After a rather lengthy time of reading on-and-off, I finally finished Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." I don't think it has ever taken me this long to read a book. Part of that is due to my not understanding poetry really well, so that is a deterrent for me to picking it up more frequently. Secondly, it is actually a really long book with a ton of poems...weighing in at over five hundred pages. I got my copy from Easton Press as part of the greatest 100 books collection.
It is written in free verse and the poems vary in length from extremely short to just a page or two. But, again, there is a lot of them. I found myself wondering what Walt Whitman was like to
hang out with. How much did his ability to view the world through his artistic lens color his daily life and his interactions?
The poetry was occasionally quite moving but mostly I just felt like I was missing something and firmly believe I often was. That's more of a self-criticism than any admonishment of Whitman and his craft. Again, I just don't get poetry much of the time, though I have tremendous respect for it.
Here's a handful of passages that struck me and that I thought I would share here. To be fair, I did fill up a page-and-a-half of these as I went, so that is telling that, even for someone who struggles to identify with poetry, I found plenty here that I was fond of.
"And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any."
"Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here."
I'm glad I read this and it was interesting to hear his perspective on life and on America from a very different era of the history of humankind and of the country.