There is a vital question driving the argument of Walt Whitman’s 1871 poem “As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days”: What is the place for a poet in an increasingly mechanized and increasingly technological culture, where the importance of the human factor seems oddly ironic or even irrelevant? It is a question as urgent and as difficult to answer in a late-19th-century America just beginning to be enthralled by an era of inventions and industrialization as it is in today’s post-postmodern culture, a culture that was revolutionized by the computer and now animated by global digital technologies.

Within all the mechanical vastness, where does a poet belong? Does the machine age have a heart, or does it even need one? By the time Whitman composed “As I Walk” more than a quarter of a century after his controversial collection Leaves of Grass had upended virtually every assumption about poetry and had created at last an authentically original American voice in poetry, Whitman was now confident in his self-appointed role as America’s Poet. Thus, in this poem Whitman grapples with an appropriately big topic: defending the role of the creative individual in an American culture increasingly held spellbound by gadgets and persuaded by the logic of efficiency and mass production over the virtues of inspiration, intuition, and self-expression.

Poet Biography

Walter Elias Whitman was born in West Hills just outside the hamlet of Huntington on New York’s Long Island on May 31, 1819. He was the second of eight children born to Walter Whitman, a struggling farmer and part-time carpenter, and Louisa Whitman. After the father spiraled into debt following a disastrous attempt to speculate in real estate, the family relocated to take advantage of the employment opportunities for unskilled blue-collar work in the village of Brooklyn. Whitman’s father struggled (and began turning increasingly to alcohol). Whitman left school at 11. He worked for a time as an apprentice typesetter in a printing firm. The young Whitman relished the work, loved the physical feel of words as he set line after line of inky type. When his family returned to Long Island, Whitman remained in the city. He was all of 14.

Despite his limited formal schooling, Whitman was an accomplished autodidact. Over the next several years, he secured positions as a schoolteacher; but he loathed the classroom. And he missed the hustle and hum of the city—he abandoned teaching in 1841. After a brief stint as a printer in Manhattan, he returned to Brooklyn at the age of 22 and assumed the editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He wrote incendiary editorials on education, women’s right, workers’ rights, prison reform, immigrant policy, and, supremely, slavery. It was during these years that Whitman began composing what would become the cycle of 12 poems that would make up the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.

Although sales were disappointing (the critical response was tepid—save for the glowing reviews Whitman himself wrote and published, anonymously, in Manhattan newspapers), Whitman now relished playing the New American Poet—amid the theaters, oyster bars, and cellar taverns along Broadway, he became a presence, a self-conceived and self-sustaining celebrity. Over the next four decades, Whitman would return to Leaves of Grass, add to it, revise poems, reorder poems, believing the collection was an organic thing and needed to grow. The outbreak of the Civil War, however, shook Whitman emotionally and psychically. The pressing realities of the war tested the integrity of Whitman’s compelling vision of cosmic unity and spiritual transcendence.

When the war finally ground to its conclusion, Whitman returned to writing poetry with a new vigor, releasing two new editions of Leaves of Grass, including the 1872 volume in which “As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days” appeared. Then, in January 1873, Whitman survived a catastrophic stroke that rendered his left side largely paralyzed (a second stroke four years later would similarly impair his right side). By the country’s centennial in 1876, Whitman was hailed as America’s greatest living poet, the Poet of Democracy. Although his optimism lapsed as he grew increasingly weaker, Whitman continued to play Walt Whitman, America’s Good Gray Poet (with his carelessly flowing white beard and wide brimmed wool hat, he became, save perhaps for Mark Twain, America’s most photographed and most photographed celebrity).

Over the next several years, even as his health deteriorated, Whitman became the center of a kind of cult-like following among America’s younger poets, who discovered in Whitman’s unconventional poetry with its celebration of the spiritual dimension of the organic world a clear rejection of the staid middle-class values of Gilded Age America. Just past his 70th birthday, after years of heroic resistance to a host of physical conditions (Whitman’s autopsy would read like one of his own massive catalogues), in the gloaming of dusk on 26 March 1892, Whitman, nearly paralyzed, died in his Camden, New Jersey, home. In the three hours set aside for public viewing, an estimated 2,000 admirers braved a chilly spring rain to view Whitman’s body on display in the front room window. Four days later, thousands more took the day off work to line the streets of Camden just to get a glimpse of Whitman’s hearse heading to nearby Harleigh Cemetery. Crowds packed the shallow hillside in the cemetery as Whitman’s body was interred in a 650 square foot mausoleum he had designed (and paid for) himself. It bore no elaborate inscription, no verse, no dates—it read simply “Walt Whitman.”

Poem Text

As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,  

(For the war, the struggle of blood finish’d, wherein, O terrific Ideal,   

Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won, 

Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars,  

Perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers,  

Longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others,)  

Around me I hear that eclat of the world, politics, produce, 

The announcements of recognized things, science, 

The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions.

I see the ships, (they will last a few years,) 

The vast factories with their foremen and workmen,

And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it.

But I too announce solid things, 

Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing, 

Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring, triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight,  

They stand for realities—all is as it should be.

Then my realities; 

What else is so real as mine?

Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face of the earth, 

The rapt promises and luminé of seers, the spiritual world, these centuries-lasting songs,           

And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements of any.

Whitman, Walt. "As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days." 1871. Poets.org.

Summary

The speaker walks along city streets during peacetime. He contemplates the end of war and the potential for new conflict, yet he takes heart at the growth of cities and industry all around him. There are “solid things” (Line 13) cropping up across the nation, and he doesn’t begrudge this “grand procession” (Line 15) that signals America’s new reality. The speaker, however, also endorses his own “realities” (Line 16), realities that he finds in the creative, mental, and spiritual worlds, realities that only poets can offer. The speaker finishes the poem by admitting that the ”visions of poets” (Line 21)—the realities championed by poets—are more important and longer lasting than any of the previous “solid things” (Line 13) mentioned earlier in the poem.