WIBCI Post #76

WIBCI we knew more of our LITERARY HISTORY?

In Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller there was the following quote that struck me. It struck me because it made me realize I didn’t know anything about Walt Whitman which started this cool stream of consciousness/domino effect which I will continue after the quote…

Often we sat by the fire drinking hot toddies and discussing the life back there in The States. We talked about it as if we never expected to go back there again. Filmore had a map of New York City which he had tacked on the wall. We used to spend whole evenings discussing the relative virtues of Paris and New York. And inevitably, there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman. That one lone figure that America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life; her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America, Whitman has expressed; and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the poet of the body, and the soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today; a monument covered with crude hieroglyphs for which there is no key. It seems strange to almost mention his name over here; there is no equivalent here in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized.

So the realization ‘I don’t know anything about Whitman’ started me off…..

Here is what I learned:

1. I don’t know anything about Walt Whitman
2. I should get over my ill founded dread of poetry and try to read Leaves of Grass
3. Whitman wrote a novel in 1852 called The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. BUT according to the Audible title description: No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, at the University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations.
4. He was pro-temperance and anti-slavery
5. He believed that Shakespeare did NOT write all that is attributed to Shakespeare
6. (Wikipedia) Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855) was used by Ray Bradbury as the title of a short story and a short story collection. Bradbury’s story was adapted for the Twilight Zone episode of May 18, 1962, in which a bereaved family buys a made-to-order robot grandmother to forever love and serve the family.
7. He was a ‘major figure’ in Transcendentalism which according to Wikipedia is on the first philosophical currents that emerged in the US and is considered: a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. They thought of physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.

I kinda dig when something I don’t know, begets something, that begets something, that begets something.

Last Updated on 09/22/2025 by Death of Hypatia Inc.