"
I hear America singing," he wrote, "the varied carols I hear." The San Francisco poet Robert Duncan expressed Whitman's democratic ideal nicely when he said that we are living in a Symposium of the Whole, a time when "all the old, excluded orders must be included, the female, the proletariat, the foreign, the animal and vegetable, the unconscious and the unknown, the criminal and failure--all that has been outcast and vagabond."
In
I Hear America Singing! (Knopf), you can find 62 well-loved songs that have stood the test of time.
Having hung out with Whitman for several years now, I've been trying to imagine how the poet--who exulted "
I hear America singing" and who had a penchant for shouting from the rooftop--would have reacted to the military's policy of the zipped lip.
This passage also can be read as a continuation of an intertextual dialogue between Hughes and Wait Whitman: The Weary Blues (1926) included Hughes's famous "I, Too, Sing America," which reversed Whitman's celebratory tone in "
I Hear America Singing." Like the passage cited above from the "Revival" draft, Whitman's poem uses an occupational listing (including mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman, and shoemaker) to show a common thread of song.
I Hear America Singing I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and
