I Hear America Singing

At the center of a poem that so baldly celebrates working and the rewards of having an occupation is a most complicated question, never actually addressed, of what exactly is the work of a poet? It is after all the poet’s song we actually hear.

In a poem that celebrates other occupations that clearly focus on pragmatic productivity—boats docking safely, clothes getting washed, bricks being laid, timber being felled—the central figure, really the only figure in the poem, is the poet/speaker. What does a poet do? Before Whitman’s generation, the answers were fairly clear. Poets either tell stories, fictional or historical, in lines of engaging sonic delight that manipulate rhythm and rhyme to enhance the reading/listening experience and at the same time reveal the poet’s deft command of language, or they use the chiseled lines of carefully metered poetry to inspire, to share lessons, to teach insights to live better, more moral lives.

Neither appears to apply here—the poem offers no tidy moral insight, it shares no story, and its manipulations of language, its rhythm and rhyme schemes, seem at best careless and at worst juvenile. What then is the poet’s work? Infused by the soaring arguments of Whitman’s generation of Transcendentalists with their conception of a material world that sustains a profoundly spiritual reality, Whitman offers a third possible role for the poet: a spiritual seer, a mystic, more like a religious figure or prophet than an artist, not just inspiring but radically realigning the axis of the listener’s perception of the world.