Walt Whitman

He was born in 1819, to Quaker parents in the Long Island part of the State of New York. He was not just any man. He was a common man. He was every man. This is the thing he taught us in his masterwork, the poem he took a lifetime to write, his Leaves of Grass.

In 1978 I took a college course in American Literature that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau, and the premiere poet of the movement, Walt Whitman. He then spoke to me through his poetry in Leaves of Grass and taught me the fundamentals of everything.

Yes, Transcendentalism is the beginning point of my personal philosophical journey in life. Transcendental philosophy grew out of the Unitarian religion where all people are basically good, a point that appealed to my heart directly. Not that there are no bad or evil people, but these come about by the corruption thrust upon them by institutions and organizations controlled by those previously corrupted. People in their self-reliant, natural form represent the goodness inherent in creation.

In many ways, Walt Whitman, in his innovative free verse, becomes the voice of the transcendent experience. If you look seriously at his poems like “Song of Myself”, “I Sing the Body Electric”, and his elegy for President Lincoln, “O, Captain, My Captain!” you see that he was a strong advocate of self-reliance, a celebrator of sensuality and the physical pleasures of life, and he reveals a deep love of the goodness evident in human beings like Lincoln who illustrate the heights of goodness we can reach.

So, what is Walt Whitman doing in the middle of an essay basically about being a nudist or naturist?

One factor he has in common with the naturists and nudists whose activities are generally illegal outside of private places is in the reception he gets from the culture in general and the institutions that prop it up.

Walt discussed enjoying life and sexuality in ways that were labeled by screaming critics and keepers of the public standards of what “You better by God well believe!” as scandalous, pornographic, and evil. Of course, he was either a homosexual or a bisexual man in a time when those things were considered highly illegal and punishable by law. He probably, just as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond, bathed naked in lakes, ponds, and rivers outdoors. This was not an uncommon thing in a time before indoor plumbing was common. But the morally upright and accusation-ready multitudes would’ve much preferred that this man exhibited more piety and far less naked skin in his life. And his poetry was so… so… sensual and exhilarating to read about in a time when morals were more likely bound up in tons of religious restrictions and practices preferred by clergy because they made you more pure… and less… that!

And what matters most about the poetry of Walt Whitman is what you find there about the transcendental experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the experience, “Spots in time.” That moment in which you stand centered amidst the natural world, finding in it what is transcendent, what connects your soul to the soul of the universe. In those moments, whether you experience that spot in time while naked or not, you begin to understand that everything is one thing. It is all connected. You can find God when the butterfly lands on the back of your hand… or when the cardinal sings at you from a high branch in the elm tree. There is no way to explain it better than that. You will not truly understand until you transcend reality for yourself. I get there by naked meditation. Your path may well be different. But you have to go there, at least once.

More than that, when you return to a book-lined world of libraries and thoughts of men whose lives are long since complete you should read Leaves of Grass. And Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s book about living the simple life living in the natural world. And while you’re reading, don’t forget the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Lamb. You do not have to invent the world for yourself. There are others whose thoughts and words proceed you. But do not take my word for it. Or their words either. Think and choose what you read for yourself. No one has the right to do the thinking for you.