Title: Why Walt Whitman Called America the 'Greatest Poem' - The Atlantic
Headings: Why Walt Whitman Called America the ‘Greatest Poem’
Why Walt Whitman Called America the ‘Greatest Poem’
Content: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Nussbaum argues that “the ability to imagine vividly, and then to assess judicially, another person’s pain, to participate in it and then to ask about its significance is a powerful way of learning what the human facts are and of acquiring a motivation to alter them.” In other words, poetry constitutes the practice of what robust pluralism requires. A literary imagination, Nussbaum writes, “promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred.” Thus, although Whitman’s racist views of black people, shaped in part by the bad science of the day, were contradictory and at times ambivalent, his poetic vision forged a way past his own hidebound limitations toward greater justice. In “To Foreign Lands,” Whitman claims that his poems offer the world the very definition of America: “ I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World / And to define America, her athletic Democracy, / Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.” An “athletic democracy” is made so not by politicians, Whitman claims, but by poetry. For the poetic mind is a mind attuned to justice. In her work On Beauty and Being Just, the Harvard professor of aesthetics Elaine Scarry describes the importance of multiple viewpoints, arguments, and counterarguments to “political assembly,” wondering how “will one hear the nuances of even this debate unless one also makes oneself available to the songs of birds or poets?” The basis of poetry is precisely those connections forged between different elements, different voices, and different perspectives.