Walt whitman biography video of barack obama

Nathan Connolly: Walt Whitman had high aspirations for his poetry.

Walt whitman biography video of barack obama speech today

He hoped to bring disparate elements of the country together through the power of his written word, but how truly inclusive is the vision he articulates? I spoke to scholar Cristina Beltran and started by asking her how Whitman understood the role of the individual in a democratic society.

Cristina B.: There’s always this way in which he’s trying to think about himself as part and parcel of a larger polity, and he’s also always thinking about how he has inside himself the potential to be those other people.

Whitman never uses the language of social construction, but he very much articulates that, that you are shaped by your environment. And you hear that in different works of his, where like in the poem, “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” where he says, “I can see them in Germany and Italy and China and Russia, and it seems that I should become attached to them as I do men in my own land.” So he always is sort o