As the the 200th anniversary of the great poet's birth approaches, his classic 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' remains an mystical ode to future readers.
A metal cast of Walt Whitman’s hand and a cigar box are part of a display at the Library of Congress celebrating the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. By Michael E. Ruane Michael E.
Trained as a printer and newspaper reporter, Whitman wrote stories, essays, sketches, blurbs, editorials, memoirs and letters, as well as some of the world’s best loved poetry, between the 1830s and his death in 1892. They included his famous requiems for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “O Captain! My Captain!” as well as “Song of the Open Road” — “Whoever you are come travel with me!”
And he loved the company of people — present, past and future — “you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,” as he wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in 1856.Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd . . .Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,“It’s totally cosmic and transcendent,” said literature historian Barbara Bair, of the Library of Congress.
“He was a journalist,” Bair said. “He was interviewing people . . . and then he would also get an idea for a poem and he would write trial lines.” A dapper man with a full gray beard and light eyes, Whitman came to Washington from Brooklyn in December 1862, when he learned that his brother, George, had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
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