Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Walt Whitman strives to create a literary legacy that establishes itself as arising from the past, America’s national history closely twined with its natural history. From this situation, he seeks to project his work and America’s character, as he defines it, into a future nation. As we read and reach Whitman during a time of climate crisis, the analyses and conversations change, with students placing greater emphasis on Whitman’s insistence on a healthy present - and a healthy society - that grows by internalizing the lessons of Nature. Following the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism, Whitman argues for a harmonious coexistence of self, nature, and society as the essence of his artistic expression. These messages resonate as a response to current crises, with additional urgency informed by Whitman’s employment of paratactic temporality throughout his work in Leaves of Grass, as he, for example, seeks to “raise the past on the present, / (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past)”. Whitman here becomes that “perennial tree,” growing out of the soil of America’s plural democracy, much as the voice of the poet grows out of the voices of the many. By emphasizing the dependence of individual identity on community identity - and of both as dependent on Nature - Whitman delivers a timely message of connection and the value of art as a response to crisis.