Broadway Sights

For my long overdue posting on Specimen Days (comparing versions of A Song for Occupations was a much longer process than I anticipated!), I wanted to comment on the entry entitled “Broadway Sights.” In this entry, Whitman notes his pleasure in spending time on Broadway and the various sights and people he had seen through the years while milling around this particularly frenetic area of the city (including several presidents and other prominent U.S. political figures, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, and James Fenimore Cooper). As a former resident of lower Manhattan, I can relate to Whitman’s experience and the uniqueness of New York City as a place of residence. The sheer number of people and resulting closeness, the cultural variety, the perpetual energy and lack of adherence to most circadian norms. There really is nowhere else like it – certainly not in the U.S. anyway.

Whitman’s posting started me thinking about his environment in New York and the impact it had on his poetry. One particular theme that we have discussed frequently is that of the “high and the low” and Whitman’s desire to experience and expatiate on life at both ends of the spectrum. There is likely no better place to have access to the extremes of life than in New York City. The destitute sleep in the streets right outside buildings and apartments of extreme opulence. Those who make their living as prostitutes do so in close proximity to the “high” culture of the opera and world renowned museums. Whitman certainly took advantage of the cultural and economic diversity New York offered during his time. He frequented the opera while at the same time recognizing and respecting the popular draw of a place like Barnum’s American museum. He communicated with the likes of Edgar Allen Poe while also relating to the working class Bowery B’hoys. Whitman refused to be limited to any one point on life’s spectrum and his environment in New York allowed him to move freely across various categories.

Another theme that may have been influenced by New York is the conflict Whitman continually revisits between the importance of the “the self” and the need for contact with other human beings. In Manhattan, space is at a premium and for the most part people in the city are essentially living on top of one another. There is a forced closeness that the city necessitates in almost all aspects of life. At the same time (and I think you may have to have lived there to truly appreciate this), New York City can also be one of the loneliest places on the planet. It is a place full of individuals focused on their own initiatives, their own situation, their own problems. Your neighbor may live so close you can smell him, but there is a good chance you don’t even know his name. Eye contact on the street is reserved for tourists and those with nothing better to do. I feel this conflict of the individual as all-important versus the individual as part of a group in many of Whitman’s poems, particularly in Song of Myself, as Whitman oscillates between moments of extreme individual reflection and moments of close contact with all types of his fellow man.

I am certain Whitman’s experiences in New York City helped form the basis for much of his poetry. Given my time in New York City, this makes his writing even more interesting to me. It also makes me wonder what kind of poet Whitman would have been had he been born in Iowa...