Song of Walt Whitman, Song of Hope?

Walt Whitman was a Long-Island born poet who is most notably known for Leaves of Grass (1855), a work that was inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for great poets to render the genuine American experience. In this collection, Whitman takes the voice of a democratic poet on and “prepares us for the perception of a single, universal truth and for our subsequent transformation into the kind of people we need to be” (Brink 2013, xv). Whitman was always close to US pop culture and its (anti)heroes. The nineteenth-century American poet is at the heart of America’s culture, which is shown by, for example, John Keating and his rebellious schoolboys chanting Whitman’s eponymous line of “O Captain! My Captain!” in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) and the many references to Whitman’s work in Breaking Bad (2008-2013) (Bolonik 2013). To the question “Who is the quintessential American?,” Elisabeth Panttaja Brinke, writer, editor and educator who taught literature at Harvard University, Tufts University and Boston College, argues it is “Whitman” (2013, xxii), mainly because of the poet’s representations of both democracy and nature.