robert Johnson—str…