Walt Whitman, A Kosmos

Reading the poetry of Walt Whitman is a unique experience.  His poetry extends far above and beyond the reach of most other contemporary poets because of the vast scope that his work encompasses.  He not only writes about life, but he virtually lives life within his poems—they resonate with his very essence; they are overflowing with the powerful force of his life.  Whitman was so incredibly alive, and so incredibly aware of life, that life itself is imbedded in everything he wrote.

         

A particular favorite poem of mine that Whitman wrote is I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.  This poem is beautiful in its simplicity and its undemanding tone, and yet it is simultaneously wonderfully complex.  First, it is a nature poem, which I adore; nature poetry is easily my favorite kind, and Whitman does an exquisite job with it in this particular piece.  The descriptive quality is absolutely perfect, and he paints a magnificent mental picture of a giant mossy oak standing alone in the swamplands of the South.  But the real miracle of this poem is how seamlessly Whitman transcends the basic descriptive nature poem and turns it into so much more—he ties this tree in to his own soul; he relates it to himself, and in it he sees his own qualities as well as others.  In anthropomorphizing the oak, he makes it both representative of himself and a contrast to his own needs and desires—he admires the tree for its sturdy stature, then proceeds to admire it for the differences it shows from him: that it stands alone, “solitary,” with no one near to keep it company, which he himself could never do.

Whitman marvelously turns this nature poem inward, forming something that is both descriptive and introspective at once.  This is a wholly amazing feat to accomplish, and yet he does it so flawlessly, so eloquently, so tantalizingly, and most of all, so beautifully. 

It is obvious throughout Whitman’s work how much he purely loved life and everything in it—people, nature, art, weather, buildings, animals—and how he seems to have found joy and beauty in everything he saw, felt, smelled, and heard, but I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing brings out another quality: his almost child-like wonder of the world, which is his most endearing trait of all.  It celebrates his connection and intimacy with nature and with his natural, “primal” self, both of which made him the irrepressible, irresistible man that was “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.”