During my visit, the statue was covered in a giant black tarp, making it look as though he were about to be kidnapped rather than unveiled. Walt Whitman Shops also has a surprisingly large statue of Whitman - at least, I think the statue is of Whitman. The people walking around Walt Whitman Shops look happily bored and moneyed and, often, unapologetically Long Island (e.g. It has an Apple Store and Brooks Brothers and Pottery Barn - soon it will have Pottery Barn Kids. While such controversy contributed to his fame, it makes him an unlikely inspiration for a mall. Whitman’s inclusivity earned him controversy during his life, as he faced various charges of obscenity, particularly for his earnest depictions of sexuality. There’s a good chance you’ve read or at least heard of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “I Sing the Body Electric” or “O Captain! My Captain!” or “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Not only did Whitman write a lot, but he also wrote about a lot of different people - laborers and soldiers and prostitutes - with a generous and knowing voice. Whitman’s verse is democratic in a way that poetry almost never is. Singer justly admires “I Hear America Singing,” in which Whitman hears the songs of mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, hatters, woodcutters, ploughboys, mothers and daughters. “They know he was a poet, more from Dead Poet’s Society than anything else.” Although most of Singer’s students come from Long Island, where Whitman’s name is ubiquitous, they know almost nothing about the man. “He’s probably the best historical commentator of the 19th century,” Singer told me in a recent phone conversation. There’s something about Whitman.Īlan Singer, professor of teaching, literacy and leadership at Hofstra University, teaches Whitman from a historical perspective, using his poems to instruct students about what it was once like to live in New York. I remember a teaching assistant detailing his conversion from Modernism to Whitman with the excitement and incredulity of a teenager moving backward from Led Zeppelin to Robert Johnson. In college, I made a habit of defending internally inconsistent or plainly duplicitous comments with “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I was not alone. Everybody reads “Song of Myself,” which makes sense because “Song of Myself” is pretty great. I had both predictable (Kerouac) and unpredictable (Pynchon) adolescent tastes, but I don’t know where Whitman fits on the scale. The reason I chose Whitman is obscure to me today. A sample line of verse: “I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea.” Assured I would become a writer and viewing Whitman as a predecessor, I made it my duty to sit in spiky abandoned parks and read the book from beginning to end. When I was in high school - not, sadly, Walt Whitman High School - I worked at a now-extinct independent bookstore from which I ordered an unabridged Leaves of Grass. (Foursquare) suggests that “America’s great poet would be incredibly disheartened with the state of these restrooms.” (Yelp) admiringly quotes, “Know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls,” and Matthew T. People who feel compelled to comment on rest stops via social media are aware of Whitman’s legacy. Whitman died in New Jersey, and that was enough for Cherry Hill. Brooklyn offers Walt Whitman Library, Walt Whitman Park and Walt Whitman Houses, which look exactly like every other dispiriting redbrick city project (no fine native craftsmanship here).īut my favorite Whitman homage is farther south, at the Walt Whitman Service Area of the New Jersey Turnpike. Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking Whitman ever lived anywhere else. Whitman eventually left Long Island for New York City, a move NYC cannot forget. Near his birthplace, which announces itself as a “fine example of native Long Island craftsmanship,” you will find Walt Whitman High School and Walt Whitman Shops (formerly known, and still referred to, as Walt Whitman Mall). Long Island is not bashful about reminding you that Whitman was born there. I live on the Queens-Long Island border, and both the City and the Island make various claims to the bard. But Greater New York City has loved Whitman for a while.
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