Today’s Poem: I Hear America Singing

Those who work with their hands sing to Walt Whitman

Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark, 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I Hear America Singing

by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols 
    I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his 
    as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures 
    his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready 
    for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him 
    in his boat, the deckhand singing on 
    the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his 
    bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s 
    on his way in the morning, or at noon 
    intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or 
    of the young wife at work, or of 
    the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her 
    and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day — at 
    night the party of young fellows, 
    robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong 
    melodious songs.
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The trouble with Walt Whitman (1819–1892), for us here at Poems Ancient and Modern, is that his poems tend to be too long to read in a morning article.

Of course, there’s also the problem that over the decades Whitman has been declared more a culture-wars emblem than a poet, his work posed as some grand sociopolitical theme to accept or reject. But, really, length is the difficulty with looking even at the Whitman of a capacious spirit who wrote what ought to be in the canon of everyone: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” for example, or “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” We’ve published only his brief “A Noiseless Patient Spider” and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” thus far.

But there’s also “I Hear America Singing,” which first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the third version of the book. It’s among Whitman’s most anthologized poems (in part because it’s not long; anthology-makers face limitations, too). And it shows clearly his technique of giving a sense of form in the midst of a free-verse flow, a torrent of words with the cadence of the King James Bible.

What pushes the poem along is accumulation. People in occupations follow one another like some grand national parade visible only to the poet: mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker, hatter, woodcutter, ploughboy. And the repeated participles — “singing . . . singing . . . singing” — serve as the organizing that would be done with rhyme and defined meter in other 19th-century poets. By the time we arrive at “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,” we hear the repetitions as a choral refrain.

And yet, who exactly are these people? We reach the great democratic point that Whitman has in sight with that “belongs to him or her and to none else,” especially when we notice that the singers he names are mostly those who work with their hands. Even the female line is a line of labor: The mother, who must care for a child. The young wife explicitly said to be “at work.” The girl “sewing or washing.” The people of the nation sing with their hands in motion.

Still, for all the individualism asserted by the poem, there are no individuals actually present. The only plurals are the first mentioned “mechanics” and the last mentioned “young fellows,” with the rest given as singulars, from the carpenter to the girl. All of them are more representatives than particulars: synecdoches without individuation beyond their types. And those types are overwhelmingly determined by the things they do and the professions within which they work.

How then are we to take the central claim of the poem, the great individualizing? There is a national unity, a community, asserted in the claim that all of America’s laborers are singing — the idea that a joy in individual work is what we have in common. But there also seem to be lesser unities identified in Whitman’s categories. Carpenter, mason, boatman: Each type has a defined task, a common purpose, a shared ethics and vocabulary (in ways the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre would have understood, each profession possessing its own standards, language, and internal goods). The carpenter remains carpenter. The mother remains mother. None of them is given with the kind of particularity on which, say, Wordsworth or Frost would focus. Whitman’s individuals are themselves only in their type of work. (And notice the possessives for the carols they sing: “his . . . his . . . his . . . belongs to him.”)

For Whitman, the voices swell together into a chorus called America. And a MacIntyre-inflected reading could provide philosophical coherence to the apparent contradiction of Whitman’s radical individuals described solely as types: The particular professions are like measures and keys — the structures that give meaningful shape to the melodies the individual singers sing. Through profession-specific labor, democracy offers a communion of joy that nonetheless allows individuals to think of their work-songs as uniquely theirs.

It’s a beautiful vision, but I find myself shying from it. Your sense may vary; I’m not proselytizing my own metaphysics. But Whitman’s great chorus of democracy seems to me the attractive, seductive version of the thin self of modernity — the self that finds itself in function, its individuality determined by its type.

A different understanding of the human person — the individual as something created and thus untyped at the fundamental ground of its being — would allow, I think, a much more radical assertion of the unmediated self. Whitman has given it as much coherence as he can, but that “belongs . . . to none else” is the anti-theological turn that blocks him from a deeper, more particular individualism that “and to God” might allow.

To test that hypothesis, and make the contrast clear, we’d need to discern a genuine metaphysics somewhere inside the cloud of Whitman, which would require unpacking at least “Song of Myself,” another of those enormously long Whitman poems. And that’s project for another day, or two, or three. But for now I am bemused by the fact that my initial reaction to “I Hear America Singing” is a sense that Walt Whitman is being insufficiently radical.

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