Walt Whitman's Birthday - "I Celebrate Myself"

It's the birthday of Walt Whitman (books by this author), born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father's trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The Poet," which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later said. "Emerson brought me to a boil."

Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, "I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.

Whitman spent the last 20 years of his life revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, issuing the eighth and final edition in 1891, saying it was "at last complete � after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace and war, young and old."

Today, most scholars agree that Whitman was likely gay. When he was asked directly, toward the end of his life, Whitman declined to answer. But he did say, shortly before he died, that sex was "the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood � that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world."

via http://writersalmanac.org

I celebrate myself;   
And what I assume you shall assume;   
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.   
 
I loafe and invite my Soul;   
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.             5
 
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes�the shelves are crowded with perfumes;   
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;   
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.   
 
The atmosphere is not a perfume�it has no taste of the distillation�it is odorless;   
It is for my mouth forever�I am in love with it;      10
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;   
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.





There are many editions of Whitman's poems, including the free to read online Leaves of Grass at www.bartleby.com

Walt Whitman 2014

Walt is all around us lately.

Did you take note of the Apple television ad for the iPad Air? It quotes Whitman's �O Me! O Life!� to promote the idea of creating and uses Robin Williams from his English teacher role in Dead Poets Society.

�That the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.�

Walt is also on the new poster designed by the Academy of American Poets for this year's  National Poetry Month.  You can request a copy online.

The poster uses the closing lines of �Song of Myself,�

�Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.�

If you want to go deeply into Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," you can enroll in a free course offered online by the University of Iowa. This course - known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) - will be open to thousands of people at no cost (and for no credit).

�Every Atom: Walt Whitman�s Song of Myself" will take a collective approach to a close reading of America�s democratic verse epic, first published without a title in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and later titled "Song of Myself" in the 1881 edition.

Breaking Bad and Walt Whitman

There have been several Walt Whitman references during the four and a half seasons of AMC�s Breaking Bad. This month the final episodes of the series are being shown.

The two WW's - Whitman and Breaking Bad protagonist, Walter White - have a strange connection.

The two don't seem similar. White is a high school science teacher who finds out he has cancer and becomes a crystal meth maker and distributor to build up a cash reserve for his family. Over the seasons, he breaks very bad, going �from Mr. Chips to Scarface� as the show's creator, Vince Gilligan, has said.

Whitman is nothing like that. Whitman and his book, Leaves of Grass, were not part of some original plot plan by the creator, But he keeps popping up.

In season three, White�s lab assistant, Gale, recites Whitman's poem �When I Heard the Learn�d Astronomer", a poem about disillusionment with theory and a need to engage with the world.

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander�d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air,�

Gale gives Walt a copy of Leaves of Grass as a gift. In a later scene, Walt read the book which Gale inscribed with �To my other favorite W.W. It is an honor working with you.�

The name of this year's fifth season�s midpoint cliffhanger episode was �Gliding Over All,� which is an allusion to a poem in the book, "Song of Myself."

Gliding o�er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul�not life alone,
Death, many deaths I�ll sing.

This poem connects with the Walt that White has become.

And then Walt�s brother-in-law Hank, a D.E.A. agent who has been pursuing the meth cook that is Walt, found the copy of Leaves of Grass in Walt's bathroom, and reading the inscription written by the now dead Gale, knows that Walt is the meth cook and drug lord also known as "Heisenberg."

Walter "Walt" Whitman the poet was a humanist and part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism. He is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

His work was very controversial in its time, particularly Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Will "The Good Gray Poet" figure in the final episodes of the series?

As at thy portals also death,
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds...
I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
And set a tombstone here.



More About WW and WW
http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Walt_Whitman
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246218