As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

The poem’s opening line announces that the poem will explore a post-bellum America, an America broken just eight years earlier by the cannibal logic of a bloody civil war. Less a narrative, which is a story with a plot and characters, and action compelled by suspense and moving toward some big-bang climax, “As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days” is something of a pronouncement, the speaker engaging with nothing less than his nation rather than with any specific audience, much less with himself. Inspired by the exponential growth of post-Civil War America, the poet uses as his starting point how just a short time ago the country, “the struggle of blood finish’d” (Line 2), was devastated, scarred, its landscape in smoke and ruin. Although the poet is not naïve enough to pretend that sometime in the future “more denser wars,” “more dreadful contests” (Line 5) will not shake the foundations of his country again, America for now has rebounded and now thrives in a kinetic environment animated by a boom of new inventions that represent the practical applications of innovative theories in the sciences. In turn, the “growth of cities and the spread of inventions” (Line 9) have fostered America’s boom economy, resulting in the rebuilding of America’s urban infrastructure. A nation in ruins 10 years earlier is now at the vanguard of world economic power and the global leader in technological innovation.

In the second and third stanzas, the poet catalogues the manifestations of this new sense of America’s power: “science, ships, politics, cities, factories” (Line 14). Appropriating the ancient role of seer, the poet offers a wide-lens view of his America. He notes the ships plying the seas that are even now, in an America restlessly driven by innovation, on their way to obsolescence, “they will last,” he jokes, perhaps “a few years” (Line 10). That exhilarating sense of upcycling, the restless energy of invention commands the poet’s respect. He takes nothing away from the scientific achievement made manifest by an America defined by its obsession with invention. These inventions he celebrates, these gadgets, even these magnificent edifices that create a city, are substantial and real and should generate appreciation, even wonder, not fear or anxiety. “They stand for realities—all is as it should be” (Line 16).

Had the poem closed there, it would have been a conventional celebration of America’s can-do optimism and its signature drive to invent and then reinvent and then re-reinvent again. But Whitman adds that last stanza. Yes, factories and ships and lines of sweaty, muscular factory laborers are real, part of America’s larger resurgent reality, but they are not as real as what he terms “my realities” (Line 17), curiously a word he elects to make plural. How can there be multiple realities? To borrow his logic, what can possibly be more real than reality? The imagination, for starters. It is at this point that the poet turns to abstract concepts, things that are not produced in factories and cannot be shipped out of New England ports, but are just as real: liberty for every person; the divinity of the individual; the entire construct of the spiritual world, the world unverifiable by the new sciences; the startling promises of visionaries who offer daring, sublime concepts of cities, really entire worlds, that someday will be built into being by lesser human beings.

In the closing two lines, Whitman turns uncharacteristically intimate but with characteristic braggadocio. In the end the most real reality—and only in Whitman’s argument can such a thing exist—are the songs constructed by those like himself, that is “the visions of poets” (Line 21). Those apparently ephemeral and deliberately un-pragmatic things are the “most solid announcements of any” (Line 21). In a wild and confusing techno-age where everything, as the poet notes, grows obsolete as soon as it is launched, the poet—not the scientist, not the architect, not the inventor, not the engineer—gifts America with its greatest and most enduring reality: the poem itself.

By the time Whitman drafted what would become “As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days,” he had mostly grown into the role he first gave himself without irony or any hint of modesty when the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. At that time, Whitman, in his forties, was a minor poetaster, a failed house painter, a failed schoolteacher, an unemployed printer, and a struggling journalist who nevertheless reassured his fledgling nation that he was in fact the Great American Poet for whom they had all been waiting.

Through the dark years of the Civil War, Whitman observed first-hand (he volunteered as a nurse for the Union Army hospital in Washington) the reality of the nation he had sung into being coming apart at every nail. Over the next 20 years, Whitman emerged as the Great American Poet he believed himself to be. His subject matter was consistently his fascination/obsession with the grandeur and potential of his nation now healed and now pointed forward. He invented a poetic line to match his new nation: a poetic line that coolly rejected the tight rhythms and anticipated rhymes of British poetics and forged an entirely free sort of line, poetry that unapologetically and un-ironically created its own metrics, as defiantly independent as the nation he watched emerge from the rubble of its anything-but-civil war.

Ironically, even as “As I Walk” affirms the resurrection of America and how its best and brightest minds were creating an industrial revolution that was in the process of catapulting the country, not even a century old, into international economic empowerment. Whitman himself, aging and feeling all of his 70+ years, had begun to doubt his own powers as a poet. Indeed, Whitman completed the working draft of “As I Walk” just a handful of months before a stroke would begin his nearly-decade long spiral into ever worsening health.

It is that collision of realities—the resurrection of the nation he loved and his own awareness of his failing abilities as both a man and a poet—that creates the urgency of what seems otherwise to be a pedestrian hymn to the wonders of American ingenuity and the American obsession with building a better mouse trap. America, the poet celebrates, is back—its “science, ships, politics, cities, factories” (Line 14). Indeed, the United States Patent Office issued just under 5000 patents in 1865; a scant five years later, the time of the poem’s composition, it issued more than 15,000. Coming back from a devastating war “against vast odds” (Line 3), a divisive and angry and bloody conflict that would have doomed a lesser nation, America, ever restless, ever on the rise, now sings to the poet. “Around me,” he affirms, “I hear the eclat (or success) of the world” (Line 8). America is on the move, its factories and its cities, a country giddy with rebirth, now heading into its centennial commemoration like a “grand procession to music of distant bugles” (Line 14). America is now affirmed and confirmed by the world, the “indorsement of all” (Line 12). All this, the poet happily acknowledges, as well the sheer breadth and economic reach of this new America: “They stand for realities—all is as it should be” (Line 16).

It is the closing stanza, when the poet introduces “my realities” (Line 17), that the poem takes an unexpected turn. Yes, America is back, grander than before, busier and noisier than before, more respected than before, more American than ever before. The poet celebrates the endless buzz and hum of factories teeming with workers. “I see…and do not object” (Lines 10, 12). But the poet distances himself from a too-simple embrace of science—as a poet, as a man of the heart and the soul, he is less defined by the senses and by the material world of things than he is by ideas: freedom, the integrity of each individual, the ability to dream of worlds not yet built.

The poet then cautions a nation against embracing too quickly and too deeply the novel gadgets of the new sciences. Do not allow the accumulation, the clutter of things, the mesmerizing thereness of all the things that now define the resurrected America to distract from acknowledging the realities greater than things you can see or transport on ships or even buy or sell. Whitman, just months from a stroke that would enfeeble him, trumpets the resilient power of the poet as greater than any gadget, gizmo, building—anything. It is ideas, not commodities, which have driven the American experiment since Plymouth colony. Whitman reminds his American readers, who by this time regarded him as America’s Good, Gray Poet, that visions, the ecstatic work of poets, first created and have sustained America. “The vision of poets” he affirms, are “the most solid announcements of any” (Line 21). Machines come and go. Even as they intrigue, they inevitably slide into obsolescence. Objects make life easier, certainly, but ideas make life grand by gifting it with a future. It is the mind (or soul, for that matter [for Whitman the concepts are interchangeable]) that forever progresses, forever evolves. In the end, America needs its poets, its visionaries, and its dreamers as much as it needs its scientists, inventors, and engineers. Those steamships come and those steamships vanish, the poet points out, but no gadget, no commodity, is as immemorial as this poem you are reading and nothing matches the kinetic strength of the empowered individual, despite his age and his assorted infirmities, behind its creation.