A teeming nation of nations

The man who sang America from The Economist, April 11th, 1992. A remembrance of Walt Whitman on the 100th anniversary of his death.

A couple of striking passages.

In the sort of cadence that people now call Whitmanesque, he described this America as "not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations . . . magnificently moving in vast masses". The long, rolling lines of his poetry, unconstrained by rhyme or regular metre, are the music accompanying the idea of a people rolling inexorably to their future.

[snip]

Both his convictions and his poetic power abide. It does not matter much that "Leaves of Grass" remains an outrageously mixed bag. (One critic observed that, though "few poets have ever written better, few poets have ever written worse.") Such quibbles would not have troubled the Whitman who, at the end of "Song of Myself". loftily declared, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." He also said that "the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." In the 100 years since his death, America has amply returned his compliment.