Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life

To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that. It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times such as our own. William Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary has provoked media reflections on his consolatory power; a recently established Poetry Pharmacy is receiving attention; and social media brims with poems and poets attempting to make sense of what’s happening to us. Arguably there couldn’t be a more apt context for Doty’s book about his lifelong exploration of — and through — the great American poet Walt Whitman.

There certainly couldn’t be a more appropriate explorer than Doty, as both a leading North American poet and a memoirist and prose writer of exceptional grace and depth. This genre-crossing book leads us on an exploration of Whitman’s work, regarding ‘Song of Myself’ as ‘a call to change our way of seeing self and other, a persuasive text that aims to revise our understandings of the most basic things. The poem wants to accompany us in the direction of awakening’.

When he died in 1892 Whitman was still rewriting the epochal Leaves of Grass, first self-published in 1855. The man who wrote ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ was as protean as his work — so charismatic that his extraordinary gaze survives even slow-motion 19th-century photography. He left school at 11, worked mainly in printing and journalism until the outbreak of the American Civil War, then moved to Washington, where he nursed wounded soldiers while holding a succession of minor civil servant roles.