WALT WHITMAN ABOUT GOD

 

WALT WHITMAN ABOUT GOD

            The American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is easy to understand but not easy to categorize like romantic and classical poets. He is unique  ---- extremely original.  

            His collection of poems known as Leaves of Grass is very popular. Whoever reads it is amazed by its ideas as well as poetic style.

            According to the  literary historian Arthur Compton-Rickett (1869-1937)  Whitman is essentially a loafer, a loafer along the crowded streets, a loafer along the  countryside, a loafer both in the spiritual and physical sense ; and his writings are the frankly direct expression of his loafings.  

            Unconventionality he carries out to to its logical conclusion, and strides stark naked among our academies  of learning.

            A strange, uncouth, surprising figure, it is impossible to ignore him, however much he may shock our susceptibilities.

            His songs are no mere paeans of rustic solitudes. They are the songs of the crowded streets, as well as of the country roads; of men and women of every type ---- no less than of the fields and the streams.

            He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth.

            In fact, he seeks the elemental everywhere. His business is to make men and women rejoice in ---not shrink from ---the great primal forces of life. But he is not for moralizing:

            “I give nothing as duties.

            What others give as duties I give as loving impulses.

            (Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?}

           

            What follows is a relevant extract from Whitman’s poem about God:

 

“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his funeral drest in his shroud….

 

And I say to mankind,  Be not curious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God.

(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about each am not curious about God and about death.)

 

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

 

Why should I wish to see God netter than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name.

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

                                                            ******

G.R.Kanwal

18 May 2025