I announce a life that shall be copious,
vehement, spiritual, bold;
I announce an end that shall lightly and
joyfully meet its translation;
I announce myriads of youths, beautiful,
gigantic, sweet-blooded;
…I announce a race of splendid and savage old
men.
I say you shall yet find the friend you were
looking for.
— Walt Whitman
I don't care what the academics say, Walt Whitman was crazier than a bedbug and, further, in my less than humble opinion only, (roughly) a third of what he wrote makes any sense on any level or is even worth reading....but within that third is brilliance, and passion, and melodic beauty and most of all there is hope.
Whatever else he may have been, Walt Whitman was about hope.
However, I present is a man I admire very much, the late Brother Thomas Merton, to present, the counter-argument on behalf of Mr. Whitman, who was, if nothing else, very much his own man.
Many poets are not poets for the same reason
that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.
They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they
are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is
called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their
years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint…They wear out
their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s
experiences or write somebody else’s poems. – Thomas Merton