poets to come

Poets to Come

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!

Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,

But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than

before known,

Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,

I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

casual look upon you and then averts his face,

Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

Expecting the main things from you.

This section wasn’t part of the assigned reading, but I was browsing through the book and it was one of the places I stopped. I know that I like it partly because of ego: I want to be one of the “poets to come” he’s addressing. His expectations are pretty heavy, but it would be nice to meet Walt Whitman’s ghost at the library and have him tell me that my writing, and the writing my friends are doing, is “Greater than before known.”

But I think the real reason I like this passage is because it embodies my favorite things about Whitman: his huge ego combined with equally strong modesty; his ability to see beyond the time in which he lives and to project possible futures; his emphasis on the ways in which we are all connected and alike even as we are individual; above all, his compassion and love for everyone (even people who don’t exist yet).

I love how much faith Whitman has in writing, both his own and others’. This passage shows faith not only that his words will last and inspire great things, but that writing as an art can be great. I think that’s a fairly rare thing to believe. Most people don’t value art, music, or writing very much—unless it can turn a profit. But Whitman positions writing as a form of salvation, and I agree that it can be. For me, this is where his compassion and his guesses about the future become important. Whitman was not only able to see himself in everyone in his own time, but in people who didn’t even exist yet, whose lives he could never begin to guess at. In spite of this, he repeatedly says that he is with us in the future, and that he loves us simply because we are people and deserve to be loved. I think that’s astounding. I also think that this is what all writing should strive to do. At its best, writing acts as a microscope and a mirror: it shows us facets of things we’d never seen before or thought about; and it reflects us. You should be able to see yourself in a good piece of writing, no matter how different the character is from you. Writing shows us that, at base, we are all human. At its best, even at its saddest and angriest, writing should show us that we are not alone. Whitman does this repeatedly in Leaves of Grass, and it’s a remarkable feat.