5 - Whitman’s urbanism

Summary

Remember . . . [Leaves of Grass] arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York . . . absorbing a million people . . . with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equaled.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, / Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, / No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

As Whitman himself suggests, the pleasure he took in New York City was something more than a happy backdrop for his real work as a poet. It was, rather, fundamental to his attempt to imagine - and to enact - a democratic poetics that would find its basic resources in the unacknowledged though universal fact of humans having bodies, and its site, as it were, in the dense interactions of such bodies made possible in the most populous cities, New York above all. It is in this sense that, despite his strong attachment to the category of the nation as a whole and his repeated thematization of regional vignettes, Whitman is also, centrally, an urbanist - and one grounded in the specific urban locale of Manhattan. For it is in the daily life available in cities like Manhattan that, according to Whitman, one can best “absorb” and be absorbed by the largest number of other people - that one can try on, learn from, identify with other subjectivities, other concretely embodied modes and styles of life. This is perhaps why Whitman uses the word “inspiriting” to describe his experience of “the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never ending human currents” on Broadway.