Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Upon the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson, already revered as the staid sage of Boston, sent young Walt Whitman a note of encouragement, saying, “I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career” (“Letter to Walt Whitman.” The Walt Whitman Archive). Ever the self-promoter, Whitman used Emerson’s endorsement as a blurb for subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, without bothering to secure Emerson’s approval. But the connection between the two poets goes further than just encouragement.

There is a philosophical connection between Whitman and Emerson that focuses on Transcendentalism. This connection appears in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” From Emerson’s copious essays and occasional poetry, Whitman absorbed the concept of what Emerson came to call the over-soul, a radiant New Age perception of the Christian God, how everything in the natural world, from rocks to stars, were struck from the same grand solution, thus creating a cosmic unity, a grand transcendental energy field rendering space and time ironic. This passage, from Emerson’s 1841 essay “The Over-Soul,” resonates with Whitman’s optimism in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

Man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live within a divine unity (Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Over-Soul.” 1841).

As a young journalist yearning to be the great poet that he believed America needed, Whitman embraced Emerson’s writings and sought to bring Emerson’s radical and sweeping perceptions of an organic world that manifested a spiritual dimension that did not require any religious framework. During the ferry crossing, when the speaker leans over the railing and sees spokes of radiant light shooting out from his own head, light that in turn connects him to the universe of sunlight and starshine, Whitman expresses Emerson’s perception of the individual person as a vibrant molecule connected within the cosmos, a grand unified organism.