what would Whitman do?

trinity and technology

While staying at his mom’s house in Brooklyn in April of 1865, Walt Whitman learned that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated at Ford’s Theater during a production of Our American Cousin which his lover at the time, Peter Doyle, a Confederate deserter who fled to Washington, DC and got a job as a bus driver, had been watching. “There was nothing extraordinary in the performance,” Doyle later said of the play.

In the dooryard of Walt’s mother’s house were planted lilac-bushes, with “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” and “perfume strong I love.” In his burial hymn for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman imagines breaking a sprig of lilac and placing it on the President’s coffin as it travels, by railroad, across the United States.

My mom’s house also has lilacs planted in the dooryard. She introduced me to Walt Whitman. I have since re-encountered him several times, returning every few months to Leaves of Grass and reading or re-reading whatever pleases me. I think of Walt Whitman literally every day. The psychic geography of the Washington, DC area, where I grew up and now live, is Whitman.

Across places that today are paved over by McMansioned suburbs, the nation’s most aggressive data center build-out (which I covered for the BBC last summer), or slop bowl lunch joints catering to lobbyists making the world worse, Walt Whitman rambled on a series of fascinating side quests during the Civil War.

I live blocks from the route which Peter Doyle, a DC omnibus driver, followed each day with Whitman joining him regularly in the evening to sit at the front and yap after clocking out of his bullshit day job as a government clerk. The National Portrait Gallery, my favorite art museum in the city, was a hospital where Whitman nursed wounded soldiers.

If there is any dead white man whose opinion we should hear at this moment, it is Walt Whitman. Part of this is because nobody else from the 1800s was quite as seriously engaged in thinking about you and I — he tells his reader, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.” From the same:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried...

A conjuncture of factors has led me to think about Whitman more than usual. First: the United States seems fucked and Whitman is a poet of the Civil War, who sought to articulate a vision of democracy that was broader, weirder, and freer than a Classical or Enlightenment inheritance. Second: it is spring and lilacs are blooming — so he comes to mind. Third, in my last post I talked a lot about Nick Fuentes’ use of “you” as a pronoun, and I was working on something else about 4chan greentexts. It occurred to me that the poet who seems to address us in the most modern, meme-y way is Whitman.

The 4chan greentext form begins with “>be me,” and “Song of Myself” begins: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The original edition of “Leaves of Grass” features only a picture of Whitman in a jaunty pose, dressed as a regular guy, without his name as an author — he is an anon.

Whitman’s poetry is highly personal, but not in the sense of confession or autobiography. He talks most often about solitary, embodied experiences — being a commuter, looking at the sky, breathing. These are things people do alone, but with the knowledge that everybody else does them. Titling a poem “Song of Myself” is not narcissistic because the subject is not Walt Whitman, but the experience of selfhood in the first place — Walt is just the most accessible self for Walt to write about.

The self, in Song of Myself, breathes, bathes, fucks, wonders, eats, smells, and exercises — but most of all, he yaps. There are, according to a quick cmd+F search of the poem, 489 instances of “I” and 235 instances of “you.” The cardinal activity of the Whitmanian self is the act of address — communion with other selves. It is a communion premised on equality, a word which Lincoln (and I’d say Whitman) understood in a mathematical way, grounded in Euclid.

Before all other facts about the world, Whitman cares that people are equal. This is not a precept of morality, but a principle of physics for him, an undeniable truth about the universe which society may construct elaborate contraptions to suspend — in the way airplanes defy gravity — but ultimately must obey. Black or white, male or female, poor or rich, young or old, “I give and receive the same,” Whitman writes. But there are also other equalities: the past, future, and present are the same; writer and reader are the same; death and life, victim and perpetrator, are all the same.

The Union cause was always spiritual, and grew increasingly more so as the war went on. It promised a just emancipation of slaves, described in Biblical terms (“jubilee,” “grapes of wrath,” and so on) but it also rested on a radical interpretation of the words “union” and “equality.” I think the Union transplanted the Christian conception of the Trinity onto the American project.

Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d” interests me in part because it makes this connection clear. It centers on a “trinity” defined by Whitman: the blooming lilac, the song of a “gray-brown bird,” and the “thought of him I love.” The last of these is proximately the dead Lincoln, but more profoundly all of Whitman’s countrymen. Instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have lilac, bird, and guy you love. The components of this trinity can be interpreted more abstractly: nature, the creative/expressive act, and the thought of your fellow men that you love. In this, we find the three-personed God, the three-faced American nation, which Whitman worships.

Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

Originally, I wanted to study Whitman, the mid 19th-century newspaper business which he worked in for much of his life, and the transatlantic connections between Europe and the United States in the Civil War era. One reason I gave up on this was that this kind of academic career is hopeless in 2026, given how the life of the mind has been so thoroughly fucked over. Another reason is that I figured this was not really spiritually true to Whitman’s vision, which — I idolize the poetry, not the poet here — is really the thing I believe in above all else. He’d want me, who he talked to so directly across his poems, to speak from and to my own modernity, about the affairs of regular people and the things that matter in the heart.

Whitman wrote in the language of his day, without fuss. He inflected it with archaisms like reversed word orders (“when lilacs last”), random “thou”s and so on, which are carried over from the King James Bible. The KJV was for many Americans at his time one of the only books they owned. It was their liturgical language — not quite as extreme as the Catholic Church’s use of Latin, but certainly not the way people really talked. Whitman’s fusion of that language with the rhythm of everyday speech and the straightforwardness of his “>be me” kind of address creates an interesting juxtaposition, but also relatability.

I see his outlook as very contemporary. He wants to overshare, he wants to be relatable, and it feels weird to call him “Whitman” as you would another author rather than “Walt,” as you would call a dude you know. And so I wonder too, if there is something very contemporary in his mystic conception of union, that might salvage.

Faced on the one hand with the complicity-rationalizing managerialism that motivated the Biden years, and on the other with the Ahab-striving of our cruelest to win (whether against China, modernity, ourselves, God, etc.), I think we should see Whitman as a resource that can inform us of another way, and offer a language in which words like “democracy” and “equality” can actually matter and actually be the tough, existentially crucial things they are, rather than pablum sputtered out by people who have never failed to dodge an uncomfortable truth.

I will write more about memes, but also expect another post or so on Whitman before the spring ends.